Forever Curious, Part 3
Chapter 2: Spiral Dogfights
She’s been going for about two hours, or about forty-five kilometers now, by dead reckoning (including the time she lost during the exchange with the bat-walls) and is approaching the south subtropical region.
In this energy-rich area—assuming the local fauna has adaptations that leverage the fast-rotating magnetic field—there seems to be more action. There are not just more bat-walls—which she’s now learned to discern from a great distance—but other flying creatures, as well. Some that are attacked by the bat-walls, some that seem to attack these flying mats: predators?
Her radar is showing a small echo in the distance. Which is interesting, as the bat-walls are invisible to her radar, so she needs her sonar and lidar—each with their own limitations—to pick them up over a longer distance (essential in this environment with limited visibility). Something that conducts electromagnetic radiation. Possibly an artificial construct?
It’s approaching fast at a gliding speed that triggers her envy. Or is it powered? Closer up, she notices it’s not one single UFO, but four, flying in tight formation. She’s on a long glide down from a nice thermal a few minutes back, so they’re coming at her from above. Very fast.
She makes an evasive maneuver, feinting to the left, then diving to the right. Three of the four alien avians miss her, but the most right of them manages to nick her on her left wing with its nose. It’s sharp enough to scratch the shape-shifting metamaterials of her hull. Do they want to spear her?
As she is now above them, she can have a quick, line-of-sight look. She has no idea how long she will be in here, and while her battery health reads just over eighty percent, she tries to travel as energy-efficient as possible. Therefore, she keeps the mini-cameras that are spread all over her hull behind a protective layer, relying on the trio of radar, lidar, and sonar in this limited sight layer. The disadvantage being that she only has a vague impression of incoming aliens at first.
But now her ‘eyes’—forward-looking cameras with quick-opening caps that are positioned in line with her real eyes—can take a few quick snapshots, helped by a synchronized flash. The extraterrestrial avians have X-shaped wings and long, thin, sharp—she can acknowledge— snouts.
Their ‘wings’—for lack of a better word—are not quite the flexible, often fractal-shaped, streamlined versions of terrestrial avians. They seem much more rigidly geometric as if not gliding aerodynamics but something else is powering their flight. Yet Na-Yeli can’t discern any powered mode of propulsion on them, no propellers, nor jets or thrusters of any kind.
Their ‘X-wing’ shape doesn’t seem to make much sense aerodynamically speaking. Usually, one needs two big, horizontal wings for lift, and one needs only small vertical ones for steering, any bigger and the vertical ‘wings’ will cause unnecessary drag. Nevertheless, on these X-kites—as she silently baptizes them—the wings are all exactly the same size. So either their vertical wings are too small, or their horizontal ones too big.
As if to banish any doubts about their maneuverability, here they come again, making a few turns much sharper than Na-Yeli thought possible. Much sharper than she can perform, unaided by propulsion. Approaching even faster than on their first run, Na-Yeli can’t use the same dodging movement. Coming in from two sides at once, a sandwich attack she can only evade by making an even sharper turn. Reluctantly, she switches on her ion thruster and escapes just in the nick of time.
Or maybe not, as a second X-kite manages to leave a nick in her right wing, this time. Na-Yeli doesn’t want to fight back, not particularly to avoid starting a war—‘what happens in the Enigmatic Object (EO) stays in the EO’ is part of the treaty—but because it’s not what she’s here for. She’s sent to find out the secrets—if any—of the Enigmatic Object. Each alien race has a special name for the neigh-impenetrable dark, globular construct; and nobody has been able to extract its deepest secrets. She just wants to get at the heart of it, both literally and figuratively, and these X-kites with their hounding dogfights are—in her viewpoint—merely an obstacle. She prefers to pass or circumvent obstacles, not destroy them. In general—as with the bat-mats—she tries to avoid confrontations, which are time- and energy-consuming, as much as possible. Nevertheless, she has weapons.
Two strategies cross her mind. Either she fights back, wasting precious energy, time, and effort. Or she avoids them one more time, and then makes a run for the South Pole, hoping—assuming—that there will be an opening—not a shutter—there. For the latter, she has to be sure that she’s faster than the X-kites pursuing her. And that they won’t follow her into the next layer. Talk about the devil and the deep dark sea.
As they approach her for the third time, she arranges her feints in such a manner that her final escape leads her south. These X-kites are swift, but through her ion thruster and her shape-shifting hull, she is swifter. Seemingly by the skin of her teeth, she evades them. In reality, though, this time none of them came close enough to nick her.
Then she feels a sharp pain in both her wings—where her arms are—accompanied by a flash of lightning near her tail. What the hell, she thinks, ignoring the pain, they throw lightning bolts? Her instruments acknowledge her suspicions, she’s been hit by a massive discharge of static electricity.
She thanks the foresight of her battle planners, who drilled her to put up her Faraday cage before a fight, just in case. Normally, Na-Yeli uses advanced rectenna elements for recharging her batteries by tapping energy from the Enigmatic Object’s fast-rotating electromagnetic field. But this will not work when her Faraday cage is up, and switching between the two modes takes some time. Luckily, she got the Faraday cage up just in time.
Thus, the metamaterials of her exoskin act like a Faraday cage and protect her. But the two nicks that the X-Kites managed to get on her wings allow some static discharge to go in. Her instruments survived, and she’s a little worse for wear, but she can’t take hits like this indefinitely.
Nevertheless, this might explain the X-Kites’ superb maneuverability. Somehow they tap into the fast-rotating electromagnetic field of this layer. Their wings could be of an electromagnetically permeable material ... Take it a step further: an electromagnetically permeable material that can both be used as generator and motor ... Two of their X-wings can absorb power from the rapidly rotating electromagnetic field, power that then can be used to generate a perpendicular field in the other two wings ... And as such provide magnetic counter-forces enabling its surprising maneuverability ...
It’s crazy, but the best explanation she can come up with. Now don’t use precious time wondering how such strange creatures could evolve—or were they designed?—but find a way to test this hypothesis. Here they come again. First these bat-mats out of hell, she thinks, and now this. Is it going to be like this all the time? She’s not happy at the prospect. Under her subconscious surface, though, another personage is relishing the challenge. Bring it on!
They attack in a diamond formation. A classic, Na-Yeli realizes, in whatever direction she tries to flee, at least one will follow. They must have noticed that’s she vulnerable to their static electricity charges and hope that one of them can get a full, direct hit. Na-Yeli’s been trained for this, exhaustively to say the least, but this part of her brain is not optimally suited for extended dogfights. She remembers attack and defense tactics, has lightning-quick access to all human-known dogfights in history through her computer implants, but these hinder her more than help her, as she’s spoiled for choice and can’t make up her mind. A few more minutes, she thinks, and the self-repairing properties of my exoskin’s metamaterials have fixed the holes. I’ll be impervious to their lightning bolts.
She feints, counter-feints and triple-feints as the four X-Kites are closing in. Then she gives her ion thruster full throttle and heads straight through the center of the diamond formation. This takes three of her four adversaries by surprise, yet one reacts incredibly fast by jabbing her with the sharp end of its snout. She feels something breaking—a quick check on her vital signs tells her it must be the tip of the X-Kite’s snout—but the same vital signs show that her exoskin has a long rip of almost fifty centimeters long. So much for fast repairs, she thinks.
In the next encounter, Na-Yeli reacts too slow and two X-Kites hit her with their static electricity bolts. Entering through the big rip, it trips the intelligent fuses of half her sensors and hurts her human body like hell. So much, she has trouble staying conscious. Oh shit, I can’t fail this early into my— and she faints after she feels someone else is taking over.
If her adversaries could see Na-Yeli’s face, they might have noticed the subtle changes in her expression. The open, curious yet calculating gaze is replaced by a grim set of her jaw and the aggressive twitching of her eyes, always looking for enemies. KillBitch is in command, and she glowers with hate. She hates the pain that’s tearing through her body—even as it feeds her hate—she hates this mess of a battle situation she’s saddled up with, and she hates, hates her opponents who inflicted all this damage. But, most of all, she hates to lose.
She doesn’t have much time to gather her thoughts. Half her system is down, still recovering. Only the afterburner of her ion thruster is still functional, and while the small nicks have healed on her exoskin, it will be at least half an hour before the big rip is patched. However, she still has most of her lethal weapons.
The X-Kites come in for the kill. They know she’s taken two big hits and might think her maneuverability is limited, and they’d be right. KillBitch strengthens the impression by intentionally putting a wobble in her glide. Pretend I’m almost down, she doesn’t even think this, as it’s a survival trait at least as old as humanity itself.
They come in from two directions, above and below. The top ones to shoot me down, her battle instinct recognizes, the bottom ones to finish the job. From both previous encounters, confirmed by a quick calculation of her computer implants, she knows exactly when she will be in the X-Kites lightning bolt firing range. A split second before that, she transforms from her flight posture into an almost perfectly spherical fetus curl, the shape-shifting metamaterials barely keeping up with her, also ensuring her ion thruster is pointed up.
Undeterred by her strange maneuver, the top two X-Kites fire at her, at will. She’s hit, not once, not twice, but several times. However, KillBitch has curled up in such a manner that the big rip in her hull armature is inside. Subsequently, only a small trickle gets through. It tickles, her battle-hardened soul scoffs, is that all you’ve got? In the meantime, she falls, her fall accelerated by short bursts from the ion thruster’s afterburner.
She drops below the two lower X-Kites that, for good measure, also shower her with a volley of hits. Then they follow her to the fatal barrier below, preparing to feast on her sputtering remains. They’re coming in closer and closer, KillBitch’s battle instinct observes, must be thinking I’m dead meat already.
Her sonar and radar still work perfectly, enabling KillBitch to estimate the distance to the skin of spaghettification very precisely. At the last possible moment, she uncurls from her spherical fetus position into a long rocket with only tail fins and ignites her afterburner at full power. She misses the deadly barrier by millimeters and is up and above the four X-Kites before these have had a chance to reverse. She readies four of her mini-torpedoes, aims, and fires, expertly hitting all four X-Kites without a second thought.
Then KillBitch reverts to a more fuel-efficient flying shape, and heads for the South Pole, while her backward-aimed cameras carefully monitor the plummeting remains of her opponents, ready to go back if necessary. But she doesn’t need to, all four X-Kites plunge to an explosive, angel-hair-pasta stairway to heaven. KillBitch isn’t interested. Let the scavengers have ‘em, is the last thought of KillBitch’s warrior soul as the Slow CEO returns to the fore.
—or—
Author’s note: Na-Yeli’s trek continues through the Spiral Dog Fight layer—see the illustration above. Will it be worth your while? “This is a tremendously impressive book! We get to ride along woth Na-Yeli through an incredibly well conceived alien labyrinth,” says Sara B, a reviewer on NetGalley.