Tech Scavengers [Humorous, Action-Packed Space Opera]

Negasi definitely, absolutely, totally needed a raise.

He prepped his targeting system as the three Dragonflies hurtled toward the Antikythera, while trying to keep his eye on the ships detaching one by one from Latimer Station. There had been a panicked stampede to depart thanks to some nutcase lobbing grenades in the market area. The nerve of some people.

What worried him was that those Dragonflies couldn't have gotten here under their own power. They had to have come from a larger ship, and there were only three at the station that big enough.

One of them, he felt sure, housed a few Mantids who had stayed on the mother ship while the four heavies went to make a stir-fry out of Nova and Negasi. Now that those four were dead, their buddies would want revenge. But which ship were they on?

One large freighter remained docked at the station. Two others were pulling away. The first was an older Grun'hon transport that looked too rickety to be a threat, and all Grun'hon ships were huge anyway.

The final ship caught Negasi's eye—a large freighter with oversized cargo ports that could easily conceal a launch pad for fighter ships. What he could scan of its weapons systems and engine capabilities through its shielding revealed a lot more power than the usual freighter. It could just be some intrepid merchants going to dangerous parts of the Orion Arm, or it could be their Mantid friends.

The second option became much more likely when the ship turned for them and fired a pair of torpedoes.

"Jeridan!" Negasi shouted.

"I'm on it."

The Antikythera did a tight loop and shot away in another direction with maximum acceleration. The front hull registered a small impact that did not damage the armor.

"MIRI, what was that?" Negasi said, trying to train his weapon systems on the freighter as the sky spun, then switched direction and spun the other way.

"Unknown. Some small metal object. I detect electronics. I give it a 78.7 percent chance of it being a comm probe or drone."

"Scan the hull. Anything stuck to it?"

"Negative."

Good. No tracers or bombs, or at least nothing MIRI could detect. So we probably won't get killed by a surprise, only by what's in front of us.

At least I can fire at what's in front of us.

Negasi fired a couple of torpedoes at the freighter, even though it was still a bit too close to the station. Well, what had the station ever done for them?

The freighter spun out, trying to avoid the torpedoes. The first torpedo Negasi let fly on its own systems. The second he took in manually, switching his view to the camera feed on the torpedo itself.

He rode it in, making micro-adjustments as the Mantid pilot performed some spectacular dodges. The first torpedo missed by a hundred meters, but Negasi kept with the second, moving as the Mantids moved, closing in. From his POV camera on the torpedo, he saw the flash of flechettes passing by on two sides. One of the Mantid gunners was trying to shoot the projectile out of the sky.

Fat chance.

The freighter loomed up in his sight, approaching impossibly fast, and then the image cut out as the torpedo hit.

His view automatically switched back to the gunner's goggles he wore, showing a magnified view of the freighter.

It showed a small hole in its side. Escaping gasses brought with them wreckage and hopefully a few insectoid bits, but the jet cut off quickly as the damaged area automatically sealed off from the rest of the ship.

The freighter turned around and opened fire with its full complement of weaponry. Negasi gulped.

A high-powered torpedo good enough to split most non-military vessels in two had barely given it a bloody nose.

Now that's just not fair.

Four torpedoes shot in their direction. Negasi concentrated his fire on one, knocking it out as Jeridan took the Antikythera on a crazy zigzag through the sky, heading for the ice world but angling away from the approaching Dragonflies, which had come around the opposite horizon.

Oh no, he's not going to pull the same stunt he pulled on Eridanus Prime, is he?

Jeridan accelerated, moving well inside the station's orbit and picking up speed.

Oh, cack. He is.

Negasi focused on the incoming torpedoes. The Dragonflies were closing fast, but still not in range. They might not have to if the remaining three torpedoes hit.

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And it was really, really hard to shoot torpedoes out of the sky when Jeridan was making the Antikythera move in random directions.

But he did get one.

The other two came right for them.

Jeridan swerved at the last moment and one shot past. The fourth made a hit.

The entire ship shuddered. Negasi's crash webbing kept him from being smashed against the inside of the turret. Still, he got shaken so much he needed a moment to recover.

By the time he did, the freighter, which was acting more and more like a battleship, moved in on them.

Negasi concentrated his gunfire on it, the Antikythera's advanced weapons systems making for an easy hit. Explosive slugs battered its hull, not seeming to affect it very much.

It didn't stop advancing, anyway.

Two dorsal turrets on the freighter opened up, sending a hail of flechettes at the ship. These bounced harmlessly off the Antikythera's thick armor, so a few seconds later they switched to explosive ammo.

That began to take effect. Out of the corner of his eye, Negasi saw the console lighting up with yellow warning lights on various parts of the ship schematic. None had turned red yet.

Negasi fired the pulse cannon, making a direct hit on the freighter. No effect. They had shielding just like the Antikythera. The Mantids had done them the courtesy of assuming the same and hadn't even tried their own pulse cannon.

Negasi switched to the flechette guns, zeroed in on the enemy dorsal turret, and gave it everything he had. The flechettes sparked harmlessly off the thick armor, but Negasi kept up the pace, his sharp eyes negating the sickening effects of Jeridan's twists and turns and rolls, his aim growing more and more precise as he hoped one, just one of the tungsten slivers would hit the target he could barely see on maximum zoom.

There! A small, brief explosion, and the enemy turret fell silent. He had hit the gun and put it out of commission. Not bad when firing from a target making evasive maneuvers at another target making evasive maneuvers more than a kilometer away.

"I'm a genius!" Negasi shouted.

"If you're such a genius, take out their other cacking turret!" Jeridan snapped.

Negasi tut-tutted. "Quiet! There are children present."

"All the more reason to take out the other turret," Nova added. She sounded more awake now. Aurora must have jabbed her full of enriched blood surrogate and stims.

"Dragonflies coming within range in fifteen seconds," MIRI added.

Negasi shook his head. "Sheesh. Pressure a guy, why don't you?"

He aimed at the turret, had to turn away to take out a torpedo hurtling in their direction, then got the turret back in his sights. The Mantid gunner was busy pummeling the Antikythera's hull with explosive rounds.

With Jeridan making crazy evasive maneuvers, precise aiming proved nearly impossible. Like before, Negasi hoped that by bathing the turret with tungsten spikes, eventually one would take out the weapon system.

That sort of worked. He saw a brief flash, so quick he wasn't sure he really had seen it, and suddenly the explosive rounds stopped hammering away at the Antikythera's hull.

Yet the Mantid gunner continued firing.

"He's missing!" Negasi said. "He's missing by a light year! I must have hit his targeting system."

Then a realization came crashing into his consciousness that swept away any minor victory over a bit of enemy optics.

Where had that torpedo come from, the one he had taken out a few seconds ago?

It hadn't come from the ship, or he'd have seen it launch. And it hadn't come from the station, which was directly behind the ship.

It had come from the left, in the direction of the Dragonflies, but Dragonflies don't carry torpedoes. The fighter ships were too small.

He looked over there and his heart whimpered and curled up into a ball, sobbing to itself.

At the center of the trio of Dragonflies came a fighter ship the size of the Antikythera. Not a souped-up freighter like the one he had mostly disabled, but a naval-quality fighter ship. He'd seen destroyers not as well equipped.

"WHAT IN EARTH'S NAME IS ON THAT MEMORY CHIP!"

"Something important," Nova said.

"Really? That's so enlightening. I feel so privileged that you pour out your innermost thoughts and feelings to me in such a candid manner."

Negasi would have gone on but for the salvo of four torpedoes that came flying at them.

He fired, and as soon as he did, the tightly clustered torpedoes spread out, their AI detecting the threat. He took out one, then a second, and gritted his teeth as the other two hurtled harmlessly past.

Jeridan fired a couple of torpedoes back at the ship, only to have them get blown out of the sky before they even reached half the distance.

Now the Dragonflies got in range.

All three of them opened up. Warning lights flashed all over the Antikythera's schematic. The armor, weakened by the beating it had taken from that steroid-infused freighter, began to buckle under the onslaught.

Negasi focused his fire on one of the nasty little fighter ships, knowing it would be too little to change the course of the battle. If he took this one out, there remained the other two Dragonflies. Even if he took out all three—a tall order even for an ace gunner like him—that destroyer was more than a match for them. And that freighter wasn't out of the fight, either.

They were dead.

"We're not dead yet!" Jeridan said.

Had Negasi spoken out loud? Probably shrieked out loud, considering his emotional state.

"We're not dead yet," Jeridan repeated. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are approaching the surface of Jua Six, which has an interesting geological history. While the perpetual loser at chessboxing in the turret is an expert on xenoanthropology, I always make a point of studying any planet I spend time around, and I've discovered some intriguing details about this medium-sized ice world. It has, in fact, a similar geology to Eridanus Prime."

The planet loomed in front of them now, taking up almost the entire view.

Negasi yelped and shot down another torpedo.

"Get to the cacking point!" Negasi shouted.

The surface of the planet was coming up quick.

"Tsk tsk, there are children present," Jeridan said.

"Get to the cacking point!" Aurora shouted.

"Well," Jeridan went on as a red light pulsed on the readout, showing a hull breach. "Jua Six is a dead world with no atmosphere and a mantle of ice up to five kilometers thick. Only a few of the tallest mountains stick above the surface."

He swerved to dodge a torpedo, his voice calm, his hands sure and unhurried on the controls. "At some point about two million years ago, a large asteroid impacted with Jua Six, cracking that mantle into a vast network of deep and narrow canyons that zigzag across the surface in a complex and beautiful maze. A maze we're going to fly into right now."

Negasi, busy shooting down yet another torpedo, looked back at the planet just in time to see the surface barely a kilometer away, gleaming ice crisscrossed by black fractures.

Jeridan aimed right for one barely wider than the Antikythera.

Negasi screamed. Nova screamed. Aurora screamed. He was pretty sure he heard the S'ouzz scream too.