Chapter 74: Hunted By Pirates

Leo’s right hand lifted off the armrest, and his index finger came down on the master communications toggle with one sharp tap.

CLICK!

The transmission died mid-word.

...The forced handshake was cut at the root, and the sneering pirate voice vanished, leaving the bridge in perfect silence except for the low steady purr of the Micro-Fusion Core under the deck.

Nobody questioned it.

Aoi didn’t suggest negotiating, Elena didn’t ask whether they could offer up part of their cargo, Camila didn’t plead for a peaceful way out and Harper didn’t hesitate for a single heartbeat.

The rule Leo had set in the medbay held the whole room in an instant instinctive grip, and the moment his finger lifted off the toggle the crew moved like one machine.

"Combat stations!" Leo barked, and his voice boomed across the deck with an authority none of them had heard from him before. "Clear the dais! Lock down anything loose and strap in!"

"Moving!" Harper yelled, lunging across the deck and vaulting into the port weapons station, slamming the four-point harness over her chest.

CLACK!

Camila swept the food trays into the lower locker and dove into the environmental station, yanking her straps tight with quick practiced tugs.

Aoi took her place behind the cartography table with her fingers flying across the grid as the silver rings of her talent spun to life around her temples.

"Sensor lock acquired! Three hulls, identical mass profiles! Tier-2 raider corvettes, dual dorsal rail-cannons and forward plasma lances... They’re entering our medium engagement envelope!"

Elena dropped into station two with her hands dancing across the structural and weapons panels.

"Capacitors at one hundred percent! Laser batteries are tracking and synced to the targeting bus! Shield grid is live and the starboard plates are tied into the dispersion net!"

Chloe slid into the secondary combat seat directly behind the throne and locked her harness without a sound, her eyes fixed on the canopy with cold focus.

Jin-Ah took station three and began feeding trajectory profiles into the flight matrix.

"They’re flying a Delta-Three bracket," she reported, her voice steady despite the adrenaline pouring through her. "It’s built to pin us against the rock cluster and shred our engines with overlapping crossfire."

"Range one hundred and eighty kilometers and closing!" Aoi called. "Relative velocity eight kilometers per second! Intercept in under twenty-five seconds!"

Leo sat alone in the center of the throne.

Slowly and deliberately, he buried both bare hands deep in the crystal cradles.

HUMMMMMMM!

The neural link surged through his palms in a warm liquid-electric wave, locked into his spine and branched out through his whole nervous system until the fifty-meter Graventhal hull felt like an extension of his own skin.

...And then it hit him.

Back in the tutorial rubble it had been a prickly static in the small of his back, a vague nervous twitch that left him guessing which way to bank.

This time it erupted from the base of his spine like a living current of molten bronze, surging up through his vertebrae and washing over his shoulder blades until his mind flooded with clarity.

...The tingle was gone, and in its place was a guide.

It felt like a hand resting firmly on his back, pulling his awareness across the void before his eyes could even register the blips on the hololith.

The three incoming pirates became living lines of intent in his head, and he could feel the drift of their thrusters, the charge cycles of their rail capacitors and the exact arcs where their crossfire would meet.

Leo could feel the narrow empty pockets between their firing solutions before their gunners had lined up their sights, and the slow tumbling weight of every boulder drifting between them, and he knew with terrifying certainty where each shot would land seconds before it was fired.

The three black-and-crimson corvettes flared their attitude thrusters and opened their weapon bays, spreading their formation to box him into a triangle of fire.

They expected him to run... They expected him to panic and bank desperately into the asteroids and scramble for cover like every terrified civilian ship they’d ever cornered.

A faint dangerous smile curled the corner of Leo’s lips, and he drove the master throttle wide open.

SLAM!

One hundred and fifteen percent of the Micro-Fusion Core’s output dumped straight into the main ion drives!

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The Wanderer-7’s twin turquoise plumes exploded into two blinding hundred-meter lances of roaring ion fire, and the corvette shot straight down the throats of the three pirate ships with bone-crushing acceleration that slammed everyone back into their seats.

"LEO?!" Camila shrieked.

"Hold on!" he grinned.

The canopy flared with crisscrossing streaks of emerald, amber and turquoise as the Wanderer-7 burst through the fringe of the debris field on a dead collision course with the strike wing.

The three corvettes held a tight Delta-Three arrowhead with their twin rail-cannons raised forty-five degrees above their spines, humming with high amber charge.

"They’re locking primary batteries!" Aoi called, her rings spinning in tight halos. "Port and starboard ships are bracketing our escape lanes while the lead holds the center!"

"Capacitors charged to the teeth, Cap!" Harper yelled, her knuckles white around the gunnery triggers. "Give me an angle and I’ll peel them open before they clear their muzzles...!"

"Hold your fire, Harper," Leo said, unhurried, and the calm in his voice settled the spike of panic across the bridge. "We’re not trading broadsides with three gunboats at range... We’re going to break their teeth from the inside."

"From the INSIDE?!" Camila squeaked.

’Hold my fire, he says,’ Harper thought, her trigger finger twitching against the guard. ’Three gunboats coming down our throats and he wants me to hold my fire...’

The Wanderer-7 kept charging straight at the lead ship’s nose without a flicker of hesitation, and the gap collapsed at a sickening rate.

Aoi called out the range in a voice that climbed higher with every number, sixty kilometers and then forty and then twenty, while the lead raider grew from a speck into a black blade filling the center of the canopy.

’He’s going to ram it,’ Harper thought, her whole body locked rigid against her harness. ’He’s actually going to ram it, he’s lost his mind in that tube—’

’Please, God, please, please,’ Camila prayed with her eyes squeezed shut.

Behind the throne, Chloe’s lips had parted, and she was smiling.

The pirate pilot blinked first.

With ten kilometers left between them his nerve broke, and the lead raider flared its thrusters and twitched its nose off the collision line at the last second, its two wingmen opening fire to cover the swerve as its hull slid past them in a long wide screaming arc.

BOOM-BOOM! BOOM-BOOM!

Four heavy slugs tore out of the pirate muzzles at fourteen kilometers per second, lancing through the void toward the exact point where the Wanderer-7 was about to be.

The guide yanked at his spine a heartbeat before the muzzles flashed.

Leo clenched his left hand in the cradle, and the starboard attitude thrusters fired in three micro-bursts as the corvette’s nose hauled up into an inverted sixty-degree climb that rolled the whole ship upside down.

PFFFFFFFT-PUMP!

Three of the penetrators screamed past the belly plating with less than forty centimeters to spare, and the fourth clipped the edge of the hull.

BZZZZZT-FLASH!

The shield grid lit up in a shimmering sheet of blue hexagons that rippled out across the ventral plating and swallowed the impact in a burst of spitting sparks, and the slug ricocheted away into the debris field and pulverized a drifting nickel boulder into glittering dust.

"Shields holding at eighty-one percent!" Elena shouted, her eyes wide with exhilaration. "They work, Leo! They actually work!"

The two wing ships came at them from both sides with their forward plasma lances blazing with two long searing streams of green fire crossing in an X right where the Wanderer-7 was flying.

SZZZZZZT!

Leo felt the guide tug left and then down, and he pulled both hands toward his chest.

The corvette dropped like a stone between the two crossing lances with its canopy filling up with green light, so close that the heat warped the stars outside the glass and the bridge’s temperature alarms chirped once in protest.

...One lance splashed across the starboard flank.

FZZZSSHHH!

The shield flared blue and soaked up most of it, and the rest washed over the new slate plates in a shower of harmless orange sparks that died in the vacuum.

"Seventy-four percent!" Elena called. "The plates are taking the rest! Not even a scorch on the Graventhal!"

"That was the plate I carried..." Chloe said happily.

’Thank you, Chloe,’ Leo thought with a flicker of a grin, as the guide in his back already swung his attention toward the lead raider.

"Lead ship is overshooting!" Jin-Ah called. "Its momentum’s carrying it straight through our ventral arc! Its engines are exposed to the turret!"

"Not for long," Leo murmured, and his dark eyes lit with a dangerous spark.

Without giving the pirate commander a single second to regain control of his wingmen, Leo killed the main ion thrust completely.

WHAM!

The corvette broke away from its acceleration and coasted on pure momentum like a frictionless iron dart, and Leo twisted both hands in the cradles and kicked the yaw thrusters hard, spinning the whole ship one hundred and eighty degrees on its vertical axis...

Everything loose on the bridge drifted up off the deck for a heartbeat as the dampeners caught up, a stray fork turning slowly past Camila’s nose, and the Wanderer-7 flew backward through the dark at six kilometers per second with its bow pointed straight at the glowing unshielded tailpipes of the lead pirate.

The raider’s pilot tried desperately to flare his attitude thrusters and kill his forward drift, but inertia had already made its decision, and his eighty-meter warship hung right in front of the Wanderer-7’s cockpit with nowhere to go.

"You flew straight past me," Leo said softly. "Bad idea."

CLANK-WHIRRR!

The S-Rank Twin-Barrel Mag-Rail Turret swung forty-five degrees across the dorsal spine and locked dead center on the lead raider’s engine housing.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

Four eighteen-kilometer-per-second tungsten penetrators left the barrels in a continuous deafening blue roar!

KRA-KOOOOOOOM!

Two slugs drilled straight through the pirate’s starboard deuterium injector, and the other two punched through the main reactor housing and blew the eighty-meter raider apart in an expanding cloud of shattered black titanium and burning green propellant.

Before the wreckage could even scatter, Leo triggered the new laser batteries on the dorsal shoulders.

ZAP-BOOM!

ZAP-BOOM!

Two crimson beams sliced through the exploding carcass, cutting the command module away from the drive core and reducing what was left to drifting harmless slag!

PING!

A radiant golden panel unfurled across the main hololith.

[HOSTILE TARGET ELIMINATED]

[Vessel Destroyed: Tier-2 Raider Corvette (Federation Auxiliary Unit 6-A)]

[Battle Assessment: Clean Intercept / Shield Contact Only]

[Reward: Major Combat EXP Distributed to All Active Crew Members!]

[Master Captain Leo Kaine: EXP Acquired!]

[Officer Aoi Tachibana: EXP Acquired!]

[Crew Member Harper Bell: EXP Acquired!]

[Crew Member Elena Sterling: EXP Acquired!]

[Crew Member Jin-Ah Park: EXP Acquired!]

[Crew Member Camila Morales: EXP Acquired!]

[Crew Member Chloe Ivanson: EXP Acquired!]

For a second nobody else could speak.

Camila was staring at the drifting slag with her mouth open, Aoi’s rings had stopped spinning altogether, and Elena let out a breath that shook on the way out.

"He flew backward," Jin-Ah said faintly, to nobody in particular. "He flew backward and shot it in the engines..."

"Target one is dust!" Harper roared, pumping her fist as the warm tingle of combat EXP settled into her status. "Four slugs, one kill! That’s how we do it!"

Leo skipped the celebrating completely and simply tapped the recovery stud with his thumb while the ship was still drifting backward.

"Foundry Recall."

THOOM!

The sapphire cone burst out of the Wanderer-7’s belly and swept across the remains of the first pirate ship.

The tumbling black plates, the severed rail-cannons and the intact reactor fragments dissolved into shimmering streams of blue particles that poured into the intake grilles with a deep grinding roar!

GURGLE-CRUNCH!

The Foundry ran white-hot, its chambers humming at full capacity as the military-grade alloys were broken down into raw structural mass.

CHIME!

[FOUNDRY HARVEST REPORT: RAPID FIELD ABSORPTION]

[Target Absorbed: Tier-2 Raider Wreckage]

[Ship Evolution Progress: 31% ? 35%!]

[Integration Effect: Hull tensile density increased by 12%. Primary weapon capacitor recharge rate accelerated by 8%.]

"Thirty-five percent!" Jin-Ah shouted over the hum of the cooling lines. "But the other two are breaking formation... They’re splitting off to catch us in a pincer from both sides!"

On the hololith the two remaining red markers peeled apart, one sweeping wide below them while the other climbed high above their starboard quarter, and then the high one rolled over and came down at them like a hawk... a sleek razor-edged hull with jagged crimson teeth painted along its prow with both plasma lances already glowing white-hot and pointed straight at the Wanderer-7’s canopy.