“I'll have you know I'm outrageous to you as a personality quirk,” Barix replied with great dignity. “Not out of any biological impulse.”
“And that makes it better?” Dax asked, the slight edge to his tone suggesting it wasn't completely banter for him.
“For me? Unquestionably.” The slight man turned to Aiden. “Back to our original subject. To be fair, I can't complain about you lubricating your drive piston, if it means we get more lucrative opportunities like this one. I for one welcome our new robotic masters.”
“I'm sure you do, if it means a chance you'll get a companion of your own to serve your every whim and quietly control your every decision,” the captain muttered. “Void, if I'd given you Ali you'd be following her around like a lapdo-”
Lana jumped when Dax abruptly stiffened and leaned over his controls, his voice showing emotion in spite of the professional setting of being on duty. And that emotion was alarm. “Two ships just jumped in!”
Aiden was already steering the Last Stand into a vicious evasive maneuver, one that nearly threw Lana out of her seat in spite of the inertial dampeners. He was cursing like a, well, pirate, eyes on the main display. “Right on top of us, too. That's no coincidence.”
No, it surely wasn't.
The Dormant hastily stood, clutching the back of her portable terminal's seat for support when the captain threw them into another maneuver. “Reporting to duty station,” she yelled as she bolted for the exit, headed for the shields room. Belix was hot on her heels, making for her post in the engines room. Around them, the combat stations klaxon had activated to fill the room with blood-red light and a deafening wail.
This was it. She'd be ready to get to work the moment she was triggered, beginning her sabotage and attacking the ship from within. A pity she'd only managed to reprogram two of the new Fixes; between them all being stored together, and often busy with assigned tasks, finding a chance to get one alone for long enough to work on it had been a real pain.
No matter. Two should be enough to back her up, especially with the element of surprise. Within minutes, most likely, her mission would be complete and the Last Stand would be destroyed. All she needed was the trigger.
Which . . . should've come the moment the task force ships jumped in. Where was it?
* * * * *
Aiden pulled the Last Stand out of a modified corkscrew and tried to get some distance between him and their two unexpected arrivals. Who, suspiciously, had begun shooting pretty much the moment they emerged from their spacetime rifts, and with surprising accuracy.
The trick about trying to outdistance pursuit was it required going in a straight line, or at least consistently moving in the same direction. Which left your movements predictable and your ship awfully vulnerable to enemy fire. Another problem was that the attacking ships had emerged from their rifts at the fastest safe speed, moving directly for the Last Stand on coordinated routes.
In other words, they'd made escape as close to impossible as they could. “Ali?” he said tersely. “What's going on with these ships?”
She answered slowly, still in the midst of processing the data. “Standard heavy transports meant for carrying assault shuttles and infantry troops, primarily combat androids. This one has the typical weapons loadout for a support ship of its size, comparable to a light cruiser but with more shield layers and enhanced buffers to make up for inferior maneuverability.”
Under most circumstances, that would give the transport slightly better than even odds in a head to head fight against a normal light cruiser. With the Last Stand's improved systems, Aiden would've been confident pitting his ship against either of these hulking piles of space debris, but going up against both at the same time significantly shifted those odds.
Especially since there was the mystery of why the Deeks were sending transports after him. Was it just the best they could scrape together on short notice?
The Last Stand's fourth layer of shields winked and overloaded, leaving only two left, and he grit his teeth and focused more on evading and less on escaping. Hopefully, slow as the transports were his ship's escape would be inevitable in any case.
Aiden just needed to focus on staying alive that long. “Gunner, you making anything happen?” he demanded, although he didn't have high hopes against such sturdy targets.
The young man simply shook his head, not needing to tell him what he could already see; now that the chase was on, the pursuit paths of the two ships were converging on each other. Rather than try to evade the Last Stand's return fire, throwing off their own aim, the transports looked as if they planned shield each other if the gunner came close to knocking down the shields of either target, allowing time for them to recharge.
And of course, there was no way even the Last Stand's weapons loadout could take down the shields of both ships simultaneously. The only small silver lining was that in the brief times the targeted transport hid to recharge its shields, only one would be firing on them.
A small, small silver lining. Biting back a curse, Aiden tried a few more daring maneuvers to buy them some more distance, snapping at Barix as he did. “You calculating a rift out of here for us?”
“No, I'm browsing full immersion dives to decide my next adventure,” the slight man snapped sarcastically. “You know, you should've ordered me to have a jump prepped in case something like this happened.”
Prep a jump, out in the middle of nowhere when nobody should know they were here? He'd drive his crew insane working them overtime on something like that. “If you're volunteering,” Aiden growled, yanking the ship back into evasive maneuvers as a barrage of laser bursts
