Ten against one.

  The pirates closed from three directions, their mismatched hulls bright against the dark. Behind me, the Cymatic Halo pulsed, a beautiful and deadly field of black glass and blue lightning. Ahead, the gas giant hung like a bruise in space, its gravito-magnetic heartbeat rippling through the ring system in waves I could feel caressing the hull through the neural port.

  The interdiction field hummed through my sensors. No hyperspace. No Cheatlight. For the next hour, we were stuck here.

  Too bad for you guys, I'm the hunter here.

  "Good thing we downloaded the Reizen's databases," Rosalia said, her fingers dancing across her console. "Cross-referencing vessel signatures now." A pause. "They all have bounties."

  "How much are we talking?"

  "Not fantastic, but significant. Enough to cover expenses and then some." Another pause. "Nicolas, the bounties specify 'dead or alive.' There is no requirement for restraint."

  "I don't think there's any other kind of bounty for pirates."

  "I must admit, you are most certainly right."

  Let's earn my first payday.

  Something warm spread through my chest, not quite pride, not quite excitement. More like... arrival. This was what I'd trained for in Life Among the Stars. This was the fantasy that had consumed years of my life. Pirate hunting. Bounties.

  And now it's real.

  "Ten contacts total," Rosalia continued, her tactical display mirroring mine. "Five approaching from port-dorsal. That is the largest group. Three from starboard. Two from below, holding position."

  I studied the sensor data. Most of the ships were exactly what I'd expected: cobbled-together hulks, mismatched components grafted onto salvaged frames. But the two hanging back were different. Cleaner lines. Purposeful silhouettes.

  Ninja rule applies. The more enemies, the less dangerous each one becomes. They'll get in each other's way, hesitate to fire when friendlies are in the line of fire, probably have no real coordination.

  The two hanging back worry me more than the eight charging in.

  "I'm going for the big group first," I said. "Five on one sounds unfair." I let my teeth show. "For them."

  "You intend to charge directly at five hostiles."

  "They're expecting a scared rabbit. Let's give them a wolf instead."

  I redirected power to forward shields and propulsion, feeling the ship respond through the neural port like an extension of my own body. The Quillon drive hummed with building energy, plasma channels shaping themselves for maximum thrust.

  The Mahkkra surged forward.

  G-forces pressed me into the seat. Not crushing, but insistent, despite the inertial dampeners. A reminder that physics still applied, even in a ship designed to bend the rules. Through the neural port, I felt the shields strengthening, weapons charging, every system primed and ready.

  The pirates' comm chatter flooded my audio feed. Unencrypted, of course.

  "Wait? Is he coming at us?"

  "What kind of ship is that? I don't recognize the profile!"

  "Hold formation! He's one ship, we're five!"

  Noobs. Broadcasting tactical information on open channels.

  I didn't fire immediately. My heavy lasers outranged theirs. I could have started picking them off at a thousand kilometers, but I wanted them committed. Confident. Unable to scatter before it was too late.

  Come on. Come closer. Get confident. Think you've got me outnumbered.

  That's it. Just a little more...

  Range closed. Two hundred kilometers. One hundred. The neural port fed me targeting solutions, probability cones blooming in my awareness. Their formation was tight. Too tight. Classic amateur mistake. They'd get in each other's way when things got chaotic.

  Now.

  My heavy lasers spoke.

  The lead pirate's shields flared. A flash, and a ripple of color that lasted maybe half a second before it collapsed. The beam carved through his cockpit before he could react. His ship tumbled, then bloomed into expanding debris.

  Splash one.

  The formation broke. Too late. I rolled starboard, tracking the ship trying to flee right. A two-second burst punched through his engine block. He tumbled, then bloomed.

  Splash two.

  "He's too fast! What the..."

  "BREAK BREAK BREAK..."

  One dove beneath my plane. I went inverted, pulled through, the split-S slamming me down into my harness. My vision tunneled from the G-forces. Blood drained from my brain, the world went grey at the edges. I clenched my core muscles, forced air into my lungs, kept my targeting reticle on him. Trigger pull. Flash.

  Splash three.

  The fourth tried to break left. I triggered the anchorfield thrusters and felt the gut-wrenching lateral slam that would have been impossible for any conventional ship. The Mahkkra didn't turn. It pivoted, creating a momentary anchor point in spacetime and pushing against it. The g-forces hit like a hammer, my ribs compressing, breath forced from my lungs. But I was on his tail before he'd completed his turn.

  Behind me, I heard a wince coming from Rosalia. Sorry, but I've got to stay focused on the fight right now. I'll try to warn you next time.

  I hit the trigger. His shields collapsed. His ship followed.

  Splash four.

  The last one was different. Better ship. Better movement patterns. My sensors tagged an energy drain net emitter on his hull. Nasty equipment that could sap my shields if I got too close.

  Don't want to dance with that one.

  I felt the torpedo tube cycle through the neural port.

  The torpedo streaked across the void. He tried to evade. Too slow. The warhead detonated against his shields, overwhelming them in a flash of released energy, and when the light cleared, there was only debris.

  Splash five.

  Twenty-three seconds. Five ships to debris.

  "Five contacts eliminated," Rosalia managed, her voice slightly unsteady. "Time elapsed: twenty-three seconds."

  "Told you." I was breathing hard, but grinning. "Unfair. For them."

  I took a moment to assess. Shields holding. Weapons nominal. Torpedo count: seven remaining. The pirate comms were a chaos of fear and disbelief. Filled with conflicting orders, panicked shouting, someone praying in a language I didn't recognize.

  "The remaining vessels are recalculating approach vectors," Rosalia reported. "They appear... hesitant."

  "They should be. What about those two in the back?"

  "Holding position. Observing." A pause. "Nicolas, those two concern me more than the others. Their movement patterns suggest actual training."

  The remaining pirates didn't give me time to breathe.

  "Missile launch!" Rosalia's voice cracked. "Multiple contacts. Twelve... No, sixteen... Correction. Thirty-five inbound, at minimum. Mixed guidance systems. Some are hunter-seekers."

  I relaxed. The situation felt familiar. The Mahkkra had countermeasures, but not enough for that many missiles at once. They were trying to saturate our defenses. Standard tactic.

  "Countermeasures?" Rosalia asked with a slight trembling in her voice.

  "Nah. Too many missiles. It's a saturation volley. Don't worry. I know what to do."

  Use the terrain. When overwhelmed, always put something between you and the incoming doom. Good thing I came here to surf those waves. The halo will be perfect.

  "Hold on to something."

  "Nicolas, what are you..."

  "We're going in."

  I dove toward the ring system at maximum thrust.

  The rings swallowed us whole. One moment, open space. The next, we were threading between mountains of obsidian glass, each chunk larger than the Mahkkra, all of them moving. Rising. Falling. The pulse hadn't hit yet, but I could feel it building through the neural port, a slight backward pressure in the ship's frame.

  A sound from the co-pilot's seat. High, sharp. Not quite a scream.

  "Nicolas! We are going to... there is no... the trajectory is..."

  Blue-white lightning flickered in my peripheral vision. Two rocks kissed, and electricity arced between them in a cascade of sparks that could have vaporized us if we'd been fifty meters to port.

  "I know what I'm doing."

  "You cannot possibly..."

  "Rosalia." I kept my voice level despite the chaos outside. "I've run thirty-seven simulations. I know these waves. Trust me."

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Sharp course corrections. Three Gs, four Gs, the harness cutting into my shoulders as I weaved through gaps that seemed to close as fast as they opened. The neural port fed me a constant stream of data: rock positions, velocities, the building charge of the next pulse.

  The pulse came.

  I felt it through the ship. It came like a ripple in the sensors, a subsonic boom that passed through the hull. Around us, the rings responded. Obsidian chunks surged upward, patterns shifting, gaps opening and closing like the jaws of some vast organism.

  I rode it. Dove with the trough, climbed with the peak, threaded between colliding masses as lightning bloomed in chain reactions across kilometers of space.

  Behind me, the missiles died.

  One caught between two rocks, crushed. Another flew straight into a lightning arc and detonated. Three more lost guidance entirely, spiraling into the dark, their tracking systems overwhelmed by electromagnetic interference. The few survivors emerged from the interference cloud, still tracking. But I was already kilometers ahead, lost in the maze of black glass. They did not make it through the next wave.

  "I..." Rosalia's breathing was ragged. "You did that. You actually..."

  "Told you. I know what I'm doing."

  "I... The training flight. Even your flight recordings. I could not imagine..." She stopped, visibly collecting herself. "Status report. Shields at eighty-two percent. No structural damage. The pursuing vessels have entered the ring system but are maintaining distance."

  She's holding together. Barely, but holding. That's more than most would manage.

  The sensor shadows that had hidden the pirates worked both ways.

  I went dark. Minimal emissions, passive sensors only. The electromagnetic interference that had confused the missiles now hid me from my hunters. Three ships from the second group, designated them as Group Beta by Rosalia, were sweeping the area in formation.

  These weren't the cobbled-together junk I'd destroyed earlier. Clean lines. Military surplus, probably stolen. An old Imperial patrol craft, refitted. A Kingdom interceptor with oversized engines. A third that the computer didn't recognize, angular and fast-looking.

  They're not coming at me one at a time. Actual coordination. Actual training.

  "They are conducting a standard search pattern," Rosalia reported, her voice steadier now. "Sweeping vectors suggest they expect you to flee toward the system edge."

  "What if I don't flee?"

  A pause. "Then they would need to collapse their formation to pursue. That would create... openings."

  That's my copilot.

  "Keep track of them. Highlight their position and potential trajectories in my display."

  I waited. Watched. The pulse rhythm was my clock now: ninety seconds between waves, predictable as a heartbeat. The angular ship was running point, ten kilometers ahead of his wingmen. Sensor shadow on three sides.

  There.

  I came out of the dark like a ghost.

  My lasers punched through his aft shields before he knew I was there. The first burst collapsed his defenses. The second carved through his engine block. His ship tumbled, venting atmosphere, and the debris caught a lightning arc and bloomed into white fire.

  "Contact! Contact! Where did he..."

  "Six o'clock high! He's on my six!"

  "Break left, break left!"

  The Kingdom interceptor was on my tail now, laser fire missing my starboard shields by a hairbreadth. Good pilot. Fast reflexes. But he didn't know the waves like I did.

  I saw the convergence coming. Two obsidian mountains drifting toward each other, piezo-electric charge building between them. The gap was shrinking. A hundred meters. Eighty. Sixty.

  I punched through at thirty meters, the Mahkkra's hull scraping static discharge off both surfaces. The hairs on my arms stood up, the ship's frame groaning with accumulated charge.

  He tried to follow.

  The rocks met. Lightning erupted, a cascade of blue-white fire that consumed everything behind me. When my aft sensors cleared, there was nothing but expanding plasma.

  "Two contacts eliminated." Rosalia's voice was almost steady. Almost. "One remaining from the secondary group."

  "Yeah. And I know exactly where he..."

  "BREAK! Break NOW!"

  I didn't think. My hands moved, yanking the controls hard port, anchorfield thrusters firing. The Mahkkra slammed sideways so hard my vision greyed, blood pooling in places it shouldn't, the world narrowing to a tunnel of darkness with a bright spot in the center.

  Railgun slugs tore through the space I'd occupied a half-second before.

  Railguns. In a fighter?

  Group Gamma had arrived.

  The first ship defied every design principle I knew.

  It was a sphere. Just a sphere, maybe ten meters in diameter, with half-spherical attachment points studding its surface. Four sported propulsion units and each one could rotate independently across the entire surface of the main body. Two more held weapon mounts. Another carried what looked like a partial shield generator.

  Partial shields. Maybe forty percent coverage at any given time. Repositionable, but never complete.

  It was tiny. It was ugly. And it moved like nothing I'd ever seen. It could spin, pivot, accelerate in directions that seemed to change every half-second.

  Piloting that thing would be a nightmare. The disorientation alone would drive most pilots mad.

  Which means whoever's inside it is either crazy or very, very good.

  Part of me, the part that lived for the pure joy of flight, felt a pang of envy. The maneuverability on that thing had to be incredible. Maybe better than the Mahkkra. Racing through an asteroid field in something like that, feeling every axis of rotation respond instantly to thought...

  I want to fly one of those someday.

  But the tactical part of my brain was already cataloging weaknesses. Limited firepower. Those weapon mounts were small, probably light lasers at best. And that partial shield meant there was always an exposed angle.

  Pure racing machine. Not a proper combat ship. Beautiful, but fragile.

  If I can catch him with his shield facing the wrong way, even once, he's done.

  The second ship was almost the opposite. Triangular, like a scaled-up version of an Earth fighter jet, like a Rafale stretched to twenty-five meters. But the symmetry was wrong. One fuselage slightly off-center, a second smaller fuselage alongside it that ended in a shape that screamed "main weapon."

  Spinal-mount cannon. So you're the railgun guy.

  Sturdier than the sphere-ship. Less agile. But built around a gun designed to vaporize things in a single shot.

  A mosquito to occupy me while the big gun gets a firing solution. Classic coordination.

  The Hammer is the real threat. But the Mosquito is the lock that keeps me from dealing with it.

  The sphere-ship came at me like a wasp on stimulants.

  I rolled port. It matched, somehow inverting its thrust vector mid-maneuver. I dove. It followed, spinning to keep its weapons tracking. Every time I thought I'd lined up a shot, it jittered sideways, changing direction with no apparent regard for momentum or pilot comfort.

  How is he not passing out? Those G-forces should be...

  I tried to catch him from an unexpected angle, snap a shot at his unshielded flank. But he was ready for it. The partial shield rotated with my attack vector, always interposing itself between my lasers and his hull.

  Damn. He's good. Really good.

  "Railgun charging!" Rosalia's voice was strained. "Three seconds!"

  I slammed the controls into a split-S, throwing us into a dive. The slug, accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, ripped past overhead, close enough that warnings screamed through the neural port.

  "That was close."

  "Too close." I was breathing hard. "We need to change the equation."

  Another pass. Another attempt to find the gap in his defenses. He spiraled past me, lasers scoring my port shields, and I caught a glimpse of his unprotected starboard quarter, there for just a fraction of a second before the shield rotated back.

  There. That's the window. Half a second, maybe less.

  I just need to force him into a situation where he can't rotate in time.

  But not now. Not with the Hammer lining up another shot. Not with my shields already at sixty percent and falling.

  Then both enemy ships disengaged, climbing rapidly out of the ring plane.

  Why would they...

  Every system screamed.

  Shield strength dropped: fifty, forty, thirty, ten, zero. My Quillon drive stuttered. Power output crashed. The Mahkkra shuddered like she'd been gut-punched.

  "Energy spike!" Rosalia was frantic, pulling data. "Origin: one of the pirate installations in the outer ring! Some kind of directed disruption field. It flooded the entire combat zone!"

  They lured me in here. Drew out the fight until I was deep in the halo. Then triggered their trap.

  These aren't amateurs. This is a coordinated operation.

  Shields: down, slowly regenerating. Quillon drive: forty percent output. Weapons: functional. Position: deep in the halo, surrounded by oscillating rocks, with two ace pilots above me and one survivor from Group Beta somewhere nearby.

  If they come back down now, I'm dead.

  Unless I killed the thing that had crippled me.

  The quantum singularity torpedo. It has an annihilation radius larger than the base's safe zone. If I can get close enough to launch...

  Close enough means threading the needle with forty percent thrust. One mistake and we're dead.

  "I'm going for the base."

  "The base?" Rosalia's voice cracked. "Nicolas, our propulsion is... we cannot maneuver..."

  "We can. You worry too much."

  "The waves will..."

  "I know."

  I pushed the crippled Mahkkra into the halo's heart.

  Every maneuver was agony. Forty percent thrust meant slower reactions, wider turns, less margin for error. I compensated by using the Anchorfield Thrusters as propulsion instead of just vector adjustment. The rocks rose and fell around us and the lightning chains bloomed in cascades of blue-white fire.

  "Collision imminent on port bow!"

  I saw it. Adjusted. The obsidian chunk scraped past close enough to leave paint on our hull.

  "Nicolas, we are going to die... the trajectory is impossible..."

  "It's not."

  "We cannot! There is no margin, even for you... "

  She was hyperventilating. I could hear it through the comm. Her training was cracking under the strain of sustained terror.

  "Rosalia. Listen to me. Take a breath."

  "I am trying to..."

  "One breath. That's all. We're going to make it. But I need you focused."

  A ragged inhale. Then another.

  "...I am focused."

  "Good. Now tell me when the base is in range."

  We emerged from the worst of it. The base was visible now. A structure built into an asteroid, surrounded by the relative calm of a wave-interference zone. Sensor dishes. Docking clamps. And the unmistakable shape of a heavy weapon emplacement.

  "Disruption weapon charging!" Rosalia shouted.

  "Not this time."

  I felt the torpedo tube cycle through the neural port. The quantum singularity warhead streaked away. Pure annihilation compressed into a package the size of a loaf of bread. Its drive signature brilliant against the dark.

  I'd seen quantum singularity weapons in Life Among the Stars. The game rendered them beautifully.

  Reality was different. Reality was worse.

  For a fraction of a second, a black hole existed where the base had been. Light bent around it, the stars behind distorting into rings, the pirate installation simply ceasing as matter fell into an event horizon that should have been impossible to create.

  Then the singularity collapsed. The reversal was violent. A white-hot flash as captured mass converted directly to photons. The equivalent of a small sun briefly ignited in the ring system.

  When my vision cleared, there was nothing left. Not debris. Not atmosphere. Not even dust.

  Just a gap in the asteroid field where something had once been.

  Six torpedoes remaining. That was worth it.

  My shields were climbing. Forty percent. Forty-five. The Quillon drive hummed back to full power, the dampening effect finally dissipating.

  For three seconds, I let myself believe we'd turned this around.

  Then the aces dropped back into the halo.

  The sphere-ship came first, spiraling down through the debris field with that impossible, insect-like motion. The triangular ship followed, its spinal weapon already charging, the energy signature bright enough to light up my threat display.

  They'd watched me vaporize their base. Their friends. Their operation.

  Now they were coming to return the favor.

  Round two.