Smike

Shattered Steel - An Ace Combat/Project Wingman/etc inspired aircraft-based RP

Ximena Huang

Ximena was unserious, to put it politely. She snickered, she joked, she poked and prodded people to get a reaction on the ground, and then started salivating at the thought of claiming kills in the sky. No one looked to her for sober leadership or collected professionalism, not even her superiors-her file marked her as a maverick who was nevertheless useful in a fight and thus worth keeping around as cannon fodder.

All of that wasn't untrue... but it wasn't the whole picture. Ximena was intelligent by any standard, educated in economics and espionage and even thermonuclear physics. She spent years infiltrating megacorps and foreign powers as a double agent, identifying and neutralizing threats while also stealing sensitive information on next-generation technology.

All of that to say, when she saw a perfect sphere of energy coalesce at speed and then leave nothing behind except a hole in the ground, she knew better than to treat it as anything but a serious threat. That wasn't high explosives, obviously, nor was it another laser, or rather, any lasers involved would only have been to ignite the air which would trigger an extreme conversion of matter.

That was fucking plasma.

Directed-energy weapons that could fit on planes weren't supposed to be possible yet; plasma weaponry wasn't supposed to exist ever. That one had just been sitting around in Libya was an unwelcome fact, most unwelcome indeed.

Her eyes were bleeding again, the blast of light making the advanced prosthetics fritz out even through her helmet's visor. Ximena blinked rapidly, vision swimming and smeared with crimson as she maneuvered a handkerchief over her face.
-------
Her hackles only raised further as the flight came in for a landing, watching the plumes of smoke drifting lazily into the dawn sky. Malta Tower claimed it was just a standard domestic fire...

...Malta Tower could collectively take a long walk off a short cliff. She didn't take anything on trust, certainly not from people who had already been compromised. The Westerners had saboteurs in their mechanics bays and pirates sneaking up on their coastline; Ximena wouldn't have trusted them to tell her it was wet out had they been caught in a hurricane.

Fgura, huh?

Noted.

Once on the ground she busied herself by washing the blood from her cheeks with a water bottle stashed under her chair, listening to Scott as she did so. Free drinks and an excuse to get smashed made a nice reward, as did the slightly less than two days of free time. The question was what she would fill her hours with. She had an idea, most definitely, but it was a bad one.

A terrible one, honestly. Completely irresponsible, bone-headed, and almost certainly illegal. Ximena knew all this and yet she found it hard to set the idea aside. She grabbed herself a beer, mulling over plans while watching the squadron twink go up to bother Scott again-he was either desperate for a father figure, nursing a crush, or both-playing out various scenarios in her head.

They were just idle thoughts, she would have claimed. Simple daydreaming, honest! Whether or not that was true was still to be determined.

Once a spy, always a spy.

Shattered Steel - An Ace Combat/Project Wingman/etc inspired aircraft-based RP

Fuka Nakano

Mitiga was in the same city, scarcely five or six miles away from the shattered wreck of Tripoli International Airport. It took seconds for Peacenik to swing around and get in range, once again in the midst of searching radar and scrambling jets. She cycled through her weapons with the bored diligence of a store clerk running inventory, waiting for Wunderkind as well as Scott and his personal hound Kat to pick their targets. A Blinder, the control tower, some fuel storage, and then the runaway, all of which went up in overlapping starburst explosions, bathing the night sky in brilliant orange. She watched impassively, selecting her targets from what remained.

"Rifle out. she called, the last of her anti-radiation missiles streaking towards a SAM site to erase it from the face of the earth. " And pigs away."

Her final JDAM and SLAM-ER shot out for the Tupolevs, tearing one to pieces and blasting the wing off another. That was all of her air-to-ground expended; Fuka was now free to bail out. As she started the trip home she felt not satisfaction but unease, the sensation causing her jaw to clench under her oxygen mask.

She was definitely tired, and who could blame her? Two strike missions in the same day, both of which involved multiple dogfights, and preceded by a gunfight on foot and another sortie, shifting in and out of her flight suit more often than she had changed her socks. The stop and start got under her skin, made her feel like she was being jerked around. But that was an old annoyance, something she had gotten used to long ago.

"All our powers combined!"

@Letter Bee

Good God, shut the fuck up.

Fuka felt out of place. She wasn't even a week removed from entering mercenary life and was already second-guessing it. She didn't trust multiple members of the squadron for reasons of personality and stability; they were crazy, but not her kind of crazy. Too many loudmouths and blood drinkers, too many Section 8 candidates with chips on their shoulders and poor impulse control.

Again she remembered her mother's warnings, the older woman trying to curb her already burgeoning sociopathic tendencies in childhood but failing. Now Fuka was flying high in the pale pre-dawn, trying not to think about the length of her contract. It was her fault, of course, her fault and no one else's. She had been so desperate to separate herself from her family that she jumped from field to field without concern with whether or not she'd fit, like a college kid sampling majors.

She should have stayed in the Army, where things made sense. She had enjoyed being a Ranger and was damn good at it, good enough that she might have been able to join Delta. She belonged on the ground with quiet professionals, not in the sky with showboats. Similarly, Cobalt needed a second-in-command who fit their vibes, not a silent and sullen samurai who hung around like a stain on the wall until it was time to kill something.

"What firms are developing those and where can we find them? Is anyone else interested in trying to get them?"

@Letter Bee

"That's not for us to know at the moment. We're better off focusing on the practical nature of what we just faced; the who and why will be determined by the intel people. We all got very lucky-had they come in on our broadside, firing their lasers, some of us would be dead or captured. They don't need to wait for lock-on or to lead their shots, and we can't outrun light."

Ximena Huang

Ximena snickered meanly as the last of the Titans was condemned to Tartarus, just like their namesakes. La Catrina waggled her wings before cutting in front of Calico, lazily rolling onto her back while Jefe scanned the giant menu that was Mitiga International Airport.

"Hmmm, let's see here...ah, you'll do."

There was a communications building off to the side, festooned with antennas and coaxial cabling. It looked ad hoc to Ximena's well-trained eye, a series of field modifications thrown into an empty structure in preparation for some intensive operation. There were probably people in there, hunkering down while trying to relay requests for support.

A Soviet-made bomb smashed right through the roof before exploding, blowing out most of the walls and collapsing what remained in on itself.

"And something for you as well."

There was a shop hangar with the nose of what looked to be an Il-76 jutting from it, the venerable beast of a utility craft undergoing maintenance of some sort. Ximena cheerfully made the mechanic's jobs impossible with her last KAB-500, the guided bomb splintering the cockpit and cracking apart the fuselage.

"Blasting Russian planes with Russian weapons, funny life we live, ain't it, Calico?"

Funny indeed. Ximena was out of explosives but still had rounds rattling in her chaingun, and she was ill-tempered enough to use them. With the radar down and most if not all of the missile platforms destroyed, she was free to make a looping pass over the base, watching hawk-like for signs of life.

There.

A pair of trucks had split off for the exit gate, practically bumper to bumper in their haste to escape. It wasn't much, but no predator turned down a meal.

"Moving to strafe!"

The Beautiful Corpse screamed down from on high, proverbial talons outstretched and cannon winding up. In the split second it took her to line up a shot Ximena took in the battered state of the vehicles, saw the beds full of soldiers and aircrew. She saw terrified faces, uniforms stained with sweat, rifles slung over shoulders or clenched in hands-

Good enough, they were a legitimate target.

"Guns guns GUNS!" Jefe shrieked, cackling madly as she let loose with everything she had. In an instant, the trucks were nothing more than twisted piles of scrap, metal fused with flesh, while set alight and thrown all over the service road they had tried to escape by. Ximena showed mercy by making sure no one would be left to bleed out, using up the last of her high-explosive incendiaries on the thirty or so squirters.

Any counterattack the Libyans put together would just have to go on without them. Satisfied in the same way a bear would be after feasting on an elk carcass, Ximena threw her plane up and over into formation with the rest of the gang.

"I saw you tossing rockets during your dogfights." She hailed Mykhalio, blithely cutting into the conversation. "Don't do that, it's wasteful. If you're not going to spend them on something actually hittable, you might as well take more actual missiles instead, get good at using your main gun like I am."

The 'helpful' advice covered her racing mind, Ximena making a note to discuss the evening's events with her boss later. In fact-

She killed her helmet mic and fished for her tablet under her seat, awkwardly propping it between her knees and typing an email with one hand. The message would be waiting for Scott whenever he next checked his inbox.

RE:LASERS????
Should probably talk to you and Wiseman again. Seems like my past has come back to bite us all in the ass instead of just me this time
( •_•)
PS: that was fun we should be wingmen sometime (✌ﾟ∀ﾟ)☞

@Rhona W @Letter Bee @Finetales

Shattered Steel - An Ace Combat/Project Wingman/etc inspired aircraft-based RP

Fuka Nakano

Her chandelle had been a hasty manuever performed to buy her time without expectation of a successful escape. Peacenik assumed that if someone had been entrusted with a fancy-supertech stealth fighter they were good enough to stay on her tail. Shifting into the long, climbing turn would only break missile lock, give her a chance to think. After that she was back in the fire.

"Cobalt 6, Fox 2"

@Damo021

Valkyrie came in swinging, her wild haymaker of a missile launch missing its target but forcing him away. Good. Great, actually, a better result than she hoped for. With a second bandit hounding him he'd find it hard to recover his momentum, a problem Fuka could commiserate with. They had the same problem: flying a big, heavy craft while trying to outmaneuver someone throwing much less weight around.

In the time it took for the Titan to get a lock Peacenik had already come out of her turn, tilting the Black Bunny to provide a smaller cross-section as she activated the usual countermeasures. Flares and chaff spread out behind her as she continued, showing no more concern than if she had just merged onto a particularly tricky section of highway.

"Thanks for the assist, Valk. Heartbreak, good copy. Trusting you to not get me killed."

Turning her back on an enemy while they were still alive made the hairs on the back of Fuka's neck stand up, but what could she do? If two ace pilots weren't enough of a distraction to keep the rival gun-for-hire busy she might as well've pulled out her pistol and ejected her brains across the cockpit.

"Cobalt 8, 9, I'm coming in. Stagger your shots, we'll catch them in a buckshot pattern."

Ximena Huang

The aqua-tailed prick flinched once Ximena got them in her gunsights, Jefe snarling in savage glee as her opponent was forced to abandon their original plan. Strike Eagles were a touch faster than La Catrina, yes, but that wasn't everything. There wasn't enough of a power gap between the systems to make up for a skill and positioning gap, and Ximena was ahead in both categories.

"Where the fuck do you think you're going?" she hailed, well-aware that the Titan wasn't any more likely to respond than her peers, but so high on adrenaline she didn't care. "You're not sneaking out of this!"

She essentially copied Miss Blue's maneuver, overshooting the Silent Eagle while lurching La Catrina's nose in tandem with the enemy. A minute earlier the burst of laserfire might have caught Ximena off-guard but now that she knew energy weapons were on the field? Not a chance. She dipped low in the midst of her swing-round, beams of light lancing over her head. A stray shot hit, but at an oblique angle, scorching the seabird's underbelly. La Catrina didn't even shudder, the massless bolt singing through the stealth-coated skin and into the air intake.

“Minor damage sustained.”

"I noticed babe! Don't worry."

Had it been a straight-on shot the injury would have been catastrophic. But Ximena understood laser technology, knew the upsides and downsides and how it worked. Moving at an angle forced the light to reflect awkwardly, wasting some of its thermal energy. Instead of destroying her intake Miss Blue had only damaged it, and not overmuch at that. La Catrina was pulling to one side due to inefficient engine thrust but a quick glance at the HUD told Jefe she hadn't lost any of her electronics or weapons. There was no fuel leakage, no fires to extinguish, only a bitch to put down.

"Fox Two"

@Finetales

Calico had the same brainwave, Ximena watching as three missiles streaked out in search of fresh meat. A second later Peacenik joined in with a Fox call of her own, and then a second after that-

"Fox 2, Miss Blue. ¡Métetelo por el culo!"

She didn't know if Calico spoke Spanish but Peacenik probably knew a bit-

"Cobalt 9, keep the commentary to yourself."

Yep.

@Finetales @Rhona W

Shattered Steel - An Ace Combat/Project Wingman/etc inspired aircraft-based RP

JEFE VS GORGON

"Sorry to love ya and leave Kitten, got a problem here."

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.

“Where are you going you little rodent?” 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.
-----
“Worthy of your plane, I see,” 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.

“Missile incoming.”

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.

“Thank you my darling.” 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, maybe 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.

“What’d Titan do, recruit you right out of the crop duster?” 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. “Surely you’ve got more than that?”

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.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

She stabbed the control panel to switch back to closed comms, giving the rest of the squadron a warning:

“All friendlies be advised, enemies has advanced weapons! Repeat, enemy has directed energy weapons!”

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.

"Good show, good night, cào ni mā."

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.

"Looks like you boys are down a pilot!" she gloated over open channels. "I hope you've arranged your wills."

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.

Splintered / Reflections

Jacobin Dokken

The worst part of the mission was always the actual drop-in, at least when it was hot. Leaping off a plane or rappelling down from a chopper or deploying from an APC, it was all the same:

A few brief moments of sheer, terrifying vulnerability replete with the knowledge that you couldn't do anything except hope the enemy had bad aim, followed by a mad dash into position so you could start laying down fire.

Back when she started in the Home Guard, everyone knew that the next invasion would be by the Soviets. Jacobin had been familiarized with the deep battle doctrine so favored by the Reds because it had been assumed that she and her comrades would be the ones trying to stop it, fighting desperate running battles against T72s and BTRs while NATO struggled to keep control of the skies. It had been a harrowing prospect, but as the years went on and war never materialized it slipped to the back of her mind.

And then one day it came back with a vengeance. Instead of human conscripts with AKs she was fighting aliens wielding plasma weaponry, trying to dodge fire from spacecraft.

It took two-and-a-half seconds to fall from the plane to the unforgiving ground below, just long enough for Jacobin to really dwell on the insanity of the situation. She cursed the Totality for coming and Earth for calling her up to fight them and herself for sticking around long enough to get herself crippled and shunted into a wheelchair...

And then the jump jets engaged, the great stomping boots of the Gernsback kicking up sandy grit. That was the signal that it was time to stop bitching and start doing; classic compartmentalization.

"Understood Silv, I'll keep them off you."

As big as the M9 was it was hard to find cover for it, but that didn't mean Jacobin wasn't going to try. She leapt forward with a burst from her jump jets, taking up position behind the burning remains of a YPR-765. Whatever hit had punched through the side armor and destroyed the poor souls inside of it, but it was intact enough to serve as a strongpoint and the flames billowing through the open hatch didn't disturb her aim much. She couldn't even feel the heat safely ensconced in her suit.

It had taken time to acclimate to shooting accurately with hands not her own. Trying to shoulder a rifle without actually shouldering it made her brain ache in a way she couldn't explain, to say nothing of trying to aim with a scope while looking at the world through a screen. But she knew what she was doing, zeroing in and waiting for the Totality to make its move-

There! Coming around the side from behind the remains of a medical bay, a heavy trooper looking to flank. Jacobin shifted her barrel to follow and fired once, tucking a 25mm shell into the softer, actuating inner skin rather than the hard carapace. The result was messy, but effective.

No way that was the only one.

"Veep! Watch the right flank!"

Horned Bastard, 202nd of the Ravenous Cohort

The Devil was already running while the commander relayed orders. In such a situation, they were comfortable assuming as to what their role would be, preferring the infinitesimal chance that they were incorrect to wasting precious seconds getting into position. They had the shield; they took up the front.

"This unit recommends staying behind it." they radioed to the others, their voice almost serene in its soft, spacey cadence. Despite the din of battle in the distance and the roar of the plane engines somewhere above, HB was completely calm. Their vitals readout put their heart rate at thirty beats per minute, the same as it was back at base. Fear and excitement were rudimentary chemical imbalances that served no purpose in battle, and thus HB had worked to remove them from their mind. They did feel, however, a vague sense of satisfaction.

Of peace.

Rifle fire pinged off the Devil's shield, high-velocity rounds ricocheting uselessly off into the sky or the dirt. A squad of line troopers, pinned down by Silverwind's suppressing fire, nevertheless attempted to hit the sensor suit of the vanguard rushing towards them. HB lifted their shield higher and fired a couple of grenades from their launcher, twin bursts of plasma melting the light infantry where they stood.

"This one is moving to engage in melee. If possible, try to slip around the enemy so we can herd them."

A Runner tried to get behind to shoot at their back, catching a tomahawk backswing to the 'brain' as a reward.

Shattered Steel - An Ace Combat/Project Wingman/etc inspired aircraft-based RP

Ximena Huang

"I'm watching them, don't wanna blow my cover until I see just what I'm dealing with."

Slow and steady wins the race, patience is a virtue, all those good lessons she had heard somewhere and tossed aside as worthless-they mattered up here. She craved the fury of a fight and the glory of a kill but it would be hard to enjoy them if she misjudged a situation and ate rockets.

Rockets, yeah, right. Getting shot down by an unguided bomb would be pretty embarrassing.

"But you know what, just for you-I'll make an exception."

She had probably taken a few too many AMRAAMs and not enough AIM9s, but the MiGs were out of her visual range anyway. She wasn't paying for the missiles, and Shattered didn't give her a cash bonus for not spending all of them, so why not take a shot?

She slowly squeezed the trigger, waiting to hear the beautiful blessed sound of a confirmed lock. She only completed the pull when La Catrina whispered sultry, sweet nothings in her ear.

"Target locked."

Ah, bliss. Better than any dirty talk, that was for damn sure.

"Foooooox TWO!"

And still more were coming, a flight of Mirages creeping in for a scuffle while they were still unbloodied. Her finger hovered over the trigger as Catrina searched, the eyeless beauty using all her awesome power to detect the enemy. Invisible waves soared through the air before bouncing off an object moving at hundreds of miles an hour back towards her, and through some techno-occult magic the Beautiful Corpse had another victim in its sights.

"Target locked."

"God, she's sexy. Fox Two."

Another shot, another hit. That one almost missed due to some skillful maneuvering from the pilot, but the shower of flares they sent out didn't deter the missile. An entire wing was blown off, followed by the canopy as the operator bailed out.

Lucky you. Jefe thought, waving to her vanquished foe in their ejection seat. Get back to base, wipe the sweat from your face then get back into the sky so we can meet again. I'll kill you next time, I promise.

"Easy fuckin' does it. I'm still going to stick close to you for now Kitten, keep sniping them if I can. That way-"

"Be advised, there are more bandits. I repeat, more bandits. A minimum of four heavily modified F-15s. I repeat, MINIMUM of four."

"Pinches ratas con alas, cào nǐ mā!" She practically spat into the radio, groaning in annoyance. Right in the middle of a conversation, piece of shit bastard fucking-"I see 'em, moving!"

And see them she did. Blacked-out stealth fighters-shit, Silent Eagles? Great. Flying the same model of super plane like a real military unit, they even color-coordinated their trimming.

Well, aren't they just so well-organized? she sneered to herself, twisting the stick around. She recognized them too, the big T was a good logo: Titans. Efficient, lethal, better than the local yokels she had been chewing through the past couple of days.

Tonight was shaping up to be interesting.

"Sorry to love ya and leave Kitten, got a problem here."

It was only fair to let her know that she was on her own again, and in Ximena's defense someone was actively trying to kill her. She'd make up for being so rude later. Right now she had to get things started.

Step one was to keep her height advantage. Jefe was already high up in the clouds and wanted to climb even higher, force her new friend to chase her up a proverbial mountain. Letting her speed drop allowed her to turn on a dime, La Catrina flipping her nose around so she was coming down on Mister Green from on high.

"Nǐ hǎo!"

It wasn't a brevity code but it was broadcast for all to hear...right after she sent an AIM straight at him. The beauty of those things was that they were entirely immune to flares, being radar guided, and jamming them was often just tying the noose around your own neck. Once it detected a jamming attempt, it would switch to passive guidance and crash into the source of the signal.

And just for kicks, Ximena was guiding it with her Scorpion as well. There was a rule that applied to business, espionage, and combat aviation:

Always stack the deck.

@Rhona W

Shattered Steel - An Ace Combat/Project Wingman/etc inspired aircraft-based RP

Fuka Nakano

"Peacenik, Brightspark: I'm tangled with two MiGs, got them off your trail. There are more though, watch your back!"

@Finetales

Well Calico was certainly eager, Fuka would give her that. Breaking off unbidden from the flight to smash into two bandits while more were coming in hot was...unorthodox, certainly, and potentially a lethal mistake. But high risk sometimes meant high reward, and Peacenik was more willing to trust the Singaporean ace's mad dog instincts than she was the Chinese mercenary's...or the Filipino child's, or the German air force transfer or the Swedish traitor or the English torture victim's...

"Roger Calico, I see them. Sparrow, I'm continuing ground attack for now. Peel off and help Cobalt 5, but stay loose. You might have to help both of us."

She had always been solitary, even as a little girl. One time, her mother, exhausted after a long day of work and then a night of glad-handing the upper crust of the political world at some charity event, had seen her coldly brush off the attempts of some of the other young guests to make friends. She had taken her aside and, calmly but firmly, told her:

"You're going to need to learn to like people, because they're everywhere. You will be working and living with them forever, and it's easier if they're your friends."

The memory stuck but not the lesson. Fuka remained distant; She was never anyone's best friend. No one thought to put her as an emergency contact, she had never been a bridesmaid, and not even her own siblings asked her to be godmother to their children. She stood apart from people by design-she could laugh and joke as required, of course, but that was in and of itself usually a performance, enough of a show to allow her to disappear. Those who got close to her found that she wasn't someone you could build a tight bond with and that she wasn't worth the effort anyway. She loved her family, but it was a distant and often somewhat obligatory love from both ends.

"That far hangar's got some gear in it, gonna handle it. Rifle out."

A SLAM-ER lived up to its name, slicing through the aluminum frame and detonating inside. The fuel or ammo stores within went up all at once, flames pouring through the gash in the roof. Fuka tilted away, already searching for targets with her Litening pod.

Sitting in her glass bubble high above the carnage on the ground, Fuka could remember a time when she had seriously wondered whether she was a psychopath. The thought had occurred to her in high school, and then later in the Army when she clamored for combat. It wasn't uncommon for super-grunts to want to see action (that was the whole point of being a Ranger) but where others wanted to fight because they hated the enemy or loved the people they were protecting or simply needed the rush to feel alive, her enjoyment of it was cold, clinical. It satisfied her in the same way as troubleshooting a car or patching a hole in the wall. She looked at a problem and the tools on hand and figured out what to do, and she could tell immediately whether she made the wrong move.

Case in point, the RWR was beeping again.

"Got eyes on another mobile SAM. Guns."

The Black Bunny dipped its nose and spat, a burst of cannon shells ripping apart the truck-mounted missile launcher before it could try and hit a second target. The RWR fell silent. Problem solved.

Was she a psychopath? The fact that she was more curious than concerned was a mark of evidence in the Yes column, and her lack of emotional care for most people was another. She probably wasn't, but she was certainly not going to the shrink to find out. All that mattered was that she could do her job and her team could do theirs. Affection, trust, friendship, they would come on their own or not all and didn't matter anyway. One cog in the machine didn't trust another to move, it simply did its job and assumed the others would as well. If that wasn't the case, well...

She'd adjust.

"Cobalt 5, I have no visual on you at the moment. Assuming you're not dead, continue to strafe. We're going to-Hold that thought."

The RWR was one of the very few friends she had. It bleeted, it blathered, it hurt her ears with its atonal shrieks and robotic voice, but it only spoke when it had something important to say. It beeped in warning, pulling up the concentric rings used to indicate thread direction on her instrument panel. This most recent scan was from somewhere above. She glanced upwards, squinting into the dark-

Her self-control slipped.

"Godamnit."

That half-instant of anger was a secret shared between only her and the RWR and the plane itself. She hadn't even raised her voice nor make any gesture outside of a squint. It was the closest she ever got to rage, and with that moment of weakness out of the way, she could set about doing something about it.

Fuka flipped the comms on and broadcast to all friendlies, no longer just addressing her own flight."Be advised, there are more bandits. I repeat, more bandits." Peacenik glanced back at the intruders, lips moving as she counted silently. "A minimum of four heavily modified F-15s. I repeat, MINIMUM of four."

They had come up quick and quiet and professionally, the sort of approach Fuka preferred. Strike Eagles, like she said, but the fact that she was only aware of them now meant they had stealth capabilities. Fancy stuff, not the sort of thing the Libyans would have got their hands on before the world collapsed.

Another PMC.

Fuka drummed her mechanical fingers against the instrument panel as she hit the throttle, pushing power to the thrusters as she pulled into a basic chandelle. The number of knots per hour on the airspeed displayed crept up in unison with her altitude, the Black Bunny pulling up and to the left in a turn that would have been far too fast had she been trying to get her FAA license, but was just fast enough when peeling out of gunsight. She'd be moving too quickly to aim a cannon at but slow enough that any missiles would overshoot her, and with her taking the turn first, she had the advantage when it came to chasing each other's tails.

"Ladies and gentleman of Flight 2: Give 'em hell."

@Letter Bee @Finetales

Shattered Steel - An Ace Combat/Project Wingman/etc inspired aircraft-based RP

Fuka Nakano

"Roger Peacenik, we've got your back."

@Finetales

"Alright then Flight 2, go to work."

Mykhalio took the early initiative as was his nature. Fuka watched impassively as Brightspark nuked a radar installation before moving on to other targets with respectable gusto but a lack of protocol, firing off his arsenal without a single warning.

"Cobalt Five, do not fire without calling a weapon release code, I repeat, do not fire without giving a weapon release code.

The last thing Peacenik needed was to be dodging friendly fire because an errant shot crossed her path. Death by her own team would have been extremely embarrassing. But she wasn't there to ruminate; she had targets to find.

The flight lead yanked her stick rightwards, throwing the Black Bunny into a hard bank over the airport. A big airbase like this would have multiple radar installed and probably an extra brought in. Heartbreak had already snatched one it looked like, Myk another, so then where was-

Gotcha.

A beat-up P-40 still in Russian green and mounted on an old school artillery tractor, tucked out of the way behind a stack of storage containers. She almost didn't see the thing due to having to watch her missile lock indicators, only just catching a glimpse of the venerable beast as she carved a path over the backend of the airport. Moving low and slow like she was allowed her to turn on a dime, stomach lurching as she whipped up and over with the Litening camera now active. With no time to lock on and too low to manually guide a bomb without crashing Peacenik made a split-second decision:

"Magnum out!"

The AGM shunted from her weapon bay like a punch from Heaven, rocketing towards the truck at Mach 2. Without a lock onto a specific target, it went for the biggest source of radiation nearby, turning the P-40 and its operators into nothing more than spall.

A good hit, but she was running out of time. SAMs down below kept sweeping her, blinded by the number of targets available and unable to focus on any single one but quickly narrowing down their options. A Tunguska crawling along in search of cover fired a burst in her general direction, Fuka responding with egregious overkill in the form of-

"Rifle out."

Twin thirty-milimeters couldn't compete with a thousand pound JDAM.

"This is Cobalt 3, I see one radar installation left-behind the control tower. I'm going to try and snipe it before things get too busy, watch my back. "

Ximena Huang

She had mixed feelings about her loadout. On the one hand flying her beloved sea bird with external pylons meant cutting back on its main function. Stealthiness took a dive when you duct-taped a bunch of missiles to the outside of a plane specifically shaped to better hide. She wasn't a complete sitting duck like Kitten or even Scott, but she was definitely more noticable than she liked to be. But on the other hand...

Here we go, here we go, here we GO!

...she was perched on enough ordnance to knock out a city block, and it was getting to her. Two Soviet guided bombs from the turn of the century and NINE American air-to-air missiles from the depths of the Cold War made her, de facto, an angel of death. As a little girl her father had told her stories of the grave and terrible Yanluo Wang, the King of Hell and the ultimate judge of souls. Such superstiton was frowned upon by the CCP of course, but he had told her anyway and the images stuck with her ever since. He was a dharmapāla, a wrathful god, who rewarded the pious with protection and punished the wicked with brutality.

Jefe considered him something of a kindred spirit, her skull-marked plane and killer's talent making her as worthy a vessel as any other mortal. She was not overly religious but at times very spiritual, and those moments of quiet calm before a fight helped her enter a state of near-zen she struggled to find anywhere else.

Had she been crazy she might have actually seen herself as an angel or a saint or a god, but she was in fact perfectly sane.

That's why she only felt like all of the above.

While the others dove in like vultures who found a fresh carcass she showed uncharacterstic restraint, climbing high into the cloud cover but keeping roughly in pace with Kitten's Warthog below. The A10 smashed the remaining runway (Ximena would probably just dump her bombs into the a building and call it a day) and continued to prowl, a big lumbering bear in contrast to Jefe's raptor.

"Hey Kitten." she hailed, voice almost eerily steady in contrast to the excitement around them. "I'm the clouds with decent stealth and I've got basically nothing but missiles and bad intentions up here for anyone that comes your way. You see so much as a seagull moving towards you, tell me."

Whatever planes were left on the ground would be hard-pressed to make it into the air but Libya had other airfields. Within minutes there would be Mirages and MiGs a-plenty for the taking, so many they would blot the sky like mana falling from heaven. La Catrina would feast on their bodies, Ximena their fighting spirit. All would be well.

Some small part of her brain not drowning in adrenaline spoke up: perhaps she wasn't entirely sane after all. Ximena dutifully noted the possibility before ignoring it. Nuts, sane, supremely arrogant, overwhelmingly terrified, slightly sociopathic, outright traumatized-she was none of them and all of them at the same time. She was definitly off, dials cranked up too far for too long. Shattered let her fire all cylinders because she kept a lid on things and produced results, an arrangement that suited her perfectly. All the adjectives one could call her didn't matter because they melted away when the shooting started. Once the enenmy crossed the horizon she would be one thing:

Sublime.

Shattered Steel - An Ace Combat/Project Wingman/etc inspired aircraft-based RP

Completely forgot to list loadout oops

Peacenik

• Full load of 20mm cannon rounds
• 2 1 AIM-9X Sidewinders: Short-range air-to-air missiles
• 1 AIM-120 AMRAAM: Medium-range air-to-air missile
• 2 1AGM-88 HARMs: Air-to-surface anti-radiation missiles
• 2 1 GBU-32 JDAMs: 1000-pound guided bombs.
• 2 1 SLAM-ERs: Stand-off cruise missiles, remote-control or fire and forget
• AN/AAQ-28 Litening: Laser targeting pod with infrared and TV camera, can transmit footage to friendly aircraft.
• 1 Droptank

Jefe

Full load for main gun

• Two One AIM-9X Sidewinders in wing bays
• Two KAB-500S-E guided bombs in internal bay
• 6 4 AIM-120 AMRAAMs, 1 fuel pod on external pylons

Splintered / Reflections

The Valkyrie’s Loadout

"Keeping myself in rear with the gear, thanks.”

Arm Mounted Weapons
-Anti-Armor Missiles
-Chain Gun

Back Mounted Weapons
-Heavy cannon
-Mini Missile Pod

Rear Waist
-Sniper Rifle, loaded with armor-piercing rounds

Left Hip
-Handgun, loaded with armor-piercing incendiary rounds

Right Hip
-Two extra magazines for sniper rifle

Left Calf
-Two extra magazines for the chain gun

Right Calf
-Combat Blade

The Devil’s Loadout

"When stealth is not an option, this unit is best utilized in shock assaults."

Arm Mounted Weapons
-Light Minigun
-Shield

Back Mounted Weapons
-Automatic Grenade Launcher, loaded with plasma grenades
-Heavy Gattling Gun, loaded with high-explosive incendiary ammunition

Rear Waist
Combat Axe

Left Hip
Two reloads for light minigun

Right Hip
Extra ammo for automatic grenade launcher

Left Calf
Two EMP grenades

Right Calf
Two smoke grenades