A warning sound blared, and Alex pressed a button to shut it off. He immediately rattled off critical data. Remaining weapons. Life support.
I looked at my engines. I could fly. I still had control. Whoever had just fired at us had their one shot.
And they’d missed.
“Lock down everything we don’t need. I’m taking him out.” Already in evasive maneuvers, I spun the Valor around to find a shuttle loaded with missiles bearing down on us.
“They have target lock.”
“I thought you said their jammers were still up.”
“Guess they turned them off so they could try to kill us.”
“Shit.”
“I’ve got target lock.”
“No. Jam them. I’ll take them out.”
Alex activated our jamming system as I put the Valor into a spinning dive away from the shuttle and their missiles.
“Does that thing have laser cannons?” I asked.
“Unknown.”
“Great.” As we spun, the missile they’d fired slipped past us and exploded in the rocky face of the asteroid just above the Gamma 4 base. “What the hell is that?”
“Looks like a shuttle with missiles.”
Genius. “I can see that. I never saw that in the game.”
“Training simulation,” he countered with a grumble. “And I’ve never seen one either.”
Pushing the Valor to dangerous speeds, I flipped us around and came up on the backside of the shuttle, my finger itching to fire the laser cannons and take them out. But it wasn’t a Scythe fighter. It was a shuttle. “How many people are on that thing?”
“Unknown.”
“Rephrase. How many people can that shuttle carry?”
He glanced at me, then up, through the translucent cockpit cover, to study the ship. “Twenty. Maybe thirty.”
I had two, maybe three seconds to make a decision.
“They have missile lock on the base,” Alex said.
There were children on that base.
I pulled the trigger on my controller, and four laser cannons, two mounted under each of Valor’s wings, hit the shuttle simultaneously. It exploded into hundreds of burning fragments as my attack tore the shuttle apart.
“How many people did I just kill?”
Alex sighed, but if he’d really been flying all those gaming—training—simulations with me, he would know I was not going to let this drop. “Best estimate is about thirty. Three per Scythe fighter, which is nine, and about twenty on the modified shuttle. But I could be off a bit on my count.”
“I just killed thirty people.” It was not a question.
“No. We just saved over a hundred civilian lives.”
That math did not add up for me. Logically I was fine. But my soul was hurting. I was a killer now. I. Had. Killed.
My heart dropped with the adrenaline dump. Alex had said the same thing to me over and over again, but this was the first time I truly understood.
This absolutely, positively was not a game. What had I done?