“When your combat, you see the illusion. The VERS is designed to give you… to make you feel as if you have liberty and mastery over your immediate environment. That’s what you base your reality on. But you always feel the truth. That you’re the tool, an organ, trapped within a slave, the machine.” shouldn't it be "a slave trapped within the machine?"
“The starfighter you mean?” surely there's a better name you can come up with than starfighter? It sounds incredibly cliched, and clashes with the realistic feel of the acronyms
“Yes.”
It was like she was in a dance, between the rain and a city of umbrellas. The tactical overlays the VERS had provided her showed the defence fields emitted by the corvettes, cones pointing away from the massive, exposed, super-structure of the deep space platform. Nice ideas, but I'd rephrase that first sentence - in particular, remove the word "like", turn it into a metaphor rather than a simile, eg "She danced between the rain and a city of umbrellas" - elaborate on as desired.
Jadra was standing with her back resting on the wall, behind where she stat (sat) the days before. Abryal, sitting, had a constant gaze towards Jadra which was rarely returned.
“At Canton, everything went really bad, fast. Cliche. Try to avoid, and give a greater sense of something bad happening. This sounds more like a B-movie line than what someone would actually say. I was stationed on the DS Platform not expecting combat. I doubt Nlaide Strategos did or else they would have provided us with more than sticks to defend ourselves. There were two squads, forty starfighters, ten corvettes and no defensive battery to speak of. This prison has a better defence system. The whole day was simple enough, CeePee’s until the fuel arrived.”
“Ceepees?” Abryal asked, vying for explanation. You don't need the ees in this, CPs will do just fine
“Combat patrols, but it got bad soon after one of the fuel cruisers was spiked, and four Strike Cruisers came quickly out of nowhere, launching over five hundred starfighters in minutes. Soon after came the rain.”
Jadra saw the lines the VERS provided her. For factions of a second they appeared, a contrasting yellow to the blackness of space. Jadra knew yellow was always benign.
“I used to pay a lot of attention to the yellow lines because yellow meant something was firing at you, someone had some intent to kill you, there was aggression against you. You notice that, because space is usually very empty. Canton was choked that day. After seeing all the yellow lines, and all the people who wanted to kill me, I decided not to take it so personally from there on in.” Jadra, still coy, continued her vigil of the ground as she talked on. Infodump - keep the explanation brief, most of this is just filler and kills the pace. Why's she saying this, anyway?
The down pore of fire continued. Sequential, sharp, bright, distant bursts signalled the loss of starfighter. The individual blazes of final glory cheapened and deminished in specularity as the frequency of the explosions steadily rose. Jadra knew she had to do more than dance, to jink, and dodge to keep all the lines yellow whist the armada closed in.
“It’s called a proactive suppression barrage and it’s ment to flatten a squad’s defence plain and reduce the amount of depth a pilot can manoeuvre in. In academy, we where never taught how defend against it, just what it was technically called. In the academy before any of this happened, no one really cared. It didn’t matter, the Nlaide wasn’t a real army, it was a defence service, we where employees, not captains and lieutenants. I didn’t think at the time, there was a real federal government in the Federation. Until Canton, I didn’t even thing there was a real war.” Overuse of italics, don't put "real" into italics more than once.
“Tell me more about the VERS, and how you pilot a starfighter, explain it to our viewers watching this as clearly as you can.”
“The VERS is really the best half, the input, what you see and feel. It’s short hand for The Virtual Environment, Rendering System. All pilots have implants, in the brain, about 2 or 3. The VERS algorithms run in your own grey matter and process the raw data that the external sensor arrays of the craft your flying. OFAC, Output Feedback And Control algorithms run in the starfighter and they take the neurological output directly from your body. That’s what allows you to dodge the bullets; it can also cause you to die, from Oversync.”
“Explain, what’s Oversync?” Abryals attention was suddenly ignited
“Oversync is when too many of the neural connections used in Starfighter control. In a starfighter, there is this thing called the Synchronisation Rate. It is the percentage of bodily motor functions slaved to starfighter controls. At thirty to fifty percent, you lose feeling in your skin, your arms become numb, you go blind and often wake up drooling. This is the average rate for normal operations, in combat, you need as high a Sync rate as possible, as the better your synced, the more accurate you are, the faster and sharper your responses are, and the better your resolution and targeting algorithms work for the VERS. But you run the risk of an Oversync, where too many bodily functions have been shut down for too long – your body starts to die." Jadra's tone or posture didn't shift or signal the severity of the condition and to an extent, Abryal knew why.
"A Li Processor keeps most of your bodily functions alive but when native neurology has been absent for long enough, your body will release hormones that permanently shut down organs, including the brain. I’ve seen it a few times where starfighter autopilots have returned the dead bodies of pilots which have Oversynced in combat.”
“What is the average Oversync Rate in pilots?”
“Ninety six, but most pilots can’t sync that well.”
“I’m quoting it here that you have an apparent sync rate of eight hundred and eleven. Is that correct?”
“Yes”
Interesting ideas, but this is still pure infodump. Try and incorporate it more naturally into the story as a whole, and I doubt most readers care about the exact sync rate of pilots.
