Phoenix Free

 

If Captain Ora Rayder was to admit one thing to herself, it would be that her ship looked funny from thirty miles up.

This thought crossed her mind as she barrelled through space, uncontrollably, with the heads up display on her helmet flashing in an angry red warning message at her - something about low oxygen, she was a little bit too drowsy to take proper notice.

The Phoenix was in the middle of a sharp maneuver, turning sharply to starboard in a way that looked slow to the human eye but was relatively quick in terms of space combat.

A medium sized frigate, the Phoenix was designed to be quickly maneuvered whilst holding her own against ships larger than herself.

The size also lent itself to a larger cargo bay which was perfect for piracy.

From outside she looked like an half-squashed tube, an overturned skyscraper almost, with a sharply pointed front leading to a long, metal ram.

At the rear of the ship the hull curved upwards and formed a vertical column which doubled up as both the rear thrusters as well as supporting the base of the rail gun which ran along the roof of the ship.

Of course, Phoenix had seen better days, poor girl.

The left side of her hull was shattered and burning, a strange white mist could be seen as the air inside was evacuated slowly, choking the crew inside.

A body was sucked out through the hole and launched into space but Ora couldn’t identify which one of her crew it was. She sucked in a gulp of the quickly disappearing oxygen and hoped it wasn’t Alani.

She liked Alani.

Phoenix was burning because of the numerous fighter crafts that were surrounding her and dropping volleys of fire across her hull in coordinated blasts.

Usually that was a problem solved by the multiple-craft defence cannons, but of course those had been disabled so they weren’t an option, and the carrier-ship that lingered in the distance had made short work of her defence barriers, which were running at low-power even before the attack had been launched.

The scene of carnage was awful enough, but it was made eerie by the absolute silence of it all, but Ora was quickly becoming unconscious, and unconscious people didn’t generally concern themselves with their surroundings.

As she began to feel her stomach churning from the force of the spin she was in, Captain Ora Rayder cast her mind back to where all of her problems had started, to see if she could pinpoint where it had all gone wrong.