“If I didn't know you were screwing with me, I'd say that's the entire point of your “brilliant” plan!” Aiden shot back.
Thankfully at least someone on the bridge had good news for him as they blew past the freelancer and it maneuvered to pursue, its response sluggish after being caught off guard by their target's insane gambit, especially since they were also in the middle of evading the gunner's railgun fire.
That was where the good news came from, since as the mercs maneuvered to pursue they left themselves vulnerable for a flyby. “Freelancer shields failing, targeting engines,” the gunner said. A few seconds later he added, “Confirmed, target cruiser engines disabled.”
Aiden blew out a relieved breath. They'd still have to take fire from the freelancer for another minute or so, but they were already almost out of the danger zone. Then they just had to stay ahead of the Vindicator and as long as Barix did his job, they might just survive this.
Thankfully, the Ishivi could always be counted on to do excellent work when it came to saving his own skin.
“Fantastic shooting,” the slight man told the gunner, still working furiously. “You managed to snipe a warship executing combat maneuvers at extreme range with railgun slugs. You think you could ever just once not blind the rest of us with your dazzling brilliance?”
“Understood,” the young man replied in the same emotionless tone. “In consideration of your ego, I'll look into the feasibility of offering a subpar performance in life or death struggles in the future.”
Aiden snorted in spite of himself; ever since getting chewed out by Lana about the gunner, he'd been noticing that the man managed to be perfectly professional while at the same time injecting a surprising amount of attitude into his emotionless conversation.
Also, anyone who insulted Barix was okay in his book. Especially if they did it well.
The slight man glowered back. “Well, I'll admit you aided our escape by knocking out that ship's engines. But while you were busy boasting and insulting me you could've focused on also disabling their weapons. Because they're still shooting at us.”
“Make that shot us,” Ali said, at the same time a new laser barrage from the freelancer's recharged capacitors sprayed across their shields.
Aiden winced, cursing at himself as a second laser barrage sprayed across their hull. He didn't need to hear Barix's warning as he watched their final layers of shields flicker and then wink out.
“Shields down,” the science officer said. Then he cursed. “Mini rift opening in the cargo bay!”
Cursing as well, Aiden toggled his mic for shipwide broadcast. “Boarders in the cargo bay. Prepare to repel.”
Ali was already vaulting over her workstation, racing towards the nearest door with a heavy cauterizer in one hand and a KFM in the other. In the shields room Fix would be similarly abandoning his post to make for the cargo bay.
Aiden couldn't afford to worry about them, or what the boarders would do to his ship, as he focused on risking a few slight maneuvers to keep the Last Stand away from a fresh stream of laser bursts arcing towards their unshielded hull, sacrificing a bit of speed in exchange for them not all getting blown up.
In spite of his brilliantly conservative flying one laser clipped a wing, causing a noncritical hull breach warning to begin blaring along with the other alert klaxons. Aiden grit his teeth and put them back into a slightly modified corkscrew, again pushing for every bit of speed his girl could manage.
“Belix, now would be a good time to work some engineering magic!” he said tersely over his radio.
“I don't work any other kind,” she shot back with acid contempt. But it wasn't just an idle boast; the engine consumption readouts on his display moved a hairsbreadth farther away from redline, allowing him to coax a desperately needed bit of extra speed out of them.
“First layer of shields back in five,” Barix said tensely. “Four, three, two . . . we're golden!”
Aiden breathed a sigh of relief. At this increasing range and with the freelancer dead in the water, they were probably safe now. The main hurdle to worry about going forward was the Vindicator inching ever closer; it was already opening fire on them at extreme range, and at this rate they were going to get pounded the moment they slowed down enough to make the rift jump.
But putting aside those concerns for a more immediate one, he turned his thoughts to the boarders. “I hope you've been employing internal countermeasures,” he told Barix.
The Ishivi paused to give him a look of pure scorn, his only response before going back to work employing the ship computer's defenses against a boarding party's attempts to hack doors and critical systems. As well as manually dropping emergency blast doors to slow the enemy's progress through the ship, and even manning some of the strategically placed interior defensive weaponry when they came near any of it.
“They” would be a standard team of three combat androids that had to have come from the Vindicator. That was the only thing they could be, since living things couldn't go through mini rifts without ending up dead or comatose. Which didn't inconvenience Deeks all that much, since they preferred sending robots to do their fighting anyway.
Experts agreed teleportation devices were a technical impossibility, not only currently but probably no matter how technologically advanced humanity became. The mini rift was a good workaround, creating rifts just large enough to move up to a thousand pounds of mass over short distances. And Aiden would've loved to get one on his ship, along with another combat android, so he could send a boarding party to target vessels to increase his chances of taking them intact.
Unfortunately, mini rifts also had serious drawbacks. For
