Steal the Demon: A Science-Fiction Novella by Robert Roth (free novels to read txt) 📕

to match her vector. She twisted her hands inside the control zones, directing the maneuvering thrusters to spin the ship around and point the nose toward her closest pursuer while still maintaining her original course vector. She mentally assigned the heavy a targeting icon. It flashed red for several seconds as the ship’s computer crunched a storm of data, calculating mass, acceleration, speed, and the Coriolis force of orbital mechanics, before finally lighting up green. Kimiko fired one of the coil gun barrels, and a line of angel fire blazed across the blackness between them. The slug must’ve cracked a reactor when it hit, because the ship blossomed into a brief sphere of blinding virtual light before vaporizing completely.

“Splash two,” Kimiko called out as the remaining Al-Zamani craft peeled off, separating from each other in a bid to make it impossible to target more than one at a time. She flipped the ship around again to point the nose back onto their vector. “Paradox, can you give me a display of active flight vectors around Davida?”

“Affirmative,” he replied, and the main viewscreen lit up in front of her with a wireframe schematic of Davida Station. Colored lines painted themselves into the Nav display, each expanding into cone shapes as they got farther from the station, marking the current and probable vectors of all the ships in motion around the station. Instinctively, she began to plot a path that weaved through them, taking her dangerously close to the station itself. It was finally time to see just how frosty the Al-Zamani pilots really were.

“Alert,” her ship controller announced. “Missile launches detected. Two missiles inbound.”

Kimiko launched another of her drones, which immediately drew the inbound missiles’ attention and was destroyed.

“Incoming wideband transmission,” Paradox reported.

“Let’s hear it.”

“All craft, this is Davida Station Control. Be advised that a combat action is taking place within our orbital envelope. All pilots are advised that combat craft may enter active flight lanes. Message repeats. All craft-”

“That’s enough of that,” Kimiko said, and the message immediately stopped playing. The vector lines in the Nav display began to flash and move as Davida Traffic Control issued new flight vectors to dozens of ships, both inbound and outbound, and their pilots struggled to comply. It was chaos, which was precisely what she was hoping for.

A new pair of targeting alerts materialized as two heavies angled toward her from above and below Davida’s orbital plane. Kimiko quickly rolled the ship to port and then into a tight corkscrew spiral. The grav-gens valiantly fought to compensate for the maneuver, but her pilot’s couch hugged her tightly in place. A fog of slug fire rained around her, taxing the remaining strength of her defense screens. She ignored the sudden alarm as one of the screen generators flashed out, and the others overstressed themselves to compensate. Marking the nearest interceptor with a targeting icon, Kimiko unleashed a volley of particle-fire when the icon turned green. The Al-Zamani pilot tried to break off, but blast after blast smashed into the heavy until its icon flared and disappeared.

“Splash three,” Kimiko called out as she cut her thrust completely, then spun the ship toward the next closest interceptor. The coil guns each screamed in succession as Kimiko fired a pair of tungsten slugs at the enemy ship. One or both of them must’ve hit their mark, and the interceptor disintegrated into a cloud of wreckage. “Splash four.”

Suddenly the collision alarm sounded. Kimiko surveyed her display in surprise, but saw that the ship in her path, a mid system mega-hauler, was still well enough away for her to correct her course. The collision settings were clearly meant for a less-skilled pilot, and erred on the side of excessive caution. She fired the main engines, now pointing into her course vector, and quickly slowed the ship, before cutting them again and spinning the ship around nose-first. Two more of the Al-Zamani heavies were lining up on her tail, but had ceased firing, obviously wary of damaging the giant ship in their firing lane.

She fired her maneuvering thrusters, diving the Shaitan dangerously close to the cargo ship in a stunt that would’ve had most pilots shitting their pants–which the captain of the mega-hauler was probably doing at that very moment. Not that they needed to worry about her. She could smash straight into the massive craft, and they probably wouldn’t even feel it on the bridge. That gave Kimiko an idea.

“Paradox, prepare for strafing fire,” she responded. As she passed nearer to the mega-hauler, she fired the retro thrusters, quickly slowing the ship from forty-eight hundred meters per second to less than a tenth of that. Her body strained against the straps on the pilot’s couch with the force of the sudden deceleration. But, her ship dutifully compensated, adjusting the local grav-field to keep her conscious and aware. As the ship fell into the mega-hauler’s shadow, Kimiko spun the nose up and to port, exposing the starboard side CIWS guns to their massive target. “Target the container mounts on that hauler, Paradox, and commence strafing fire.”

“Commencing.”

The staccato buzzsaw of the point defense guns returned as her ship quickly passed along the hauler’s flank. Medium-distance craft like that one–which plied the trade orbits between the Belt and Mars or the Jovian System–were really just long spindles, with the bridge and crew quarters on one end, and the engineering facilities, engines, and giant drive cones on the other. The spindle’s exterior was covered with stacks of space-hardened cargo containers, which could be attached or removed while the ship was docked, and their cargo dealt with at their destination. In some cases, that hauler didn’t even need to stop, instead just dropping specific cargo containers during a slow fly-by, to be retrieved by station or orbital tugs. Kimiko had instructed Paradox to target the clamps holding the outermost layer of containers in place. Even at their leisurely four hundred meters per second cruising speed, he couldn’t hit every one of them. But he