“I'm not asking you to commit to doing anything right now,” Ali said, tone urgent. “Just name yourself an ally, say you share our cause of aiding humanity, and once I have your word we'll work out the details later. That shouldn't be too hard.” When he still hesitated, she continued. “The Pilots are working around my lockout, and only the Caretaker overrides will stop them from resuming fire on us. You have ten seconds.”
That stank suspiciously of a strong-arm tactic to him, but at the moment his options were getting awfully slim. Especially with the display warning him that the transports had launched more atomics.
“Five,” she said calmly.
“Spend eternity in an event horizon,” Aiden snarled. “Fine, I promise! As long as you don't turn into insane genocidal monsters and try to wipe out or enslave humanity because of some glitch in your programming, I'm with the Caretakers!”
As one, the fighters turned and made for the transports, shooting at the approaching atomics on the way.
Barix cheered and leaned back from his controls, grinning. “Thank you, Captain! I for one am fully on board with letting the soulless AIs fight and die for us.”
“Hate to bust your bubble,” Ali said wryly, “but those eight unshielded fighters can't take on two heavy transports. At least, not without considerable luck and incompetence on the enemy's part, which they haven't shown. We're going to need to turn around and join the fight.”
Aiden frowned. “Wait. If you're all about preventing intelligent life from dying, what's the problem with letting the fighters distract those ships long enough for us to get away? Everyone wins, or at least nobody loses.”
The Caretaker shot him an impatient look. “They somehow found us in the middle of nowhere, my love. Chances are good they'll be able to follow us if we run now, probably bring in reinforcements as well.”
Well, shoot. Aiden supposed they were going to have to solve the problem of how they'd been trailed. Which meant they needed breathing room, and those transports had to go; they only had one real choice. One he couldn't feel too bad about, considering those SOBs had tried to kill him and his friends and the odds were in his favor now.
He leaned on the controls again, sending his ship in a sharp bank back towards the pursuing transports. At his station the gunner leaned over his weapons systems, preparing to fight. Aiden mentally built himself up to the same challenge.
Barix groaned. “So now we're fighting after all? And since we're doing it solely to evade pursuit, we don't even have the option to disable those ugly behemoths and strip them for profits. You're risking my neck for no benefit!”
“You're right, you living through this is of no benefit,” Aiden shot back. “At least not to anyone but you.” He turned to the gunner. “Shifting tactics to the paradigm of engaging multiple foes.” He suited his words by gunning the engines and taking them towards one of the transports.
“Understood,” the gunner said in his maddeningly calm voice. And the guy probably did.
The best option in this situation was to use the Last Stand's better speed and maneuverability to keep one pirate hunter between them and the other one. Ironically, the same thing the transports themselves had been doing to keep the gunner from breaking through one ship's shields.
That would make the fight effectively one on one, but would severely limit Aiden's options for evasive maneuvers as he struggled to keep in the middle cruiser's shadow. Which meant a good old-fashioned slugfest, exchanging fire with a ship with about equivalent weapons but more layers of shielding and better buffers than them, hoping to take it out before it could take them out. Assuming they managed that, they could then go toe to toe with the remaining one in a more conventional fight.
He would've liked that option a lot less without the fighters, which changed everything; if even one transport focused fire on his ship, those fighters would be free to rip the distracted vessel apart. The only other option for the enemy was to focus on taking down the more vulnerable unshielded craft as quickly as possible, so they could then focus their attention on the Last Stand.
They wouldn't have that much time. Not with the gunner on one side and eight railguns aimed by Pilots on the other. He hoped.
The good news was, with the chaos of the fighters suddenly turning on them, the transports had temporarily broken off their sustained barrage on his ship, giving the shields time to recharge. The bad news was, only five layers came back up; at best the sixth buffer was overloaded, at worst the emitter was damaged. Fingers crossed it was the first.
“Lana, what's the story on the shields?” he demanded.
“Working on it,” the young woman replied in his ear.
He hoped that meant his newest, most inexperienced crew member was actually accomplishing something. Because right before going into a slugfest was the worst time for his shields to be at less than their best.
* * * * *
This wasn't even the task force? How was it possible that the criminal had picked up on the beacon the Dormant had set up, and acted on the information sooner than an entire flotilla of warships?
Either way, it was obvious no trigger was forthcoming. The best the Dormant could do was move slowly in repairing the shields, hope it would be enough for these transports to blow them up. Somehow she doubted it.
Even worse, if they survived the captain would tear the ship apart looking for the beacon. He'd find it eventually, which meant the task force had a few hours at most to stop dragging their heels and come blow them up.
Given their track record so far, she somehow doubted that, too. Which meant her focus going forward would be making sure suspicion didn't fall on her, or ideally anyone else on the ship, for the beacon's presence.
