Trent's Rules of Space Combat:

Rule 1: Immediately get above, or below, the plane of battle.

It was something he remarked on occasionally, though rarely was it implemented. Static battlefields had been ingrained in the mind of every military commander since before man had taken to the stars, and no matter how much they tried it took admirals and generals, the best of them, to stop them from seeing the battlefield as a lateral plain. So it was that as the group started to break up into their defensive patterns, throwing themselves into the fray, that Tom Trent dove. Screaming underneath the field of battle until he was far enough away to get some perspective, his hands worked on autopilot to make miniature adjustments to his trajectory while he took a good long look at the situation.

Defense for a sniper was a combination of overwatch and threat analysis. The new machine was obviously the largest threat on the battlefield but there were the cogheads stepping in to study it, which meant Tom didn't have much to help it with. Tom's method of acquisition included 'put a hole in it big enough to make it stop', followed occasionally by 'put enough smaller holes in it to make it stop'. Capture, interrogate, reverse engineer...none of these were things that Tom was any good at or had any interest in. He was a flyboy and a marksman, plain and simple. And as the hotsy-totsy little firecracker of their group dove in to save the rookie, the marksman side of things saw a golden opportunity to fulfill that command from on high.

"Don't you worry, darlin'." He was already drawling into his microphone, tongue between his teeth as he magnified the target on Maki's tail, waited for it to break into a pattern to close distance... 

"Not about to let some Coalition kid get there before I do."

Lightning.

The shot speared through the unit from collar bone to hip and punched right out the other end--if it was a comfort to anyone, the pilot probably hadn't even realized he'd been hit by the time the green bolt vaporized him, exciting his molecules until the energy between them was greater than the energy holding them together. Did time slow down, in that moment of death? Would sensation somehow transcend the nervous system, a moment of physically unimaginable pain transcending simple limitations to achieve some lingering meaning or horror before death, perhaps even into the afterlife?

Nah. Probably just a matter of light's out.

Fire and move, fire and move. Better than any sniper on foot, the Mosquito careened through space at dizzying angles to get away from its marked firing position and [i]still[/i] managed to search for a new target--parallel processing was a bitch, Tom thought with an idly smile around his tongue as he flicked down towards the middle of the battlefield, harder to spot for his distance from the line of scrimmage that was the defensive perimeter of the Lincoln. A risky maneuver but he thrived on risky maneuvers, and out of range of all but the most dedicated opposition...

His attention flicked to Trapp, watching the glimmer of him slide through space even as his tactical readouts spat all sorts of information out at him. It scrolled across the screen faster than he could read, useless as ever...but [i]not[/i] useless was the red line that had already pierced the Mk II on approach to him, its coordinates locked and triangulation already beginning to occur from the targeting systems. The firing time wasn't stellar--there might have been some bleed through in the energy systems, he would have to note that to the egg-heads--but he flicked a finger to the Tesla drive to compensate. Cutting it momentarily, momentum in space carried him along at an even clip as he tried to get past the tangled that was Gerry and his new dance partner.

"Come on, come on..." He hummed idly to himself, idly amused that Trapp would call the rest of them out on their shit but completely ignore his own, getting in that close to blast up a Ferir just because it was on the tail of his squad-mate. Like it wasn't their job to get shot at. Obvious enough that the man had some guilt issues from his little speech back on the ship, but that was no reason to leave him hanging.

"Don't worry, Mama, I'm not about to let the old warhorse go down..." He smirked, the drive's boost bringing the Arbalest back online in record time. A quick jet to clear the fray and move past the obscuring shrapnel of Yuu's Calamity Cannon--that beast of a gun--and it was all green light and dropped Ferir. Not as clean as his first move, the blast still took out the upper half of the machine. If the pilot was lucky, he might even have survived long enough to get sucked out into space and processed as a prisoner. If he wasn't blown apart during the combat first.

Who could say.

"Eye in the sky reporting in." He drawled as he flicked over the Tesla drive and shot backwards with a sudden jerk of inertia, his padded piloting harness jerking against his chest as he screamed backwards towards the Lincoln. He'd made two shots out of position, so it was time to get back behind the bruisers--Wes was a [i]much[/i] easier target. Besides, the man liked being shot at. The few missiles that had been streaking for his location were left behind, detonating hard on a scattered burst of flares that made Trent smirk a bit in his suit. "Two dead birds, two chickens out of the fire. Anybody got something fun for me to light up yet?"