Chapter 75: The Hunter Becomes The Hunted

"Let them split," Leo said, and his lips curled into an easy grin.

SLAM!

He reignited the main ion drives and snapped the Wanderer-7 out of its backward drift, rocketing forward with a concussive roar of turquoise thrust that shoved everyone back into their seats.

The diving pirate opened up with both plasma lances in a frantic vengeful barrage from their upper starboard quarter.

SZZZZZZT! SZZZZZZT!

The guide pulled Leo half a meter to port, and the first bolt of superheated green plasma seared past the canopy so close that the glass flared white.

The second caught the starboard flank, and the shield grid blazed up in a sheet of blue hexagons that swallowed most of the heat before the rest splashed harmlessly across the slate plates in a shower of orange sparks.

"Shields at sixty-eight!" Elena reported, her eyes wide and bright as she watched the readouts. "The plates are dispersing the thermal wash! He can’t get through our belt...!"

"Then he’ll have to work for it," Leo laughed, his dark eyes fixed on a narrow canyon of tumbling basalt dead ahead. "...Let’s see if he can fly."

He clenched both fists in the cradles and dove the Wanderer-7 straight into the densest part of the asteroid belt.

The fifty-meter corvette moved like a silver fish through an iron reef, threading the rocks with the guide in his back pulling him toward gaps that looked completely impossible from the cockpit.

He threw the ship through a fifty-two-meter crevice between two rotating iron slabs and rolled ninety degrees onto her port side, so that her flanks cleared the jagged rock faces by barely eighty centimeters on either side.

SCRAPE!

A shower of sparks burst out as the lower sensor fin grazed a basalt ridge, but the ship shot through clean and slid out into the open pocket on the other side.

"We just scraped a mountain!" Camila wailed.

"We kissed it," Leo corrected her as Camila pouted at him. "...There’s a difference you see."

Behind them, the crimson-toothed pirate was biting hard.

Its pilot was skilled blind with rage after watching his leader die, and he pushed his engines to full burn to keep the Wanderer-7 in his sights.

He shaved through the same crevice with his shields flaring against the rock with his nose already dipping to line up a killing rail salvo on Leo’s stern.

BOOM-BOOM!

Leo felt the shots coming and flicked the corvette into a corkscrew roll, and both slugs howled past the tailpipes and buried themselves in the rock face behind them in two silent sprays of gravel.

"Let me shoot him!" Harper begged with her thumbs hovering over the triggers. "Cap, he’s right there, let me shoot him!"

"Not yet," Leo said. "He’s got his shields up and his nose on us... Wait for the opening."

A tumbling boulder the size of a house drifted across their path, and the guide tugged him straight toward it.

Leo swung the corvette in tight behind it and matched its spin for one long heartbeat, keeping all that rock between his stern and the pirate’s guns.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The pirate’s slugs slammed into the far side of the boulder and blew it apart into a spray of gravel and dust, and the Wanderer-7 burst out of the cloud on the other side with her shields crackling where the fragments rained against them.

"He’s using the asteroids as a shield...!" Jin-Ah breathed.

Leo twisted his right hand in the cradle, and the laser batteries swung back over the dorsal shoulders.

ZAP-BOOM!

The crimson beams lanced back at the pursuer and splashed across its forward shield in a flare of red, and the pirate jinked hard to the side with smoke streaming off its nose.

"He felt that for sure..." Elena said with savage satisfaction.

"He’s locked on our engines!" Aoi shouted, gripping the edges of the astrogation well. "He’s matching our velocity at six point eight kilometers per second!"

"Then let’s lose him in the rocks," Leo muttered, banking toward a cluster of hollowed-out nickel asteroids drifting forty kilometers ahead. "...Jin-Ah, give me the tightest line through that cluster."

"Plotting!" she called. "Bear twelve degrees starboard, then down past the big hollow one... it’s dead and empty, the scans show nothing inside—"

The guide in his back screamed.

It slammed through his spine like a fist, yanking him up and away so violently that his teeth clicked together, and for one baffled heartbeat Leo had no idea why then the hollow asteroid ahead of them split open.

...The whole rock shuddered and cracked along a seam that hadn’t been there a second ago, and chunks of nickel the size of shuttles blew outward into the void as something enormous shoved its way out of the inside.

A Level 3 Void Leviathan erupted out of the cave inside the rock without any warning at all, a huge dead-black shape uncoiling out of the dark in a storm of shattered stone.

Its obsidian-scaled jaws gaped open three hundred meters wide, lined with row upon row of needle-sharp teeth and a bioluminescent lure on its brow pulsed violet in the black, flashing right in front of the canopy.

"LEO!" Camila shrieked, pointing at the gaping maw filling the entire glass.

"Where did THAT come from?!" Harper screamed.

Two huge milky eyes the size of cargo bays rolled toward them in the dark, and behind the throne Chloe leaned forward against her harness with her lips parted though she was fascinated instead of afraid.

There was no time to answer, so Leo fired the ventral emergency retros, wrenched both hands up in the cradles and snapped the Wanderer-7 into a violent vertical barrel roll that scraped the dorsal turret along the monster’s upper lip.

SCREEEECH!

The corvette shot up over the creature’s horned brow so close that its violet lure lit the whole bridge purple, and then they were through and out into the open black.

...The pirate behind them had no time to react.

Locked into maximum pursuit burn, with his sensors blinded by the Wanderer-7’s ion wake and the shattered rock still spraying everywhere, the crimson-toothed raider flew straight into the leviathan’s open throat.

CHOMP!

The huge jaws slammed shut like an iron portcullis.

CRUNCH!

The eighty-meter corvette was crushed in half between four rows of teeth.

A brief muffled flash of orange bloomed behind the monster’s sealed cheeks, a thin burped plume of green deuterium vented from its gills, and then the beast slowly coiled back down into the darkness of its hollow rock, thoroughly satisfied with its unexpected iron meal as its lure dimming until the asteroid looked exactly as dead and empty as the scans had promised.

The bridge was dead silent for two full seconds.

"Holy shit!" Harper yelled, her mouth hanging open. "Did you... did you just feed an entire combat ship to a space fish?!"

"I didn’t know it was there!" Leo shot back, his heart hammering against his ribs, and then a breathless laugh broke out of him. "But hey... it was hungry."

"The scans said EMPTY!" Jin-Ah protested, staring at her slate in deep personal betrayal. "It was hiding inside the rock where the sensors couldn’t see it!"

"Note it for next time," Leo said, already whipping the corvette around in a sweeping high-G arc. "One left... Let’s finish the set."

The third pirate corvette had broken off its attack run completely.

After watching its leader blown to scrap and its wingman swallowed whole, the last raider was in full panicked retreat with its rear thrusters burning white-hot as it banked frantically for the edge of the debris field, dumping heat flares and clouds of chaff in a desperate attempt to break contact.

The chaff burst across the sensors in a blizzard of false contacts that turned the whole hololith into snow, and Jin-Ah swore under her breath, a word none of them had ever heard her use before.

"Target three is running for the jump corridor!" Jin-Ah called, recovering fast as she tapped in the pursuit vector. "Distance four thousand kilometers and opening...!"

"We’ll catch him," Leo said, and his voice dropped into cold focus.

Leo ignored its wake entirely as the bronze warmth singing along his spine pulled him twenty degrees to port, straight across the path of a massive spinning iron asteroid tumbling along a counter-orbit, and Leo swung the Wanderer-7 around the iron mass in a tight slingshot that whipped her forward like a stone from a sling.

WHOOOOOOSH!

The corvette burst out from the asteroid’s flank at a ninety-degree angle to the fleeing pirate and cut its escape corridor off completely...

The pirate pilot panicked and hauled his nose up to fire an emergency spread of unguided rockets.

FWOOSH-FWOOSH-FWOOSH!

Six trails of smoke corkscrewed across the dark toward them.

Leo rolled under the first four, and the last two burst against the shield in a pair of blinding blue flowers that shook the deck under their feet.

"Shields at fifty-five!" Elena called. "Still holding!"

"Elena," he said. "Pin his rudder...!"

"With pleasure, Captain!" she shouted, slamming the ventral rail release.

KA-THOOOOOM!

The four-meter Graventhal harpoon spike blasted from the Wanderer-7’s belly at seven kilometers per second!

SHCK-CRUNCH!

It punched straight through the pirate’s port engine housing and sank its teeth deep into the raider’s main reaction manifold, and the tether snapped taut.

SCREEECH!

The winch howled as the tether took the full weight of a fleeing eighty-meter warship, and the whole Wanderer-7 lurched sideways against her own thrust.

Elena gripped the harpoon controls with both hands and leaned back in her seat as if she could hold the ship by herself.

"I’ve got him!" she cried. "I’ve got him, Leo..."

The fleeing ship was jerked violently off its axis and spun helplessly in a circle like a fish on a line, dragged right between two towering pillars of solid basalt.

"Harper," Leo said. "He’s all yours."

"FINALLY!" Harper screamed, and slammed both triggers.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

The S-Rank turret roared four times, and the tungsten slugs struck the pinned raider dead center, tearing through its bridge, its crew deck and its main fuel tanks in one devastating line.

KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The third pirate corvette blew apart in a blinding sphere of white-hot fire, and its shattered plates pinged harmlessly off the Wanderer-7’s shield as the shockwave washed out across the dark.

Silence settled over the cockpit.

...The three red contacts were gone, wiped clean off the tactical well, leaving only the quiet steady hum of the Wanderer-7’s systems.

CHIME!

[Three for three... This unit has updated its estimate of the Master Captain’s piloting from "reckless" to "concerning."]

The bridge erupted into breathless cheering.

Camila let out a wild laugh and clapped her hands against her thighs, Elena leaned back in her chair with a wide dazzling smile and Aoi stared at the empty radar shaking her head with her dark eyes shining with pride.

Harper ripped off her harness and leaned over the rail of the dais, staring down at Leo with an expression that was half awe and half shock.

"Leo... seriously, what the hell was that?!" she said, waving her hands wildly. "You were threading fifty-meter gaps like you were riding a bike, and you flipped over a space monster’s face like it was a speed bump!"

She squinted at him, her freckled nose wrinkling in deep suspicion.

"Did you get some crazy power boost after almost dying in that tank?" she demanded, jabbing a finger at his broad shoulders. "Like those aliens with the monkey tails in the old anime I used to watch...? The ones who get their butts kicked, sleep in a medical pod for a week and wake up strong enough to crack a planet in half?!"

Leo laughed out loud and pulled his hands out of the cradles.

"I don’t have a tail, Harper... I just had a really good cup of mint water."

The crew laughed with him, and the warmth of it filled the cabin as they started logging their post-combat diagnostics.

Leo leaned back in the throne and let his eyes rest on the evolution bar glowing at thirty-five percent.

Three hostile ships had come to take his crew, and one of them was already inside his Foundry, and the guide in the small of his back had gone quiet and warm, like it was satisfied too.

Nobody noticed the faint flicker on the very edge of the long-range sensors.

...Far behind them, twelve thousand kilometers out in the freezing black, tucked into the thermal shadow of a dead iron moonlet, hung a fourth ship.

It was a sleek needle-thin racing vessel built from iridescent hyperalloy that shifted from deep purple to violet in the starlight, and its six specialized ion thrusters purred in silent stealthy rest.

Inside its customized cockpit, a lone alien woman sat with her long legs kicked up over the flight console.

Her skin was a smooth vibrant pink, and a wild mane of bouncy purple hair tumbled down her back.

She leaned forward with her chin propped on her palm and her large luminous violet eyes locked onto the replay of the Wanderer-7’s impossible maneuvers... and in the small of her back, a strange electric tingle was singing.

"Oh..." Vexa Tarn whispered into the quiet cockpit with her fingers tapping lightly against the throttle. "Now who are you?"