I slide open the cover in the compartment to the right of my seat, grab the handle inside, and pull my special ammo control console up beside me. I hide it during day-to-day operations to avoid the risk of accidentally blowing myself up. It still terrifies me to have a high payload in my ship. But I never waste what I salvage. If it can help me get revenge for my mother and older brother, I will find a way to use it and deal with it.
I target an area with a squadron of Solcrue Skysprinters and make a quick dart through the belt toward them. Selecting my MRAT, multi-round automatic targeting, system I fire one missile and dive into the protection of the asteroid belt again.
The weapon peels apart into fifteen smaller missiles in two seconds and takes out twelve ships. Three are duds or just targeted the same vessel as another round. I still don't know quite how the user had programmed them. But they're decently effective with smaller fighters.
Asteroids disintegrate near my tail. The mothership fires up at me, turning the belt to gravel, sand, and fire. The explosive force pushes my ship dorsal-first into an approaching asteroid. I bash into it. My harness catches me painfully hard before I’m whipped backward, ass-first, toward another.
“Ah, fuck!”
There’s no time to get my bearing. I crawl my hands to the controls and push my engines hard to avoid a rear-end collision. But as I rocket forward again, momentum carries me on a course back toward the enemy.
“Might be our last mission, Pup,” I say to the little gold plastic dog glued to my dash. It wears a smile on its strangely shaped face. “Miss you, Haakon.”
Haakon said dogs were always loyal. They never betrayed their families. As much as I want to fly far away from here, I'm going to honor his memory, his loyalty, and his sacrifice by taking out as many of the enemy ships as I can.
I charge back through the debris field, hoping it’s still an unpredictable move. The moment I’m through, I fire at the mothership with the only canister of shield disruptors I’ve managed to build, plus a chaser combo of a high-impact shape charges—that should blow a cone-shaped hole in the hull—and my barrel of grenades.
There’s no time to look back and see if it works, though the flash of green that ripples around the hull is encouraging.
Two Skysprinters are hot on my tail as I dive back into the belt. They're fast, but I'm faster. Trouble is, I can't fire at them unless I'm outside. It would just waste more ammo and send it pinging wildly around. So I get as far ahead of them as I can, bank hard, dive beneath a larger asteroid, and circle back.
As they exit the belt, I target them and fire. They return my attacks from behind far better shields. My ship takes two hits out of many, but it's enough to knock out a thruster in the belly of the ship. My ship wobbles. The stabilizers compensate for it, but I have reduced capabilities.
Swearing, I hide back in the belt and work my way toward the other side, weaving between the rocks. A blaze of light cuts through the darkness of space. Then another until theworld around my ship is a weave of gunfire through shattering asteroids.
I lose my controls. Engines won't redirect. Scanners become blotted. And space outside my ship clouds with metallic dust. Bashing into an asteroid sends me in a transverse spin out of the belt. A rogue asteroid, likely from a different collision, knocks me back into the tumultuous clouds.
There’s no way I’m dying with weapons still on my ship!
Using my bow's vents, I blow some dust off my windows and try to shake loose some of the debris. I'm vulnerable, a sitting duck as my grandfather would say.Whatever a duck is.
With scanners struggling to lock on, I know I’m on my own and switch to manual targeting. The berserker approaches, firing at me as it tries to protect the massive crew ship. It’s another big target, easier to hit, less likely to damage, but I’m in no position to outrun anyone. I tap my suit’s wrist controls and seal up my helmet, anticipating this going sideways fast. When I’m as close as I can estimate, I unload everything I have.
“Kelta!” My younger brother calls over the radio. “Get out of there!”
I choke up as reality hits. “I can’t! I’m dusted!”
My guns continue to fire at my fingertips. The berserker’s heading toward my position. “Engines are clogged on asteroid shit! I’m sorry, Reidar. I drew the short straw this time!”
I scan for him but don't see my family anywhere. No one from our fleet is visible. They’re always better at hiding than me.
The berserker’s guns glow in preparation to shoot.
“Be good to Dad. Make lots of babies with Eira. And tell them Auntie Kelta loved them.”
“Don’t say that, Kelta—”
I’m almost out of ammo. My engines can’t take me away from the Berserker’s path fast enough. It’s almost caught up to mewhen a blast from a Skysprinter slams into my bumper panels, disintegrating them and knocking me toward the mothership.
The berserker’s shot lances through the sky, clipping a wing. I have no controls left. The burning engine of the damaged mothership shimmers with heat and grows in size like the hungry rings of a round mouth full of teeth and angry menace.
I try to eject, but my screen won’t send the command. Prying open the manual release, I grab the handle, but it’s jammed, too.
Damn gravel!
I steady myself at the controls, realizing my end has come. My fate is in the hands of the universe now. If it doesn’t kill me before I’m under the engine, I’m taking it out.
I’ve got one explosive left. My fuel tank.
