The sound of footsteps behind him reached his ears, then a gasp as he slammed the ship sideways to fit between two boulders almost as big as a war-cruiser.
"What's happening?" Her voice was breathless, a tremor running through it. "Why are we moving?"
"Strap in." He didn't look around. He couldn't. He needed to keep his focus on what he was doing. "They found us, and we're not waiting for them to come get us."
She grabbed at the back of the copilot’s chair, hauling herself into it as he went into another hard arc to avoid smearing them across the side of an incoming asteroid. He heard the harness click, then Barnaby wailed in protest as she grabbed him and held him close to her chest. Relief filled him. She was strapped in and safe for the moment.
Heat bled off the drive housing. He could feel it through the deck under his feet, even through his boots. That was not good. The Vett'an's drives were built to run in parallel, both operating at the same power level. But with one struggling, he had to overclock the other one to compensate, which was throwing the whole system out. Every gap he threaded them through, every hard cut, he was asking the ship for thrust she didn't have, and she was giving it anyway. Which meant that somewhere a temperature gauge was creeping toward a number he really didn't want to read.
The third C'Vaal ship came up at him from below.
He never saw it coming. It rose out of the field beneath them, where the plating was thinnest, firing before he could roll clear. The hit slammed into the Vett'an like a fist and the whole ship lurched, slewing sideways. Shit, they were using their weapons to cut through the field. There was nowhere left to hide.
Swearing, he yanked them back on their previous course before they could get crushed between two tumbling rocks. A panel above his head sparked, making Amelia squeal and duck, then went dark.
The systems console lit red on the port ventral quarter, flashing warning messages: Hull integrity dropping.
Trall. One more hit like that, and they’d breach. He hit the emergency beacon that would alert any Imperial ship in the area that they needed assistance. He hadn’t before to avoid giving their position away to the pirates, but that moment was long gone.
"Hang on," he said, and threw the Vett'an into a corkscrew that put a slab of rock between them and the ship below.
The field thinned out up ahead. He saw it coming, the ragged edge of the debris where the rocks gave out and open space opened up… black and clean and lethal. In the field they had cover, but out there they were sitting ducks. The C'Vaal ships were bigger, faster, and better armed.
He had nothing left that was clever. So he reached for stupid.
He slammed a hand down on the drive controls and killed them. The thrust cut out, jolting them forward in their harnesses while all the ship’s systems screamed at him. He used momentum to flip the ship, then took every joule of power that had been feeding the engines and shoved it into the weapons systems.
It was a terrible idea. It was also the only idea he had.
The forward cannon array came online with a whine, and he opened fire.
The first burst caught the pirate on the left broadside. It sheared off hard, spinning away from a fight it hadn't expected. The other two slowed and spread. He knew what they were thinking. A yacht that quit running and turned to fight meant one of two things. Either it had backup coming and the balls to wait for it, or whoever was flying it was crazy enough to be dangerous. Both made a pursuer think twice. And that hesitation was all he needed.
He didn't waste it. He fired again, walking the cannons across their noses to keep them off balance.
"What are you doing?"
"Buying time," he said, and fired again.
But the time he'd bought ran out as the lead ship recovered its heading and the other two slotted in beside it. They’d have active scans on, watching for inbound Imperial ships. But there were none, and try as he might, he couldn’t get a vector solution to get back into the asteroid field.
The C’Vaal came in, slow and certain now, circling like sharks. But they didn’t fire again.
They were going to board.
He knew it the way he knew he needed his next breath. They'd close, they'd grapple, they'd cut their way in, and then it would be draanthic pirates in here.
Gods, if he had the mutation like Raaevik, that wouldn’t be a problem. Well, it would be, for the C’Vaal.
If he had what Raaevik had, the rage riding under his skin, the mutation that turned a Latharian warrior into something that didn't feel pain and didn't stop, he could tear every one of these draanthing pirates apart with his bare hands and not even break a sweat.
But he didn’t. There was no blood-rage mutation, no berserker under his skin. Then his jaw tightened. He compressed the fear, the worry, and the sheer and utter rage that anyone would dare threaten the safety of his female into one hard knot. He didn’t need the blood-rage mutation. He was an Imperial Bodyguard, a sub-commander. He had his training and more years of bloody and brutal combat under his belt than he’d ever want to admit to his female, and gods help anyone who set foot on this ship.
He locked the array onto auto-fire, setting it to keep the C’Vaal off them for as long as the power held, and shoved himself out of the chair.
"Up. Now." He had Amelia’s harness undone before she could argue, his hand closing around her arm as he pulled her out of the seat. Barnaby exploded out of her lap and hit the deck running.
"Thyaar—what?—"
