by Mimi Riser
* * *
So it happened that the RAT fleet, plus two Titans and one idealistic young Mage, set out for Gaeas-7 in one of Kkrypt’s own warships. The added weight of the RATs’ small raiding vessels, crammed into the holds of the huge cruiser, slowed them down initially, but finally they built up enough momentum to make the jump into hyperspace. Exiting, three gal-standard days later by shiptime reckoning, proved easier.
Smash sat at the helm on the bridge with Dael and the Titans, watching the gray void of hyperspace change back to the star-spangled spectacle of space-normal. Dael strummed his lutar while Braun dozed and Bres fiddled with fine-tuning a mazer, having nothing better to do. Hyperspace had been a very boring place.
She glanced up eagerly at the large view-screen. “Which star is Gaeas-7’s sun? Can we see it from here?”
“You tell us. You’re the navigator,” Dael teased.
She gave him a frosty look.
He ignored it. “And a very beautiful one, too, I might add.”
The frost turned to ice. “You’re wasting your time, you…you pirate. I know your kind—you’ve got a girl in every port. Well, I’m not one of them.”
Dael pretended to faint with dismay. “Beautiful and heartless,” he moaned.
Splat! Bres hit him in the head with a hurled seat cushion.
“Also horribly bad-tempered,” he added with a wink.
Dael did love to live dangerously.
“You forgot to mention my dead aim.” Bres threw two more cushions. Then, finding that her ammunition had been exhausted before her temper was, she threw the mazer she’d been adjusting.
Dael ducked, and the mazer fired a short stun-blast as it struck the bulkhead behind him. The beam did no damage, as it missed hitting anything, but the noise woke Braun who’d been snoring nearby. Leaping to his feet, he glared wildly about, ready to thrash whomever the attacker might be. He looked so comical, even Bres had to laugh.
“It’s all right, Braun”—Dael choked back his guffaws—“only Bres demonstrating the proper way to fire a mazer. You see,” he continued in mock seriousness while retrieving the small weapon, “most people think you fire it by pressing this little button here. But Bres has devised a much more effective method—”
He never got to finish. Bres flew at him in a fury, chasing him off the bridge and down a passageway.
Smash and Braun doubled over with laughter.
“Where were Dael and Bres going in such a rrush?” Xu-fu asked as he walked in.
Smash and Braun laughed harder.
Xu-fu made a rude gesture and strode past them to study the scene on the viewer. Something in the clusters of stars caught his eye. He peered closer…
“Smash? I think we got company.”
“What?” Smash’s head shot up.
“Where?” Braun demanded.
A blue finger pointed.
Together the three men stared at four Fed cruisers growing larger and larger in the view-screen.
