"All's quiet out here so far," reported Max Vasser. "Jazz wants to check out the asteroid, so we're going to--"
Her sentence was interrupted by the telltale click of a dropped carrier wave. Suddenly worried, she fiddled with the communication controls for a few long seconds but to no avail. "Jazz, I've lost contact with Carter and the others."
"Damn," hissed Jazz Phoenix. "Maybe it's just interference from the pirate ship's hull."
Max shook her head. "There was no static, just a clean break, like a dampening field suddenly going up."
"Just like around the cargo holds," observed Jazz grimly. "Dammit! This whole thing is a setup! The pirate ship's the cheese--"
"--and we're the rats!" finished Max, the terrible truth slowly dawning on her "They probably cruise around the star systems bordering on the Mulluran DMZ waiting for spies like us to come along and find them, then lure them in close with this black ship so they can spring the trap. The ultimate anti-espionage tactic -- kill the spies! And we fell for it!"
"Hook, line and sinker," rumbled Jazz, sounding very annoyed at herself for having been such easy prey. Their course of action was clear to her though. "We have to help them," she declared resolutely.
Max tempered Jazz's impulsiveness with some sound reasoning. "We have no idea what we'd be stepping into if we went in after them. We could be caught as well. We've got to come up with a plan."
They never got the chance to argue about it however. A huge orange fireball exploded between the Basilisk and Sphinx, sending them gyrating away in opposite directions, Max and Jazz tossed around inside their cockpits like a couple of beans inside maracas.
"What the--?" cried Jazz in surprise. Suckered twice in one day! I'll have to turn in my wings when we get back to the starbase! She grabbed the joystick and yanked it hard to bring her spinning fighter back under control. Checking her HUD, she made a quick assessment of the tactical situation -- the screen was full of enemy blips. "Vasser!" she called across the comm channel, "Report!"
"Bastards must have been hiding inside that big asteroid's magnetic distortion field; that's how they snuck up on us," came back the reply.
"I read twenty-four pirate fighters on my scope," said Jazz. "You want to handle them or do you want a little help?" she asked facetiously. She craned her neck around to see that Max was already banking her Banshee around to face the oncoming horde head-on.
"You can pick up any that get through me," Max replied, her voice utterly confident.
Jazz grimaced evilly, ready for the thrill of the hunt. The odds were twelve-to-one against them -- a little steep, Max's bravado notwithstanding. It would be a difficult battle, but these amateurs would rue the day they crossed Jasmine Phoenix!
As soon as the outer airlock door had closed and the airlock was plunged into darkness, Lee Carter could hear the sharp hiss of atmosphere being pumped back into the room. Somehow, she, Sam Beckett, Jo Schmidt, and Alex Dalton avoided being skewered by the wildly firing phaser beams that thickened the air inside the corridor, firing from hidden crevices along the walls, floor and ceiling. Using the sharp light from the sporadic beams, she fumble and pounded with her fist at the controls to the inner airlock door until she was rewarded with a green light and a sliver of light where the door opened onto a well-lit corridor beyond. "It's open!" she shouted above the din and chaos.
Desperate to get away from the flashing phasers, Sam, Jo and Alex pressed forward, and the four of them wound up in a tangled and bruised heap on the floor of the (thankfully) phaser-free corridor outside. Jo extricated herself enough to pound the door control with the flat of her hand, and the airlock slid obediently shut. She let her head drop back down to rest on Sam's elbow, that being the piece of anatomy directly below her in the dogpile, and breathed a deep, heartfelt sigh of relief, echoed by the other three women.
They were all singed and bruised from the ordeal inside the airlock, but there was no time to rest. Painfully, they disentangled arms and legs and picked up dropped equipment, useless and unpowered though it was. Alex was checking out her suit and observed with some surprise, "All our stuff is drained except the quantum fiber in our flight suits! The dampening field must be selective."
"They probably want us alive," commented Jo unhappily. She snapped her useless tricorder shut and stuffed it back in its belt pouch.
"In that case it's too late for me," groaned Carter from where she lay at the bottom of the dogpile.
Sam gave her a hand up, and asked, "How do we get out of here? We sure can't go back that way." She pointed back towards the airlock door and the deathtrap inside.
"Good question," replied Carter, looking up and down the hallway they found themselves in. As in the airlock, each end of the corridor was sealed by a door, the aft hatch labeled with a sign that read 'Machinery Spaces', and the forward one labeled 'Living Spaces'. "So there is room on this tub for humans," she said, pointing at the sign. "So where are they? If they're not aboard the ship, then..."
"They must be outside!" exclaimed Alex, realization suddenly dawning. "Max and Jazz are probably in trouble! We have to help them!"
"This way," said Carter, starting for the door labeled 'Machinery'. Before they got halfway there though, the door slid open and a skirmishing line of stocky wheeled robots rumbled out. Their burnished domed heads swiveled and zeroed in on the four women; metal arms tipped with blades and lasers swung around; and they began advancing menacingly.
"On second thought, let's go this way," said Carter hurriedly, reversing direction. The other three were right on her heals. When the first laser beams hit the wall, blowing out a light strip and ripping jagged, scorched tears in the bulkhead, they broke into a run, the killer robots not far behind. They barreled through the forward hatch and slammed it shut behind them. On the other side, the metal robots clanged noisily against it, sending shudders through the thick walls as they tried to break the door down.
After a few anxious minutes of determined bashing, their programming evidently decided their course of action was futile, and the noise stopped. A few seconds later though, a spot on the door brightened from its dull gray sheen to orange, then white hot. Sparks flew, and the women backed away. The burning spot stretched into a line creeping its way slowly around the outline of the door.
"They're cutting their way in!" cried Alex in dismay, fear showing in her blue eyes.
Carter looked around. There was no other way out of the room they were in -- a sort of common lounge she guessed, judging by the furniture. No escape. How were they going to fight a dozen armed robots without weapons of their own? She didn't know.
"Come one!" she shouted. "Help me stack this furniture. Maybe we can hold them off for a while."
Quickly, they began tipping over and piling up the sofas and tables, building a primitive fort to hide behind. It would buy them a few minutes at best, thought Carter, but only a miracle would save them now.
Sam had just tossed the last upended chair atop their barricade when the hatch burned through and clanged to the deck with a shattering crash, and the first waving robot arm appeared through the hole. She barely had time to dive behind the cover before the laser beams started flashing through the air, burning and cutting everything to ribbons.
Max rolled and jinked in wild unpredictable spurts. Enemy disruptor blasts flashed through the space she had occupied just moments before, sizzling the vacuum there but nothing else, and before her adversary even knew what was happening she was behind him with his fighter lined up squarely in her gun sights. A precision burst of phaser fire later and the pirate starfighter was no more, replaced by yet another rapidly expanding fireball.
It was in this manner that Max worked her way through most of the pirate ships, her vaunted esper powers giving her an unfair advantage over her opponents. The slight glimpse into the future her prescience gave her allowed her to always be one step ahead in the game; to be exactly where her opponents didn't expect her to be, popping up behind or beside instead and blasting them to Hades before they could do anything about it. She was death incarnate, reaping her bloody vengeance on them, a she-devil out for their souls.
A few of the smarter pirates turned tail and tried to run, but Jazz was there to cut them off and deal with them in her own way. Lacking Max's esper abilities, she relied on more traditional methods -- letting her targeting computer do most of the work and occasionally squeezing the trigger.
Twenty of the pirates were destroyed, and the remaining four, apparently having learned that escape wasn't an option either, decided to gang up on Jazz as a last-ditch effort to at least take one of these devils with them before they were blown out of the sky. "A little help here!" called Jazz, feeling a little nervous for the first time during this entire battle. Orange fireballs blossomed all around her cockpit as the near-hits came closer and closer, the shockwaves rattling her teeth. She jinked and rolled, yawed and pitched in every combination she could think of, but just couldn't shake these guys. The little green blip in her HUD representing Max's fighter was still a long way off -- she would have to deal with these guys on her own.
Inspiration hit her -- or maybe it was just plain desperation. She angled her vector towards the big black pirate freighter and opened up the throttle. Predictably, the four pirate fighters followed, but they were losing ground rapidly, their older planes simply no match for the engines in Jazz's Banshee. Reaching the pirate ship, she did a tight loop-the-loop around it, which placed the four smaller ships square in her sights. She pressed the trigger on the joystick and held it down. Phasers and disruptors filled space with crimson and emerald bolts, most going wild but a few finding their marks. A few stray disruptor blasts struck the freighter in the forward module, blowing a gaping hole in the hull.
The mechanical killing machines were piling through the ruined hatchway, blades flailing and lasers firing. Carter's barricade was quickly being cut to ribbons, but there was nothing any of them could do about it. In moments the robots would be upon them and then it would be all over.
To her right, Sam screamed as a laser beam shot through a gap in the piled furniture and burned an ugly gash in her non-cybernetic arm. Clutching the wounded limb, she went down, her face twisted in agony and covered in a sheen of sweat.
Carter considered making a suicide attack on the machines, but realized that it wouldn't do a bit of good. They'd simply cut her down and then proceed to do the same to her friends. But at least she'd go out fighting! She was just about to jump out from behind her cover when the entire situation changed dramatically.
A deafening explosion and shockwave from behind them knocked the four women forward into their barricade and the robots into the wall beside the burned-through hatch, then a hurricane threatened to sweep them all in the opposite direction, backwards. Carter spun around to see what was the matter, to discover a gaping hole had been blasted into the hull of the freighter, and the room in which they stood was now open to space. She thanked the fates that the quantum brains of their flight suits automatically activated the force bubbles round their heads. She had no idea what had caused the breach, but she recognized an escape route when she saw one.
"Everybody out!" she shouted.
Jo and Alex grabbed the injured Sam by the shoulders and hauled her after them as they followed Carter in a mighty leap of faith out the hull breach and into deep space. Mini-thrusters on their boots automatically kicked in and steadied their trajectory, and after a few moments of orientation, the four women jetted back to where they had parked their Banshees. The killer robots apparently were unequipped to follow them outside their ship and were left behind, waving their metallic limbs in frustration at being deprived of their kill.
Meanwhile, Max had joined Jazz in finally dispatching the remaining four Pirate fighters, and as quickly as it had begun the space battle was over; the large black Pirate freighter floated in the center of an expanding cloud of debris and Pirate bodies.
The first thing Carter heard upon climbing back into her own Banshee and sealing the cockpit canopy was the sound of Max's voice over the comm system. "Nice of you to join us, Boss, but you're a little too late. Me and Jazz went and had all the fun ourselves."
"We had a little ourselves," replied Carter. She and the others fired up their engines and lifted off from the hull of the bogus freighter. "There's just one more thing left to do."
The six reunited Banshees assumed a diamond formation and stood off from the freighter 500 miles. Their wingtips started to crackle with tightly constrained zero-point energy, and on Carter's command released it all in twelve seething, roiling sphere's of destruction, two from each Banshee. The quantum pulses shot towards their target at the speed of light, and a split second later, the black Pirate ship exploded in a brilliant display of pyrotechnics killer robots and all, nevermore to trap unsuspecting passersby.
Mission accomplished, sort of, the Banshees set course for home.
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