The cloud looked like dust from this distance, but when he enhanced the image with his visor, Jaeger could see the individual rocks and balls of ice as they tumbled lazily through space. Some of them were barely larger than his own fighter, and some were the size of a mountain. It was so hard to judge distance and scale in space without using instruments, and the field of asteroids was dark, the system's sun too far away to provide much illumination at all. It was little more than a pinpoint in the distance, barely distinguishable from stars that were a thousand light years away.
The two fighters slowed their approach with bursts of gas from their forward thrusters as the asteroids ballooned in their field of view, becoming alarmingly large. Jaeger could see small fragments and particles of dust impacting on his canopy and making his hull shake. The vessels were designed to endure the rigors of combat, and so it wasn't too concerning, but they still needed to be careful and stay alert. It wouldn't do to get pancaked between two drifting hunks of rock the size of houses.
There was no clear limit to the asteroid field, but Jaeger was soon surrounded by larger rocks, his visor's optics doing their best to brighten the darkness and his flight computer tracking the nearby objects so as to warn him of any impending collisions.
"Radar is useless in here," Baker muttered, "it's like tryin' to find a needle in a haystack."
"You'd know all about haystacks, you hick," Jaeger replied. Baker had a thick Southern accent, and everyone gave him shit for it.
"Switchin' to thermal," Baker said, "not seeing anything ... I really don't want to move deeper. It ain't a good idea if you ask me."
"Well they didn't ask you, it's an order," Jaeger said as he used his thrusters to inch forward. "Stay on my six and keep an eye out for movement, you know how sneaky these Bugs can be."
"Considerin' I got more confirmed kills than you, 'Bullseye', I sure do."
Jaeger kept one eye on his sensors as they moved deeper into the cloud, following the route that had been planned out by command. The problem with fighting Bugs was that no two colonies were ever alike. Sure, they shared certain basic tenets and design principles, but the rate at which they adapted to their new environments and their willingness to mutate their own bodies meant that you could never accurately predict what you'd be facing off against. Fortunately, their violent xenophobia extended to their own kind too, different colonies never cooperated or shared tactical information between one another. It was a good job too, or the UNN would never be able to win the arms race that would ensue.
"Hang on," Baker said, "I got somethin' on the scope. It's a heat source, three o'clock high, hard to gauge the distance in this soup."
"I got it," Jaeger replied, his HUD showing a red blip amongst the ghostly green outlines of the nearby asteroids. "It's faint, might be a critter trying to mask its engine signature." He switched radio channels and put a call through to the Rorke. "This is Bullseye, we've picked up a heat signature, requesting instructions."
Mission control came through with a hiss of static, the woman's voice crackling in his earpiece.
"Roger that, Bullseye, marking your location. Your orders are to proceed and investigate."
"That's a solid copy mission control, proceeding deeper..."
He flipped to the back channel again, relaying the instructions to Baker.
"Control says we should check it out."
"Fuck. Oh well, ladies first."
Jaeger took point and drifted towards the faint heat source, maneuvering around obstacles with short bursts from his thrusters, the signal growing steadily weaker. He was almost certain by now that it was a cooling engine. Something had probably moved shortly before their arrival, and the heat that it had generated was slowly dissipating into space.
"I got a bad feeling about this," he said, "weapons going hot."
He flipped up the guard on his joystick that covered one of the fire buttons, and he felt a tremor run through the hull as a hatch on the back of the fighter opened up like a trap door. As well as long-range missiles and affixed cannons that could be used both in atmosphere and in space, there was also another weapon mounted on the FS-26 that could only be used in a vacuum. A large, belt-fed railgun extended from the hull on a flexible arm, making it look like the head of a stork. It was invaluable in a close quarters dogfight, able to pivot and track independently of the fighter. A targeting reticle appeared on Jaeger's HUD as the weapon came online. It was primarily computer controlled, but UNN regulations required a human to pull the trigger ... or at least a sapient creature.
As they neared the source of the signature and came upon a large asteroid, their railguns turning this way and that like curious geese as they scanned for targets, the blip on the radar completely vanished.