User:KharBevNor/dogfight

Quick text dump of a short story. It'll be gone in an hour or so.

He was on her the second she left the fire exclusion range, unclamping the Lance from the asteroid he had been hiding it behind and powering up to full fusion burn, saving the antimatter for any unexpected situations. She accelerated the moment she saw him, loosing off a few missiles which hardly even served to annoy as anti-projectile turrets gunned them down. She was on her own now, and she knew it. Not enough money to buy passage back into Corvinian fly-space, it was either their guns, against which she stood no chance, or him, against which she might just do it.

No slip-ups this time he thought.

She had made two serious attempts to escape twice now, once by hiding in the atmosphere of a gas giant and using flares to draw him off whilst she made good her escape, and once by launching an attack on his credit balance whilst he was tailing her through a wormgate, stalling him for three hours whilst he sorted out the mess and regained ownership of his money. All the time she sought the protection of planetary fly-space, where weapons fire was forbidden and any attempt by him to take her down would result in his destruction, or at least the destruction of his ship.

Outlaws, however, are not welcome in most ports, and she most often found herself with twenty-four hours grace to get the hell out. Once the planetary authorities themselves had attempted to reclaim the bounty, and he had fired on the engine systems of the frigate chasing her, thus getting money put on his head. A bounty hunter with a price on his head. Not unheard of, certainly.

To tell the truth, he had spent far too long collecting this one. He should have cut his losses months ago, let her escape to freedom or the net of another, but it had become personal now, a contest between two individuals, well matched and intensely competitive.

He cut a wide arc, dropping down across the plane of the ecliptic to come up from underneath her. He let a few flurries of nanopulse fire off as he did so, but she was easily able to dodge them with an evasion pattern. The weapons suffered from their power in the way of speed. Unlike a normal laser you could see a nanopulse bolt coming, just, and evade it. He rotated the ship on its axis to get maximum burn and cut a sinuous curve towards his opponent, who rotated in a huge arc to drop behind an asteroid just as another barrage of energy weapons fire spat from his guns. The asteroids surface burst in teardrop explosions of molten rock and spewing steam, turning quickly to ice as it hit the coldness of space. He cursed and fired his dorsal thrusters, knocking his ship fifty kilometres whilst holding the same course, but now calculated to let him out on the same side of the asteroid as her.

Except not. She shot around the side of the asteroid in a curve and unleashed a beam of plasma at him. He jerked the controls, and the beam went wild, just heating the air in his cockpit and eliciting a few beeps from various sensors. He volleyed back with a salvo of missiles, which flew wide as she used some sort of countermeasure, striking the asteroid in huge blossoming zero g explosions of dust and burning gas. Lasers fired wildly out of the cloud, and he went off in an evasion pattern to dodge them, locking on a precision laser to the source and firing a two second beam, flickering and spattering to maximise hit probability. There was a flash of white in the cloud, and she emerged, trailing gas from a thruster unit. The trail cut off as she banked sharply, repairs already under effect as two spherical charges dropped from the little ship. He swore and threw his ship into a wide curve.

The two charges exploded, sending clouds of white-hot shrapnel out away from the Bullet at relativistic speeds. He coiled round to avoid the deadly shower, the attack coming so close that his engine trail vaporised some of the shards, turning them into streaks of incandescent vapour.

Concentrate, concentrate...

He slid, sinuously back across the inside of her curve, target cursor trained on the plasma trail of her ship as he thumbed through the ships panoply of weapons. He was still pretty high on ammunition for the projectile weapons, and the he-3 tanks fuelling the internal and external reactor were almost full. She had expended a lot of her heavy weaponry, and sustained far more damage than him…of course, he was more limited in his options. He scrolled past anti-matter pinheads, neutron and hydrogen bombs, self-fuelling explosives. He needed at least a recognisable corpse.

3 Billion Standard bonus for getting her alive...

He was about a hundred or so kilometres behind her, claustrophobically close in an infinite universe, at these speeds. Both ships were accelerating wildly, tearing out into the systems gas giants at almost twenty percent of the speed of light and rising. The relativity device that smoothed the curvature of space time inside the ships living section, eliminating 99% of inertia, was reaching peak strain. He eyed its readouts warily. Time to test the field...

He executed a barrel roll, keeping parallel to her vessel but increasing the distance between them to the safety margin where the detonation of either ships power core would not result in the destruction of the other. Then, he scrolled up the Lance’s impressive list of propulsion options and, pausing only to shunt more power to the relativity device, hit the secondary igniter.

A pellet of antimatter was fired into the externalised fusion reaction that propelled the craft, causing the bluish flame to explode outwards with a flash of almost green-tinted white energy. The ship jarred slightly