Ari watched, with a sigh of relief, as the Shrike again ground into motion and McKnight's voice came over the COM. She could hardly bear the thought of her wing mate dying in her first engagement, especially McKnight who'd stood up for her against Eric. The depth of relief she felt at the realization of his survival was far deeper than was, in all honesty, probably healthy. She then set about checking over the Astelion's systems and grimaced at the reports in front of her. Shields were down completely, the blast had damaged the generator, thrusters could only function at 70% efficiency, which could be a death sentence for a speed based mech, and that wasn't mentioning the many fragments of her armor now floating around space.

With the sudden call for an about face, Ari didn't hesitate to spin the Astelion around in a proper one hundred eighty degree turn. Charging forward, she found the remains of the III, plasma blade drawn. Even as McKnight darted over to fight, she looked over to the targetting console to begin acquiring a firing solution...and promptly felt her hopes and dreams shattering. Displayed on the console in big, bold, red letters were the words "TARGETING AI OFFLINE". Without the AI, she couldn't get a solution, but McKnight was still in combat, and may not win without help. Ari began to panic, but an idea came to her, no matter how hair-brained it was.

She flipped the targetting systems to manual and watched a series of calculators and sensor windows displaying measurements pop up. She began rapidly punching in numbers, taking into account drift, enemy position, the lack of gravity and other such factors. She sweated from nervousness as her fingers danced across the keys, numbers and calculations being done at a frantically rushed speed. If it weren't for her engineering degree, she would've just done the emergency reboot, but that took 5 minutes, and McKnight may not have that long. As she finished typing, she watched the completed firing solution plug into the targetting computer. With the solution provided, she began the reboot of the targetting AI, routed through the backup cores, and immediately centered her sights on the position provide by the solution.

As the enemy MAS sluggishly boosted away, the X-50s heated up and prepared to fire. Thankfully, she'd kept the cannons at full charge while standing guard over McKnight. The X-50s finished heating and, with a prayer to any deity that was listening, she fired. She watched nervously as the shots raced out, and hoped against hope that they'd hit. Her calculations had been rushed, and had been done on possibly malfunctioning hardware, so she had no way of knowing if they were accurate. She watched and held her breath as the plasma grew closer and closer to the enemy's predicted position.

Sure enough, the left shot missed the target...but the right made contact. The enemy MAS turned to slag, and she watched as the shattered vessel was sent flying away. She breathed a sigh of relief at this, glad to have saved McKnight from what may've been his fate. She looked over at the slowly resetting targetting AI and sighed, hoping she wouldn't be plagued by such failures in the future. Though, this at least taught her not to depend on having the targetting AI. As this situation had so eloquently proved, she couldn't depend on it always being around. However, for now she should probably at least take a moment to speak on her COM. She reached over, gently keyed it, and said calmly "[color=0072bc]Hostile down. The Astelion took a beating, thrusters damaged and shields are down, targetting AI shorted out and I'm running a bypass now. Still combat effective.[/color]" With that, she turned to fly back out into combat, unwilling to allow her teammates and fellow UEE pilots to bear the entirety of the burden of this combat simply because she'd taken some battle damage to an enemy missile. After all, the 7th MAS received the most vital missions, she couldn't just chicken out!