Loyalty is a precious commodity… and like any commodity, purchasable for the right price.

  – Unknown

  Commander Justin Adamis watched quietly as the brilliant colors of Etherspace peeled back from the viewscreen, revealing the star-studded black canvas of real space. The blue lights indicating the upcoming hot exit from Etherspace flickered away, lighting up the bridge in the bright, cool white of operational lighting. The holos he’d seen always showed colored lighting on the bridge as combat was joined, but nobody would do that. During a stressful operation, good lighting was vital.

  “What’s the situation?” Adamis folded his hands into his lap, awaiting the report. His comms officer was already hard at work linking up to the nearby Azure Focus, their scanning corvette.

  His own ship, the Cleansing Sabre, had exited Etherspace mere moments after the two corvettes he’d taken with him. They’d waited so patiently for a sign of trouble, and finally one of their scouts had given a trajectory. With their restricted starmaps, Enforcers like himself could cross the higher-mana areas of space, cutting travel time by as much as half if they were lucky. Trade routes were usually the fastest available, but their waypoint had been a barren system with an unstable red dwarf. They’d made it here only a couple hours after the target, if he was correct.

  Minutes passed while the sensor readings were interpreted. The Azure Focus had an array of sensors that were far more sensitive than most, and it was their best bet to detect the strange pirate. Whatever bizarre method was being used to mask its presence had to have some weak point. If it didn’t…

  That could destabilize the entire balance of power.

  “We have something!” The comms called that out and then hesitated to add more. “Barely. The heat signature is so badly smudged they almost missed it. Doesn’t look like a ship at all, but it was moving and stood out enough they checked it anyway.”

  “Hmmn.” Adamis lifted his hands to his chin, tapping against his lips. “Can you get me an identification on model? Class? A visual, anything?”

  Obligingly, the viewscreen switched to a blurry image of what looked like a dragon in flight, thrusters burning behind it. At this distance, the magnification on the ship’s cameras couldn’t make out any details, but the shape was distinctive.

  “I’ll be damned,” Adamis muttered. “It does look like a monster. Is that a Draconis ship?”

  Hillman, the dwarf Executive Officer seated next to Adamis, snorted loudly. “It is. That’ll be about the weight of a heavy frigate, but they’re relics. Unless they’ve gutted the reactor and other things, it won’t mount many long-range weapons. They’re old tech, so the maximum burn will be about 5 G’s.”

  Adamis nodded to his XO. Hillman was into all the old ships and specs like that, so he trusted the assessment. Adamis himself knew most of the ships in use in the sector quite well, but he’d never studied up on the outdated hardware. All he knew about them is that they were an old vanity project from a few centuries ago.

  “Target is under burn at about… 2.5 G.” Another bridge officer confirmed the reading. “Orders?”

  Adamis sighed. “A heavy frigate…” His ship was a much newer model, but was only a patrol frigate with two corvettes. If he hadn’t been told the ship lacked good long-range weaponry, he’d hesitate even against a civilian frigate. This one had too many unknowns. He didn’t like unknowns.

  Much as he wanted to capture it and its strange technology, he knew he had to play it safe. They were viewing ‘old’ footage, but it wasn’t that outdated. Seconds, not minutes. The target would know they were here as well. Against an oncoming trio of Enforcers, he was sure they were already doing an emergency plot for their Etherspace Drive.

  “Fire cannons at will,” he ordered. “Torpedo control, get a solution on that ship if you can, spread of four.”

  If all of that hit the ship, there wouldn’t be anything left to investigate. Adamis was banking on it being tougher than he thought. If they could disable it enough to prevent a jump, the rest could be handled with more care. And if they managed to jump first… hopefully they could get an idea of its capabilities.

  The blazing purple of several blasts from the mana cannons joined four more from the corvettes, streaking toward the target. Adamis imagined he could also feel the launch of the torpedoes, a faint shudder every time he saw one of the lights on the viewscreen blip on a new friendly contact. He knew it wasn’t happening that way – the ship was too large, the torpedo tubes too smooth for the launch to be felt all the way to the bridge. He just liked the idea of it.

  On the viewscreen, he watched the ship burn towards the nearby planet. Mana cannons didn’t fire at lightspeed, but they were still damn close enough, so it wasn’t likely the ship could do a good course correction to dodge more than a few, at best.

  Of course, as he half-expected, the ship had a surprise. He just didn’t expect the type of surprise.

  The image was blurry, but Adamis and the crew could still make out the general features. Neck, head, wings, tail. Little lumps for the claws below. It wasn’t very clear, but distinct enough for an obvious match. It really did look like a dragon.

  What he didn’t expect was how it twisted and curled, wings altering position and the neck turning, making the whole ship seem to writhe. The thrusters lit up, and the relative velocity and vector of the ship listed on the viewscreen went crazy as it tried to get a valid reading.

  The torpedoes were still on their way, but the ship deftly dodged all but one of the cannons, leaving the glimmer of a mana shield to absorb that sole successful strike.

  “Hillman… that wasn’t a 5G turn.” Adamis muttered in a grim tone as he sat up and gripped the arms of the chair.

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  The dwarf scratched at his beard. “No… no it wasn’t. Either they’ve upgraded the internals, or the crew’s painted against the walls. Never seen a ship move like that, either.”

  The Commander sighed. “Well, maybe the torpedoes will hit. Navigation, do you have a new heading on them? Where are they running to?”

  The man at the navigation console looked up with a start, his face etched with confusion. “Sir… they’re headed for us. I think they’re attacking.”

  As soon as the ships had appeared from Etherspace, Apex knew they would be trouble.

  He’d coasted on with his stealth, just in case they couldn’t detect him, but the movement of the trio of ships already hinted that they were at least looking for him. Naven had identified one of the corvettes as a sensor platform, and warned that they could probably get his signature.

  “Apex, what are you doing? You can easily dodge long enough to escape.” Sallus asked the question, but her voice was level and without surprise, even after the twisting maneuver that had seen the blazing shots fired overhead and to the side instead of on target. The high-G maneuver had given most of the crew a lot more to worry about, but Apex couldn’t worry about that now.

  “I guess you were right about some of the Enforcers being on the take,” Naven commented. His voice held a heavy sigh, the man’s disillusionment tempered with some level of expectation. “I don’t think you should try to take on the frigate right now, Apex. You could probably win, but the chances of getting some severe damage would be pretty high.”

  The dragon grumbled, but acknowledged. “Noted. I’ll just make an example out of the corvettes, and then we can jump. Sallus, can you lay in a course?”

  “I’ll need a few minutes, I’m working on it.”

  The volleys from the mana cannons the Enforcers held were still raining down on Apex as he altered course toward the trio of ships. His own evasive maneuvers repeatedly strained the compensators in brief spurts, but that meant the bolts went wide more often than not. He couldn’t see the shots coming, but they were so far away they couldn’t see where he was – only where he’d been. They had to saturate the area and hope.

  Relying on hope against an apex predator was a losing strategy.

  The ships were still dozens of light-seconds away, which was close on a map, but hours away for ships. Even at his best sustained burn, the ships were hours away and already starting to split their formation in an attempt to catch him in a crossfire. His own mana cannons fired a few shots, but the gunners were still inexperienced, and these were military ships, so had far better inertial compensation than the freighters and patrol craft he’d been preying upon. They could maneuver, and with seconds between the shot fired and the shot reaching the target, it probably wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t used to this. Usually when engaging an enemy, he was already close enough that getting into melee range was a matter of seconds or minutes. It had already been thirty minutes of closing the distance, and he wasn’t even halfway there. He’d also have to slow down before he hit if he wanted to really engage the enemy. In the meantime they could keep firing and hope to get lucky… though the barrage had stopped in the moment.

  Apex mulled over the problem as he made small adjustments to his flight path to keep the evasion going. He’d have to consider ways to solve this with his limited mana circuits. Long-distance space battles weren’t just difficult and slow-paced, they went against his fighting style.

  “Torpedoes incoming.” Naven announced the threat calmly, falling into his professional tone. “Looks like they’re heat seekers.”

  Apex grunted at that. He controlled the turret on his back, and was able to shoot down two of them after a flurry of bolts. His tail swung about, firing the plasma drill to one side, then down and doing so again, hoping to muddle his heat signature more. He still had a low-level cloak going, so he’d have to hope that was enough.

  One of the remaining two streaked past wide, allowing a quick bolt to detonate it as well. The last one exploded nearby, and Apex growled as the mana shield flared. Nothing else happened aside from some faint, irritating tapping sensations at his side, which confused him for a moment.

  “Looks like they’re using newer torpedoes. You lucked out.” Naven’s voice spoke a few seconds after the near-hit. “They’re meant to pierce the newer composite armors. That old steel plating of yours works better against them, but they likely have something else available that can work against your plating better. Be careful.”

  Another grunt, but Apex saw the problem. A few minutes later, he cut the forward thrust, but kept with the small evasive burns, and regular, brief high-G burns to slow down. He was glad now that his body had no blood to pump, because the ‘thrill’ of this attack had long since faded. He could appreciate the strategy involved, but Apex rapidly found the actual combat rather… dull. Geometry and waiting he could do, but combat should involve more ripping and tearing.

  He resolved to work more on his cloaking. Already, he’d refined the technique to be much better, but obviously it wasn’t good enough yet. If he could identify what points in his mana circuitry were the problem, perhaps he could have Sallus prioritize upgrading those.

  In the meantime, he spent the next hour alternating between dodging, deceleration burns, and theorizing ways he could avoid this monotonous approach in the future. “Maybe we should have run just so I didn’t have to bother with all this.” The grumbling wasn’t sent to the bridge though. He really did want to put the fear of a dragon into these people who dared interfere with his vengeance.

  He’d make it quick.

  Once Apex was within one light-second, the mana cannon barrage started up again. He’d been practicing his evasion this last week, so they still had trouble leading the right amount to actually hit him. All those drills had been useful, after all. They also hadn’t sent more torpedoes, but a few moments later he was within missile range for one of the corvettes and the frigate. He felt the tickle in his senses as the guidance systems fanned over his body and across the shield.

  He didn’t bother to try to confuse them this time. The missiles streaked toward him, locked on, but he’d already found his prey. One last powerful deceleration burn pulsed out from his thrusters, and then he was upon the sensor corvette. It was odd, attacking his prey while flying backwards, but he was getting used to the odd maneuvers of space.

  His action was almost mechanical as his claws sunk into the armored hull. Apex was working through angles and possibilities, his thoughts wandering toward how to handle this situation better in the future. He wasn’t even bothering to think about how his tail drill burned through the engines to cripple the corvette.

  He also didn’t really think too hard about how the frame of the smaller ship started to buckle and come undone under his claws when he fired his own thrusters again, putting some torque on the ship from another direction. He released a moment later and engaged a full burn again, letting the missile salvos from frigate and remaining corvette detonate against the mutilated and engine-dead hull of their own ally that he’d thrown up as cover.

  “Okay Sallus, let’s go,” Apex rumbled. He dropped the mana shield during the explosion and put on the best cloak he could muster, sheathing himself in a befuddling aura. One of the frantically-firing mana cannons caught him on the ‘belly’ as he switched over, but the damage was superficial over the heavily-armored section.

  An information box overlaid his vision telling him coordinates were locked in, and he jumped to Etherspace, leaving behind the drifting wreckage of the corvette as a warning.

  These ships were indeed more formidable. He’d have to come up with new tactics quickly, or resign himself to running away more often.

  Mission Accomplished

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