Jack of Harts

Jack twisted his stick and thrusters flared them around a few pieces of tumbling wreckage. Jack slammed the throttle forward, and engines roared tongues of blue fusion flame behind him. They accelerated towards the British vanguard, and Jack smiled with approval as their point defenses engaged every incoming enemy missile.

Jack found the Spitfire he was looking for at the very head of the vanguard. No surprise there. He tapped a button on his communications display to start transmitting. “Hey, Lance, old buddy. You’re looking a little lonely out here.”

“Not lonely at all,” Lance answered a second later, and his smiling face appeared on one of the displays. “Ivan’s giving us a warm welcome, in fact!”

“What did I tell you about trusting Russian vodka?” Jack asked as the range closed, pulling the throttle back to match speed with Lance’s squadron.

Displays flashed as Betty logged them back into the British networks. A whole new universe of fire plans and point defense options filled his cockpit. Laser turrets and missile pods realigned, thrusters burned to shift them into optimal angles, and gravitic cannons hummed to life as their capacitors achieved maximum power.

“Don’t,” Lance said with a chuckle. “It can give you a real headache in the morning.”

And then Jack’s little squadron of Avengers fired in time with the British vanguard. Grav beams and missiles reached out to smash one Russian ship, and wreckage filled his vision. Pieces of former warships drifted around them. Surviving point defense lasers fired at each other in fitful spurts of otherworldly destruction. Jack accelerated them through the flashing wreckage, trusting the deflection grids to deflect anything too small to dodge, trusting Betty to avoid anything too large to deflect, and really hoping none of those point defenses took a personal disliking to him.

“We have incoming fighters,” Betty reported, pulling his attention away from wreckage.

Jack glanced at the displays to see nearly a hundred Russian fighters closing with them.

“Ignore them,” Jack ordered and focused on the battleship he wanted so very much dead. “Stay on target.”

“Staying on target,” Betty acknowledged.

They shot out of the wreckage in time to the screaming duet of rock and roll guitars and opened fire with every weapon they had left.

***

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Smashwords

So we all know that the President got sick with COVID after the first Presidential debate. So we know that then the debate commission decided they wanted to change the rules for the next debate to make it virtual. And we know that the President said no to that idea. And he questioned whether the moderator could even be trusted to be neutral. Which was when the moderator reached out to a Trump detractor, asking if he should even respond to that. Then the commission canceled the debate entirely. Claimed their moderator’s account had been hacked. But he admitted to lying about that later, and was suspended.

So thanks to all of that, we got to see an entirely different debate this week than we had thought we were going to get. Biden was off getting a nice soft interview on another network. And instead Trump got to debate a reporter. Yes, it was billed as a Town Hall meeting, where normal people could ask questions of the candidate. But it was really the reporter who did most of the asking, and she did an excellent job of channeling a Democrat contender so she could interrupt Trump, talk over Trump, and tell him what he was really trying to do every time he answered one of her questions about what he was trying to do. He actually had to fight to get his answers out over her interruptions, and when he said things to the handful of people they allowed to ask questions that got applause, the reporter jumped in over it to say what the real truth was as she saw it.

One of my favorite lines in the debate was when she was haranguing him over something he was supposed to know because she’d just told him what it was, so he couldn’t say he didn’t know what it was anymore. And he just responded, “You told me, but what you tell me, doesn’t necessarily make it fact.” And that was glorious. The main stream media doesn’t get told enough that we just don’t believe their every word simply because they say it. They need to prove it. They need to show their work, as my teachers used to tell me, because we’ve learned long ago that they are simply not to be trusted. And it was good to hear a candidate say that straight to their face.

So overall, I think it was a good debate. Though next time I’m hoping Biden shows up for the debate instead of some random reporter. He really needs at least one good round of questions before we go out to protest on November 3rd. I mean vote.

Yeah. Vote.