Scattershot.
There’s no dodging anymore. If it had just been a single missile, I probably could have dodged it entirely. Now I just have to cross my fingers and pray.
Something hits. There’s a huge jolt, and klaxons blare all throughout the cockpit. There’s massive damage, but the cargo bay wasn’t hit. Just the engines. My ship is mostly engines with just a tiny part of it made to house me and a passenger or two, so it figures the engines were hit.
I do a few more juking maneuvers, but that damages the engines even more. The HUD warns me to stop, but I have to make sure the human ship can’t target me with another scattershot missile.
I cut the engines completely only when I think I’ve outsmarted their tracking.
It will take me hours to assess the full extent of the damage to my ship, and checking on Catherine will only take me a few minutes.
I put a helmet on and seal the visor. I don’t want to smell her.
I float back into the cargo bay--when the engines are off, there’s no sense of gravity on the ship--and I hear her muffled screams through the foam.
“We’re safe,” I shout back at her.
“Let me out of this thing!”
I bite my lip and consider it. She could stay in my quarters while I figure out what the hell I’m going to do next. Or I could just lock her in the bay. She’s not coming into the cockpit and filling it with her toxic scent, that much is clear.
“Look,” I say. “You’re safe in there--”
“Let! Me! Out!” she screams. I didn’t think it was possible to get so much sound through all that foam.
“I’ll cut you out,” I say, “but you stay in the bay.”
I get my wrist to form a blade, and I start cutting her loose.
She floats out of the foam, and by the look of the way she flails around, she’s never been in zero-g.
“All right,” I say. “Enjoy. If you have to puke, there’s a suction tube on the wall by the airlock.”
Before I can get guilted into doing anything else for her, I kick off the wall and float through the doorway out of the cargo bay. I shut the door behind me.
I spend a few hours in the cockpit plotting the course. It’s hard, because seeing her again is distracting me. The shape of her is etched into my brain. Every time I lose focus, even for a moment, I see her. Her ass. Her breasts. Her green eyes. Her fucking smile.
No. I have to focus, because the situation looks dire.
My ship can’t really afford to use engines for more than a few minutes. Each second they run, the chance of them completely exploding increases. After a two-minute burn, it’s a sixty percent chance. It increases to eighty percent chance after three minutes. Ideally, I don’t want to use the engines for more than thirty seconds total, which gives me very few options.
The good news is that I am floating toward Arcturus. The bad news is that the human ship is, too, and any distress signal I throw out will reach the human ship before another swarm pirate ship. I can encode my signal, or use a signal that I think the humans can’t even detect...but if I’m wrong, they will know where I am and be able to destroy me.
If I just keep floating on my current course, I will never hit another planet or habitat. I could just float and hope someone can catch me as I get into the main system, but I’ll be moving so fast that it’s unlikely anyone will be able to intercept me in time.
The computer has one option for me, and it sucks.
Glacius, the ice planet, will be within a few million miles of me even if I just keep floating and never use the engines. If I burn the engines a tiny bit, right now, I’ll end up orbiting it. I can use Glacius’ atmosphere to slow my ship down, and then I can initiate another burn to break orbit from Glacius and enter the main system at a slow enough speed that someone can actually tow me back to the swarm.
The reason the plan sucks is because it will require two minutes of engine burn, giving a sixty percent chance of blowing the ship up and dying, and also because Glacius is known as the “savage planet.” It’s the absolute last place you’d ever want to get stuck.
I