The wind felt wild against his steel skin tonight as Cyril cut through the skies in his scout Dart. With the odd spatial awareness granted to him by the radar unit, he could sense the heavy transport carrying ground assault battleframes miles behind his nearly invisible body. Smiling inside, he nosed over and started checking his assigned grid for thermo signatures. The mission brief stated that they could expect stiff resistance to the raid from the Techdowners, but he really didn’t see how a few neo-luddites with light weaponry could ever hope to stand against a battleframe, much less a full fire team of four.
“Target cluster sighted,” he transmitted over the datalink to control. “27 signatures, tagged tango-1 through 27. Moving on to next.. SHIT!” He reacted with blind panic and speed impossible for any normal pilot as a heat bloom streaked up from target tango-8, straight at his wildly jinking body. “Control, they have at least one missile launcher, where the fuck did they get a launcher?”
He dumped chaff and shot for higher altitude as the missile shot through the space he had recently occupied. His frame protested loudly at the sudden acceleration, warning him that he was pushing it near the red line. He ignored it, continuing to curse and wondering how they had even seen him. His Dart was equipped with top-line thermo-optical camouflage! More missiles were launched, but he was already far from the target zone.
“Let the assault team deal with those bastards,” He thought as he sped away.
