"Thanks. How bad is it?" Keff asked the air.
"Hull breach, minor. Already being fixed," Carialle said shortly.
The automatic repair system quickly pressurized the sector and filled it with self-hardening polymer/metal compound. Nothing vital had been damaged, but Carialle wondered how many of those hits they could take before being destroyed. Her nerve endings still stung. She fed somatotropins to the injured part, and increased her sugar levels slightly.
Keff shook his hands to help the blood flow to the white and pinched palms, then slammed his fist down on the record button to send a message to CW.
"Mayday. This is the CK-963. We are under attack by three vessels, origin unknown. I am uplinking video of these vessels, plus other data we have gathered regarding the disappearance of a Central Worlds ship in this sector. If we are unable to escape, send fleet ships to the Cridi system at once. We have already taken damage. I repeat, we are under attack-uh-oh!"
The screen caught his attention as the red light on the enemy ship appeared again. "Cari, they're shooting again!"
"I'm moving, I'm moving!" Carialle exclaimed. The ship zigzagged as well as it could to avoid the coming barrage, but she couldn't move far to any side. There was no way to dodge another blast. "Our shields aren't meant to take this."
The Frog Prince once again put his newfound power into operation. His hands whisked back and forth in silent commands. Carialle felt the Core within her walls hum. Suddenly, her hull felt as if it had been dipped in transparent padding. The next bolt of energy, invisible to the naked eye, exploded in a burst of white light against her side. Keff and Tall Eyebrow were jolted around in their couches, but the ship sustained no damage.
"Thanks, TE," Carialle said. "You just earned your keep." The globe-frog signalled a shaky "You're welcome."
The enemy, obviously taken aback that its volley made no impact, sent half a dozen bolts in rapid succession. Carialle attempted to avoid them, but two of them hit her-one in the tail, and one close to the airlock. The white light from their impact momentarily blinded one of her cameras, and the cabin lights faded down for a second. Carialle took the moment of the blast to slide into a narrow alley formed by a winding DNA-strand of floating rocks. The next blast missed them, exploding a meteorite that peppered the hull noisily with sand. Carialle maneuvered through the belt, hoping to keep the distance between her and her pursuer. It vanished among the rocks.
"How long will your shield hold?" she asked Tall Eyebrow.
"I do not know," he said. "Perhaps long enough, but a sustained volley might overstrain it. Especially if they have a Core, too."
"I'm sending that message to Simeon and the CW right now," Carialle said. "If we lose, no one will ever find us. It'll be weeks, if not months before the message gets home. Someone has to know about these people. They've obviously been using the outskirts of this system as a hideout for years, and no one knew about it."
"You did," Keff said, grimly.
"An unhappy surmise, unluckily turning out to be true. At present, that's no satisfaction," she said briskly.
"Are these the ones?" Keff asked, with a concerned look at her pillar. "Are they your salvage squad?"
"I don't know," she said. "I was blind then."
"Do the engines match the configuration?" Keff asked. "Did they make physical contact? Can you recognize the vibration? Frequency emissions?"
"I don't know. After the attack I know my sensors went skewiff, so I might have been filtering all I know through bad information. I'll only know if I can get one of them to walk on me again. And I'm damned if I'll ever let that happen."
She recognized that her voice had grown terse, and made an effort to pull herself together. The moment of indecision and resolution took only microseconds, but she knew Keff had noticed the hesitation.
"I'm fine," she said, making the Lady Fair image appear on the wall. The peach-colored veil from her hennin floated softly around her face, which wore an expression of peace. Keff gave it a skeptical glance, but nodded. Both of them had to concentrate right now on survival.
As they wove through the asteroids, two blips appeared ahead on long range scan. Carialle wondered if her new equipment was more sophisticated than theirs; could she see them before they saw her? It might mean the difference between escape and destruction. Carialle studied her telemetry. Where could she turn to avoid them? Nothing truly safe offered itself. A sharp turn in any direction threw her into the teeth of the celestial meat grinder. Suddenly, a gap opened to starboard. She took it, nipping in just before two bolts lanced through the space she'd been occupying.
"This was probably not a good idea," Carialle said. "One lone, unarmed ship doesn't have a chance against a force of three. We've got to get out of here."
"We still have to find the DSC-902," Keff reminded her. "Even if we can just locate it before we get away, that'll be a help. I'd rather rescue them if we can."
"I'm with you, O brave one, but we need to survive this mission to be of any use to them." She broke off to dodge the first ship, which appeared on the other side of a rock full of holes like Swiss cheese. It fired a few times, through one hole then another. Carialle avoided them all, but felt stone shrapnel ping against her hull. The enemy ship spurred after her. She fled, only to find the lone ship had radioed the other two, who appeared on either side of her at the next wide spot. Carialle calculated the period between spiralling rocks, and ducked upward. The three ships, unable to maneuver with her skill, plummeted forward.
Carialle widened the gap between her and the enemy to half a dozen planet-widths by diving down and through the asteroid belt, and coming out "south" of the plane of the ecliptic. She made a note of where the three ships were, and turned back up and into the stone dance at some distance from them. Her sensors indicated that the enemy had figured out what she had done and were coming after her, but she was ahead of them now, scanning for traces of the DSC-902.
"Do you know, they're fast, but their equipment is ancient," Carialle said. "I might be able to outlast them in hide-and-seek, if only we don't get in the way of sustained fire."
"Your engines are better than any of these brutes," Keff said, anxiously watching the aft monitor. One of the ships, blip number two, was outside the belt now, pouring on velocity to catch up. "We can outdistance them. Maybe we can outclass them, too. TE, can we convince them we've got some heavy armament?"
"How?"
"Grab one of those rocks as we go past, and sling it backwards toward this fellow."
The globe-frog looked worried. "It will mean relinquishing control of the shield," he said.
"We'll have to chance it," Carialle said. "My shields are 92% intact, and none of those old pots can match me for maneuverability. Go ahead."
The thick padding around her vanished suddenly, leaving her feeling chilled as if she was exposed to the cold of space. Hastily, she rebuilt her defenses. Carialle felt a momentary drag aft and to port as Tall Eyebrow hitched his power to a rock about three meters across and pulled it out of the dance. It sailed along behind them like a puppy. Carialle turned on all her dorsal thrusters in a sudden burst, and turned on her belly, heading back toward the pursuing ship. Tall Eyebrow made a pushing motion in midair. The rock spiraled up from Carialle's tail and flew in a tightening pattern around her body toward the enemy. With the extra momentum behind it, the missile appeared to elongate in flight.
The enemy ship had only seconds to avoid collision. It veered to up and to starboard. Tall Eyebrow reached out to the end of his range to alter the rock's course to match. It got to within a hundred kilometers of the enemy before the lasers exploded it.
"I missed," Tall Eyebrow complained.