They hadn't issued a heave-to command, and I'd been listening since I first picked them up on my radar. I wasn't carrying anything illegal - and I generally tried not to - but still, the last thing I wanted was the attention of the police. I reveled in silence and excelled in being silent. But my headphones were on, my radio was quiet, and the ships were spread in a threatening arrowhead on my radar screen. And gaining on me.

They meant business.

I had glanced at my ship chart, pinned next to the viewscreen, at least six times, repeatedly lining up the blips on the radar with the silhouettes on the chart. Yes, they were Paulsen 44s, the standard ship of the Imperial police. So I knew what I was dealing with at least.

I sighed and ran my fingers through my hair, absentmindedly wondering how long it had been since I'd washed it. I'd never installed anything more than a sink and a toilet on the Velenoso, waiting to dock at stations to shower and take care of stuff like that, but I hadn't felt up for docking anywhere larger recently. I tended to avoid crowds.

If I was desperate, I could hail them. That would assure that I had their attention, but it would also help them zero my position. And I feared with grim certainty that they were already coming to kill me, and that lighting myself up as a beacon was exactly what they wanted me to do. I feared there was no changing that fact. After all, why else would they be trying to sneak up on me?

I had been overly paranoid before, but it was strange to have 3 cops tailing me like this. Random patrols didn't act this way, and I hadn't done anything worthy of attention.

The Velenoso was a fine-tuned ship, but nothing special to the naked eye; and my cargo was a recording of no particular regard that fit in the pocket of my flight suit. I was flying to a mid-sized city in a fairly isolated region of space to drop something off at a post office. There was absolutely nothing I was doing to warrant being tailed, much less so aggressively. Thoughts boiling, I eyed the vastness of space laid out in front of me, and the iron black bows of the cops in my rearview screen.

With an agonizing slowness the blips grew closer on the radar. Gradually I tilted the wheel forward, slowly revving the engine up towards its full power. This was my secret: I didn't have the best equipment, but I had equipment and wits good enough to outmaneuver some imperial swine. And boosters.

I took my first dose of the day now, taking the glove off my left hand quickly and sliding my exposed skin up to the wrist into the circular port on my dashboard. I felt the twinge of pain of the application, and then the surge of the booster in my blood. My gaze settled on my speedometer, slowly increasing as I pushed the Velenoso harder and harder and began to plot my escape maneuver.

But before I could do anything, the urgent buzzing of the ship's alarm silenced my thoughts. My eyes darted to the small and well-worn keypad & monitor setup next to the dashboard - the ship's computer - to see the alert, and my eyes were greeted by a sidelong wireframe of my own ship, with one area highlighted.

They're firing at me? From this far away?

The shockwave of turbulence the ship received from starboard aft stunned me even more, nearly throwing me out of my seat and over the dashboard. I gripped the controls tightly, staring out the windshield: the remnants of a crimson laser trailed off into the distance, cutting through nearby cosmic debris, the unmistakable mark of an imperial .75 Gt Wellman frigate gun, a long distance weapon that made cruel work of metal and flesh. It was absolutely not standard issue for an imperial police cruiser.

What was a specialty craft doing all the way out here? And why was it firing at me?

With no desire to have my bones liquefied by the most vicious armaments Imperial research could develop, I continued pressing forward on the controls to speed up. I took mental stock of my armament: four guns on either wing plus two under the nose, all drawing from the same stack of cartridges stored in the heart of the ship, and a few mines I could drop behind me to try and break the tail. Enough to take out three cops; not enough to play around with them.

I didn't love my chances in an all-out dogfight - I was confident I could outpilot any of these goons 1-on-1, but the Velenoso wasn't a war machine, and I had no special desire to claim 3 lives, even those of imperial cops - but I was concerned I wouldn't end up having a choice.

Eyes darting between the array of meters on the dashboard and the viewscreen box showing me my radar, I felt my instincts - honed by experience and sharpened further by the booster - begin to take over. My hands were no longer shaking; my heart raced less from anxiety and more from excitement, as though the cruisers had whet my appetite for war; my thoughts raced, but with clarity and focus.

I'm not going to die for some stupid recording. And I'm certainly not going to be struck down by some two-bit patrol cops with guns they can't even use!

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

It was always dark in the Velenoso cockpit, unlike most other personal craft. I liked it that way. It was almost like it tricked my brain into feeling cooler in a space that could heat up quickly. I felt cool now, my dark hair resting in smooth waves around my face, the silent void of space transmitting through my headset in the noiseless wake of the Wellmann blast. My gloves were comfortable on my hands, snug and well-worn. As I began punching calculations and commands into the ship's computer, I considered when the last time I'd killed a person was.

It'd been a couple years. Space could be lawless, and the Empire was seeing its already tenuous control of several border regions begin to slip farther, but it wasn't completely barbaric. People were generally fair to each other, if occasionally unkind. But in particularly long, lonely stretches of the universe that certain ships - say, couriers - had no choice but to sail through, pilots who were caught napping behind the wheel or happened to stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time could meet an unfortunate end at the guns of pirates and highwaymen. The empire was in on it, of course, just as much as they were in on all forms of crime that happened under their jurisdiction. It helped keep the wheels greased in one of the many ways the wheels needed it.At the very least, it gave the police in various backwater sectors something to do besides traffic drugs and people around, planet-to-planet. The cost was, as always, lives. Specifically, the lives of the underclass.

Around two years ago I'd had to drop a mine as I darted into an asteroid field, and a bandit who'd proctored a particularly savage pursuit of me failed to avoid the full effect of it; it pushed him out of control and he spiraled off into an asteroid, exploding in a fiery impact. Some pilots wouldn't consider that a kill - they can do the philosophical backflips necessary to believe that it's the dead pilot's own fault for chasing so hard, that he was doing something far too risky and unwise and that it wasn't the mine that killed him, if he'd just been more in control in the first place he could've recovered - I don't buy all that. I've had more than a couple guys try to argue that with me.

It's always guys. The girls I've told the story to just get it. I don't know why. It always comes up after a few drinks, though. People always ask about that sort of thing. So I've thought about it more than I probably would care to.

I dropped another mine now, to my port side, a little blinking grey sphere that would explode if anyone buzzed too close to it. I'd set it in an area I'd calculated via radar and my own assumptions about imperial flight patterns to be in the vicinity of two cruisers' potential flight paths. Taking them both out at once would be a miracle; I was just hoping for one and taking my best shot at such.

Meanwhile the ship that'd tried to snipe me earlier had broken out wide to the far right. I wondered if he hoped to cut me down, or off, and trap me into the firing range of his two comrades. And, I figured, he couldn't shoot while his gun recharged, so he wanted nothing to do with me now.

Wolfish, I felt something shift inside of me. Suddenly, from my perspective, this little cat-and-mouse game became a hunt. There was something savage that rose out of me in these moments, and I always felt some hesitation to let it out - but let it out I did, let it out to prowl and stalk and pounce as far and wide as it wanted. I had to; this was how I survived. If this predator needed my body and mind for a while, that was ok. If the cost was my soul, let it have as much as it needs.

I imagined myself feeding a large wolf and stroking its head as I did so.

Breaking off my previous course I shifted hard to my back right. Spinning and rotating at the same time I adjusted the Velenoso to point at the sniper that had been tailing me so hungrily just moments before, and with gusto now I charged at him, eyes narrowing as I centered the aiming reticule over his ship.

He was clearly surprised by my aggressiveness, about as much as his near-snipe had surprised me. This time, being rattled would be fatal for the pilot. Coming upon him as he failed to change course, I fired three shots across his bow, and saw one hit the cockpit dead-on. The laser would have melted him instantaneously; he was dead before the ship exploded.

My focus retrained on the radar screen as I circled back around in the shattered debris of my first kill. The other two pilots hadn't fully readjusted yet; they were slow to respond to my movements. Are you surprised I went for your leader first?

I had outpositioned them from the start, and now I penetrated deep into the cops' flank. With space blurring around me I once again centered the distinctive blue-black cruiser of the Imperial police within my crosshairs. Responding to my movements the ship had changed direction, and as his engines revved in a desperate attempt to escape I pulled back on the trigger and fired off a volley of shots which I watched strike a glancing blow on the center of the ship. Scared but alive, he scurried away in the opposite direction I was headed.

Pulling off to my left, I circled back around right in line with the remaining cop, who had been attempting to catch up to me and his buddy; with two more trigger pulls and two more volleys from my guns, I treated his ship to multiple hull penetrations on either side of its chassis. It didn't explode immediately, but it was almost instantly disabled; I could see its pilot struggling at the controls, briefly, as I passed. It exploded within my rearview camera, a second kill in this chance encounter.

I had lost radar sight of the third ship, and I was pointed in the direction I needed to go, so I kept on going, seeing no more of the imperial police force as I sped, hard but in control, away from the sight of the skirmish.

After a few minutes that felt like a few hours the rush that had fueled my attack began to cool off, and a great drowsiness took hold of me as cruised, numbed slightly to the stimuli of life as I scrolled through the ship's onboard map looking for the nearest station, which would offer me a place I could rest, eat, and call the man I was working for.

Picking a place I leaned back in my seat and let the cruise control take over, and as time sank back into the background I began once more to feel at home in my cockpit, firmly settled at the controls, alone with the vast nothingness of space around me, radar screen empty and silent.

I like being a courier pilot. You get to spend a lot of time alone. It suits me.