Immediately, she then put on a single-gee acceleration and launched herself into a jinking pattern that would have slammed heads hard if the eggs hadn’t locked down every inch of their bodies and cushioned them.
Kris had the larger of the three ships in her crosshairs. Twelve huge rocket motors were putting out plasma from four of eight reactors. Kris targeted where she’d expect to find two reactors and fired Lasers 1 and 2.
Apparently engineering solutions galaxywide tend to yield the same answers. Two 18-inch lasers smashed into the engineering spaces of two reactors. Magnetic containment equipment suffered lethal disruption. Twenty-thousand-degree demons that were never meant to know the face of man were unleashed, ripping and tearing, feeding on construction that was not meant for the likes of them.
Two untouched reactors joined the dance of destruction, then their hunger spread the entire length of the ship.
In a blink, where a ship had been were only gases.
Kris would watch this on the recordings after the battle. Once she’d seen the destruction begin, she was already turning to the second ship.
It had not yet reacted to the disaster overtaking her leader. Her slow response was her doom. This ship had only nine rocket engines. Kris targeted two reactors and hit one.
One was enough to begin the chain of catastrophic failures that ate the ship.
The third ship had a faster captain. He’d already begun to swing his vulnerable engines away from this sudden attack. Kris had had Nelly launch four of her limited supply of high-acceleration 12-inch antimatter torpedoes at him even as she concentrated her lasers on the other two. The six 5-inch secondaries added what they could.
The third hostile, though smaller, was still equipped with way too many lasers and was bringing them to bear on the Wasp.
“Flip ship,” Drago ordered. “Get that wreck back between us and them.”
Nelly was already doing it as the helmsman reached to obey.
Kris had her eye on the alien. She still had her rear stinger. If the stern came within fifteen degrees of that puppy, she’d knock a big hole in its bow.
NELLY, CAN YOU GIVE ME A SHOT?
I CAN ADJUST OUR JINKING TO SHOW THEM OUR REAR, BUT ONLY FOR ONE SECOND. AND I’LL BE CHANGING COURSE EVEN AS I’M DOING THAT. I COULD FIRE THE LASER AND ADJUST ITS AIM TO MY JINKS.
DO IT, GAL.
A short breath later, Laser 5 fired. A few seconds more, and the wreck was once again between them and their enemy. The entire sally took less than ten seconds.
As the Wasp returned to the safe shadow of the hulk, and to a more sedate smooth quarter gee, the ship exploded in cheers.
Captain Drago let the crew rejoice for a moment, then punched his commlink. “All hands, good shooting and good ship handling. Two down, but anyone want to bet the third ship heads home with its tail between its legs to let its betters know that the old wreck has a new owner?”
No one offered to take the bet.
Even as he finished speaking, Sensors was already reporting. “Sir, the ship has continued on a course that will bring it around the hulk after us.”
“Then we better play ring-around-the-rosy,” the captain said, and the helmsmen tucked the Wasp in close to the wreck. With one eye on the hulk-mounted sensors, he began edging them to port, keeping the hostile exactly opposite them.
“Well, Your Royal Highness, have you got any more ideas? I’m plumb out.”
Kris sighed. She’d been about to ask Captain Drago the same question.
But she was the Longknife. Admitting she’d scraped the bottom of her barrel of ideas for how to keep alive while killing what was after you was just not part of the legend.
5
For the next quarter hour, they circled the wreck.
Then the alien got sneaky and reversed course.
The Wasp also quickly flipped ship and took off in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately, that gave away that they had better situational awareness than the hostile. He noticed that quickly enough and started shooting up the hulk with all those lasers the aliens seemed to oversupply their ships with.
In fifteen minutes, they’d lost so many sensors that they could no longer communicate with them by tight beam. Rather than lose more of Nelly’s next child’s brainpower, they closed their net down.
“He’s going to switch his direction real soon,” Drago muttered.
“So let’s change the game. How about hide-and-seek.”
“Explain yourself, Princess.”
“There’s a big hole in the wreck. I’d hate to take the love-boat-size Wasp in there, but at Condition Zed, we’re pretty small.”
“Nelly, have you mapped that hole?” the captain asked.
“No, but Professor Labao’s computer has.”
“Lay in a course to back us into said hole next time we pass it. Be careful with my ship, Nelly. I like it just the way it is.”
A few seconds later, Nelly flipped the Wasp, slammed on the brakes with a three-gee deceleration, and brought the ship to a dead halt in space. In a human blink, she swung the ship around, aft end to the hole in the hulk, and did a little twisting dance as she backed it into a hole that was doing its own bit of rock and roll.
There was no crunch of metal.
They were hardly in the shade of the hole before the alien ship slid by a good thirty thousand klicks out. Not only was he changing his direction, he was also edging out to get a longer horizon.
“Now what do we do?” Drago asked.
“Nelly, deploy visual sensors to the right and left, above, and below our hideout. Whatever direction he comes from next time, I want to get enough warning to accelerate out after he passes and get a shot at his engines.”
“Doing it, Kris. By the way, Kris, we got the full coverage of that ceiling I wanted and one of the nanos discovered a boot with the leg still in it. We should be able to get DNA off it.”
“Good! Now, Nelly, where are my visuals?”
“Coming online.” The forward screen divided to show what was ahead of them as well as a large cross in all four major points of the compass.
“Kris, dear,” came Granny Rita’s voice over the net, “I do hate to joggle your elbow again at a time like this, but the Alwans would like you to make a new try at contacting the alien. They feel that the demonstration you have given should persuade it to surrender to your will.”
“Sorry, Granny, it ain’t gonna happen. This is the fifth time we’ve run into these bastards. The only one that didn’t end with one side annihilated was the one where our ship managed to run away. Fights with these people are to the death. Tell your friends to get used to it. Either they die, or we die, and I’m busy doing everything I can right now to make sure they’re the ones dead.”
“Thank you, love, I had to try.”
NELLY, WHAT ARE THOSE CRAZY BIRDS TALKING ABOUT?
SORRY, KRIS, I CAN’T FOLLOW THEM. THEY ARE USING TOO MANY SOCIAL REFERENCES TO THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN THE PAST. LANGUAGE IS MORE THAN EACH WORD.
ENOUGH, NELLY.
The alien was getting smarter. He’d adjusted his orbit by fifty-five degrees. Kris barely caught a glimpse of him as he headed for an orbital crossing that wasn’t too far from their hideout. He was also blasting away at the wreck, using his firepower to swat at anything and nothing.
“There’s a chance that one of his wild shots may blast our hole,” Nelly said. “Should I back us deeper?”
“No,” Kris and Captain Drago said at the same time.
“Get ready to boot us out of here on my order,” Kris said. “Jink the way you think you have to, Nelly, but get the forward end of the Wasp aimed at that bastard.”
“Jinking pattern standing by,” Nelly said.