Slev Torrent - Cormag Starsector- Aboard The Human Instinct

Slev shouted back at Otto, “Hold on, this is about to get fucking bumpy. I have all the inertial dampeners turned on, don’t know how much it will help! You handle the big guns and the drones I got the missiles and point defenses!”

Otto slapped a button in response, shooting two meter wide orbs from where they were nestled within the rear of the ship's cowlings. “Drones out! I finally get to shoot the guns again!” The ship shuddered slightly as Otto sent a hundred half meter long tungsten projectiles at a target in the distance. The shots obliterated an asteroid but missed the combatants.

Slev gave a grim chuckle. "Wait till we are in range, you little psycho I don’t know how much ammo we have.”

“I do!” Otto chirped, unleashing an even longer burst this time.

The line of deadly metal traveled out from the ship, cutting off the path the pirates were on and forcing them to swirl outward from their pursuit or risk running into a wall of death. They definitely noticed the Instinct after that last volley, all of them forming back up slightly farther in the asteroid field, waiting for their newest prey with a healthy dose of caution. Slev adjusted the ammo type in the missile pods and let four of them fly free. Tiny, glimmering comets shot ahead of the ship before disappearing from both sight and scanners.

Slev fine-tuned one more setting on the missiles. "Ha, good luck with those assholes!” Slev tightened his grip on the controls as their ship plunged into the edges of the asteroid field. He violently cut power, pulling in close to a kilometer-wide, gently spinning rock. He gently cruised around its circumference, ready to dart to the next asteroid the moment he broke cover and gave Otto a shot. As they rounded the corner, the scanner lit up. Otto fired One of the pirates had darted towards them after they broke visual contact and was in knife-fighting range. Slev watched in morbid fascination. The sharp angles and garish black and red stripes of the small craft just started to turn away in panic from them when the main cannon hit.

The pirate vessel had shields, they didn't do much as hundreds of kinetic rounds sheared through the opaque haze of energy and practically cored a hole through the cockpit region on top of the ship, piercing out the bottom in a river of molten shrapnel. Then one of the hidden seeker missiles decided to make sure it was dead. Flashing to life directly next to the drifting corpse of the fighter and tearing the entire thruster assembly off in a dull blue explosion.

Otto smiled and waved his tentacles in an odd show of victory. “I am the gunner, now I call it, it was dead before the missile; that one is mine.”

Slev actually glanced back at his copilot with an incredulous look on his face. Quickly, he engaged the engines, darting to the next piece of cover in this three-dimensional battlefield. He wasn’t fast enough; a shower of guided missiles fired from somewhere deeper in the field had locked onto them and was fast approaching. Slev flipped the ship, flying backwards past the asteroid he was using as cover, facing the nose of the ship directly at the missiles. His hand grabbed the controls for the ship point defenses. Two lines of green lightning began dancing wildly from the front of the ship. Then one of the missiles came close enough, and both pillars of lightening immediately stuck onto it, branching from one missile to the next, turning the entirety of the void before Slev and Otto into a terrifying malestrom of barely directed chain lightening.

Slev flinched back, squinting his eyes against the blinding light. “What hell kind of point defense is this? I thought it was going to shoot a laser beam!”

Otto shrugged. “Much better than a laser beam, I think. Try to hit a ship with it I want to see what happens.”

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Slev lifted the ship upward, hoping one of the pirates was trying to sneak around behind him again. “I thought I was supposed to be the irresponsible one out of us."

The asteroid they were next to imploded. Rocks were being torn inward and compacting into a point of darkness as the void seemed to consume itself. Slev panicked and punched both thrusters forward on maximum. He and Otto both blacked out for a few moments before coming to with two pirates hot on his tail. In the short period of unconsciousness, they had managed to shoot straight into the open, far above the asteroid cover.

Otto sent both of the drones behind them. “They have Gravitic weapons!”

Slev launched another cluster of seeker missles. "Thanks, Sherlock, I didn't notice the fucking black hole!”

Blips of red light flashed against the shield drones as they intercepted laser fire. Both pirates wised up and immediately started focus firing on one drone at a time. The first drone was quickly dotted with burning punctures and fell behind as its shields were overwhelmed. Otto had been sending out bursts of fire, but at this range, the laser weapons had the advantage, and the pirates were successfully evading his fire. The occasional impact glimmering on the edge of the pirate vessels shields, but nothing got through.

This stalemate continued for another minute then two as the pirate vessels slowly fell farther behind the faster ship but were still well within weapons range. Slev curved towards another piece of cover, but it was still over a minute away, even at his pace. Where were those fucking missiles? Slev wondered, sending out yet another batch of the seeker missiles.

As if to answer his question, the pirate ship in the front had the misfortune of running into almost all of them at once. The seeker missiles were a very advanced piece of stealth technology networked with the others of their kind to attack only when they had calculated that they had over a 90 percent chance of destroying a target. Slev didn't know any of that, so his mouth hung open in shock when the scanners lit up.

The lead pirate vessel was ripped in half as a semicircle of seven missiles that were cruising alongside it, matching its pace, detonated. In a rippling, synchronized pattern. First overwhelming the shields, then systematically tearing the hull apart chunk by chunk at the midline. The trailing pirate vessel decided to call it after that. Sharply veering off from behind Slev, taking a few glancing pot shots at The Instinct's shield before disappearing behind a wall of tumbling debris.

Slev turned the instinct into a slow, looping curve, aiming farther into the asteroids. “Don't relax yet, there is still something out there that launched all those fucking missiles.”

Otto shouted, "Slev, dive now!”

Slev did without questioning it, pushing the steering yolk forward and increasing their speed so fast that he risked blacking out again. The emptiness of space now above and ahead of them consumed itself. A small pinprick of absolute darkness devoured the light of the blue sun and wrenched nearby asteroids closer to it. Slev flinched as the Instinct's speed sharply dropped, but he had dived soon enough to avoid being pulled in.

Otto flung an image from his screen to Slevs. “The pirates have a frigate! We need to run!”

Slev could see it rising from the cover of the largest asteroids far ahead. Three hundred meters long, dual side-mounted thrusters, each as large as his entire ship. The top housed over a hundred external missile silos, jutting awkwardly from the metal. It was a military escort vessel that looked like it had been stitched together to act as a carrier and fire support platform. Nothing but the hull and engines matched anymore. An uneven landing bay was roughly added to the bottom of the frigate. Half a dozen small forms were darting from it.

Slev heartily agreed with Otto's assessment and began an angled run away from the pirates and towards the relative safety of Cormag One, still far in the distance.

There was a tense few minutes as the massive frigate and its accompanying swarm of fighters turned to intercept them. Thankfully, The Instinct was much faster than them, and as the pursuers grew farther behind, they abandoned the chase.

Slev wiped the sweat that was dripping down his brow. "Whew, that was something, my first space battle! I would like to never, ever, do that again.”

Slev reached over and fiddled with the comms until he found the signature he was looking for. “SS Gold Rush, this is Slev Torrent, have you made it clear?”

A chipper southern voice twanged back. "Thank you very much! I saw you blazing in like an avenging angel and took that as my cue to hightail it the hell out of there.” There was the sound of menus being opened. "Well, holy spitfire, The Human Instinct? You another Terran miner like me?”

Slev smiled. "No, sir, just a bounty hunter who saw the first other human vessel he's seen in a few years in a bit of trouble.”

The twang shot back. “Well I'll be. I am one lucky son of a bitch! If you are planet side on Cormag One, drop by the old farmsteads. We have a small human mining and farming settlement a couple hundred klicks from the main city. The least I can do is feed ya and give you a warm bed to sleep in for saving my hide. Martha is gonna be in a worried tither over this whole mess, but her pies are to die for. Well, not as good as when we had actual apples, but the alien stuff ain't far off.”

Damn, this guy is a chatty fellow. Slev thought, although he didn't mind in the least. He hadn't realized quite how much he had been missing other humans until this moment. “I will take you up on that, got some business in the city, then I'll swing over your way!”

With some friendly goodbyes, they ended the call. Otto looked over at Slev, obviously wanting to ask a question.

“Yeah Otto?”

“What is a pie? I didn't understand that word.”

Slev's stomach gave an anticipatory grumble. “The best thing humans have ever invented.”