[center][h1][b][color=#6ecff6]JEFE[/color] VS [color=#DAA520]GORGON[/color] [/b][/h1][/center] [quote][color=6ecff6]"Sorry to love ya and leave Kitten, got a problem here."[/color] [/quote] The Silent Eagle sporting sleek white trim angled in toward the streamlined, equally sleek shape of Jefe’s F-22N. Even with the swing-wing jet carrying external stores, it still had a reduced radar cross-section and enough of one that it was hard to resolve a strong lock with his AMRAAMs, and as it rose upward through the clouds, he had to push his throttle up a notch to keep his speed up and gain power in the climb. His radar warning receiver blared; a lock on against him and a missile in the air. It was a head-on shot, and that made things slightly easier, but not much. He slapped the countermeasures button for chaff, even as he heeled over into a tight turn off-beam to the missile and dropped altitude rapidly, pulling a high-G turn. If he could drop low enough, he could lose the missile in the ground clutter along with the hard turn, trying to outfly it. ----- Ximena clicked her tongue in annoyance at the cloudburst of chaff even as she moved to follow. The maneuver was well-timed and nicely executed, the Sidewinder hurtling past her target towards the ground. It was trying to veer back in the right direction but its angle was off and those thrusters didn’t last forever. With luck it’d hit someone or something important down there, but she had to focus on the more immediate target. Dropping low was the smart play for the Eagle, trying to go high would have slowed its momentum and made it missile-bait. Unfortunately for Mister White going down only made it easier for Ximena to keep her height advantage. [color=6ecff6]“Where are you going you little rodent?”[/color] She hailed him, cycling over to the main gun as she followed his path from on high. Trying to aim directly at something when both she and the target were moving at hundreds of miles an hour was of course a wasted effort but leading a shot? Pretty simple. She spun up the Vulcan and let loose a half-second of fire, trying to blow apart the Eagle’s cockpit and the pilot with it. Scudding low over Tripoli’s rooftops and streets, the dark shape of the Silent Eagle was even darker against the night, and the blacked-out city threw up very little light to highlight the fleeting, arrowhead shape. Nonetheless, a pilot with Ximena’s skill, along with her planes’ instruments and her enhanced vision picked out the moving shape. While the burst of cannon fire from her M61 was well-aimed, the Titan pilot pulled a hard bank to port at just the right moment, the volley of 20mm shells missing, tearing his cockpit apart by the barest of hairbreadths. The majority of the stream of hot lead missed, but the tail end of the burst chewed into the forward edge of the starboard intake and wing root, disabling his own vulcan and slamming the plane around in the air and forcing him to gain altitude in an elegant, steep looping climb. ----- [color=DAA520]“Worthy of your plane, I see,”[/color] he spoke to himself as he pulled up, the weight of the G’s tight on his barrel chest, and his thick neck muscles straining against the amplified weight of his helmet as he looked out the top of the canopy, searching the skies for the F-22N. Lighter in colour, he picked out the swing-wing stealth jet and his helmet-mounted sight locked onto it, and he squeezed off a snap-shot with one of his own AIM-9X’s, the heat-seeker locking onto the friction heat of the plane’s leading edges. ----- She watched most of the burst fly off somewhere into Tripoli, the impact distant enough that she couldn’t see the miniature explosions. Hopefully it hit somewhere unoccupied! It wasn’t her problem and she didn’t have the time to care. Hitting the intake was a decent consolation prize if she had actually managed to damage it, knocking out the other would be a kill (or close to it). But Mister White was already pulling into a quick climb, scrambling to get back onto an even playing field. Ximena moved to match him, her height advantage allowing her to La Catrina’s nose down in a shallow dive on an axis to intercept. [b][i][color=000000]“Missile incoming.”[/color][/i][/b] La Catrina’s warning wasn’t news (Ximena would have done the same had she been in Mister White’s seat) but the plane wasn’t built to read minds. It looked at facts. Millions of complex processes occurred instantaneously, providing as much information as possible to the pilot. La Catrina was particularly diligent thanks to the Distributed Aperture System crosshatched into her guts-she spotted a surge of heat and read its heading as being ‘right towards me’, duly alerting her jockey and automatically sending out a spray of chaff and flares. That was everything the Beautiful Corpse could do, the rest was up to Ximena. [color=6ecff6]“Thank you my darling.”[/color] Jefe grunted, straining under multiple Gs while going into evasive maneuvers. The lower approach Mister White was firing from worked in her favor; the missile was forced to take an awkward turn to get on her tail. Not that awkward, mind, those Sidewinders were mobile suckers. She had a second, [i]maybe[/i] one second, to save herself. She followed procedure automatically, performing a technique that had been drilled into her head after a thousand repetitions. With the cloudburst of distractions fanning out behind her, she pulled her plane onto its side, flying knife-edged perpendicular to the missile to throw it off. In a risky maneuver, she cut her burners, trying to let the plane blend into the cold night sky. The American taxpayer had spent a bit more than $300 million to build her plane. Ximena had been one of said taxpayers for a time, her realty income going directly into the United States war machine. You’d think that for that money, her Seabird would be goddamn invisible against a half-million dollar bomb! Then again, La Catrina was stolen so Ximena was already getting a hell of a lot more bang for her buck than she would have been otherwise. Fair enough. [color=6ecff6]“What’d Titan do, recruit you right out of the crop duster?”[/color] she called to him, well aware that the supersonic blur that just passed over had been a few inches away from turning her into soup. [color=6ecff6]“Surely you’ve got more than that?”[/color] She had shifted over so that she was once again on the path to intercept. This time he was rising, dodging would be harder. Good! She pulled the trigger, another half-second of Vulcan fire ripping forward. Something flickered at the edge of her periphery, twin spears of light. [color=6ecff6][i]Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.[/i][/color] She stabbed the control panel to switch back to closed comms, giving the rest of the squadron a warning: [color=6ecff6]“All friendlies be advised, enemies has advanced weapons! Repeat, enemy has directed energy weapons!”[/color] The last she heard of them they were a dead-end technology, too difficult to miniaturize. Fabricante Diaz had been a trainwreck of a company that hemorrhaged money, but their science was solid. They had checked the numbers again and again; you just could not shrink a power source enough to mount lasers on anything but the largest of vehicles. Well, someone had figured it out. ----- Gorgon, the white-trimmed Silent Eagle, had tail-slid around in a tight turn that had blurred his vision and crushed the air out of his lungs, but it had got him around on the F-22N and its tricksy pilot. Whoever they were, they were good; very good, and very lucky too. But luck couldn’t outrun lasers. As the targeting reticle in his helmet visor predicted the path of the beams, he jabbed at the trigger, staggering shots to try and land something on the sea raptor, before the jet’s silhouette slid out of his view, and he pulled into a hard wingover and a dive to avoid any followup from his target, trying to weave around to line up another shot. ----- She would never admit it to him of course, but Mister White was world-class. Unfortunately, she was better-she was a strong pilot and a faster thinker, and while fancy lasers gave the Titans an advantage she wasn't going to be caught off guard like some wet-behind-the-ears prick in a puddle jumper. As soon as her shot missed she was already moving, well aware of the Eagle coming in on her outside. She launched multiple sprays of flares and chaff, the brilliant display forming makeshift physical concealment in tandem with her bird's stealth functions. Beams of weaponized light split the aluminum-encrusted, magnesium-lit corona like lightning across the sky, casting an eerie glow through the night...but hitting nothing more than air and foil strips. Somewhere within the man-made supernova Jefe had blindly dropped the throttle back, slowing suddenly while her opponent riddled empty space ahead of her. While he was diving, she was moving in the opposite direction, tipping Catrina's nose up into an absurdly high pitch; a classic Cobra maneuver. She was now behind him while he was committed to a weaving dive, which meant that she was once again on top. [color=6ecff6]"Good show, good night, [i]cào ni mā[/i]."[/color] The eye-tracking reticle wired into her helmet locked onto Mister White immediately, an AMRAAM firing in tandem with another half-second burst of cannon fire. ----- Gorgon struggled to pull back, the Silent Eagle doing its utmost to co-operate. But physics was just not on his side. Energy was everything in a dogfight. He’d gained some in the dive, sure; but he was fighting gravity to try and pull up and get her off his tail. The jets’ radar warning receiver blared at him and he cursed and snarled, pulling a hard wingover. It was a risky move and he lost more energy in doing it, and he felt the lift drop out from under him. He pushed the throttle up, trying to build up more power. As he did, the damaged intake shed more debris and there was a loud bang from somewhere in the plane and it lurched, red ‘FIRE’ caution lights lighting up across the panel for his starboard engine. Power dropped off, and there was no way to avoid Jefe’s missile or her follow up burst of gunfure. There wasn’t time to do anything. Gorgon was reaching to pull the ejection handles as the AIM-120C plowed into the broad back of the Silent Eagle. The blast-fragmentation warhead tore through the thin skin of the jet, igniting fuel left in the tanks and volatile hydraulic fluid. The resulting fireball tore the jet apart in fractions of a second, burning components flung asunder in a fireball. It was so quick, the pilot had no time to even feel it or register his own death as it happened. ----- Ximena snickered to herself as the Eagle split apart, its cockpit now a crematorium. [color=6ecff6]"Looks like you boys are down a pilot!"[/color] she gloated over open channels. [color=6ecff6]"I hope you've arranged your wills."[/color] She shifted towards the next fight, having gotten a taste for blood and wanting more. Calico looked like she could use some help and Kitten was for the time being unbothered so Jefe went towards the smaller of the felines, intent on giving the aqua-trimmed Titan a second problem to focus on.