Chapter 19: Heroes Under Fire

The first of the blasts fired by the closing army hit the Fortuna’s thick hull as the rabbits made it to the expansive docking bay. Jazz, Spaz, and Lori were already waiting for them, standing beside the Hybrid Corsair’s door hatch, eager to raise some hell with the three awaiting ‘bots, as well as with the Corsair’s extensive weapons array. Acid pressed down on his ear stud again, and the hatch popped open with a pneumatic hiss. They dashed in, and the door closed again, with the same quiet hiss.
Acid glanced at Jazz, Jack, and Firefox. “You three head down to the hangar. You’ll find the controls for the ‘bots in the piloting chamber. I’ll light the way for you.” He flipped open a panel on the wall, keyed in the location, and pressed a small yellow button. Immediately, a line of yellow lights lit up, creating a path leading to the hangar.
As the three indicated rabbits bolted, following the line of yellow, circular lights that shone through the metal grate floor, Lori’s expression changed from eager expectation to disappointed indignation. “Huh? What about us? What do we get to do?”
“Wizard, Electrik, you two take the flight controls. Phish, you’ll be needed at the manual shield stuff. The rest of you get to help me with the main guns. I need more than myself up there, y’know.”
Lori’s face immediately broke into a wide grin. She was the first one behind Acid as they were off to the Corsair’s weapons bay.

Jack, Jazz, and Firefox had no hard time following the blazing yellow lights; they were really the only luminescent objects bigger than an LED in the lengthy metal corridors of the Hybrid Corsair. It didn’t take long for them to find the hangar, with the three enormous robots inside. They truly were intimidating in their height; Firefox, the tallest of the three, only stood about halfway to one’s knee. Jack made his way to the other side of the hangar, where there was another door, and called them over. They progressed through the door and up a small, winding flight of stairs to the piloting chamber.
The chamber was hexagonal, and there was what appeared to be a cross between a joystick and a handpad on a pedestal near to every other wall, each accompanied by a pair of red goggles with a headset microphone extending from the right side of the eyepiece. Marked on each pedestal was the name of the robot to which the respective control points belonged: the Nightmare’s controls stood on the opposite side of the room, and those for the Pegasus and Razorback were to their left and right, respectively. Firefox darted to the controls of the Razorback, and Jack and Jazz exchanged glances before the green-furred rabbit strode to the Nightmare’s pedestal, leaving the Pegasus to Jack.
On further examination, the joystick proved to have two trigger buttons, one above the other, as well as three thumb buttons and a mini D-stick atop the main silver-coloured shaft. The handpad was connected to the left side of the joystick’s base. It held three buttons, positioned for the user’s middle three fingers, accompanied by another mini D-stick and a wheel where one’s left thumb would be. Jack wondered if he’d ever figure all of them out before getting himself blown up, as he pulled the goggles down from the ceiling of the piloting chamber.
As he fitted the goggles’ strap around his head, Firefox saw what would be the Pegasus’ eyes flare to life, a burning orange to contrast the shining blue of its metal body. Jack could now see through the giant robot’s eyes; although he did not yet know how to turn the ‘bot’s head, he could see himself, through the window of the piloting chamber, wearing a pair of goggles with a bundle of wires running up to the ceiling. He hesitated to touch the controls, for fear of accidentally destroying something.
Without any prompt, a picture of the two-handed controls popped up in the goggles. Each button, wheel, or stick on the device was labeled clearly, as the short descriptions were connected to their respective parts by thin, angular lines. Some of the labels Jack knew to ignore, such as the conspicuous “Energy Discharge” button, but others caught his eye immediately.
“EMP?” Jack asked quizzically. “You can do that from inside a ‘bot?”
“That’s the next thing to suicide, Jack,” Acid’s voice came through from the side of the goggles. “And since suicide, to a robot, means self-destruction, I’d like if you didn’t touch that button.”
“Why?”
“You know what an EMP does, right?”
“Sure I do. It knocks out all electronic systems within the weapon’s blast radius. An extremely effective anti-machine weapon.”
“Well, the ‘bot is within the blast radius, correct? It’s right at the centre, in fact. Therefore, you’ll knock out your own systems as well. And I don’t want you to do that, especially not inside the Corsair.”
“Wait a second.” Jack replied. “If that’s true, then why didn’t the Fortuna get knocked silly when it used its EMP?”
“It did. For about two minutes. The crew got it running again so quickly purely because of its size. The bigger the machine, the easier it is to recover from an EMP. As you can probably tell, those ‘bots aren’t big enough to handle it that well.”
“Then what about the Corsair? Wasn’t it affected by the pulse?”
“Yep. Phish had to spend a whole hour here, ‘rebooting’ the Corsair, as it were. However, it’s a lot more difficult to reboot a robot than it is to reboot a ship.”
Jack thought about this for a second. Something didn’t click. “But how were we able to use the intercom if the ship didn’t work?”
“You do ask a lot of questions, don’t you? The communications system of any ship runs off of a different power supply than the rest of the ship. It’s also less susceptible to being affected by an EMP, for reasons unknown to me. Now, no more questions! Just don’t touch that button!”
Jack fell silent. Bypassing the now forbidden EMP, he began to experiment with the different movement control sticks. The one underneath his left thumb moved the head around; the one atop the main shaft aimed the gun that the Pegasus carried, a silvery, six-meter-long monster of a shock rifle. He was about to try to take a look at what his melee weapon was, when the display of the joystick disappeared from the lens of the goggles, and the words “Auto-launch sequence initiated...” followed by a countdown, took its place. There was ten seconds on the clock, and the seconds seemed to tick by faster than usual as the countdown started.
“I really hope you learned something from that little diagram, kiddies, because there’s going to be a test on it. A field test.”
Zero. There was a roar, and a brilliant flash of orange-gold light, as all three ‘bots’ engines ignited, and a light breeze from the portal of the chamber as an airtight door closed over the entrance. The huge airlock began to open painstakingly slowly, and they felt the adrenaline of excited anticipation. The three ‘bots hovered inside the hangar, still under the influence of the ship’s artificial gravity, as the airlock neared the end of its rails.
Finally, after what seemed like forever, the door stopped. There was a second flash, not as bright as the first, as the Pegasus, closest to the open airlock door, boosted its wing-like engines and flew outside the hangar. The Nightmare and the Razorback were not far behind.
The rigidity of the control sticks vanished as the autopilot relinquished the controls of the robots to the three rabbits inside the piloting chamber. Dozens of red dots, each representing an enemy fighter, glowed menacingly inside each of their goggles.
As the three robots regrouped just outside the hangar, Jack chuckled. “Wow. I’d say that this battle is almost… one-sided.”
After a few seconds, both of the other two rabbits laughed, realizing what Jack meant.
As the first shots came towards them, Jack neatly moved the Pegasus to the left, and dispatched the shooter with a single blast from the shock rifle. The battle had begun.
“Bring it on!”

Acid already had Lori and Blaze seated on either side of him, each of them charged with one of the ship’s two missile launchers, and they were performing beautifully. He himself managed the ship’s main weapon, the SSL, which was a zigzagging bolt of energy with the impact force of a large rocket. He had already destroyed nearly a dozen enemy ships, and Lori and Blaze had five each. The Corsair’s shield had taken a few hits from enemy fire, but as of yet the hull of the ship had not yet been touched.
Headcheese, Spaz, and Foo took on the ship’s various other weapons, with Spaz at the controls of the ship’s particle beam, and the other two using the two mini-gauss guns at the end of each wing. The particle beam simply razed through smaller ships like a hot knife through butter, and the gauss weapons did considerable damage to whatever it hit.
Then, Wizard’s voice came through on the intercom. “We’re going to need to kick it up a few notches, guys, because I think the satellite is planning something!”
Acid had only to glance at the viewscreen above where he sat to see that it was true. The five arms, attached to the main shaft of the satellite by a circular hub, began to rotate. At first, the movement was extremely slow, but it was very gradually becoming faster.
Acid was wearing an earpiece, and he spoke into it, without taking his eyes off of the screen. “Did you three hear that?”
“We did,” Firefox’s voice replied. “What to do about it?”
“Just keep wrecking them. We need to get through these fighters and interceptors before we can get anywhere near the satellite.”
“Consider it done, then.”
“Good.” Acid took off the earpiece, leaving it dangling around his neck, and anxiously watched the screen above him as the arms of the satellite began to move faster and faster…