Starship Alexander by Jake Elwood

stopped at the same instant. I bet they used some kind of EMP weapon. Fried all the electronics."
    Sally looked at him, wide-eyed.
    "I guess that's the first thing they'll do." He squinted at his screen. "I bet we're already in range. So it's too late to run. If I start the engines they'll fry us." He tried to look confident. "Don't worry. I don't think they see us."
    The console beeped again.
    "What's that beep?" Roberts demanded.
    "They made a course correction."
    "Does it mean they saw us?"
    Kasim gestured at him to be quiet. It's not a patrol. It knows we're here. It's coming for a closer look.
    But it doesn't know. If it knew we were a ship, it would have fried us already.
    Wouldn't it?
    He had maddeningly little information, he realized. Guesswork and supposition, mostly. But one thing he knew for sure.
    The enemy ship was coming closer.
    So what can I do about it? If the shuttle had guns, I could put up a fight. Well, for a second or two, until he fried all my electronics. Or just blew up the ship, or whatever they do.
    He's almost on top of us. What can I do?
    The alien was directly below them, or he would have tried to spot it through the window. It had to be a good ten kilometers away, still too far to see without the shuttle's sophisticated cameras, but it was closing rapidly. When would it recognize the shuttle? How long would it take for the alien to react and fire its weapon?
    Can I take it by surprise?
    He reached for the controls, not actually sure what he was going to do, but trusting his instincts. With one quick motion he started the engines, brought the nose of the ship sweeping down, and accelerated hard. He activated radar, kept a thumb on the little red switch on the control column that would override the shuttle's safety protocols, and aimed for the approaching alien ship.
    Acceleration shoved him back against his seat. The combined velocities of the two ships meant that he closed the distance in something less than two seconds. He didn't even have time to hold his breath before the little alien craft loomed suddenly huge in front of him.
    He felt the collision as a tremor through the deck plates, the seat, and the control column. It was over in an instant, and the shuttle tumbled through space. Stars whipped past the window, and he lifted his hands from the control column, letting the shuttle's computer stabilize them.
    "What did you do?" Sally's voice, shrill with fear, came through the speakers in his helmet. His faceplate was down. He looked at the dash controls.
    Half the display screen was dark. On the other half he read a damage report. Collision. Hull damage. Atmospheric integrity lost .
    "We seem to have bumped into the alien," Kasim said. "Sorry, the hostile colony ship. We have an air leak, but we're not badly damaged." He had a giddy urge to laugh, but if he started, he wasn't sure he could stop.
    "What happened to them?" Roberts said.
    Kasim checked his console. The alien ship was about a hundred meters to starboard, slowly drifting away. He zoomed in on the ship, and whistled. It was a crumpled mess, like a drink container someone had stomped on. "They aren't really built for collisions," he said.
    He shut down the radar, then gave the engines a little squirt. If the alien had a transponder or an emergency beacon, he wanted to be a long way away when help arrived. He shut down the engine, then brought up a sensor log.
    Quite a bit of information had come in during that brief few seconds when he'd used radar. He could see the circular shape of Gate Eleven, and half a dozen fuzzy blobs spread in an arc around it. He muttered a curse.
    Sally touched his arm. "What is it?"
    "They aren't as stupid as we hoped. They're keeping an eye on the remaining Gate."
    She leaned over to look at his screen. "What do we do?"
    "We can't keep ramming them," he said. "We'll have to avoid them." There was a bitter taste of disappointment on the back of his tongue, but also a treacherous spike of relief. I took