Kyle grimaced, closing his eyes as Billy carefully adjusted the sling. “...Fuck.”

  “Not the first time, I take it?”

  “First time I ever had to kill someone with a sharpened chunk of metal. Maybe the thirtieth time I broke a bone. I’ve got a kit for it in medbay. But right now I mostly need…”

  Zeke stepped into the bay… carrying a much more slender frame… one with a more spindly appearance, a dull black and yellow coloration, and… actual fingers on the hands.

  “That.”

  He set it down in front of Kyle. “You got it from here? Or…”

  “Yessir.”

  He nodded slowly… as he backed away, trying to avoid looking at the trail of blood on the floor, or the buzzing of a scrub brush.

  As the maintenance drone started scrubbing the bloodstained floor where Yumi had just been, and Kyle carefully made a variety of small adjustments to the engineering frame, Zeke settled back into the captain’s chair, frowning.

  “Okay. So. Obviously, we should just get the fuck out of here and let everyone know exactly whats going on. But… I’m assuming Yumi deleted all the proof, since she’s the one who recorded it all to begin with?”

  Kyle glanced up. His left arm was in a sling, and he had yet to finish getting the more narrow, thinner, frame set the way he wanted it. “Honestly, even if we don’t have any proof, we should just get the hell out. The Empire could show up any second now, bent on cleaning up all proof anything happened or even existed.”

  Billy stared at the last of the blood-stain that was being scrubbed away… and then the drone smoothly stepped off the bridge, on to some other task. “...But they’re gonna come here and wipe out all the mining colonies. Thousands of people, just to keep a secret.”

  Zeke sighed. “And we can’t stop them. At best, we could rescue that one executive and a few others and get the hell out.”

  Kyle gently stepped into the engineering frame… and pressed a few keys. “Ahh… I need to block-off the nerves in my left arm for a while, so I can just use the frame as an arm. Billy, that kit I mentioned? Its in a green bag in the medbay. Could you get it for me?”

  He glanced at the captain, who nodded… and immediately stepped off the bridge at a jog.

  Zeke glanced at him. “So. Mister Smith. Can you get a read on what the Empire said to her?”

  He slowly shuffled over to the console in the new frame, checking it to make sure it was all working properly… and then settled in at Yumi’s chair.

  “Let’s see. She bypassed my security and locked down the console, but….” He reached down, and slid open a hidden panel on the right side… pressing a cable up against it. After a few moments, he started making a twisting motion.

  “There’s a hardware security layer I put in before I let anyone come on board. I can essentially rewind all activity on any of the consoles and see…. Ahh. There we go.”

  He brought up the message chain.

  “Okay, so… Lets start at the beginning.”

  He stared at the display for a moment… and looked at the chair where Tommy’s corpse had been.

  “...She killed him because his implant wasn’t advanced enough? I’d hoped it was something like him being drug resistant or….”

  Zeeke sighed. “If an implant is fully set properly? If the person is willing… usually because its a choice between that or death… you can put software in there to restrict their ability to access certain memories. But if it isn’t…”

  He shook his head. “Okay. We’ve got a timeline. We’ve got… thirty hours. Did she delete all the proof?”

  “...I can see the steps she took, but not the sensor recordings themselves. I’ve already got a drone crawling on the hull to replace the antenna. For her to keep sending messages….”

  Kyle frowned. “There needs to be some other transmitter around here, and one of the comm buoys has been going back and forth for her. I wonder…”

  Zeke rose to his feet, and gave a short nod. “Okay. So. We’ve got incoming. We got no sensors report of the dragon… and we should be out of the system in 24 hours. We absolutely cannot save everyone. We aren’t equipped to kill an Empire fleet.”

  “...They only way they won’t wipe the whole system to keep the secret is if the secret is already out. How far out is Jenny?”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Kyle glanced at the sensors display. “Less than thirty minutes.”

  “Get your arm sorted as best you can, and figure if there’s anything else we can do to help kill a dragon. We’re going to get together once she gets back and decide from there.”

  ***

  The meeting was a bit more somber. Between Kyle’s injury and the two empty spots, the crew was a fair bit less chipper as Jenny clambered out onto the bridge, stretching, her silver hair damp with sweat.

  As she glanced around at the crew, she looked to Zeke. “So. Captain Rush. Whats the call? We just getting the hell out?”

  “Lets put it to a vote.”

  Zeke looked around at the remaining crew. Kyle, Clarice, Billy, and Jenny. Five left out of seven. Not gonna look good on his record. “We’ve got three options here. The ship owner only had one stipulation to cancel me being in charge, which was if the contract was wrong about the threat level he could just order us home. If he says we go home, we go home. But none of you signed up for this kind of risk. So…”

  He inhaled deeply. “We can make transmissions to talk about the dragon, and warn others about whats going on… but not only can the Empire fake things here to make it look like pirates, or even we, are the villains, but our story is a bit absurd on its face. Nobody’s seen spaceborne life bigger than a barnacle before. A bit of credits changing hands and the story flops, and we end up in prison.”

  He cracked his knuckles, folding his hands together. “The only way anybody is gonna believe us is if we bring the dragon’s corpse, or some of its eggs, with us. It followed Jenny for hours. So if we lure it out, we can steal some of its eggs and go. If the Empire knows we’ve got the corpse, or some eggs, it knows it can’t cover-up events by killing the colonies. Instead…… its gonna try to hunt us down and kill us before we bring the proof to civilization.”

  “So for option two, we try to kill it, if it doesn’t work, Jenny leads it away and we steal samples, or eggs.”

  “Finally… we can just negotiate and accept the memory restrictions. Us being cooperative witnesses will be valuable to them. Maybe we can even get them to do the same to the colonists instead of just wiping them out. These are mining colonies, dangerous places to work, so the number of kids or people without implants is gonna be really low.”

  The group all looked at each other. “So. Best odds of saving everyone… and making a nice profit selling a rare exotic animal corpse… or eggs… is option two. Option one, we’re probably marked criminals for life… nothing new for the Rush clan. Option three, we pray the Empire is reasonable and the colonists cooperative.”

  Kyle nodded. “I vote we kill the damn thing. I’ve been putting together our options, and in a few hours I can modify our missiles and mines to do a better job. In…. six or seven hours, if I get help from a couple of people to move things, we can get a volley together that… if Yumi was right about this thing… might actually kill it.”

  Jenny started to raise a hand… and then paused. “Fuck it. Lets give it a shot. We can always run the fuck out after.”

  Zeke nodded. “Well then. According to the messages, reinforcements arrive in… twenty-nine hours. Jenny, if you can figure out something to make Poisseux more kinetic-oriented, go for it. Everybody else, help Kyle get the mines and missiles ready. I’m gonna talk to the folks running the place, and arrange a meet-up; if all else fails, we’re gonna evacuate as many as we can and arrange for a few eye-witnesses to the dragon attack outside our crew. The Empire can still suppress things, but we can make it harder to paint us as terrorists… and get paid to do a few evacuations.”

  ***

  The Valkyrie-class fighter was a beautiful piece of engineering, even if she were a century-old design. With a single forward-mounted pulse laser, and a second turret-mounted one on her top which could either be slaved to the main steerage or allowed to swivel and aimed by someone in her second seat, she had decent firepower against other fighters, mediocre against other gunships… and each of the two flat sides of the blade-shaped craft had a rack of six 80mm missiles that could be fired one by one, or all at once.

  These could be loaded down with all sorts of fun munitions to allow a fighter to sink her teeth into a heavier target. Except… all of them relied on heat. Plasma, bomb-pumped lasers… the only things that they could use here were kinetics.

  Which meant… that the best option she had was going to be anti-small-craft ‘Flak’ missiles.

  Jenny stared at the ordinance, frowning… even as Kyle stepped forward… looking weird, with one arm strapped to his torso, the frame’s delicate hands moving on its own, pushing a cart towards her… with a gatling gun resting on it.

  “This is one of the spares for the Mars-class drones. It’ll be ungainly as all hell, but if you drill a hole through the upper hull, you can mount a drum of needle spikes in the back seat, slap this baby in place of the pulse laser… and turn it around to shoot at the beastie as you get the fuck out.”

  “...You want me to mount this piece of crap onto my beautiful Poisseux?”

  “Yup. Also… you’ll need to hit dead-on, none of this ‘area of effect’ stuff…. But we can convert a flak round into a sabot; basically instead of firing a whole cloud of shards… it just accelerates one really big gyrojet spike that just keeps going faster til it hits… or misses. I have no idea how well it’ll work. But… worth a shot. We can even turn them backwards… so you can attract the thing’s attention, start running away… and then launch all of them once its following.”

  “...Six forward, six back.”

  “Up to you. I’m gonna be rigging up all the drones, swapping warheads… there’s some instructions for mounting the sabot on the cart, if you want to do that, and if you unscrew the pulse laser from the turret mount… the drones will help move it.”

  She slowly shook her head. “...Alright. I guess if anyone is gonna deface my baby, its gonna be me. You’re paying to put her back right after.”

  The boy just headed off to work on something else in the cavernous bay; working with Zeke’s cousin on something to do with the warheads. Jenny sighed… and pulled a multitool off the top of the cart, climbing up onto her fighter to get started. This was gonna be rough… and ugly.

  If she’d wanted to be strapping random guns to ships, she would’ve joined the rest of the Rushes in being a pirate.

  As she carefully disconnected the three different power supplies for the laser, a spider-like drone crawled forward… picking up the gatling gun and raising it up, standing beside the fighter, waiting… she shook her head as she gently slid the weapon free.

  A remodeled century-old fighter. A two century old gatling gun. And if they took too long, they’d be facing off against brand new Empire-tech ships. This… was just stupid. They were gonna die, and they deserved to.

  ***

  “Okay then. We’re about as ready as we’re gonna be. The old flak shells have been loaded into the mines. The missiles, both on the combat drones and the big ones have just big pointy solid-core sabot rounds. The Sapper herself isn’t gonna be involved in this fight, just all the mines and missiles, so I didn’t do anything to her guns. But…”

  Kyle looked at the others. “We’re gonna port in, with all the missiles and drones already out, strapped to the hull. Dump it all. The drones put it in position, and we hide behind a rock. After that….. We take our shot. And if the thing runs off after the Poisseux again? I keep one drone in reserve… it sneaks in… and we steal some eggs.”

  Zeke gave a slow nod. “Well then, mister Smith. Does anyone else have any ideas, anything else for us to do that might make a difference?”

  “That’s about it, sir.”

  Billy nodded.

  “Good. There aren’t any FTL-capable ships in the system. The executive has grabbed a mining ship and is headed…. Here.” Zeke pointed at a spot outside the furthest asteroid belt.

  “He’s bringing some gear to strap himself to us. If we fail to get the dragon, we’re getting him. And hopefully some eggs. And getting the hell out. Jenny…. If that happens, run for the same spot. You’ll be our last pickup before we get out of the system.”

  He settled into his chair. “Lets go slay ourselves a dragon.”