Ashley grinned at the pilot she'd seen several times in the pilot's den. He was shorter than her by eleven centimetres and was always smiling. While growing up he had learned to fly an old air hopper and as soon as he got his licence he was transporting parts for a commercial excavation operation. He had a natural knack for all things in the cockpit. After he whipped through the fighter pilot tutorials he passed the qualifier on the first try. Within a week he became one of their top pilots and Ashley had recommended he lead the small group of Uriel fighters covering them.
Her jaw dropped as the navigational display noted his fighter was destroyed just then, leaving no emergency beacon. She stared at the notification and the display as the profile of his Uriel fighter became just another obstacle, a grouping of heated, twisting metal.
“Ash, focus,” Larry said from beside her. “We're coming up on it.”
She cleared her throat and focused on the task at hand, making one final minor adjustment to their course as the remaining three fighters along with the gunners on the Samson fought tooth and nail to keep their path clear. The Samson shook and rocked violently, turning just slightly.
“Engine three is gone, shields down to eighteen percent, draining our reserves to compensate!” Finn announced.
“Compensating for the missing pod.” Larry announced beside her.
“We've rotated too much, turn us back or we'll smash into the satellite side on!” Frost called out.
Ashley didn't let the controls reset, but manually rotated one of the port engine pods and fired it, guessing at how much thrust they'd need to make a good capture with the maxjack. As the ship slowly rotated she lined up the other pods as quickly as she could to slow the Samson down so it and the satellite wouldn't be destroyed when they made contact. The engines fired at full power. No one knew whether it was enough and as the many controls reset everyone held their breath.
“We're comin' in too fast!” Frost called out, still standing at the ready at the maxjack controls.
“It'll have to do!” Ashley said the instant before the Samson collided with the hypertransmitter satellite. The sounds of gunfire were drowned out by the cataclysmic noise of the hull crushing, screeching and grinding into the object.
“God dammit!” Frost shouted as he tried to manipulate the maxjack, to get a grip on their target.
“Breaches in five compartments, sealing sections off. Half our lower shield emitters are dead, I'm compensating!” Finn reported. “Somehow,” he muttered to himself.
“Do you have it Frost?” asked Ashley in a rush.
Frost struggled with the controls of the maxjack, trying to work with the working gripper arms he had left, activating magnetic capturing fields and pressing the satellite against two of the largest curled arms that were stuck in position with no power.
“Frost, do you have it!” Ashley repeated, waiting to take the newly calibrated controls and try to get the Samson out of danger.
“Shut it! You're not helpin'!” he snapped back.
“Is it possible?” Finn asked.
“Nay! I don't think-” Frost started but was interrupted as the whole ship shuddered violently and alarms sounded for two seconds before Finn shut them down.
“That was a heavy collider shell, ran us straight through, sealing two non-essential compartments and shutting down a line of capacitors! We have to get out of here!” Finn said as he watched the ship's power reserves and generation capacity drop drastically.
“Frost! Do we stay or do we go?” Ashley asked harshly.
“That did it! The thing is impaled on one arm and I could trap it with one of the ones that still work! Go! Fer all that's holy! Get us out o' here woman!”
“Finally!” Larry commented as he started plotting a hyperspace course. “You have to get us clear of this mess before we can start hyperacceleration.”
Ashley looked at the summarized status display as she fired the engines and tried to start the Samson in the right direction, towards the nearest edge of the combat area. The report told her that their shields were down to nine percent and didn't effectively cover the aft end of the ship, that they had six open compartments, and that there were only two fighters left. “Fighter wing, get out. Generate wormholes and escape now!” she ordered.
“Flightnut copies, I'm gone!”
“Byfly copies, heading out!”
“Finn, give me a burst of hyperspace particles on my mark,” Ashley commanded.
“Ready,” was all he said as he turned white.
Larry worked feverishly to find a nearby, straight, clear path but couldn't locate one on the tactical hologram or screen in front of him.
“There! Right there! ” Ashley pointed to the asteroid behind them.
“You want to-”
“Send us in the opposite direction so fast they can't keep up,” she finished for him.
He plotted the course quickly, just over fourteen thousand kilometres. “At your peril,” he said, throwing up his hands.
“More like-” Frost started.
“Two, one, mark!” Ashley interrupted loudly.
Finn's hand came down on the final initiation button for the particle emitters to send a burst of hyperspace particles out across the hull of the Samson and their cargo that would allow them to accelerate at many times the normal rate and for a split second the Samson increased speed at a rate of several thousand kilometres per second, effectively stopping it's motion in one direction fast enough to begin sending it careening recklessly towards the asteroid. Fighters, gunships and the asteroid itself whipped by as Ashley fought to guide the small ship right across the bow of a destroyer, past a wing of fighters that had freshly launched from a more distant carrier. “Plot our course fast!” she said through gritted teeth. “I'll have to blink sometime.”
Larry's fingers worked the console as quickly as he could. “Can't get a clear exit path, keep it together just a few more seconds Ash,” he said in a tone that feigned calm as he struggled with the math and constant trajectory updates.
As the exotic particles coating the hull dissipated evenly across the vessel it started becoming more difficult to make course corrections. The engines were firing at full thrust as they swivelled and swung at the ends of their thin pylons. “Hurry, hurryhurry,” Ashley whispered.
“Got it! Locked in!” Larry announced.
Ashley quickly rotated the engine pods in the right direction, locked the manual controls and initiated the automated hyperspace entry sequence. The Samson lurched under the sudden increase to full thrust and as the hull was once again coated with energized exotic particles it accelerated to faster than light speeds.
“Energy shielding down to four percent on the dorsal section and I have no power reserves to reinforce them. The rest of the ship isn't much better,” Laura announced as she watched the hull start taking direct strikes from antimatter enhanced gauss cannon rounds. She winced as a torpedo struck the upper quarter of the aft section. “Aft down to one percent.”
“The Samson 's clear!” Price announced.
“Explosive decompression reported in section A12, we just lost the main lines to the primary port engine,” came the announcement from engineering.
“Time to leave. Best speed to my designated point,” Captain Alice Valent ordered, marking a point in space on the main tactical and helm displays. “Let's see if they're willing to play chicken. Bring all weapons to bear on the command carrier and open fire.”
The remaining torpedo launch tubes, beam weapon emplacements and all the turrets aboard the Triton took aim at the command carrier ten times her size as Panloo fired the engines towards the largest ship in the fleet trying to combat them. Every knuckle on the bridge was white as all but the forward and bottom shields on the ship failed, the ablative hull began taking hits and the massive command carrier in the distance slowly began turning, trying to accelerate out of the way.