my eyes away, focusing instead on trying to spot the station before I became a smear on its hull.
I started braking, little puffs of air slowing my progress. Acres was well ‘above’ me at this point. He was using his thrusters more and taking a much more cautious approach. Which was probably smart. I remembered his comments about the man who’d been spattered across the nose of the ship when Dad did this maneuver.
I hit my thrusters a little harder.
And then there it was, seeming so much bigger in life than it had in the images. I couldn’t gauge my distance until I recognized that the silvery blotches dotting the main hull were actually ships. The docking area was huge. There had to be room for sixty vessels. Only about a third of the bays looked occupied, but that was more than enough.
Perrault wasn’t kidding. They’d built a fleet of such size that it pretty much defined ‘overkill’. Choi knew damned well that Dad would be able to outfight them, even at long odds. So he’d stacked the odds enough that no matter what my father did, no matter how brilliant his planning, he wouldn’t stand a chance.
I continued to fall toward the thing, using little bits of thrust to slow my descent. As I got closer I could see a little more detail.
There were twenty-one ships in all. I’d missed one at first, because it was painted black and because it was so monstrously large compared to the other ships that I thought it was something else, at first glance. It dwarfed all of the others. In fact, it was perhaps as large as all the other ships put together.
Most of the other ships were identical. They looked a lot like the ship my father had built to face the pirates. Someone on Earth had been taking notes. They were of a good size, and if Earth had copied my father’s design they would be armed to the teeth and bristling with anti-missile guns for defense.
The other six were a hodge-podge. They looked like merchant class ships that had been upgraded. The missile tubes were bolted on in a way that I knew very well. We’d seen a few of the enemy ships escape the Battle for Earth, but my father and I had never been able to track them down. Choi must have tucked them away somewhere, saving them for today.
I used my thrusters to veer toward one of them. My hunch was that the best and brightest of Choi’s people would be on the biggest ship. Then he’d put good personnel on the other made-for-war vessels. The former ‘pirate ships’ would get whatever was left. They were small, too, without a lot of crew room. Lots of missiles, not a lot of hands to run things. Which made them perfect for my purposes.
If I were aiming to make some mischief down here, it would work better where no one could see what I was doing. I just hoped that Acres would see the ship I was trying to steer toward. Otherwise we were both going to be on our own out here.
I was falling fast - too fast. Technically, I wasn’t falling. The relative velocity between myself and the ship I was aiming for was high enough that I was going to break bones on impact. Physics wasn’t going to make the broken bones feel any better, though. I didn’t have enough time to slow down before I impacted the nose of the ship, so I twisted and changed my approach. I jetted off to one side just enough that I fell between the ship and the fence of girders surrounding her.
Once I was tucked into the shadows of the docking area, I felt more comfortable that I could apply maximum thrust without being spotted. I braked hard and brought myself up alongside the ship. Ever so gently, I brought my magnetic boots around and attached them to the hull.
I’d made the same impossible leap my father had. It was an exhilarating feeling. I’d managed to breach the defenses of the secret enemy base, like the hero of some action film. Now what?
I was standing on the outside of one of the missile bays. This was a converted cargo ship, and usually containers were bolted on to the sides,
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