The moment I was out of the bunker and in communications range with the Turshen again, my earpiece almost blew my eardrum.

“—They’re accelerating! Should have a visual over the horizon in less than a minute!” Warren was saying frantically.

“I’m back out of the bunker, what’s happening?” I asked.

“Eleven contacts, cyborg ships,” Cerri explained quickly. “We’re all back onboard. Stay put, we’re almost at your position.”

“Open the lower hanger doors and do a flyby, I’ll meet you in the air,” I said, already flicking switches to ready for flight.

Silence crackled over the comms for a few seconds, then Gloria called, “Roger that. Linking our trajectory to you now.”

On a side display screen inside my cockpit, a chart flicked up to show the Turshen’s position and projected flight path. On the main screen, Bundit superimposed the same information onto the outside view.

“U-uh, Boss? We’re not capable of matching speed with the Turshen at its current velocity,” Bundit’s tiny robotic voice told me. “We will sustain heavy damage when we reach the destination. It will take a very long time to buff out the damage.”

“Don’t worry, buns,” I smiled, patting my armrest. “I have a plan. Get ready to launch.”

All four of Bundit’s hands opened at once, revealing large thruster nozzles hidden behind their palms. On the mech’s chassis, multiple armour plates shifted, exposing more thrusters. As one, they all lit up with a surge of heat and roaring sound.

Bundit surged up off the planet’s surface with frightening speed, although we didn’t and couldn’t break the sound barrier. There was only so much you could do with the aerodynamics of a large misshapen bowling ball. Well, that wasn’t entirely true, as evidenced by the speed that Turshen was closing in on us at. Our ship was a lot of things, but grace within an atmosphere was not one of them. It got its speed from raw power—literally smashing air particles out of the way with the brute force of its normal space engines.

“Alia! The cyborgs have launched fighters! They’re going to reach you before we do!” Cerri said urgently, breaking my concentration.

Bundit faltered for a moment before the buns took over. My screens had nothing on them, not even the enemy starships. Shit, I really needed some long range sensors on Bundit.

“I don’t see them,” I said. “Link sensors?”

“Linking,” Warren called, as calm as ever.

Suddenly, all was clear, and I saw just how fucked we were. The displacement of their ships was larger than ours by a significant margin, and the Turshen was flying towards them. Because of me, because I was between both parties. Fuck.

I changed my flight path, taking back over from Bundit. Rather than flying to meet my ship, I was headed right for the forward contingent of enemy fighter craft.

“Alia!” Roger barked, speaking over the comms for the first time. “Wrong way, girl.”

“Their shields will be straining against the atmosphere just like ours,” I said quickly, already changing Bundit’s configuration for the wild, silly, crazy idea that I was already acting on. “I’m going to try and even the odds a bit.”

Roger was quiet for almost a minute while I opened failsafe valves within Bundit and reoriented the pilot seat so I was facing backwards relative to our direction of flight.

“Alright, but come out of it alive, you hear me?” said Roger, his voice stern.

I grinned and licked my suddenly dry lips. “Roge, this is a game. It wouldn’t be fun without a little risk.”

“When the hell did our little Alia become such a wild cowgirl,” Ed asked, chuckling at his own humour.

“Probably when she rode Cerri like one,” Gloria shot back immediately.

My girlfriend began to choke and splutter into the mic, and I felt my face glow red with embarrassment, even as I laughed along with my friends. It was a pretty good joke. We hadn’t actually tried that position yet, though… yet.

“Ma’am,” one of my buns said, his decidedly gravelly male voice taking me by surprise. “Closing with the enemy. I suggest you buckle up. It’s time to break kneecaps.”

“Uh, what?” I blinked, staring at the screen my buns usually hung out on. They both stared right back at me, little pilot’s helmets on their heads.

The glitchier of the two gave me a salute. “Good hunting, Ma’am.”

Oh-kaay. So my buns had developed personalities. One appeared to be very small and apprehensive, focused on… What, maintenance? The other one sounded like some sort of grizzled veteran.

Whatever. I had enemies to smash. No wait, kneecaps to break.

“Missile launches detected,” Grizzlybun said sharply, highlighting the fast moving projectiles. All of them were aimed at me. Talk about overkill.

“Deploying arm cannons,” I said, flicking the switch that pulled out the biggest guns I had on my little mech. They flicked out, then retreated up the forearms and out of the way of the thrusters in the palms.

Squeakybun started to speak, but I waved them off and concentrated. I already knew they were pointed in the wrong direction. When I figured the time was right, I flipped over and took aim. Completely ballistic now, Bundit began to lose altitude while I filled the air with flak. Multiple missiles detonated in quick succession, but half still remained, and they arced down towards me, chasing me down towards the dirt.

I flipped again, pointing Bundit’s belly down at the ground. Oh boy, this was a risk. I’d felt this a few times, and I knew the theory, but it was such a long shot that I felt like I should be paying international shipping rates just for thinking of it.

“Buns, open the emergency aetheric syphon vent,” I said.

The buns glanced at each other. “You wish to reverse the flow, but that—”

“No, the outside ones,” I said, almost snapping at them. Damn it, this was not the time for Bundit to start having ideas of its own. I needed snappy control, not backseat drivers.

They seemed to understand that, at least, because my plan-C failsafe for problems in the aetheric syphon flicked open and began to blast hydrogen out of the mech.

Straining my mind, I compressed the mental flow of my thoughts and dilated time. Using the freedom that a faster digital brain provided, I felt around inside myself. It was there, the strange sensation I’d felt a few times. Once during the installation of the aetheric syphon, and again when Cerri had visited me in the engine room and I’d dropped the tablet, only for it to appear in my hand again.

Like soft wool gently caressing the surface of my thoughts, the odd material greeted my attention. Within that odd and comforting mess, I felt another, like a mirror of the original woollen sensation. It was different, less distinct and less powerful, but it was there. Within it, I could feel a hole, an odd empty place where there should be soft fabric.

No, hole wasn’t the right word. It was a drain, like in a bath or a sink. The soft weak fabric was falling through it, bursting out into… my mech. Just beyond that drain, I focused my will and changed the syphon, adding a cone then synching it at the top of that cone. It was rudimentary, and anyone who recognised the structure would wince at its simplicity. Still, it would serve.

With a gasp, I released my hold on the strange fabric and jolted back into the present. My descent was slowing already, killing the velocity that gravity had forced on Bundit.

The entire weight of the nearby aether coursed through my mech and became the default material of the universe, hydrogen. It was a firehose with a pressure that would make the core of a gas giant raise an eyebrow. Then, like the utterly insane individual that I was, I moved one of Bundit’s conventional thrusters and lit the cosmic stream of hydrogen on fire.

The Gs hit me like a truck, and for a moment my vision narrowed. Oops. I forgot about the oxygen content of the atmosphere on this planet.

Somehow, the buns managed to keep me from completely blacking out with the minor inertial dampening capabilities of Bundit. Clenching my thighs, I looked for the controls and found them again. We were already past the missiles, which couldn’t turn nearly as easily as me. Most just rammed into the surface, while the others cartwheeled off in a dance of mindless confusion.

Thank goodness my body in the game was like sixty percent cyborg, or I’d have been squished flat. Even then, I was struggling to make sense of the images my cybernetic eyes were giving me. Come on Alia. Concentrate. I was riding the world’s biggest blowtorch, and now I had to use it.

Using Bundit’s conventional thrusters, I aimed myself so I’d fly past the enemy fighters at high speed. They were already trying to gun me down, but I was far too fast for their tracking systems to keep a hold on me. After all, nothing could compete with game-external time dilation.

In a flash, I blasted past them, making sure to bathe as many as possible with the flaming wake of my makeshift rocket engine. Multiple fighters erupted when their tiny shields were overwhelmed and their reactors detonated under the intense heat.

“Leaving some stragglers for you, Turshie,” I said into the comms through clenched teeth.

“Bloody hell,” Gloria muttered, even as the boys confirmed they were ready with the guns to blow the remaining fighters out of the sky.

I arrived at the enemy starships so quickly I wondered if my time dilation had sputtered out. Oh, oh fudge! I grabbed the stick and pulled it up in a panic, forgetting I had mental command over steering. Bundit ricocheted off the foremost enemy ship’s shields like a cannonball of old off an ironclad’s hull.

Warning lights flashed and Squeakybun gasped, “Seal breached! Deploying the emergency helmet!”

From the headrest, a flimsy helmet unfolded and wrapped itself around my head. My ears were pressed uncomfortably against the side of my head, and I squirmed to flick them into the little voids where they were meant to go.

Throughout that time, the mega giant super enormous flaming death ray that was spewing out of Bundit’s butt was bathing the enemy starship in flame. Their shields shattered with a flash of light, and suddenly their hull was being subjected to temperatures that had to be measured in kelvin to save space on my screens.

GrizzlyBun let out a cheer, then choked it off and announced far too calmly, “Lucky hit, Ma’am. Their reactor containment has been breached. I suggest we aim for space. A conventional fusion reactor going critical would possibly ignite this planet’s atmosphere again. Their reactors are aetheric. Let’s not be around to find out what that looks like.”