[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opWeCiCGC0o][center]Was Getting Caught Part of Your Plan?[/center][/url]


They had taken the bait, but Rising Star knew instantly that they’d taken it a little too well. The warning bells, the flashing alerts, told her that much. She hadn’t had as much time to pull away as she would have liked. Her adrenaline spiked, every instant feeling like an hour, but she did not worry. For all of the unknowns in this fight, for all of the ways it had already gone wrong, she knew one thing for certain.

She was inside the fastest damn machine on the battlefield. That they thought they could corner her so easily was an [i]insult[/i].

Evasive maneuvers had already begun when she heard the alert, so she fired her thrusters a little harder than planned and sent the Valk rocketing forward and aside. In atmosphere, the anchor would have rushed past her left with a quiet [i]whiff[/i]. That was one problem down, but she still needed to work out how to deal with the five units following her. The azure one was special. Rising Star knew, in her heart of hearts, that it was. It was the same unit that had evaded Lumen-3’s initial attack. It had evaded her own. And now it was closing it.

She had found their ace.

[color=a0410d]"Affirmative, Rising Star. Sword Shroud, please move to intercept and extract Yukine. Providing railgun cover to get these primordial...[i]brigands[/i], away from G-Valkyrie. G-Valk, I am leaving the Bradley in your hands. Return it safely. The spoils of Jerusalem should never be tarnished when presented to a queen."[/color]

[i]Spoils[/i]? [i]Queen[/i]? She wanted to claim the Bradleys! A little voice in the back of Rising Star’s head voiced its enthusiastic agreement at the opportunity to examine one, and resolved to thank the Father for the chance later. But now she needed to focus on how to-

[color=a0410d]"But when you had had eaten and were satisfied, you became proud and forgot me. So now I will attack you like a [i]lion,[/i] like a leopard that lurks along the road. Like a bear whose cubs have been taken away. [i]I will tear out your heart.[/i] I will devour you like a wild lioness..."[/color]


[i]…

Oh.

Oh Jesus.[/i]

The primary guns of the historic American [i]Iowa[/i]-class battleship was the sixteen inch Mark 7 chemically propelled turret. The battleship possessed nine of them. These guns could fire two rounds a minute at a range of up to thirty eight kilometers with a muzzle velocity of 2,500 to 2,690 feet per second depending on the shell. These sixteen inch shells were, in metric terms, of a 406mm caliber. The XC|PT-003 [i]Judah[/i] was armed with two high velocity [i]460mm[/i] caliber railguns and they could fire a lot more than two rounds a minute. And as the Father was indicating, in no clearer terms possible, they were aimed in her general direction to engage the enemy at her discretion.

Though she was reasonably certain that she was out of harm’s way, Rising Star elected not to take the chance. The G-Valkyrie’s thrusters fired on command, sending her banking ‘up’ and around mere instants before the Judah opened fire. In atmosphere, she had little doubt the barrage would have been deafening; in space, the sight alone had to suffice.

[color=a0410d]"...and mangle you like a wild animal."[/color]

[i]Jesus Christ, Joan.[/i]

Still, the Father had given her an excellent opportunity. The fire from the rear would draw their attention, and draw it away from her. The Valk’s bank was sharp, changing her orientation to face the enemy units from an angle on roughly the same plane. The Judah’s fire came from the ‘south’, while the Valk faced them from the ‘northeast’. The mech was on its back, at least from the perspective of the pirates, presenting them a top-down view of the machine. In the process, Rising Star was presenting them with the smallest target area possible.

The remainder of the Valk’s missiles rocketed towards the group from the opposite direction of the Judah’s fire, catching the Rooks and Bradley between the railguns’ munitions and the twenty four submissiles of the G-Valkyrie. She ignored the azure Rook, for now, and instead directed a shot from her Launcher towards the Rook she had previously knocked away with the scrum from one of her missiles and fired the thrusters on the back of of the Valk, sending her shooting ‘up’ from the perspective of the enemy pirates. She engaged the Cross Change mechanism again, returning the G-Valk to its Waverider form, since she had no need of its humanoid configuration and every need for the Waverider’s reduced target silhouette and increased maneuverability.

[i]Tag, you’re it.[/i]