During the briefing, Tsuros was adamant: we were not to fire our reactors until we reached the corona. We were to trust in our field generators, which would render us virtually invisible. Quenched and clenched, those were our orders.

Goshi. I doubted we were anything near invisible. I broke my orders and fired my reactor. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a black whorl gliding by, the faintest stress on the fabric of nothing. Corrupt had abandoned the order even faster than I had. I diverted hard and followed him. Compression fluid hardened around me like cement.

I glanced back, expecting to see Liar following us. There was no sign of him. I wondered if, perhaps, he really was invisible. But then, I saw the faint smear of his Yama streaking across space. Liar never fired his reactor. He followed his orders, right into the side of the destroyer. His Yama vanished in a silent flare, and I clenched my jaw, awaiting annihilation.

There was no all-consuming conflagration. The baryon bomb had not deployed. Had Liar died in null-space or simply given up? I had no time to wonder. Our presence was no longer a secret.

I gripped the spurs and throttled up. For a year, I had touched these controls only once every two hundred hours for alignment. Now, I could cry havoc and let slip the throttle of my bomber.

I was free! I could fly!

I had drilled so long for this moment. My veins sang with euphoria as the reactor burned brighter, infusing my ship with power. The compression fluid thrummed against my eardrums in time with my pulse.

I was immune to most of the first-battle pitfalls. My mouth couldn’t go dry, it was flooded with compression fluid. If I soiled myself, it didn’t matter, I was cathed and tubed up. The ship had been a part of me for a year, and I knew every gurgle and throb as intimately as the beating of my own heart. I was ready. I rocketed forward, bound for the sun.

Corrupt raced ahead of me. Even though I knew he was there, I could barely keep eyes on him. When I tried to focus on his ship, his outline rolled out of my vision like a floater.

“Lose sight, lose fight!”

I must have heard Tsuros say that a hundred times. I killed thrust and sent my bomber in a transverse-longitudinal roll, doing a quick sweep for potential threats.

Behind us, the Collaborator destroyer turned ponderously, like a drunk wheeling about to see who’d thrown something. Liar’s suicide was just a pinprick in the side of the behemoth. The Kulan class was obsolete by several generations. They were tiny compared to Hezo destroyers. But this Crossfire was still a hundred times larger than our bombers, heavily armored, and bristling with guns.

Streams of glittering tinsel issued from the turrets, turning golden in the sunlight. I was stupidly captivated. The barrage was almost too pretty for me to recognize it as a threat.

FLAK!

Each filament of light was a streaking cluster bomb. The destroyer couldn’t draw a bead on our stealthed bombers, so it was blanketing space with its anti-missile defenses. I whipped my ship back towards the sun so fast I nearly knocked myself out.

When my head cleared, I saw I’d overcorrected. It was too late to change course. I could only hammer the throttle forward, riding it until my vision grayed out. I was determined I would either outrun the flak or be unconscious when it killed me.

Ahead of me, Corrupt had the same idea. He burned so hard I could see the orange-red rings of his thrusters, glaring through the field effect like a pair of angry eyes. As I diverted, I passed through his vapor trail, and my ship flinched at the momentary touch of superheated gas. My Yama was in for a rude awakening if we survived to reach the corona.

A thousand golden motes exploded, flooding space with a static storm of shrapnel. Flying directly away from the destroyer, Corrupt was safe. Golden sparks raced ahead of my ship, the shell’s most energetic outliers. I was in range! A single touch was death. I rammed the throttle forward to the limit.

It felt like my body was being crushed in a giant’s fist. The diaphragm-assist kept pumping, but I couldn’t breathe. I told myself to hold thrust for a ten-count, but I couldn’t remember what came after seven. Everything became confused.

I’m not sure if I managed to throttle down or if the Yama simply couldn’t continue. I floated on the edge of unconsciousness, my head a balloon, inflating and deflating with each pulse. I strained my ears for the telltale hiss of fluid escaping through a punctured carapace. I only heard my reactor, pinging with thermal stress.

I was alive!

I had a few moments to buzz with adulation as my heart fought to get blood back into my brain. I’d outrun the flak! But the gauntlet had only begun. I was soaring along the endless lines of freighters, bound for the Starmine. Corrupt had flown so far ahead of me, his thrusters were only pinpricks. If I wanted to catch up, I would have to go full burn.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Let them take the hits. Tsuros’ voice rang in my ears.

I had intended all along to defy him and race ahead on my own. But it hadn’t worked out that way. The others were all gone, and now, Corrupt had panicked. He plummeted ahead with his jets wide open, showing his ass to the destroyer. I knew he was a dead man.

The fool would draw Diyu down on both of us. I needed to get out of the line of fire. With my nose pointed at Sol, I accelerated until I heard the rumble of my own jets kicking in. I burned for a few seconds, giving the destroyer’s gunners time to plot my trajectory.

I cut throttle, and let the field generator kick in. Then I engaged vertical thrust and leaned towards a silver line of freighters. My plan was to hide behind the endless train of ships so the destroyer couldn’t track my silhouette against the sun.

But I’d made an error. I’d gauged the distance to the freighters, expecting them to be the same size as Hezo supply ships. These solar freighters were far larger than even the UNESECA freighters. They must have been thirty kilometers long! I was only halfway to the line when the destroyer launched the next salvo.

The first shell exploded, perhaps a hundred clicks ahead of my ship. Watching the flak pattern, I realized the gunners on the destroyer were supercharging their mass drivers. The flak guns were meant to destroy missiles coming in, not bombers flying out. The golden motes were hurled with so much force they exploded in cones, glittering gouts of dragon’s breath. The next shell burst even closer than the last. My ruse hadn’t worked! Somehow, they had a bead on me.

Speed was more important than stealth now. I gave the thrusters more power, veering into a series of gut-twisting turns. The temperature inside my cockpit fluctuated from freezing to searing. My exchangers struggled to cope with the rapid shifts in output. My Yama ripped through space, executing a twisting series of arcs that were less maneuvers and more sheer panic.

I couldn’t shake them. My eyes locked on a golden streak flying towards me. I felt a strange calm, certain it was the last thing I’d ever see. But the shell flew past me, less than five hundred meters from my Yama’s nose. My body went rigid, as if that would help.

If the shell popped, I was a dead man, but it sailed on, bound for the sun. The canopy lens telescoped as I tracked the fleeting bomb, and then I could see a rippling shadow, twin rings of burning jets.

I wasn’t the target. The cluster bomb scored a direct hit, dragon’s fire scouring Corrupt’s ship. At the very limits of canopy magnification, the black diamond of his bomber disintegrated into shards of corybantic-phase confetti. Then everything went black.

I thought the baryon bomb had killed me, but the familiar sounds of my ship said otherwise. Corrupt’s reactor had exploded. My canopy had gone opaque to keep it from blinding me.

“Thank you,” I blubbed into the compression fluid. The ship couldn’t understand, but it needed to be said.

My canopy cleared, and I shot towards the freighters, eyes alert for the sparkle of shrapnel. My mind burned as hot as my jets. No bomb! Corrupt’s ship had been sliced to ribbons. The antimatter containment field would have surely been breached.

Liar’s crash should have annihilated the destroyer and everything else for a thousand kilometers. Back in the bubble, Addict had been on the edge of madness when he threatened to deploy. He hadn’t been too afraid to trigger. He was sitting on a dud.

Did the Hezo only have enough antimatter for one bomb? Was I the only one? Was this whole thing just Tsuros’ sick idea of a joke?

I didn’t have long to think about it. I sped towards the silver line as shells exploded all around me. Suddenly, my canopy was full of golden sparks. I braced for the killing crack of shrapnel, but my luck held. My reactor roared, my thrusters howled, and I shot behind the freighters and decelerated.

It was agony, like my body was being crushed in a hydraulic press. The blurred line of freighters resolved into individual ships as I braked. I’d hoped the Clabs wouldn’t risk firing on their own men, but the bombardment continued.

I realized why. The freighters were unmanned! They had no cockpits, only the thin stalks of sensor-arrays. Of course, they were automated. It should have been obvious, but I’d spent so long under the Hezo boot I’d forgotten such things were possible.

The destroyer blasted indiscriminately, peppering the line of freighters with a steady hail of flak. I fought to keep the twisting silver line between me and the destroyer, terrified something would make it through the narrow gap between each freighter. How in Diyu were they still on top of me? I was field-stealthed, zero-sum, full-organic. Somehow, the gunners on the Crossfire had a constant lock on my position.

I stubbed my toe on the answer. My secret weapon! I had given us away and gotten Corrupt and Liar both killed. My turn was next. I’d outrun the flak, but the destroyer had more cards to play. The artillerymen on the Crossfire switched guns and raked the line with their quad-linked chain driver.

Several ships ahead of me was a skeleton barge, a spindly ribcage hauling captured asteroids. A spray of white-hot iridium rails lanced through the chunks of nickel-iron like a fork through blueberry gelatin. At first, I was relieved they were off target, but then I realized they weren’t aiming at me. They’d turned the space in front of me into a minefield of debris!

I wrenched the Yama into a desperate spiral, pushing my ship harder than I’d ever dared before. The bomber’s innards pulsed around me with the same urgency, mirroring my adrenaline shakes. The Yama weren’t sentient, the drills told us they were no smarter than a mantis or a beetle. Still, my ship was a living thing. It could feel my terror and it didn’t want to die.

On this, we were in full agreement. I piloted my bomber in a crazy corkscrew, dodging the railgun rain. The sun loomed larger, and the shots flew wider. I was outrunning the barrage!

My canopy grew darker, the sun swallowed the other stars.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

The real terror began.