She was happy with her new ship. The human she bought it from called it a ‘Kryptonite,’ though he said it was an old variant with an old class 8 drive and six less PDCs along the ship's spine. The Prata came with four sensor modules for deep space mapping, 16 mining pods with two USVs attached to each, 10 defensive modules to compensate for the lack of mounted point defense and to buffer the shield arrays, and 10 additional storage bays for any additional salvage.

She'd been contracted by a mining company from her home world to work out in the deep, mining directly from one of the three in-system asteroid belts and performing salvage operations on vessels found abandoned during the war. The contractors usually didn't ask for much, but did ask that she run materials from planet to planet on occasion, or target for a specific material in the belt.

It was boring. Even with the petabytes of entertainment media, nearly infinite games from the galactic internet, and her husband on the ship, sitting at a console watching mining USVs work still bored her nearly to death. She supposed she'd figure out how to entertain herself eventually, though, especially since she was only in the first month, still settling into a routine of work.

The one time she'd encountered anything interesting, a Br'Thei'Nin pirate ship, it had nearly surrendered to her believing her and her husband to be a full military fighting force. They'd both laughed about that for hours after they ‘let the pirates off with a warning' instead of ‘making them space dust.’

Today wasn't going to be any different. She sat at the forward console with her husband in the adjacent chair, watching the mining bees work just a few kilometers away on the resources the asteroids could provide. They'd set up a small warning field to avoid accidental collisions from smaller ships that might cross paths with the Prata's USVs. She'd seen a few civilian ships pass through, headed both into and out of the system, and one military craft with a sheen of stealth coating on the hull.

The quiet life was just fine and dandy for her.

The Prata came alive with alarms, warnings plastered on every console and the thrum of the shields powering up. The automated point defense began buzzing as missiles tried to find their mark.

“Shit!” she exclaimed, falling backwards out of her chair. She rolled, trying to get to her feet. In the corner of her eye she could see missiles appearing seemingly out of nowhere.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The stealth ship. That damned ship fired on us! She ran to the communications station, her husband running for the helm to start evasive maneuvers. One missile got close enough for the blast energy to get deflected by the shields.

“Unknown stealth ship, we are a civilian vessel! Cease fire immediately!” Her husband spun the Prata, a dangerous maneuver to get more of the point defense on target. Missiles continued to stream from the now invisible stealth ship, despite the frantic hail.

“I'm putting you on with system control and targeting that ship with the PDCs!”

“System control, this is the CV Prata! We have been engaged by a stealth ship from in-system, you have thirty seconds to have them stand down before we open fire!”

“CV Prata we have no records of any stealth ships in the system, military or otherwise.” She hesitated. An unknown vessel, not recorded by system control.

“Hail it again! Unknown vessel, we will open fire in twenty seconds! Respond!” She stared at the viewer and the main AOV, the two dots slowly drifting closer together. The seconds counted down in her head, 19, 18, 17.

“We're gonna have to get them.”

“They still have fifteen seconds. I want every scanner we have on them in the meantime.”

“Got it, calibrating.” 17 dots on the map showed the USVs slowly attempting to RTB. She was sending override codes every second to prevent any from getting hit by a stray missile or colliding with the ship.

“Getting no life signs, but I can't tell if that's the stealth or the truth,” her husband said. “In ten I'm opening fire.”

Nine. Two more missiles.

Eight. Four other PDCs spun to intercept five missiles.

Seven. Another missile hit the shield.

Six. A PDC started to overheat and was shut down, the ship rotating to compensate.

Five. The ship thrummed as the throttle was set to max.

Four. The gunfire became more controlled as the final bursts were calculated.

Three. She sent Prata into a lateral slide, rotating its nose to match the stealth ship.

Two. The maneuvering thrusters fired in tandem with the main thrusters, putting the ship into a better spin.

One. Target locked.

42 point defense cannons spit 20mm rounds at the stealth ship at 5000 rounds per minute. Rings of purple dispersed as the rounds tore into the shields. The rounds struck true, the two ships being close enough that aim barely mattered, and they ripped into the durasteel hull of the stealth craft. Marks turned to craters turned to punctures turned to full on breaches. She looked on as the ship crumbled on the view screen.

“I think that's enough.”

“Yeah.” They sat and watched the ship tumble, any former life now gone from the ship.

“What do we do? We could've just killed someone. What happens now?”

“Call the USVs back first. We're just regular people, we can't even legally salvage it.”

“Yeah. Okay.” She sighed to herself.

She'd never piloted a human ship, and the one time she'd had to use weapons it had barely scratched the surface.

So many guns.

She stood up.

“I need to lie down.”