It was Aiden's turn to snort. Since the end of the war, in other words. “It would've,” he said sourly. “But it has a certain poetic flair, doesn't it? Naming our ship after something we'll never do.”
There was a long pause. “Capitulation it is, then?” Lana asked.
No one raised an objection. “I'll plug it into the IFF transponder,” Ali said. “And mock up a history for our phony freighter. Something suitably cringing and servile.”
Aiden nodded. “I've still got a bottle of Ferkins Reserve whiskey from that Movement resupply shuttle we hit a few years back. What do you say we head inside and toast our new name?”
Chapter Four
Ceras 2
The spaceport loomed ahead, seemingly innocuous. Lana was yammering in the background, her usual needling questions and moral superiority. All traffic was following the approach courses fed them by Station Control, seamlessly moving past each other at safe enough distances that even human error could mostly be avoided.
“Break off our approach!” Ali said sharply.
Rather than complying, Aiden grit his teeth and leaned over the controls, tense and wary. “What're we facing?”
His companion gave him a disapproving look at his refusal to take the safe decision of fleeing, but she was already answering. “Two light cruisers, angling to sneak up on us.”
He scanned his eyes over the display as she highlighted the two enemy ships, then altered course for the nearest one. “Combat stations,” he ordered. “Gunner, take out our nearest enemy quick. Belix, take Lana and get down to the engine room. We're going to need whatever speed you can tease out of the engines, and enough power to fight without shorting out systems.”
“Why are we not running, exactly?” Barix demanded, working frantically at his station.
Aiden moved the Last Stand into evasive patterns as they approached firing distance with the first enemy ship. “Because shut up. Prepare to implement hacking countermeasures, and enable shipwide internal defenses for possible mini rift boarders.”
The Ishivi cursed inventively, but did as ordered.
At his workstation, the gunner got off his first shots before their target as they got in extreme firing range, a simultaneous hail of railgun slugs and pinpoint laser bursts to limit evasive options. The enemy cruiser returned fire after a few seconds, and Aiden focused on evading its two three-burst laser arrays.
Standard weaponry for any Deek cruiser of that size. The Last Stand handily outgunned her, and with its top end six-layer shield system out-shielded her as well. But outnumbered like this, the advantage would be short-lived.
“Second enemy vessel will be in range in 37 seconds,” Ali intoned.
“Trusting you to take our target out before then,” he told the gunner through gritted teeth.
The young man shook his head grimly, not needing to state the obvious; their target was now focusing fully on evasion, what little fire it was sending their way mostly wild, to try to disrupt the gunner's aim by forcing Aiden to keep up evasive maneuvers. While neither the Deek pilot nor gunner seemed particularly skilled, their efforts were buying time for the other ship to reach them so they could take the Last Stand together.
And it was only going to get worse from here. “Light frigate jumping in at closest safe location!” Ali snapped. “It's already accelerating to intercept. Current target's course will take it under the protection of its guns in 26 seconds.”
The Deeks had to have coordinated the jump via the allnet, probably sending the frigate from the nearest rift hub. Aiden spat out a curse and eased up on his evasive maneuvering, giving the gunner a chance to work his magic. “Now or never!” he shouted.
It turned out to be never; the gunner managed to take out their target's shields, and using the Last Stand's pinpoint accuracy, high rate of fire single-burst array took out one of the enemy's laser arrays. Then the Deek cruiser's first layer of shields cycled back up, and its return fire from the other laser array managed to knock out two layers of the Last Stand's superior shields.
Just in time for the enemy ship to enter the safety of the frigate's covering fire, a storm of laser bursts from four standard arrays, as well as two nukes fired one after another from its single missile launcher.
Aiden forgot about taking out the cruiser, forgot about everything but making his ship dance under his delicate fingers, tossing him and everyone else aboard around in spite of the ship's powerful inertial dampeners. One maneuver after another that barely kept them from being skewered by enemy shots.
On his display, he could see his ship's shield layers going red one after another whenever he failed to dodge, taking far too long to cycle back up as the buffers cleared. The red spread from two layers, to three, to four.
Tactically speaking, he could've broken off the moment the frigate jumped in, looped around to try to take out the second light cruiser. But with the frigate already accelerating towards his ship, they would've gotten there first and he'd still be facing two enemy ships, with a third quickly closing the distance to join the fray.
In any case, it was too late now that he was under the bigger ship's guns; flying straight to accelerate away from a fight would make them sitting ducks to the enemy gunners, and every evasive maneuver he made ate into their speed, to the point that even the slower midsized ship could easily keep up with them.
His only hope had been to run the moment Ali called out her warning. Even that would've been a slim hope, with more Deek ships potentially jumping in to intercept, or other ships in the system accepting mercenary commissions to join the fray for an easy reward. But now that the Last Stand was in the thick of the fight, the only option was to win or die.
Win, against three ships.
About the time that Ali yelled a warning that the third ship was in range, an explosion on the display was
