Chapter Twenty-Four - Outmatched

Day winced as two particle beams slipped past her hull. One of them mere metres away, which was close enough that the electromagnetic emissions from the beam played havoc on her sensor suite.

She rolled, bringing the sensors on her other side in line with her target.

It was an Accord destroyer. Nearly half again as long as she was, and significantly bulkier, with enough firepower to rip her apart, and she happened to be in its range.

The only saving grace at the moment was the proximity to an asteroid that she was hurtling herself towards.

Day lined up her nose towards the craft and fired as soon as her targeting had a lock.

A miss, but a close one, and maybe one close enough to return the favour when it came to fried sensors.

A fresh salvo came from the other ship and this time Day cursed as a single particle at near-relativistic speeds punched into and through her hull. The impact was clean, cutting a pinhead-sized hole into and through her keel. The static discharge did more damage, destroying one of her repair drones in her guts and shorting some of her capacitors as well as damaging some of the electronics on one set of manoeuvring thrusters.

She’d have to compensate for that.

Then the asteroid was between her and the destroyer and Day flipped around and pushed her main thrust as hard as it could go.

She had milliseconds of time behind cover, and she’d need every millionth of a second.

If she could change her trajectory, then she’d come out of the asteroid’s shadow somewhere the Accord destroyer wouldn’t expect her to be, and it would need to reacquire her. She had better targeting solutions than it, so it was possible she’d get one, maybe two shots off before it had a bead on her.

In that time, the hatches on her back blew open and six torpedoes exploded out of her. She didn’t even try to compensate for the imparted velocity. It would actually help send her on a harder course to predict.

All six torpedoes immediately started to race around the asteroid, burning hard to aim themselves right at the Accord ship. Two were pushing ahead of the pack. Those would be sacrifices.

Day came out of the other side of the asteroid, aimed in a millionth of a second, and fired.

This time her aim was true and her cannon punched a hole into the destroyer. It was amidships, and she imagined it had to have hit something important. Or so she hoped.

Those hopes were dashed as the destroyer launched its own counter to her torpedoes.

Twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight, seventy-two missiles, all on near-random spiralling trajectories that would end with them within metres of her in the space of a few dozen seconds.

The destroyer opened up with its point defence and the space between them filled with scintillating laser fire. It wouldn’t have been visible if it wasn’t for her scanning systems painting the beams in angry reds for her.

Two torpedoes went down before one of hers detonated itself, filling a chunk of space with an expanding cloud of short-lived nuclear hell.

The other three wrapped around the cloud and continued on towards the destroyer. They had shaped charges. Once they were within range they would detonate and send out jets of superheated plasma towards the Destroyer.

She watched another torpedo get blasted apart by laser fire, then the last detonated on their own.

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“Yes!” she hissed as the destroyer’s course shifted violently. A quarter-ton fist of plasma had rammed into its aft, right against one of its most armoured sections, but that didn’t matter, the bloom from the impact was loud and clear, and the ship was knocked to the side.

Then she activated her own point defence to take out the missiles coming for her while her torpedo tubes reloaded in a hurry.

Lasers from her Accord-style PD sniped apart missiles in mid-flight and her four Bulwark Gatling guns roared as they spat out micro-smart rounds at seven million RPM.

It wasn’t enough.

Seven missiles made it through and Day felt her mind shake as several impacts rocked her hull. Her secondary drive storage was ripped apart, two of her PD guns went offline, and her entire starboard manoeuvring thruster suite went offline.

She paused the launch of two of her torpedoes, their exits were bent out of shape. The other four launched while she tried to reorientate herself.

When she did, she discovered the destroyer barrelling down towards her.

The fight ended in a flash as both ships opened up on each other with point-defence weapons and danger-close fired missiles.

Day lost.

“Damn,” she said after she died.

“Eh, it wasn’t too bad,” Night said.

“I’d have done better,” Twilight said as she picked her teeth with a toothpick.

Day sighed and glanced around. She was now in a small arcade, sitting back in a plush seat behind an arcade machine that had a picture of her ship on one side and the Accord destroyer that had wrecked her on the other. “I could have done better. I should have pushed my PD to take those missiles out sooner.”

“The fight lasted nine real-time seconds,” Night said. “All within one hundred kilometres, but still. That’s not a lot of time to think, even for us. A real Accord ship would act slower.”

“But not by much,” Day said. “And it still won, handily. What was the damage like?”

Night glanced at the arcade cabinet. “Not great. One of its main thrusters was crippled. Seven crew incapacitated. Some PD was taken out in that last strafe.”

“And I was very dead,” Day said.

“Should have gone silent,” Twilight said. “Get in nice and close, then pounce! Chew its ass off so it can’t run, then all you need to do is bat it around from its blind spot. Its particle cannons have a bunch of those.”

“If you can get that close,” Day said.

Twilight sniffed. “Watch me... or try to, in anycase.” She bumped Day off the arcade machine with her hip, and Day stood aside, letting her have a turn.

“What do we need to improve?” Night asked.

“Our point-defence. Their particle cannons sting, but it’s not always a sure-kill. Those missiles though? That hurt.”

Night nodded. “Our Casaba-howitzer torpedoes did a number though. And once you got in close, our Bulwark PD kicked ass.”

“Yeah, but they’re not accurate enough, and the lasers are kind of useless for anything but exterior criticals and missiles.”

Night shrugged. “Well, let’s get better then.”

Day nodded, then she grinned a little vindictively as Twilight stepped out of the sim-within-a-sim with her cheeks puffed and ears twitching. “That was a fluke!” she said about the GAME OVER screen.

“Sure,” Day said. She patted Twilight on the head and didn’t regret it, even when Twilight punched her in the digital gut for it.

***