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    © 2004 Andrew Dormeier
"The first ship will be on top of us in a little over 10 seconds; the next three 1.3 minutes later."
"Did you lock down that coolant leak?" "Yes" "Okay, here's what we are going to do: Get as close as we can to that nebula without changing our heading. Then drop to 0.2 lightspeed and rotate 180 degrees. Have torpedo bays one through four armed and ready. And turn off that incessant alarm." In a quiet part of space next to a massive orange nebula, a tan ship burst into sight, quickly flipped itself around and fired its main engines to slow down. Four arcs of light shot forward from the ship. Another ship dropped into sight: a black hulk with many sharp weapons protruding from the hull. A barely visible shield began to form around its hull, but before it was able to coalesce, the four missiles crashed into the ship, destroying the bridge and leaving gaping holes in the armor plating. Four more missiles arced away from the tan ship, crashing into the other ship and exploding in small balls of flame. The rear of the ship began to glow a bright yellow and suddenly exploded in a ball of quickly extinguished flame. Smaller explosions riddled what was left of the front of the ship. "Falinor, new heading: set course for that planetary system. Now release that coolant leak to space." "Sir?" "Do it." "Alright," Falinor said as he complied. A small emergency field was shut off near the engines, allowing a trail of blue liquid to spread out behind this ship as it moved. "Now accelerate to 0.98 lightspeed on our new heading and reseal the coolant leak once we reach that speed." "Accelerating.leak sealed." "Great, now set a heading for that nebula: maximum sublight speed. Try to keep that ship debris between us and the other ships." "Done. We will breach the nebula's boundary in forty-seven seconds." "Time until arrival of other ships?" "They will reach the destroyed cruiser in fifty-three seconds." "Cutting it close." "As always." Three jet black ships dropped to sublight speeds near the new debris field. They passed the wreckage and halted just beyond. Half a minute later, four more ships joined them. The seven ships sat motionless for forty seconds, then six of them turned and jumped to lightspeed in the direction of the nearby solar system. The remaining ship stayed motionless. On the edge of the nearby nebula a small probe dropped into the interstellar cloud it had come from. |
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