So, I wrote the original text and pasted it here (link below), but, on re-reading it, found it entirely too shallow. The win was way too easy for the Night Rovfugl. The idea was that the fight between she and the Eland would showcase two entirely different doctrines: the Night Rovfugl relying on stealth, with her modified airframe, to get in, stand on station, and get out without been detected. The Eland is its doctrinal opposite, blazing lights, massed rocket and laser firepower, she and her crew live to flush out their opponents with overwhelming force.

 

 

As it turned out in that first passage, the Eland was more a wounded goose, waiting to be shot down and taken home for dinner.

 

This time, she bites and she bites hard. The Rovfugl takes a hammering and it's a battle of wits between her skill crew and the Eland's. And it's not just Krzysztof and Anja's lives in the balance. It's Barcza and his Kasrkin, too, as they're their taxi out of there. Now, I am quite aware the Valkyries are not the most meta model and as for them being stealth and pulling psuedo-Cobra manoeveures, the less said the better, but I hope you enjoy this yarn.

 

Thoughts most welcome.

 

=====

 

Krzysztof had just settled the Rovfugl into her loiter when the tone changed. Neither an alarm nor a warning. Just a subtle shift in the background noise of the displays, the kind you only notice if you are already listening for it. Behind him, his navigator stiffened.

 

“Hold,” she said quietly.

 

Krzysztof did not move his hands. He did not reach for the throttle or the weapons panel. He kept the aircraft where she was, level and clean, letting the desert slide beneath them in slow, indifferent silence. “Talk to me, Anja.”

 

Anja leaned forward, eyes narrowing at her scope. “I’ve got a coherent return resolving where there shouldn’t be one. Clean line. No sweep.” She paused, then lowered her voice half a register. “We’re painted.” The words landed without drama.

 

Krzysztof brought the auxiliary display up with a flick of his thumb. A thin red trace crawled across the overlay, steadily and deliberately, tracking the Rovfugl’s belly as if it had never lost her.

Below them, far beyond visual range, Brutus had woken.

 

Already, he knew, the crew were hunting for a fit to their sensor return, instruments alive, doing exactly what they had been trained to do when something did not fit.

 

Anja’s fingers moved across her panel. “Ground-based. Heavy emitter. Not standard air-defence. This is older."

 

“Brutus,” Krzysztof said.

 

“Yes,” Anja replied.

 

The sensor feed updated again. A mass shift. A slow, patient arc resolving into a firing solution. A turret coming around with all the time in the world. Brutus was not built to hunt aircraft, but he did not need to be. One clean solution would be enough.

 

Krzysztof exhaled through his nose. “Nope.” He didn’t punch the throttle or drop flares. No moves that would indicate fear, he just bled altitude instead, easing the Rovfugl sideways and down, sliding her into the folded dunes. Heat held tightly, keeping his angle shallow. Everything disciplined.

 

Anja watched the red trace cling for a moment longer, then it began to drift. “Tracking’s degrading,” she said. “He’s searching.”

 

“Let him,” Krzysztof replied. He kept the safeties on, for now.

 

Static rasped through the cockpit, fragmented and distorted. “…unknown transient to the south…”

 

Anja didn’t look up. “That wasn’t for us.”

 

Krzysztof didn’t ask who it was for. He nudged the Night Rovfugl deeper into the terrain mask, keeping her belly buried in geometry and sand.

 

The trace thinned and broke. Anja’s voice remained even. “Paint’s off.”

 

Krzysztof answered with motion, adjusting their orbit a fraction lower, a fraction wider.

 

On the ground, Barcza felt it. Not a sound nor a signal. Just the absence of something that had been there moments ago. He slowed, eyes lifting instinctively toward the dark sky. Nothing. The Rovfugl was gone. He raised a fist. The squad froze around him, weapons tight, bodies disciplined into stillness. Only Barcza’s face was bare.

He tapped his mic once. “Krzysztof. Status.”

 

Up above, Krzysztof waited for Anja’s confirmation.

 

“Paint’s off,” she said again.

 

“Adjusting orbit,” Krzysztof replied. “Stay sharp. You’re not alone.”

 

Barcza didn’t ask who else was. He signalled forward.

 

Brutus’ turret eased back to neutral and the night settled. It lasted long enough to be believable. Then the desert screamed.

 

Anja’s head snapped up. “Airborne contact.”

 

The horizon erupted as LV-426, the Eland, crested a dune ahead of them, engines howling, lights blazing, multilaser already stitching the sky. She wasn’t hunting quietly. She was drowning the desert in violence and forcing anything alive to react inside it. The first rake hit before Krzysztof fully saw it. The Rovfugl shuddered from the impact. A sudden wrongness through the controls wrenched his hand to the left. Drag wrestled the Rovfugl out of position. Krzysztof reacted instantly, banking and dropping, forcing the Rovfugl starboard, low and tight against the dunes.

 

Anja’s voice followed a second later. “No. To port. We’re bleeding heat. Right engine nacelle.”

 

Krzysztof abandoned the turn he’d started and hauled her the other way, "Buckle up."

 

Strobe lights swept over the dunes, ripping the night into hard, flashing segments. Rockets slammed into sand behind them, detonations rolling in overlapping waves, forcing movement rather than kills.

 

For the first time, Anja’s control cracked, just enough to show the pressure. “That’s...” She cut herself off. Then, more measuredly this time, “...very aggressive.”

 

The Eland wasn’t guessing. She was compressing space.

 

Krzysztof hugged the hard deck, keeping terrain between them and the hunter, buying seconds with angles and restraint. A dune rose ahead, above, only stars, below, darkness.

 

“Coming up on a crest,” Anja said.

 

Krzysztof nodded once and let the Rovfugl climb just enough to round it.

 

As the Eland surged up behind the dune line, Krzysztof snapped the Rovfugl around the crest, rolling hard into the Eland’s blind side.

 

Anja didn’t need to prompt him. “Tone. Now.”

 

Krzysztof fired the Hellfire missile immediately.

 

The Eland reacted with skill. She broke hard, dumping speed and flares in a violent, disciplined manoeuvre, tearing herself out of the firing line. The Hellfire drove straight into the flare cloud and detonated in a white-hot bloom that lit the desert like false dawn. The missile didn’t kill her, but it put her out of position, and that was enough.

 

Krzysztof dumped altitude and vanished back into the dunes, using the moment to re-mask and reposition. "He's good."

 

Anja focused on her scopes and looked up and out of the canopy as she tried to place Eland.

 

The Eland came back in tighter. No casual cresting now. No easy angles. She had learned.

 

“She won’t overshoot again,” Anja said flatly.

 

“I know,” Krzysztof replied.

 

The dunes ahead rose steeper, harsher. Fewer clean lines. Fewer options.

 

“Anja,” Krzysztof said. “Where’s my solution?”

 

“Not now, Krys. I’m working on it.”

 

The Eland’s light swept closer. Multilaser fire stitched across ridgelines they’d used moments before.

 

Anja’s fingers moved faster. “We’re out of clean masks.”

 

“Then give me an ugly one.”

 

A long ridge loomed ahead. Krzysztof lined them up. “Flaps fifteen,” he said. “Airbrake deployed.”

 

“I really hate when you do this,” Anja said, swallowing.

 

The Rovfugl cleared the crest and dropped behind it, bleeding speed brutally. The aircraft protested. She shuddered as physics closed in and Krzysztof pitched her up.

 

“Terrain,” the computer intoned. “Pull up.”

 

Krzysztof ignored it.

 

“Ground speed oh-four-two,” Anja said, already recalculating. “Angle of attack oh-six-one degrees and holding."

 

For the briefest moment, Krzysztof gazed up at the stars in the pitch black night.
 

“Five seconds to stall,” Anja said. “Four.”

 

The Eland committed, confident now that the Rovfugl had nowhere left to go.

 

“Three.”

 

The sky above the ridge tore apart under fire as the Eland roared above and past them.

 

“Two. Now,” Anja snapped. “Punch it, Krys."

 

“Flaps one. TOGA.”

 

Krzysztof drove the throttles forward to their stops. The Rovfugl surged upward, rolling hard from behind the ridge, flipping the geometry inside out. For half a second there was nothing but night, fire, and screaming engines. Then they dropped in behind the Eland.

 

“Solution locked,” Anja said. “We’ve got tone.”

 

Krzysztof didn’t answer. He squeezed the trigger.

 

The lascannon fired once. LV-426 ceased to exist as a single aircraft. The beam cut her cleanly in two, debris and fire tumbling into the desert below. Silence rushed back in.

 

Krzysztof eased the Rovfugl down into shadow, damaged, visible, alive.

 

Anja leaned back, breathing at last. “Eland is down. We’re not running dark. Stealth manifold to starboard engine severely compromised.”

 

“Then let’s not be here,” Krzysztof said.

 

Below, Barcza saw fire on the horizon and didn’t slow.

 

The night remained uneasy.

 

And the Rovfugl disappeared into what darkness still offered, carrying the cost of survival with her.