[01] Elite: Wanted by Gavin Deas Page B

tail first and lit up the main engines for a few seconds as she did. A plume of fusion-heated plasma kilometres long scoured a path for her through the wave of dronelets. When she was done, she flipped the Fer-de-Lance back around and let the point defence lasers deal with the rest.
    The
Unkindness
raced for the system of rings. Clear of the minefield, Ziva fired her own engines hard. The
Dragon Queen
had the best customised drives that money could buy but the Adder was up at maximum burn. Inside her cocoon, the
Dragon Queen
flooded Ziva’s system with adrenaline and a swarm of nanites to keep all the capillaries open in her brain while they shut off most of the blood to her arms and legs and forced her heart into overdrive. The only time Ziva had ever wished she wasn’t built the way she was had been the day she’d discovered that big men like Newman could push the limit just that little bit more. The
Dragon Queen
would grudgingly let her sustain an acceleration of about sixteen gravities if she was in the cockpit gel-couch and let it take over her blood-chemistry and circulatory system. Grudgingly.
    Even with stretched engines, the
Unkindness
was maxing at ten gravities. At that sort of acceleration, Ziva couldn’t move and couldn’t speak and the
Dragon Queen
pretty much had to fly itself. It watched her eyes and took a few basic commands from the way she moved them. Sometimes from a sequence of blinks.
    The
Unkindness
abruptly flipped, decelerating at full burn as it neared the ring system and suddenly Ziva was closing fast. The Adder fired a salvo of missiles. Ziva switched the laser targeting to her Fresnels and started taking them out before they could get close enough to fragment into sub-munitions. She held her fire on the Adder itself until she knew she could hit it exactly where she wanted to. Newman was wasting his time. He was hopelessly out-gunned. He had to see that, didn’t he?
    The
Dragon Queen
autonomously launched a salvo of interceptor dronelets. The defensive pulse lasers opened up again. A lone rogue broke through and a pinhead-sized anti-hydrogen warhead detonated a few metres from the
Dragon Queen
’s skin. The ship shuddered as its shields absorbed the sudden storm of high-energy exotic particles.
    Another few seconds and she’d be on top of him. Ziva flipped the Fer-de-Lance, matching the Adder’s deceleration. The
Unkindness
fired another salvo. By now, the two missiles she’d fired from the minefield were keeping station with him but he still wasn’t getting that he was beaten. She had one of the two missiles target the Adder’s own salvo and blew them to pieces close enough to junk his shields and scorch his hull.
Give it up, Newman
. But she couldn’t talk to him with the engines on full burn and he wouldn’t be able to answer even if he wanted to.
    The Adder’s beam laser began firing. The
Dragon Queen
twisted into corkscrewed flight, making herself harder to hit and spreading the damage as widely as she could; but a single beam laser wasn’t going to hurt a Fer-de-Lance in a hurry. Half the time the Adder was firing through the plume of her engines anyway, wasting itself.
    They were down to less than a thousand clicks between them but the Adder had almost reached the rings. Newman launched another salvo of missiles – as though he somehow hadn’t noticed what had happened to the one before.
    What the hell are you doing?
Ziva took out his salvo and this time she fired back, beaded up on the Adder’s engines, keeping the power low on her dual military X-ray lasers, not wanting to do any more damage than she absolutely had to …
    The
Unkindness
exploded as though every containment field inside its fusion core had failed at once. The
Dragon Queen
’s reactive cockpit went opaque and space turned utterly black. Displays lit up smoothly around Ziva, following her eyes. The Fer-de-Lance cut its acceleration to a more tolerable three gravities.
    ‘I didn’t hit