“How’s he gonna do it?”
“I think he’s gonna hit it with two gunships at once.”
“We figure if we can take down enough towers it’ll give us some time,” said Marco.
“Time to leave?” said Jolo.
“Time to convince the Fed the position they are in,” said Marco.
“They’ll never listen. I’ve tried,” said Jolo
“Bertha is reaching out to her core world contacts now,” said Katy. “There’s hope.”
“Faith in the Fed will just get you killed,” said Jolo.
……
Jolo and Katy could see smoke rising up in big black plumes before they even saw the tower. “Mantis must already be hitting the station,” said Katy. There were loud railgun blasts and he could hear a pair of Fed 4-core thrusters being pushed beyond spec—to a place only a pirate Gunboat with the thruster governors ripped out could go. But the other sound worried him. It was a BG cruiser and he didn’t think it was Mantis’s.
“Stop,” yelled Jolo, just before the hover craft crested the ridge. Katy brought the Scout to a halt, dust flying everywhere. Jolo ran to the edge and stared down into the shallow recess where no one in their right mind would ever have put a listening station. Mantis’s black Cruiser with the blue star was laying on its side on fire, a few blackened crew members strew about the sand. The giant tower, twisted in the middle, lay on the ground nearby, the bottom burned and black. Overhead, Mantis’s Fed gunboat and a BG Cruiser traded cannon fire. The Cruiser was nearly cooked, smoking from both thrusters and looking like it was ready to drop, but Mantis’s boat didn’t look much better. Jolo knew that if the Cruiser took out Mantis then he and Katy would be in grave danger, but he was helpless. He looked at the Colt in his hand. He didn’t even remember reaching for it. He might as well throw rocks at the giant, black alacyte ship. Katy came up to him, out of breath.
“We should run,” she said.
But then the black ship faltered and crunched down on the end of the tower and rolled. The Fed boat finished it off with a volley from her rail guns. Mantis set the smoking Fed gunboat down next to the Scout. He emerged, cussing. “Lost Black Beauty!” he screamed, staring down at the smoldering, black pile of metal with the blue star on the side.
“What about your people?” Katy said. Two charred figures lay next to the smoking mess. Mantis turned to her.
“I am a pirate, not a monster, my lady,” he said. “Those on the ground ain’t human. They’re my synth-bots. Probably salvageable. Install new logic boards and away we go.”
“Why’d the Cruiser come?”
“Don’t know,” said Mantis.
“How long after you showed up and started blasting the base of the tower did the bad guys show up?”
“’Bout thirty minutes.” He looked at Jolo. “I didn’t think you were getting involved.”
“I’m not. But y’all ain’t gonna last if that’s your plan to take out a tower.”
“We should go before the BG send any more boats down,” said Jolo.
“Yeah, you go Vargas. We’ll take care of everything,” said Mantis. He spit on the ground and headed back to his ship cursing under his breath, still angry at losing his black ship.
“What now?” said Katy.
“You wanna figure this thing out?” said Jolo.
Jolo and Katy headed north as fast as the little Scout could go, away from the smoke and any possible BG encounters. They passed several towers, and on the fifth they stopped. It was far enough away from Mantis’s disaster but close enough to the Kolar Mountain chain which would give them a place to hide if another big black ship showed up.
“Why’d the BG come?” said Jolo. “No ships came when we found the drill with Merthon.”
“We didn’t fire an ion cannon at it,” said Katy.
“Ok, there’s that.”
“How about this,” said Katy, “any ship larger than, say, a Scout, comes close with weapons hot and pretty soon you got a Cruiser coming down to rain hell on you.”
“Okay, let’s test it. You wait here.” Jolo left Katy under a tree at the base of the mountains and sped off in the direction of the tower. Then he drove around it a few times and waited.
Nothing.
Then he tapped the already dented nose of the Scout on the front door of the tower. The little warning bot popped out just like last time but Jolo didn’t shoot it. Then he backed the Scout away a good fifty meters and walked around the base of the giant structure. When he stopped and squatted down he could hear it. When he put his hands on the hot sand he could feel it. A subtle, rhythmic vibration. The damn drill. The BG putting holes into this planet so they could blow it up, could remove it from the universe, while the Fed did nothing.
He waited about fifteen minutes. He laid down in the sand with his hands behind his head and took a nap. But nothing came to get him. No BG boats. No big rolling bots. Not even the little laser bots popped out. So he headed back to the tree.
“We need a way to take that thing down that anyone can do, not just a pirate with a gunship,” said Jolo.
“I been thinking about that,” said Katy, lying under the tree with her hands behind her head. She propped up on both elbows. “Take me to the tower. We’re gonna
