My Angel of the Dawn (WomanxBoy, ManxBoy, Sci-Fi + Romance)

***30***

Having accepting a contract for arms delivery to Margotta Nelsa started to suspect deep down she was a romantic too. Why else did she agree? She could have chosen any other contract. She now had the luxury of hand-picking her contracts, without taking up every each one coming her way. And the payment was nothing special. But she couldn't resist, because there was a slave rebellion in progress on Margotta, and the weapons were meant for them.

Nelsa had done very few good things in her life, if any, and that particular job seemed as a nice chance to start. Life was a bloody bitch, and she, Nelsa, couldn't win against evil happening everywhere, but she could try to even the score a little. For Ariel, for herself. Of course she didn't call it that. She didn't even think about it in such terms. Just another contract, nothing special. A second-rate industrial planet with legal slave labor; orbital defense forces strong, but poorly positioned. She got used to easiness with which her baby could outrun all those cops and troopers in their big sluggish tin cans. So used, in fact, that she started to disregard them completely. That was her mistake. She should have been more careful.

Suddenly the Aurora's cockpit window was filled with a battleship's huge bulk. It was bristling with cannons which promptly opened fire. The Aurora was fired upon by Margotta's National Guard even without a warning! Maybe that was what being infamous meant, Nelsa thought clenching her teeth while she frantically maneuvered the Aurora. They could have still gone through. Ariel was at the ship's gun, returning fire, and not dishing it out every which way like the battleship, but shutting down the enemy cannons one after another. The boy was as good a gunner as he was a pilot. So together they stood a pretty decent chance. Even alone, once or twice in the past, Nelsa had been able to force her way through heavy fire.

This time it didn't work out. The situation on Margotta seemed to be way more serious than her employer had led her to believe. For one, the battleship had utilized its plasma cannons – something that simply wasn't done in such close quarters against a tiny smuggler ship. For two, a second battleship popped up and spat out three boarding skiffs, no less. Now it was to turn tail and run. Nelsa glanced regretfully at the gray planet wrapped up in clouds — so close! — and steered the Aurora away. She made a run for the nearest asteroid field, where she would lose the skiffs and hide for a few days before the next attempt.

Two skiffs quickly fell behind, but the third one stubbornly refused to get lost. Deep in her mind Nelsa felt something akin to admiration for the skiff's pilot. Very few could compete with her in space, and certainly not some regular starship troopers. Come to think of it, pretty strange that the troopers were dead set on boarding the Aurora. For orbital defense forces it would have been enough to prevent illegal landing and chase the intruder away. Why bother to capture them?

The troopers arrogantly followed the Aurora into the asteroid field. Nelsa didn't slow down: she rushed full-speed through the dense space debris of every size and shape, swinging left and right to avoid collision. Sadly, the skiff seemed to have glued itself to the Aurora's tail, never failing to repeat her maneuvers. And they kept shooting at her engines and shield generators, trying to shut them down. Ariel shot back, but the skiff presented him only his armored prow, not much of a target, how rude of them.

Ariel's voice came through in her earpiece, echoing her thoughts perfectly, "Captain, they are hell-bent on catching us, at any cost!"

"Yeah, I know," she muttered, trying to calculate a hyperspace jump to somewhere safe with one hand. Not an easy feat with her other hand on the steering controls and her other eye out for the monitors. "Bloody bastards! Back to the cockpit, pilot, and buckle up, we are going hyper in two minutes!"

Why the hell they were so bloody relentless? She wasn't used to back off, damn it to seven hells!

Ariel jumped into his chair and took control of the Aurora without being told to. Nelsa frantically tapped on the keyboard with such speed it seemed she had grown another pair of hands.

"Make a sharp U-turn and fly head-on into them, or they'll tear us a new one!" she yelled.

Two minutes to going hyper, one... The Aurora made a U-turn and flew at the collision course with the skiff. It showed no intention of making way. Ariel was skilled enough to avoid collision, if he would have to. But Nelsa's intention was to vanish into hyperspace right in front of their pursuers, a farewell spit in the face, so to say. The Aurora was still out of reach for a stun gun, and troopers usually had no stun guns, they were military, for God's sake, not cops or slavers...

Except they had. A stun wave suddenly came, invisible but unmistakable. Still too far away to cause more than a sharp headache and a fit of dizziness. Nelsa's fingers slipped erasing a whole set of data.

"Evade, lad!" she croaked, fighting the nausea.

Ariel had already anticipated her order and made a sharp turn, trying to avoid another stun wave. Too late; it caught them full-blast. Nelsa felt as if her head burst open, and everything went dark before her eyes.

She still had her finger on the launch button. For a second or two her mind was still working, her body still obeyed her. She could have pressed that button.

The thing was their hyperspace exit hadn't been properly calculated. It meant they could have jumped out anywhere at all. Maybe in a couple or years they would have found their way to a habitable planet. Maybe their life support system would have lasted that long, and they wouldn't have run out of food. Maybe. One chance in a million.

Nelsa didn't press the button. Then she ceased to feel anything.