Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, etc. belong not to me, but to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and Fox, and no money is being made here. The story, however, is mine.

“This was supposed to be easy, Eddie,” Libby said as we approached atmo almost an hour later. “Well,” I started, trying to shed some positive light on this, “at least it was fun.” “You call having the wrath of an Alliance cruiser on you fun?” Libby reached up and tied a bandage around my left shoulder. It bled more than a wound that size should, but it had stopped. I was about to answer when I heard a beep from my console. “We’re entering atmo.” This slowed us down immensely, enough for the gunships to catch up to us. I turned on the comm. “Tobias, get ready to leave.” I turned my attention now completely to flying my boat. “Libby, get rear weapons ready. Another thing I never told you about Libby, she is connected to the ship via a wireless connection. She can control anything electronic on this ship, and that includes the servos operating the exterior machine guns. In fact, the name Libby is short for Liberty, as she essentially is the ship. That’s another reason I built her. I needed someone else to help me run Liberty. Also, the AI brain comes in handy targeting and shooting at multiple bandits like we had here. Anyhow, she stared into space. A few seconds later, something lit up on my console. It was telling me that weapons were ready to come out of their hiding places at a moment’s notice. “Eddie, should we deploy the cannon?” I pondered that for a second. “No, we’d lose the element of surprise. It deploys facing forward, then I’d have to turn it around to face the rear. Plus, cannon shells are almost useless at this speed in atmo.” I pulled hard on my flight stick as we approached the upper layer of breathable air. This is where clouds start to form. “Tobias, get out of here!” I looked through my rear view. On the starboard side was the shuttle quickly letting the friction of atmo flip it to an angle where it could head to Eavesdown. We were in heavy clouds, so hopefully, the gunships wouldn’t notice the shuttle until it was far away. “Libby, get your sights ready. I want shots at the engines.” “You want the bazookas ready too?” “Why not?” I was staring ahead of me for the next batch of heavy clouds. The shuttle was away, and all three gunships were still on me. “On my mark, Libby. Three… two… one… deploy!” The screen with the layout of Liberty changed to show four machine guns and three bazookas on the rim before the ship’s bulbous butt plus a machine gun on the rear all deployed. “Libby, give them everything you’ve got!” The three ships were caught by surprise as Libby fired a volley of machine gun fire from the deployed machine guns at the lead. Half of the volley went right through its port engine. That exploded spectacularly leaving the lead ship with one wing. It broke from formation very quickly and headed fast toward Terra Firma. Meanwhile, Libby had the bazookas aimed at the ship on the left. Watching three anti-vehicle piercing rockets leave at the same time through rear view is quite a sight. Especially when two go right through the cockpit and explode. One gunship was left, and he was now wise to my game. He started dodging the repeated machine gun fire Libby sent his way. He also fired a few missiles at me. They missed, but he was dinging my rear with bullets. The ground was coming up fast, and if I allowed him to swoop over me, it’d all be over. I had one final maneuver up my sleeve. Seeing as I’ve never seen this one documented before, I’m going to call it the “Crazy Eddie” maneuver. “Libby, I’ll manually fire the guns from here. I need you in the engine room. Hard burn when I say so.” She ran down the hall, through the dining room, through the other hall, and into the engine room. The gunship was still on my tail. I had a firm grip on the yoke as I typed in a sequence on the keyboard. I pressed a button and looked through my rear view (did I forget to mention that I love my rear view?). The main engine ignited and sent me flying toward the ground. Only a second on the Radion Pulse had flurried the gunship with very dangerous engine exhaust about as bad as coming fast into atmo 10 times over. Except most ships can take heat pretty gorram well, and this gunship was no different. That wasn’t the point though. When I laid off the heavy thrust, I flipped one of my engines around, turned the ship 180°, flipped the engine back around, and at high speed, went straight at where the gunship should be. Libby commed from the engine room. “Eddie, I have a target lock. I didn’t-“ “I did.” I saw the gunship firing all guns my way. All shots missed. I opened the torpedo rack and when I was within 100 meters of the gunship, I pressed the trigger on the inside of the yoke. Torpedoes may be slow, but they put out a lot of thrust, and they were already going the same speed as me when in the rack. The trigger I pulled though sent one torpedo out of the torpedo bay, and no matter how slow a torp may be, when you’re that close, no target is going to escape, especially when flying right at it. When the torpedo was clear, I veered off course and watched the torpedo ram dead on into the gunship. The last gunship exploded from fore to aft. One last piloting trick was righting Liberty before she slammed into the ground. We were able to turn the engines to face down, and we sailed toward the docks at Pom City. And, my happiest moment of the day, I was able to send Tobias a wave to the other side of the planet telling him of our success.