Scaling Grand Mal (Derailment)

Inside the Ex-Jet, Bazooka and Crazybolt went on their seventeenth—or was it eighteenth?—strafing run.

[...]

He jinked a hard left to avoid a spray of bullets, then unleashed a full payload at the vent. Though the shots were on target, few of them seemed to get through. “Damnit!” he complained. “Direct hits but no damage. Its shields are just too powerful. There’s no rhyme or reason.”

“There must be, ‘zook,” disagreed Crazybolt. Bazooka gave a small shrug. “No, really, there must.” He called up a schematic and began typing furiously. The clacking of his fingers almost drove Bazooka to distraction, but he coded a quick filter and uploaded it to his headspace; he knew better than to interrupt the workflow of his conjunx when he got on a tear. He did another strafing run, and another still, and all the while Crazybolt got his engineer on.

“That’s it!” he shouted, still incongruously hunched over the Ex-Jet’s console. “Our energy beams aren’t getting through, but our slugs are! At least, ten or twenty percent of them are, but that’s a lot better than zero!”