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<< Author's POV MAIN | Prologue | Interlude 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | next >>
The
panel exploded in a glowing crash of sparks. Mrrralff cursed violently in
Frazin and waited for the diagnostics to flicker across his screen. He breathed
a sigh of relief. Nothing was damaged that didn’t have a redundant system.
Their relative velocities had carried Mrrralff and his enemy far apart. It would take a moment for the Jeronan to pull his craft back into a firing position, but only a moment.
The gimbal hadn’t adjusted yet. The computer was still fighting to orient after the torpedo impact.
His father, when training him to fly, had been very clear on the matter. “Recover from the tumble within three seconds or I’ll beat you until you’re unconscious.” His ISC flight instructor had been more helpful. “When your gimbals are out and you and you don’t have time to tackle roll, pitch and yawl one at a time, just pick a point in the sky fly toward it.”
Easier said than done.
Mrrralff focused on the transport they were tracking and fought the controls, trying to keep the glow of the drive flame in his field of view. It was guerilla rocket-jocking at its worst. The sudden blast of sound from his acquisition sensors didn’t help matters.
Then the stars stopped spinning and settled in their heavens. His gimbal oriented, for all it mattered. His scopes showed four torpedoes, burning hard to cancel their relative velocities. The Jeronan had jumped the gun and fired too soon.
That would buy him a little time.
He opened his engine up full, trying to put as much distance between him and the torps as he could. The inertial dampers were slow to compensate, and his rib cage rattled in his chest. He’d have to have that fixed. It would probably have killed a human.
The missiles had matched velocity and were gaining. Small torps, they had greater acceleration than Mrrralff’s heavy fighter. There was no way he could outrun them.
The enemy had almost matched velocity as well. A smaller fighter, its main armament was its torps. They were all in flight now, but if even one hit, that fighter would be more than a match for Mrrralff’s crippled craft.
Time passed slowly as he closed the distance to the freighter. He could see is wing mate’s ejection beacon. It was transmitting the “Strong Vitals” code. He’d be alright. In the distance, his scopes showed Mitchell’s gunboat, swarmed by four fighters. No help was coming, he was on his own.
The torps continued to chew up the distance between them. The freighter loomed closer. He punched up a Time on Target reading. He’d make it . . . barely.
There was a flash in the distance as Mitchell and the team splashed another fighter. He could hear the excited chatter on the com. They weren’t worried. They’d be fine, they were just too far away to help.
The freighter was looming quickly. The proximity sensors were sounding the ten second alert. He fired all his belly thrusters, pushing his craft up, then firing back down as the freighter passed underneath.
The torps were traveling too fast to compensate. They crashed into freighter’s drive section, disintegrating in a glowing ball of expanding gas. The freighter, its engines shattered, ceased accelerating, a gentle roll added to its ballistic trajectory. Perfect salvage.
The fighter would be coming in fast. Mrrralff used the cover of the freighter’s exploding engines to flip and burn off his delta-v. He was nestled, all warm and cozy, in the freighter’s sensor shadow when the fighter streaked by.
Mrrralff fired his engines, falling in behind the fighter. They had tremendous relative velocity, and he knew he would only have one shot before his opponent blew through his weapon range.
It took a moment for his tracking systems to acquire their target. But only a moment, and then they were locked on nothing more than a tumbling ball of molten metal.
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