Devil May Care Ch. 03

She looked back and saw that a hatch had opened. She focused and teleported to it, then dragged herself in. The hatch shut and air hissed into the dorsal airlock a moment before the Ring blew its way through the external force field and into open space. The main engines slammed on and she heard the quiet whirr of a ship sized DV engine going to full speed.

They were lightyears away before the corporate goons would know what the fuck had happened.

###

Dey opened the door leading from the dorsal airlock and to the main corridor of the Ring and found herself face to face with Mordin Lightbringer. She leaped backwards. "Holy fuckballs!" She exclaimed, and without thinking, lashed out with her palm. A bubble of compressed and accelerated air slammed into the alien -- passing through him and slapping the wall behind him, dislodging an emergency response kit. AS the kit hit the ground, Lightbringer looked at it, then at Dey.

"I take it you are surprised to see me," the sinister alien purred. His Cheshire smile was wide. Mocking.

"Ya think?" Dey asked.

Mordin moved forward. He didn't walk so much as float. One of those tentacles of his reached up and caressed Dey's cheek. She flinched -- his touch was warm and faintly slimy. She grabbed the tentacle, planning to shove him away. His tentacle merely looped around her knuckles, then her wrist, squeezing her. Dey looked down -- feeling a strange tingling from the contact.

"I am very impressed with you, Jane Bond," he murmured in her ear. Dey's cheeks burned as she felt another tentacle slide along her back.

"Back. Off," she growled, low. [Loki, cut whatever he's feeding me out of my feedback cycle.]

The tingling faded. All that was left was her irritation.

"Very impressed," Mordin murmured -- then let her go. He floated backwards. "Come to my room, if you want to know more, Bond."

Then he dissolved away -- just in time to be entirely vanished when Marin came to the airlock. He was panting softly, his face gleaming with sweat. He shook his head. "Holy shit, what are you?" he asked, putting his hands on the airlock doors. It was an empty gesture and both of them knew it -- if Dey wanted to leave, she'd leave. Dey grinned.

"As I said. Jane Bond," she said.

"Yeah, no shit," Marin said.

"And now you?" She grabbed his shirt, jerking him forward. No DV tricks, no augmentations. Just her raw strength. "You need to explain what the fuck is going on."

The two of them sat down on the bridge. Like all Fords, it looked sturdy and all American. Or, in other words, it didn't have a single touchscreen. Instead, everything was done with big clunky dials and toggles and buttons, with LED readouts that looked almost a century out of date. It was part of their rugged, dependable image. And from everything Dey had heard, they actually had a point. Chunks of metal tended to last better than glass. Especially when unsecured objects started to get flung around by intense manuvering.

"Explain," Dey said.

Marin sighed. "Okay. I'm an exp-"

"I know what you are," Dey said. "Explorer, ever since you got a mortgage to buy this ship. You've been keeping your head over water by doing spot trading between alien nations -- last run was a run transporting Helium-3 from a Huntress world to one of the Shockpod enclaves. You got that tattoo there. And you found that fucking a Finarien isn't the best idea without a taser."

"I..." Marin was looking shocked. "I never told anyone about that Finarien guy."

Dey chuckled softly, then spread her hands.

Marin shook his head. "All right. Fine." He sighed. "It all started when I found that fucking ghost ship..."

"A ghost ship?" Dey asked.

"Yes, a ghost ship," Marin snapped. "Don't look so disbelieving. You're the oen with superpowers."

"I-" Dey spluttered. "I'm just saying, mathematically, the chances of finding a ghost ship is fucking one to twenty fucking billion. Space is fucking huge, ships are tiny, and only ships that are hot show up on sensors. But, I mean, you're a civilian explorer, right? You're going beyond the Outback, to systems that known races don't own, right? So, it's like running into a spec of dust in the Atlantic that has Made in China printed on it. At night. In a rowboat."

Marin grinned, shaking his head. "It wasn't quite that hard."

Dey shook her head. "It's also cliché. So..."

"Do you want to hear the story?" Marin put his hands on his knees, leaning forward off his chair. Dey sighed and leaned back.

"Yes. Go on."

"Fine. Jane." Marin looked at her. Dey didn't offer her real name. She wasn't a moron. "I was doing some 4X work- that's Explore, Expand, Exploit-" he waved his hand, not elaborating on the rest of the theme. Dey nodded her head to show she got it. "-most of the time, it all comes down to finding something that you can sell. Every system I drop into, I do a parallax scan while orbiting round the Oort Cloud or system equivalent. This picks up any planets. If there's nothing in the Goldilocks zone, nothing radiating, nothing emitting, then I move on to the next system. If I'm low on water, I grab a comet."

"Efficient," Dey said.

"It's fucking agony half the time," he said, putting his hands on his face. "I keep thinking to myself: How many ancient alien ruins and pre-tech life am I skipping? How many extremophiles and other weirdos am I just leaving for someone with a bigger ship and budget to scoop up? Ugh. No one cares if you were the first person to skim a system, you know?"

"Ghost ship," Dey said.

"Huh?" Marin blinked.

"Ghost ship! Tell me about the ghost ship!"

"Right," Marin said. "So, I was in 44-I Bootis B. Or as I named it, Sly Boots. Cause I can."

Dey nodded.

"I did the parallax scan. No planets in the GLZ, nothing obviously radioactive, but there was an emission. Specifically, we were getting a light bounce-back and thermal image on something about five hundred meters long. It was heading straight for Bootis B and would impact with the star in about five months." He sighed. "The only reason I detected it at all was clear once I got close to it: A micrometeorite impact had slashed open a hydrogen tank. One in a fucking billion shot -- the outgassing had put it on enough of a spin that it showed up on scanners at all."

"So, you had found an alien ship-"

"Alien?" he asked. "What? Fuck no. It was a Subaru."

Dey blinked at him.

"Yeah. A five hundred meter Subaru Kokyu research ship. They sell them to collages and people who want to pretend they're Kirk or Janeway. This one had been pretty heavily modified. No guns, though. So, I docked with it. I figuredit had to be abandoned for some reason. Turns out the reason was..." Marin paused. "This is where you're going to definitely not believe me."

"Try me," Dey said.

Marin sighed. "It was haunted."

Dey was silent for a long time.

"Haunted?" she asked.

"Yes," Marin said.

"Like...'you don't need eyes to see' haunted or Erotic Espers of Epsilon haunted?" she asked, her brow furrowing.

"Like the airlock tried to cut me in half haunted," Marin said. "Like the PA started ranting at me the instant I got on board. It was fucking creepy. It knew my name, Jane Bond. And it was pissed."

"Unidentified vessel detected."

The cool female voice that broke into their conversation dragged Dey's attention to the screens. Her eyes widened as she saw that three ships had dropped out of FTL right on their asses -- from a stellar perspective. They were only fifty thousand clicks off, and approaching quickly. The Ring had fairly good sensors. Enough that they could paint a nasty picture of the three ships. One of them was alien -- no human had ever built a ship that had that many radiating panels. It made the whole structure look like a fifth dimensional cathedral, not a ship that should be flying in space: All flying buttresses and elegant blades. The two other ships were more familiar. They were the common delta-V shape of cheap, civilian fightercraft.

Er.

Sorry.

Race craft. No one would ever put guns on racing craft.

Save that both of these ships had forward mounted HFGs and banks of ASM-Dart missiles. They weren't aspect seekers, thank God, but they could lock onto a thermal signature and scrag a ship at almost five thousand kilometers.

"What guns does the Ring have?" Dey asked, quietly.

"Two dumbfire AT-DF 98s that I, uh, borrowed off a wreck in Trappist," Marin said.

Dey glared at him. "Those are fucking Marine Corps weapons."

"Hey, there weren't any Marines around!" Marin said, angrily. "And I regularly stick my nose into places that have fucking pirates and- shit, the Huntress ship is getting closer."

[Loki?] Dey asked.

It's definitely a Huntress ship. But we've had essentially zilch contact with them -- we only know that they evolved on a planet like Pluto. That exosuit they wear? It's to keep their nerves from melting on exposure to temperatures higher than -250C.

"Jaysus," Dey whispered.

"All right," Marin said. "They must have followed us on a straight line trajectory. I zip, then I turn, then we lose them."

The two fighter-craft fired off darts. The missiles moved faster than the human eye could easily track, and they ended up on either side of the Ring. The missiles vanished and a warning alarm started to ring throughout the ship.

"Unidentified mass detected," it said. "DV Engine cutoff enabled."

"Whaaaat fresh hell is this?" Marin asked, throwing up his hands.

Theoretical tech. Guess it works -- dump some dark matter into the local spacetime and the negative energy that is required for-

"They dropped a bunch of chaff on us. Accelerate away from them. I'll get on the guns," Dey said, cutting Loki off.

"They're that way!" Marin said, pointing. Dey nodded and grabbed onto the ceiling of the Ring and started scrambling down the main corridor as the lightning switched from white to a dull red. To preserve night vision in case the main power went offline. But, thinking about it, Dey figured they had worse problems if their power went off. She came to a doorway that lead into a room that had been jerry rigged into a weapon control platform. She figured that he didn't want to fuck with the bridge systems this far from a repair shop. She settled into the cheap office chair and tapped on the firing display -- and laughed.

Well, it's... Loki paused. Innovative at least.

[Fucking dipshit, this is Star Citizen 4's fucking turret interface,] Dey said as she tapped on the keyboard. The two missile pods were full of a hundred and eight dumbfire rockets. They would go in a straight line until they stopped or were acted on by an external force. The upside was that made them cheap and easy to make. The downside was they were, at the end of the day, no better than a railgun. She had a hundred and eighty degrees of movement on the turret gimbals, with two turrets mounted on either side of the hammerhead bridge.

She could work with that.

One of the fighters was jetting closer.

That's a Northbridge Services Group logo, Loki said.

[Fucking great. Not only are we about to die, we're about to get splashed by corporate.] She shook her head. [It's just embarrassing.]

"This is NSG-1," a male voice, gruff and trying far too hard to sound like a badass, came over the PA. "Smuggler ship, stand down or we will be forced to destroy you."

Dey smirked. [Loki, if you would.]

Connection started.

She spoke -- and let her voice be carried back on the com-wave. "This is Lt. Gallagher, USAF. This ship is holding almost five billion dollars of United States property -- I'd think-"

NSG-1 responded by opening fire with their HFGs. The two machine-guns blazed with blue Cherenkov radiation as their ammo-banks poured bullets into the chamber. The bullets zipped through space, invisibly fast, and the Ring went into a quick spin, shields coming online with a low whir that resounded through the ship. The burst was well aimed, but Marin wasn't a half bad pilot. He had been prepped and he juiced his ship downwards and in a twisting corkscrew that made the AG fields groan in protest.

Did the job, though. Let the shields redirect the bullets.

Well, Loki said. We can say they REALLY don't want you here.

[Ya think?] Dey asked, her jaw clenched against the inertia tugging at her, trying to wrench her out of the chair. Cheap office chair or not, the restraints were good. She left her hands on the controls, one thumb and one finger pushing the trackball. She sighted on NGS-2 as it arced by. It was showing its belly to her, shields shimmering faintly. She could see grapple lines mounted there. They wanted to board. Well.

"Bye bye," she whispered as she pressed the left mouse button.

For some reason, that was just less satisfying than pulling a trigger.

The dumbfire rockets filled space around the NGS-2. The shields tried to redirect them around the craft. Did a great job. Too bad they were rockets, not bullets, or it might have worked. The fifty eight rockets she fired exploded in a staggered pattern, filling the air around the NGS-2 with blue white light as their K2 warheads unspooled and filled two clicks of space with mono-filament wire spinning at relativistic speeds. Since it wasn't an atmosphere burst, the damage was actually less than it could have been as there was no thermal shock created by friction.

Didn't matter much.

The NGS-2 flew on, spaghettified just as effectively as if it had gone into a black hole.

"Holy FUCK, what the hell!?" Marin shouted over the coms.

"They're trying to-" A few bullets punched through the hull with a sound of screaming metal and a sudden blare of depressurization alarms. Dey started to wish she had a helmet on. "-kill us!" she finished.

"I only have a hundred and eight fucking rockets!" Marin snapped. "I'm not getting any more until I find another scagged Marine ship!"

"Write me a fucking check!" Dey said as NGS-1 seemed to reconsider its attempt to vent and board them. It flipped around, twisted, and as it accelerated away, it fired off five darts. Inertia screamed at her as Marin threw the Ring into a sudden hard burn. The missiles were heat seeking, they were going to home in on the ship, but every second they took, gave them a few more seconds to think more.

"Well. Fuck. Sorry for yelling at you about the missiles."

"Why!?" Dey asked. "And they're rockets!"

"Imma dump the drive core," Marin said, his voice tight.

"You what!?" Dey screamed.

Too late.

The sound of screaming metal filled the ship, ear-damagingly loud. The reactor of the ship -- a cheap, dependable nuclear-thermal reactor with a chunk of thorium that was, honestly, the most expensive part of the ship -- dropped down into space. This was a system that was used in the one in a fucking billion chance of a catastrophic drive failure that would dump a bunch of radiation into the ship's reactor systems.

It did an admirable job of dumping a very large, very hot thing out behind the ship.

Marin cut the engines.

The ship was still hot.

But the missiles weren't very smart.

All five slammed into the reactor.

The Ring still hummed quietly. Dey closed her eyes. "Please tell me you have some K12s or K15s for reserve power..." she groaned, her voice soft -- but she didn't need to speak loudly. Marin's sigh echoed down the corridor.

"I have three K7s. It's enough to get you to a habitable planet in the same solar system or to survive for about five days and hope that your message hits someone." He paused. "If it helps, I've got an FTL com. We can send for help."

NSG-1 started to fly towards them -- the Huntress' ship approaching.

"I don't think they're getting here fast enough," Dey said, frowning.

The two ships moved in -- docking clamps magnetized.

Weapons hot.

TO BE CONTINUED