Using the full array of her senses, Seraphina assessed her position relative to all the other pieces moving through her section of space, adjusting her attitude thrusters minutely to bring them more closely to bear on the course she’d plotted. Not exactly the same as Elijah’s but within his allowed parameters. She didn’t want the shadow trying to vector past them, she wanted him dead astern.

Her initial approach was well wide of her target, pulling the large ship along in her wake. She was abreast and nearly past the drifting rock when she engaged the grapple at full non-military power. At that same moment, she dumped hot shots into both engines. From that instant, everything that followed happened very quickly, even to her perception.

Seraphim lurched, her entire frame groaning torturously. Everything not securely fastened to the bulkheads dashed across the cabin and smashed against the starboard wall hard enough to make dents. The cargo in the hold strained against its tethers, threatening to break free.

An eighth of a second later, anything and everything not already embedded into the starboard bulkhead made a break for the rear, slamming into the cabin’s rear starboard quarter in a compact pile.

Bolts snapped in the grapple mount. The mounting hardpoint buckled, but held, at least for the moment. They were facing the spinning rock now, pulling something past twenty gees. Even with inertials maxed, Elijah was mashed against the padding of his cradle, arms pressed against his sides, his head against the padding. He’d gone black, even with the capsule pressurized.

One full revolution, trailing a plume of coolant to keep the inertials from melting. Two. Seraphina still held to full thrust, all trailing attitude jets burning hard, even to dorsal and ventral thrusters. All adding to the momentum of their spin. Three full revolutions, and twenty degrees past first contact into their fourth, she released the grapple. Five times in rapid succession before the mangled circuits would respond, releasing the rock and sending it on its way. They were out of position, but she was able to correct quickly.

She dropped the starboard engine to ninety percent, killed all starboard attitude thrusters, and engaged everything on her port side at max, struggling to straighten the ship behind the rock. Then full to both engines and attitude thrusters as needed to stay in its shadow.

They weren’t really charging the enemy so much as retreating before it with noticeably less speed. They were still diving tail first into the asteroid field at nearly zero-point-zero-three-five c, the rock they were hiding behind moving just a bit more slowly, and their pursuer considerably more quickly. Six of one. There would be a merge soon, and with considerable velocity.

A tone sounded and an illuminated tab appeared above the pilot’s control well. She opened it quickly, a stab of apprehension going through her.

“Sera,” the message read. “If I’m still out when this activates, execute the attached program.”

He was still out, so she executed the program. Nothing changed. That probably meant that something had just happened concerning the command code, any reference to which was blocked from her perception.

She reduced burn slightly so their shade wouldn’t run into them and spun up the weapons reactor to full. Whoah! That was way more power than she was expecting. It shouldn’t be able to do that.

She waited. Elijah began to stir.

The asteroid vanished in a nuclear cloud that would have cooked all of her sensors if she hadn’t been waiting for it. Instead, at the first hint of the rock’s outward bulge, she slammed every cover closed and flew blind for two seconds — still an eternity under these conditions. One point nine-nine-eight seconds later, the covers slid open, and she caught the final flare of fine dust that had once been their umbrella as it spread away from the blast. How many missiles had that taken? She wondered.

There he was! Two thousand klicks out and still accelerating. She rippled both starboard missiles towards the bases of his port engines and hoped they’d make it through his scoop. She waited for tone on the remaining port missile and sent it into the thickest blanket of missiles she could see covering his central mass tank. Then she opened up with the guns, diving straight in.

The port missile sputtered for most of a second, thrashing about on its pylon, and she felt her virtual heart flutter. Then it flared and thrust clear, trailing fuel from a newly acquired leak, and a portion of the pylon it had been attached to.

She rolled to port and raked the forward section of the two big pellan engines on the shadow’s starboard side with what she thought were 30mm HEAP rounds, emptying all three guns before she started slinging what her inventory told her was depleted uranium. The port gun ran dry, and she was rolling to bring the starboard guns more firmly to bear when she heard Elijah’s hoarse voice.

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“Break off,” he choked. “Break off and get clear as fast as you can.”

“Aren’t you taking over?”

“Head hurts too much,” he croaked. “You finish, it’s your dance.”

She engaged her attitude thrusters and showed their opponent her belly for an instant before flashing away at ninety degrees relative, climbing hard out of her attack run.

“Targeting strobes!” she called, voice tight.

Beneath them, blue-white light flared bright, momentarily blinding Seraphim’s ventral cameras, and polarizing everything else, as though a new sun had bloomed to contest Verion for the neighborhood.

“What in the name of all that’s...?” Seraphina gasped. “Elijah what just happened?”

“We won,” he smiled wanly.”

Seraphina cut engines and spun herself around ninety degrees to both have a look at what was going on and to get her mag scoop once more facing their direction of travel where it would do some good.

“We couldn’t have done that much with just three missiles and a single gun pass,” she marveled, examining the damage she’d done. “Its not like I’m exactly a deep space fighter, after all.” She finally turned control over to Elijah.

He brought the engines back up to forty percent, along with inertials. She’d cranked those up to one-thirty and apparently poured coolant at them with vigor and a hose during her attack, since they hadn’t cooked off and melted through the outer bulkheads. Without bothering to ask me, he noted silently.

“You’re not exactly not one, either,” he shrugged. “Have you not noticed that we’re pretty heavily armed for a small freighter? I mean, three guns per wing? Two missiles per pylon?”

“I’m not omniscient,” Elijah,” she retorted. “Just because I’m an—” she bit off short.

“Unfettered AI?” he finished for her.

“You knew?” she was flabbergasted to the point her avatar fizzled out.

“He shrugged again. “I mean, what else can you be? At this point, you’ve pretty much already given away the plot. All that daughter of Wiley and Lianne business was a pretty big clue.”

She rezzed back into being, looking embarrassed. “I suppose you’re right,” she confessed. “I’m surprised you’re taking it so well, given what Daddy told me about your history.

“Thank your... ah, daddy,” he told her. “If you weren’t his crea— ah, daughter, I’d have jacked out and sent your core critical the instant I figured out what you were.”

She frowned hard at that before taking a deep, virtual breath and mushing on. “Still,” she told him, “it remains that I’m not omniscient. I don’t know all, see all. Mostly, I just think really fast and have an array of sensors and memory drives internal to me that most other people have to access externally. I know a lot, and I can find out a lot more very quickly.

“But even so,” she waved a hand out the forward viewport at the slowly spinning wreckage

The mass tank of the ugly ship had been torn open along nearly a quarter of its upper surface, and opened up like a partially peeled orange. And while many of the missiles that had once covered it had been consumed in the blast, most of the remainder now formed a small, slowly expanding cloud around the great gash. Both port engines had been torn clear at their forward mountings and turned into twisted scrap along nearly two hundred meters of their lengths.

The starboard engines were venting vigorously, both fuel and coolant, along their entire lengths, and vomiting thick, ugly smoke. The entire ship was beginning to tumble, each rotation becoming slightly more exaggerated.

“I’m not getting the question,” Elijah cocked his head.

“30mm high explosive armor piercing and depleted uranium,” she said. Three Enderomoni 1550s. that armament should not do that much damage.”

“Are you accounting for such of his missiles and mass as might have gotten caught up in the blast?”

“Yes,” she said flatly. “I told you, I’m very good at math.”

“Okay,” he smiled grimly. “You got me. To start with, those missiles weren’t Enderomoni 1550s.”

“But the manifests—”

“Lied,” he nodded.

“But why lie to me?” she wondered.

Now he laughed out loud. Just a bit. “I wasn’t lying to you,” he chuckled. “I didn't know there was a you. Remember, I thought you were a navcom. I was lying to the port authorities, customs officers, and various police and military forces.”

“So?” she leaned forward.

“Laredo 4530s with a little cosmetic work.”

“Accessing,” she closed her eyes for a second. “Wait! Elijah, those are military grade units. Cap killers! Strictly proscribed for civilian use. They’d throw you in prison for fifty years, just for having them hanging from my wings! Where do you even get such things?”

“I know a guy,” he told her. “I suppose you’ll be meeting him eventually, when and if I ever earn enough to replace them.”

“You said, ‘to start,’” she prompted.

“Huh. The reactor’s an H-6,” he said distractedly, staring out the viewscreen at the debris spreading out from their pursuer’s wreckage. “Not an H-2. Say, can you get a good look at those missiles from here, or do we need to swing in closer?”

“We need to make it to the phase buoy and get out of here or we’ll miss our delivery window.”

He paused his perusal and turned to face her. “Oh, we’re not delivering anything,” he laughed. “Not to those bastards in any case. I’m gonna write this whole job off and file an insurance claim, regardless of what it does to my rates.”

“What? Why?”

He narrowed his eyes and scowled. “Just how many beings in the known galaxy knew we’d be here, d’you suppose?” he asked seriously.

“Why would that make a difference?”

He rocked his head back. “So you think he was after just anybody who happened by? Off Verion?”

She tucked her chin and shook her head hesitantly. Like she wasn’t sure but didn’t want to anger him.

“Play the recording back,” he told her, voice still hard. Watch the detonation of the missile that almost got us.”

She closed her eyes for less than a second, then gasped, both hands going to her mouth.

“That’s right,” he nodded. “That salvo was meant to kill us, and I do mean us. He wasn’t after plunder, he was here for murder. And I’m not really feeling the indiscriminate serial killer vibe.”

“So the receivers...?”

“Most likely in on it," he assured her. "and I don’t have any intention of going anywhere near them.” He paused for a moment. “At least not when they’re expecting me.”