What he was seeing now was . . . beauty. Horrifying beauty, like a Construct escort ordered by her masters to kill you with her bare hands after stealing your genetic material, but awe-inspiring nonetheless. The recordings he'd watched, the engagement at Brastos, didn't do justice to what he was seeing now with his own eyes.
The raw skill and coordination with which Thorne and his gunner operated was impossible to dismiss, much as he would've liked to. They made his own people, who he would've pitted against any other ship in the Fleet, any other two ships, look clumsy in comparison.
As the seconds dragged by, and the completely defenseless ship they fought continued to dance away from their attacks while raining accurate fire down on them, Dalar felt the first flickers of fear.
* * * * *
After returning to the locker and replacing the small tool, Lana hunched her shoulders and began wringing her hands, dancing nervously in place. Less than a second later Belix burst through the door, immediately heading for the machine Lana had just sabotaged.
“What can I do?” Lana asked her, expecting to be brushed aside. She just needed to not be noticed for another few seconds, until-
Belix started to push past her, and she moved.
Her stiffened knuckles slammed into the Ishivi's left temple, and before Belix even knew she was in danger she was unconscious, her dash for the controls becoming an uncontrolled tumble across the shielding bay that caused minor injuries.
Trapped inside her rebelling body, Lana screamed, clawing at her mind desperately to regain control. The horror of what she'd just done to her friend, to the ship, made her want to empty her guts and curl up into a ball.
Ali's voice came over the comms again, even more urgent. “Mini rift just opened in what's left of the cargo bay! We've got three combat android boarders! Sending the Fixes to repel . . . you're on your own with the shields, Belix.”
The Dormant saw an opportunity to go and activate the two Fixes she'd coopted, take out the other two, then join up with the boarders and destroy the ship from within. But another opportunity was even more tempting, so instead she spoke frantically into her comm. “Belix hit her head during one of your maneuvers! She's-she's not moving!”
The captain cursed a blue streak. “Ali, go figure out what the blazes is going on!”
There you go. The Dormant smiled, even as the Blank Slate continued to scream inwardly. With the possible exception of the gunner, the Caretaker was the biggest threat aboard the ship. The biggest obstacle to continuing on to sabotage the engines, ensuring the Last Stand's destruction.
Neutralizing it would mean almost certain victory.
* * * * *
“Whoa whoa whoa!” Barix protested as Ali rushed out of the bridge, as the man realized Aiden intended to continue engaging the Vindicator. “Our shields are down for the foreseeable future, and you want to keep fighting?”
“It beats the alternative,” Aiden growled, all his focus on the frantic patterns of tight loops and swirls that kept the Last Stand close to the enemy ship but, hopefully, far away from its weapons fire.
“What alternative would that be?” the Ishivi demanded.
“Exactly. We're committed . . . if we try to run, we just make ourselves an easier target and our living weapon the gunner has a harder time shooting back.”
“You should be committed,” Barix muttered, turning his focus back to using the ship's internal countermeasures to deal with their three boarders.
“Enemy shields down, prioritizing critical targets,” the gunner abruptly said tersely, exactly the sort of news Aiden wanted to hear.
Prioritizing critical targets was a fancy way of saying shots that had a chance of hitting something that would outright destroy the Vindicator. Which, given that privateering with the intent to take ships intact was all the young man had ever known, meant he hadn't had many chances to take those kinds of shots.
Although knowing him, he'd be just as good at them.
A quick kill would be nice under the circumstances, and it was miraculous that the gunner had managed to take out the enemy's shields while Aiden was doing everything he could to stay ahead of the Vindicator's two three-burst laser arrays. But those combat androids could destroy his ship from within while the Fixes who'd just entered the airlock were still trying to get there. And Ali, who should've been helping with that, had to go fix the shields instead because literally everything possible seemed to be going wrong there.
Aiden made a snap decision. “Ali, we'll either be dead or have won before you can repair the shields. Go repel boarders.”
“I'm at the damaged system now, my love,” the Caretaker replied tersely. “It's a quick fix, less than a minute. Making repairs.”
Looked as if she was going to keep up her habit of disobeying his orders and undermining his authority. Fine, he didn't have time to worry about that right now. Besides, if more Deek ships showed up, or the gunner suddenly had a stroke and lost all motor control, having shields would be nice.
“Fine,” he growled over his headset, then turned to the young man. “You have a minute to earn some bragging rights. Take out that ship.”
“That's going to be a bit of a trick since we just ran out of railgun slugs,” his weapons officer replied grimly. But in spite of his warning, he leaned over his controls and did his best.
* * * * *
The first thing the AI did when entering the engine room was drag the unconscious Ishivi out into the safety of the corridor. Apparently a precaution programmed into the Caretaker's core priorities, in case of hull breach or some other hazard.
“You should go out and stay with her, do what you can for her,” it told Lana as it worked frantically to repair the shield buffer controls.
“I
