"Heads up," Baker muttered, "it's gone dark."
"Be ready, it was around this asteroid somewhere..."
They drifted slowly around the large, irregular hunk of rock, the scanners highlighting every contour on its pockmarked surface with a green wireframe. It was like orbiting a very small moon.
"Picking up traces of methane," Baker said, "something was definitely here. I'm gonna call it in."
"Contact! Contact!"
Something that looked like a cross between a gigantic roach and a shrimp climbed out of one of the many impact craters on several pairs of jointed legs. It was huge, at least as large as their fighters if not slightly larger, its segmented body encased within an iridescent shell that glittered in shades of blue and green. Its back was covered in ablative plates that looked like a suit of medieval armor, clearly artificial in nature, probably bolted onto its living body after the thing had matured.
The Betelgeusians used a combination of organic and artificial technology, and even their spaceships were living entities. There was no doubt a Bug pilot encased somewhere inside, its lanky body hooked directly into the craft's nervous system, surrounded on all sides by exposed meat as it drove the thing around like a puppet. Rather than viewports or a canopy, the craft had dozens of glistening, compound eyes that served as cameras for the occupant.
This one wasn't flying, it was walking along the surface of the asteroid, perhaps using modified landing gear as actual legs. There was a puff of dust, and a flare of green flame as the thing lifted off, tucking its many limbs beneath its body and pivoting to face its adversaries.
Its reaction speed was so quick that by the time the railguns began to fire, there were already bolts of crackling plasma hurtling towards the fighters. Beneath what could only be described as the bulbous head of the Bug ship were housed twin plasma cannons, lighting up its grotesque eyes and its jutting sensory antennae with flashes of green light as they unloaded at the enemy.
Jaeger took evasive action, the computer keeping the railgun locked onto the target even as his vessel rolled and tilted, the barrel as steady as a gyroscope. Keeping track of the different in-picture displays and camera views while the world spun around him would have been horribly disorienting, but this was what the pilots had trained for, frantic zero-G combat was their domain.
His vessel rocked as one of the high-velocity, magnetically-contained balls of green plasma splashed against his wing, arcing across its surface like electricity as the fighter's armor did its best to dissipate the heat and energy over a larger area. Still, the intensely hot plasma burned an ugly, black smear on the wing like someone had taken a giant cutting torch to it, the ferrite stealth coating slagging and melting away.
The barrel of the railgun rocked on its arm with every shot, rings of electromagnets sending tungsten slugs the size of beer bottles hurtling towards the target at a significant percentage of light speed. They were dumb-rounds, nothing more than pieces of shaped metal, but they impacted the asteroid like tiny meteors and blasted basketball-sized craters in the rock as they transferred their kinetic energy.
Everything was spinning. His fighter was spinning, the target was spinning, the asteroids around them were spinning. Jaeger's only point of reference was the indicator on his HUD that let him know which direction was up.
Contrary to popular belief, there was such a thing as up and down in space. The Galaxy was a flat disk with a swollen core, kind of like a celestial fried egg, except a hundred thousand light-years across. One's position could be calculated relative to it by mapping the visible stars, ensuring that UNN ships didn't end up at wildly different inclinations when they arrived in the same spot.
The thrusters flared as he righted himself, and he watched as Baker loosed one of his missiles, the projectile shooting puffs of gas from nozzles on its nose and tail to orient itself as it arced towards its target. The battle was close range, but in space, even close meant miles apart. The Bug ship moved to take evasive action, but it had taken some railgun hits, leaking what looked like pus or ichor from jagged tears in its hull as the jets of green flame down its right flank flickered.
There was a flash of light, and then all that was left of the Bug ship was a cloud of expanding debris, Jaeger zooming in on the fragments of torn flesh and bent metal as they flew apart. It looked like a smear on a windshield.
"Splash one," he heard Baker shout over the radio. "Looks like another notch on my belt, Bullseye. Are you even trying?"