Adventures of Aurora Chapter 29-04
Sh’Lyra’s Space Battle
By Janissa, Sharon Best, and Tex Beethoven
(Last Revision: 26-Oct-96)
The sudden intense sound of the battle klaxons jolted everyone in the ship. Sh’Lyra had been relaxing in her study in her favorite fashion, by playing with her slaves. Fairchild, her favorite, was bound helplessly, and Sh’Lyra was enjoying herself enormously by spanking Fairchild’s naked buttocks in rhythm to the strong lashes that Diana, her newest, was giving to that rather strange slut red-headed slave. She was particularly enjoying the agonized looks on Diana’s face as she attempted unsuccessfully to hide her revulsion to the whipping that Sh’Lyra had commanded she give to the little redhead. This Diana, known to many as Wonder Woman, was showing great promise, and as soon as Sh’Lyra helped her to uncover a sadistic side to her personality, she might even promote this Diana to head Dom. Diana’s sense of honor and duty was obviously unbreachable, and there was a lot to be said for having a chief lieutenant you could trust!
But those damned klaxons were interrupting everything! Sighing in resignation, Sh’Lyra forced her attention to her own duty. She was in command of this ship, after all, and nobody would DARE send out a false alarm on HER ship! Stifling a curse, she dropped Aurora onto the floor and slapped her communicator patch. “Captain! What’s going on out there?”
Calmly and in his normal slow methodical way, which in an emergency Sh’Lyra found maddening, her captain explained, “Ma’am we’re under attack. One of the new ARZ-289 fighters just appeared off our bow about 17,000 miles away and is closing fast. One of our newer crewmen somehow jumped Lt. Carlet, the acting Communications Officer, and took brief control of the Communications room. He sent out a message that we had gone rogue. I just sent Lt. Rir-et to retake the control room. Ma’am, the fighter is now moving into an attack pattern and arming his weapons. Judging by his premature actions in engaging us without any backup, and giving away his intentions to us so carelessly, I’d say the captain of the ship is very inexperienced. We have at least 3 minutes to prepare before he is even in range to fire his weapons. But right now we simply don’t have the power to stop it. Remember Ma’am, the ARZ-289 is that new prototype fighter designed to take out a Velorian Protector. I await your orders, Ma’am.”
As Sh’Lyra listened to her Captain’s report, she stood up, she silently cursed his thoroughness. She KNEW over half of these details already! To save time, she left her study and entered her main room while he continued droning away. At least the CURRENT details were news. Motioning Janee and the others to silence as she entered, she listened carefully until he had finished, and then began snapping out her orders: “Sound Battle Stations. See if you can fool this fighter into thinking that we have enough power to defend ourselves. Alert the crew to prepare for incomings. You have forgotten that this particular fighter carries long range missiles, and we’re already within his range. I’ll be on the bridge in less than a minute. Have Chief Engineer Samtee ready my private airlock. I want all officers patched into my command channel now. Hut!” Whipping her head around she ordered, “Janee, we’re under attack; you’re in charge of securing the slaves.” Then Sh’Lyra left so quickly that to her slaves she appeared simply to vanish. In her wake, the vacuum she created swept many of them off their feet.
Within seconds Sh’Lyra was on the Bridge. A seasoned warrior, she called out “Status!” as soon as she arrived. Immediately three of her top officers all began simultaneously briefing her in rapid words. “Incredible,” thought Elen-at, a smart young Arion Prime Lieutenant who Sh’Lyra herself had just promoted to Weapons Officer. She struggled to control her voice so she spoke at the same volume as the Officers from Engineering and Navigation. No matter how many times she had practiced this routine, she still found it incredible that Sh’Lyra was able to make sense of this babble. But she knew that her Admiral was not only listening to them all, but incredibly, was absorbing every last detail.
***
In the ARZ-289 Fighter, the captain, a heavily scarred Arion Prime, scowled at his bridge crew of two. Only one other person in the universe knew where he had received his facial scars, and with a little luck today, no living person but he himself would know after he blew this bitch queen to atoms. Night after restless, sleepless night in his dreams he had relived that terrible moment which haunted his soul, and he recalled it again now. Eight years ago he had been assigned to a hunt and kill squad, and his unit was part of an Arion attack on a distant planet. The level of technology the aliens possessed was considered a threat to the Empire. The aliens were green skinned and erotically beautiful. The combat mission was easy, far too easy. So he had decided to get some information while in the midst of raping and maiming a pretty young thing. Then for no decipherable reason at all, that Kryptonian ice bitch from Hell had appeared from nowhere and attacked him! Without so much as a hint at proper military courtesy, she had grabbed his balls, pulled him out of his prey and held him upside down. What gave her the fucking RIGHT to interrupt a soldier having a bit of fun with some enemy slut?! While he struggled manfully not to scream in pain, she squeezed his family jewels until he blacked out. Then she had deliberately she thrown him on an alien mine which exploded and scarred his handsome face for life. Instead of killing him, that bitch left him broken, lying helplessly in the filthy alien gutter. A medical team had found him just before he could die, and he still remembered the shocked looks on those hardened veterans’ faces.
The Captain’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted, which didn’t improve his black mood.
The Arion fighter’s Weapons Officer reported, “Sir, I finally have the target ship locked into the long range missiles. I had to re-modify the sensors; the stupid designers had them set so they could only see extremely small and dense objects.”
“Idiot, that’s because they were designed to fight Velorians, not ships the size of a moon! Fire when ready.”
“But sir, we don’t have any orders yet from higher command. You haven’t even reported our sighting.”
“I AM THE CAPTAIN OF THIS SHIP YOU WORM, NOW FIRE THOSE DAMN MISSILES!” No insubordinate idiot was going to interfere with his revenge! That red bitch had been running free far too long already, and now she had made the fatal mistake that untied his hands. Flipping on his intercom, he rasped out, “We are attacking the rogue R&R vessel forthwith. If any of you refuse to follow my orders I will burn you where you stand.” He smiled evilly as he felt the ship rock from the launch of the two missiles. “Today I will have my revenge on you Sh’Lyra,” he thought as he fingered his scarred face.
***
Elen-at, excited, called out at the top of her voice, “Sh’Lyra, incoming missiles, impact within 35 seconds. I have no fire control yet.94" She shifted her stance to straddle the technician’s legs emerging from beneath her console. The technician, laying prone on her back, was halfway under the console, cursing as she struggled to repair the damage the invaders had created hours ago.
Sh’Lyra, as calm as the eye of a hurricane, ordered, “Captain, I can take out these missiles, but this will leave you vulnerable to anything else coming from this fighter until I can disable it. Do your best, I am counting on it.” With that, she moved faster than she had ever moved before within her ship.
Some time ago, one of Samtee’s best engineers had rigged up a magnetic bubble that was all that kept the air from leaving the ship on Sh’Lyra’s personal airlock. There was a fail safe, automatic doors closed in milliseconds in the unlikely event the bubble collapsed. Since this was a Battle Stations alert, this same engineer was in the bubble at the moment, preparing it for use. He felt very safe as he knew nothing short of an cannon shell could knock it down, and the only force available that exceeded such a force was on the Bridge at the moment, speaking with the Captain! The only problem with this system was that it had to be set manually. As the engineer was leaving the airlock he thought, “I’m going to have to rig a remote switch to handle this aspect in the future.”
Suddenly something shot past him so fast that his ears were ruptured from the sonic boom. The automatic alarm went off as the magnetic bubble collapsed, and the tech was sucked along in the wake of a sudden hurricane! He didn’t have time to even scream before he slammed head first into the emergency doors, that fortunately for his life, had clanged shut just in time to prevent him from being sucked out into space.
Elen-at turned to her Captain and reported in a hushed tone, “Captain, somehow we just launched a missile.”
When not relating to his superiors, the Captain was a man of action and decision, two of the qualities that convinced Sh’Lyra to keep him in his position in spite of his methodical, long-winded reports. He just grinned and replied, “That was no missile, Lieutenant, that was our Admiral. Keep trying to put together some kind of weapons system. Get the electronic counter measures up to full power. All hands, this is the Captain, prepare for battle.” Snapping off his communicator he thought, “SHIT as the humans say, this is a fucking R&R ship, not a battle cruiser!” The Captain turned to his right and barked to his pretty aide, “Go personally to the doctors and warn them to prepare for a lot of wounded.” When pumped by adrenaline, the same thoroughness that made his reports long and rambling also gave him a deep grasp of the many aspects of a changing situation, and very quickly!
As he watched his aide leave the bridge, he keyed in all battle personnel and spoke into his communicator. “OK everyone, this is what we’ve practiced for over and over for the last four years. Now it’s the final exam. Either we win or we’re dead. Remember that even though our ship is damaged, we’re big and tough enough to take a lot of hits, and we have one advantage the other ship doesn’t: our Kryptonian Admiral Sh’Lyra. Now, let’s kill this little gnat that dares to attack us.”
***
Sh’Lyra flexed every muscle in her body to get maximum acceleration. She shot out of her ship at over 150 G’s and headed towards the fighter. As she tore through the ether she constantly scanned space in a wide radius ahead of her, trying to spot the approaching missiles. She hoped she remembered the specs of the missiles correctly! If she was right, there was a flaw in the missiles’ sensor arrangement, and her guess was that the Captain of the fighter would have had to reset these sensors to ignore a human-sized target in order to lock onto her ship. Even though these missiles were deadly, in this case it should be safe for her to approach the missiles and destroy them. Designed to fight Velorians, the missiles were heavily heat shielded to prevent long range destruction by Velorian super vision. So the only way to blow them up was by hand. But the missiles were designed to explode if any Velorian approached within striking distance. She seriously doubted they could tell the difference between a Velorian or a Kryptonian! So depending on the skill of the Captain or the Weapons Officer in the other ship, the missiles may or may not still be set to explode when she approached them. She was betting her life that they had chosen the quickest method to reset the sensors, which would have automatically changed the close range destruct command.
After traveling over a thousand miles, Sh’Lyra spotted her first missile. She changed course slightly to intercept it, still scanning space for the other missile. Ripping off her wrist communicator, she compressed it into a small hard metal ball. Nanoseconds before she and the missile collided at speeds in excess of 800,000 miles per hour, she released the makeshift metal ball and swerved as hard as she could. She almost made it. She realized too late that she had not taken the time to tie her long red hair securely in a tight bun. Damn these unexpected emergencies! Frantically she grabbed her hair close to her head and tensed every muscle in her body. Just the last inch of her hair hit the missile at the same instant as the metal ball. The ends of her almost invulnerable hair disappeared in the violent explosion. Her head was whipped back, almost breaking her neck as she tumbled out of control, stunned.
***
Intense light lit up the tiny bridge of the fighter as an immense fireball suddenly appeared right in front of them. Its Captain, temporarily blinded by the light, cursed, “Fuck, What the hell was that? Fire the Particle Beams!”
As twin beams of destruction leaped out at the giant ship, Lieutenant Elen-at shouted, “One missile destroyed Captain, but the other is approaching fast. If it’s not stopped, impact is in 10 seconds.”
“Lieutenant, Lieutenant, I have the ECM repaired!!” the technician yelled as she grabbed the Lieutenant’s ankle, trying desperately for her attention.
”Good work, tech!” Elen-at frantically hit the power switch to activate the ECM just as the Captain called out, “All hands prepare for impact!”
Several tense uneventful seconds later the Captain thought, “Why aren’t we dead?” Turning to his damage repair officer, he barked, “Report! Where did that missile hit?”
“I don’t know sir, I’m trying to find out.”
Lieutenant Elen-at reported, “Sir, for some reason the fighter is firing its Particle Beam weapons! We seem to be the target, but we’re completely out of range.”
The repair officer yelled for the Captain. “Sir, I have a panicked cook on line, a missile has penetrated the galley, and it’s just sitting there.”
“Samtee,” the Captain said, “don’t you have a man who used to be an explosives expert before he was washed out of the regular army and sent to us?” Before the Chief Engineer could reply, he turned his head and barked, “Lieutenant Elen-at, find me a working weapon!”
Samtee, always unflappable, answered, “Yup, I’ll send him down to the galley. And Lieutenant, I think I just may have some sort of a weapon for you.”
***
In the fighter, the Weapons Officer shared a disgusted look with the Navigation Officer and then directed his attention at his Captain. The Captain was frantically rubbing his eyes, tears streaming down his face. “Sir, request permission to stop firing the particle beams until we’re in range of the R&R ship.” Privately he thought, “Great! My first ship and tour of duty, and here I am shooting into empty space while attacking a damaged pleasure ship and taking orders from an idiot Prime with muscles for brains!”
***
Dazed, Sh’Lyra shook her head. “Damn near broke your neck you foolish woman, you’ll never conquer the galaxy if you get yourself killed!” she thought to herself. She quickly scanned space and cursed. Thanks to her being too close to that exploding missile, the battle was now thousands of miles away. She flexed every muscle in her body, generating over 200 gees of acceleration, and headed back toward her ship. “Crap, as the humans say. I can’t get there in time to prevent the fighter from hitting the ship. Captain, if you’re ever going to prove you are really worthy of your command, now is the time to do it,” she thought.
***
As Sh’Lyra shot though space, the fighter straightened out and headed in for the kill. “Prepare to fire the Particle Beams again,” the Captain ordered. His eyes had finally recovered from the dazzling blast. “Umm, can someone tell me why that ship has started now spinning?”
The Weapons Officer, still pissed off at his Captain’s stupid decisions, said “Captain SIR, the beams will be at only 50% power, they haven’t had enough time to recharge since they last fired.” As the two Arions glared daggers at each other, then both turned to glare at the dial indicating the state of the Particle Beams’ (un)readiness, they both missed the R&R Ship’s auxiliary shuttle bay opening and a object flying out towards their ship.
Just as the fighter Captain’s finger hit the fire command for the Particle Beams, the collision alarm sounded. Twin beams of destruction leaped out from his ship and hit a large object just in front of them that exploded in a shower of metal bits. Too late to turn, the ship charged directly into the manmade meteor shower, slamming several hundred pieces of molten metal into the ship. Fortunately for the crew the ship’s armor held, but the Particle Beams’ projectors were damaged.
The navigator convulsively jerked his controls to the left, instinctively turning the ship, trying, far too late, to avoid the collision.
The Captain cursed violently, swearing eternal vengeance on all molten bits of metal, already hearing his review board chewing him out for letting a pleasure ship of all things defeat him! He leapt from his command chair and roundhoused the Navigator hard enough to send his head flying into a corner of the cabin. Tossing the decapitated body to one side, he took the Navigator’s place and steered his fighter directly for the giant ship. “Weapons Officer, get the short range lasers on line, we’re going to cut this baby up like a roast”.
“On line in five seconds, sir.”
***
Meanwhile in the R&R ship Lieutenant Elen-at was yelling, “Captain, he’s turning back and attacking, most likely with his lasers, but there’s a possibility that his Particle Beams survived!”
“Easy Lieutenant, no need to yell,” Captain Luzar answered calmly as he rose from his seat and walked over to her. “If he still has Particle Beams and Admiral Sh’Lyra can’t get to him, then we’re dead. So we might as well assume that the Particle Beams were taken out by our little trick. How long before he’s in range to strike effectively with his lasers?” Lieutenant Elen-at nervously licked her lips while mentally performing the math, and Captain Luzar reached out and touched a communicator pad. “Chief Samtee, how soon before you can rig up another dummy shuttle?”
“That was the last partially working shuttle we had in storage sir, and it was pure luck we even got that one to work right. I ‘d say if I have an hour I can rig up another one. Three of the Primes are ready to give it a try again with some repair plating, but of course that won’t have the remote control docking rockets to adjust its course once they throw it.”
“Have them start throwing immediately, and maybe we’ll get lucky. What’s the status of that rocket in our guts?”
“I don’t know sir, the explosives team is still trying to disarm it.”
“Do the best you can, Chief. Lieutenant Elen-at, how long before that fighter’s in laser range?”
Nervously she answered, “Within 150 seconds, sir.” Then, anticipating his next question, she turned to point to her ship’s model and indicated three locations, adding, “Our weapons will not be on line for at least another half an hour. I have three crews, here, here, and here, ready to sight and fire manually.”
“Easy Elen-at, we’re not dead yet,” he said with a smile on his handsome face. In a whisper he continued, “You are one very smart, beautiful woman, and certainly one of the best junior officers I’ve ever worked with. So here’s a challenge for you: think of something -anything - I have overlooked; we’re too big for him to kill with one pass, it will take several. He is rushing us too fast right now to do anything but lightly score our hide. So we’ve got a little time. Relax girl, and use those brains I know you have, and come up with a way of pulling us out of this.”
Then returning a wink to her startled look, he briskly strolled away and in a louder voice ordered, “Communications Officer, prepare all emergency pods, all non essential personnel are to be on them within five minutes. But no one is to launch unless I give the order.”
Lieutenant Elen-at sighed at her Captain’s back and wished not for the first time that he wasn’t just a Beta. She knew that he was a decorated war hero that had been badly wounded a few years ago. How and why he had ended up serving on an R&R ship was the favorite idle speculation of many junior officers. As a Prime, she had tried to stay aloof from the Betas until Captain Luzar, then Commander, had taken over training the bridge crew. Through sheer force of personality, he had literally forced everybody, Betas and Primes alike, into a cohesive fighting group.
Suddenly inspiration hit. Hitting the comm switch, she rapidly contacted her laser crews. “Hold your fire until the second pass; make him think we’re unarmed.”
***
The Captain of the ARZ-289 Fighter cursed as the ship’s collision alarm sounded again. Before he could react, an object shot by just to the port side of his craft. “Crap!” he thought, “The Primes are throwing shit at me.” Cursing, he fumbled with the controls, trying to set up a zigzag attack pattern. Suddenly he was almost thrown from his seat as his ship’s computer automatic pilot activated, overrode his controls, and dodged another missile in a 60 gee shunt to the side.
Barely able to catch the corner edge of the console, he used his considerable strength to hang on, the tough metal of the console slowly collapsing under his fingers. With an oath, he threw himself back into his seat. Savagely he punched the collision avoidance switch off, confident that the ship’s armor could take a couple of hits.
The weapons officer fought the urge to pray to his gods. Bitterly he reflected, “Years of hard work to raise myself up from a flunky, finally to serve on a battle ship, and the damn thing’s run by an incompetent asshole. First he kills the pilot and then he tries to head directly into the enemy. I’m going to die at the hands of an idiot!” His fingers flew over his console and the ship’s lasers licked out and kissed the hull of the R&R ship before they flew by the ship. “That tickled the belly of the whale,” he thought.
***
Unknown to the fighter Captain, his life had just been spared by that same device he had now disabled. Sh’Lyra cursed silently in space. Coming up from behind the ship, she had almost had her hands on it when suddenly it jerked to the side. Before she could do more than throw her arms up before her face, slightly over one metric ton of her own space ship’s floor decking collided with her. The explosion of metal and a dazed Sh’Lyra went unnoticed by anyone as she struggled to regroup.
***
”That ship looks like a harbinger of death,” Captain Luzar reflected as he watched the sleek fighter fly past his ship. As his console view swiveled to follow the fighter, he grimly watched it turn for another pass. With only half an ear he listened for the damage reports to begin to come in. “Klomft shit, what does Sh’Lyra expect me to do now? This tub has no working weapons capable of destroying that ship. All the shuttles were stolen by those Velorians and Terrans, and about the only things we can launch are the lousy pods that are only usable if you happen to be right on top of a planet with air. Well at least some of the ship’s personnel will survive,” he reflected bitterly. “Those damn pods were another bright idea that never really worked. They had been designed back when space ships had a high failure of the matter anti-matter engines. In fact, this ship was one of the few that actually still had pods in them. So many of his friends had died before their flaw was discovered. The problem with pods was the high fail rate of the heat resistant plastic. If the target planet had anything unusual about its atmosphere, the poor sap aboard never knew what happened. Plus, the pod only had a few minutes of breathable air.” He smiled at the thought of what his old military buddies used to call them, “They’re nothing more than coffin missiles, Luzar. Wait, that’s it, what if we use the emergency pods as weapons? We don’t have enough time to put explosives in them, but if the pilot of the fighter isn’t very good, then we have a chance.”
His excited shout startled her. “Lieutenant Elen-at, can you fire the emergency pods from your station?”
“No sir.”
“Then take command of the Communications panel. When he comes within range, launch the emergency pods. With luck either one will hit or he’ll crash into one of them. Lieutenant Rir-et, order all personnel out of those pods NOW!”
Using a small part of her Prime strength, Lieutenant Elen-at leaped directly over three consoles to land beside the startled temporary Communications Officer, and quickly activated the emergency pods. Less than two minutes later, Captain Luzar in a calm voice ordered, “Hold, wait, wait, wait, almost, NOW!” Using all of her lightning reflexes, she rapidly keyed in the command to release the pods. The massive ship actually shook as hundreds of pods were fired almost simultaneously.
***
The Weapons Officer in the fighter knew from the angle of attack that the Captain was planning a strafing attack, a highly questionable tactic that hadn’t been used for over 50 years. And for some reason the idiot even told him to not fire until they were within ten miles. Suddenly to the Weapons Officer’s horror, at the eleven mile point every sensor on his board and the Captain’s board lit up. Hundreds of missiles in all directions were being fired from the massive ship. “Incredible!” thought the Weapons Officer, “How!… What!… I would give my right arm to know how the hell they managed that! ”
“Sir, according to my sensors,” the Weapons Officer barely had time to begin before he was thrown backwards out of his chair! The Captain had either forgotten, or just didn’t care that his small crew wasn’t made up of Primes, and he tried to turn his ship on its tail in a 180 degree 25G turn. Since it was standard policy for Betas in space combat to wear space suits, only two of the crew were killed. The Weapons Officer was stunned as a giant hand seemed to hammer him down into the floor.
Flying like a madman, or like the ex-combat pilot that he actually was, the fighter Captain managed to dodge every missile, which was the one thing he had to do to survive. But in so doing, he piloted his ship on a course that exposed his tail to the enemy. Just two laser cannons shot at him from the R&R ship, but one actually managed to do some minor damage to his ship.
***
In the R&R ship, Lieutenant Elen-at cursed with a heavy heart, then turning to her Captain reported, “Sir, we missed. I just wasted all those pods!”
“Not at all Lieutenant Elen-at, we bought time. Navigator, maneuver the ship so all three lasers can be fired.”
Lieutenant Elen-at went back to her console. Dreading what she knew would be the final results of this battle, of this fiasco, that Lieutenant Elen-at just knew would end in her own death, she paused to daydream about what the Captain would be like if he was a Prime. But a blip on one of her screens suddenly commanded her attention! “Sir, I have a very dense object closing in on the fighter. It has to be Sh’Lyra.”
***
In the fighter, the Weapons Officer now knew the Captain was insane! Screaming “Pods!” he had jolted his ship around again and was grinning like a lunatic. In horror, the Weapons Officer saw that he was now aiming the small fighter on a direct collision course with the huge R&R ship! He noticed the Crew Chief hurriedly crawling under the console. Quietly the Weapons Officer followed this example and prepared for a violent impact. He almost wished he were in the relative safety of the R&R Ship. The R&R Ship’s Captain couldn’t possibly be as idiotic as this Prime buttsteak he was stuck with! And he had far more than a single metric ton of inertia on his side of the imminent collission!
Suddenly alarms sounded in the ship and the air roared out into space. The rushing air sucked him out of his hiding space and bounced him off the longest, most beautiful pair of naked legs he had ever seen. Looking up, he saw a powerful looking naked natural red head staring at him, her eyes glowing with a red light. He knew what that meant! Urgently he scrambled away from her on all fours as twin beams of destruction leapt from her eyes to strike just behind him. He was glad that nobody could see though his suit: he’d lost control over his bladder!
Sh’Lyra, quickly examining the ship, decided to try to capture it instead of destroying it. Ripping a hatch off the ship, she ignored everybody not at their console. Only two people still manned their positions. Twin rays licked out as she vaporized the one sole crew member still manning his duty station. The pilot turned out to be made of sterner stuff.
The Captain, a full Arion Prime, grunted as the beam washed over his back. Screaming in rage, he twisted about in the half melted chair. His eyes bugged out when he beheld Sh’Lyra, the Red Bitch herself, standing on his own bridge! Rage distorted his vision, making her appear even redder. Releasing his hold on the controls, he leaped at her, his face twisted in a snarl of hatred. His only thought was to get his powerful hands around her neck and twist it off her shoulders.
Sh’Lyra shifted her feet, setting herself into her normal martial arts stance, the one she had perfected through years of training and battle, both on the tatami and off. In this stance, she knew she was ready for absolutely anything that anyone could throw at her! A normal battle with a Prime would wreck the ship. She knew from his look that this man was crazy enough to destroy the ship and even himself, if he thought she would die with him. Deciding to take a chance that he was too mad to remember or use any skill to counter her attack, she waited until his hands were almost on her before she struck without warning, like a cobra. Moving so fast that she was a blur to the watching crew, her arms actually blurring into invisibility, she grasped his right wrist with her left hand, flexed her thighs to brace herself like an immovable mountain with her flight muscles, swung her left hip into his pelvis and swung him head first across the tops of her breasts. As he flew through the air in front of her, in an all or nothing killing ploy, she used her right forefinger, rigidly extended, and jabbed it deep into his left eye with all of her strength, concentrating almost a million pounds of force into the tip of her harder than diamonds nail. She snarled as she felt her finger penetrate his eye and enter his brain, his eye socket shattering and one of the bones of her own finger actually breaking from the impact with the back of his skull. The small fighting ship was lucky that all of its air had been vented out to space, otherwise the shock wave from her strike would have killed everybody aboard. It happened so fast that the fighter Captain felt only a brief flash of pain and then nothing. Instantly dead, he slumped to the floor at her feet, his body’s rapid healing process now fighting itself. Like a deflated bag he collapsed in on himself and turned into black sooty dust.
Flush with victory, Sh’Lyra looked like an avenging goddess to the remaining crew. As she turned to look at them, the two women and two men that survived quickly clasped the back of their necks with both hands in surrender. She signaled with her hands that they were to lay on the floor.
The Weapons Officer, carefully keeping his hands behind his neck, was the only one that didn’t obey. Always keeping his eyes fearfully on this avenging Goddess’ face, he ran over to the pilot console and used his elbow to gesture frantically at the controls. Instinctively Sh’Lyra’s eyes began to glow with their deadly red light before she thought, “Wake up girl, the man is trying to tell you something.” She leapt across the cabin to the console and desperately studied at the readings. For this man to risk his life just to show her, there must be something very wrong here! Among all the skills she had mastered, piloting a space ship was not one of them. She knew just enough to realize that the fighter was on a collision course with her own ship!
Gripping the Weapons Officer by his shoulder, she shoved him into the seat and pointed at the controls. Sh’Lyra knew that it was standard operating procedure that on all small craft each bridge crew member could operate each other’s consoles. Unlike the larger ships, the small craft had to dual their officers in many different skills. That way if one died in battle, the ship would not be lost, because the survivors could still operate the craft, albeit less effectively. To the Weapons Officer’s horror he saw he had no time to avoid a collision. Frantically he cut the thrusters and swung the ship around 180 degrees. Setting the ship’s engines to burn until impact, he fell to the floor and hurled his body against the foot pedal, applying full power. G forces that would have killed a normal human instantly slammed his arm to the floor, breaking it in three places. Groaning, he passed out.
Sh’Lyra quickly scanned the ship and found the nearest heavy structural member. Without bothering to rip the decking out of the way, she placed her hands directly over the thickest beam and used her own flying power to help stop the ship.
***
Back on the R&R Ship, Captain Luzar, along with the entire bridge crew, watched the fighter for any sign that Sh’Lyra was going to be able to stop this mad suicide run! Standing next to Lieutenant Elen-at, he watched as, scant seconds before impact, the ship reversed course. Minutes earlier Lieutenant Elen-at had informed him in a somewhat nervous voice that the ship was headed directly for the bridge. He knew that at this insane speed, the entire R&R ship was going to be destroyed.
Briefly, hope surged within him as the attacking ship reversed course and began to slow down as well as go slightly off course.
“Brace for impact!” he shouted, then he gasped as Lieutenant Elen-at pulled him down to the floor behind the console and covered him with her own body, her strong Prime fingers actually digging handholds into the console stand. He could not help admiring the paradox Elen-at presented to him. Her breasts felt very soft and feminine while her arms felt like silk-covered steel. Turning his head to thank her, he felt the fighter collide with his ship. He found her lips within half an inch from his, her beautiful eyes looking directly into his, her warm breath tickling him. He suddenly found himself thinking thoughts very unsuitable for a Captain on duty, and wished that she was not a Prime. Or better yet, that he himself WAS!
With a sound of thunder the two ships collided. Lieutenant Elen-at’s lips hit Captain Luzar’s with bruising force.
***
Sh’Lyra watched in tense frustration as the two ships bashed into each other, but was at least pleased to see that her efforts to steer the ship away from the bridge had been successful. “So, as the Terrans say, is the glass half full or half empty? I may have lost a forward cargo bay, but I’ve gained a fighter, assuming it’s not too badly damaged. And even if it’s ruined, it still has immense value as spare parts. She quickly turned off the power to the ship and gathered up the surviving enemy crew. As all the crew were unconscious, she simply shoved them out the airlock, tied them together with a light cable and towed them over to her own ship’s airlock.
Once inboard, she handed her prisoners over to security and then headed up to the bridge. As she strolled onto the bridge she was pleased to see that everybody was busy at work. But all were smiling from ear to ear and cheered her. Before she could order everybody to be quiet, Captain Luzar did it for her. “All right everybody, back to work, we have a lot to do before we can call ourselves safe.” Turning, he saluted his naked Admiral with his good left arm and said, “Hell of a day, boss!”
“Report Captain, what’s my ship’s status?”
“We are holding air, but just barely. Engineering is assigning crews to assess and repair, and we should know more within the hour. One missile struck us but didn’t explode. It is still in the third level galley being disarmed. Apparently there are a lot of debris blocking the Explosives Team’s access. That area and all areas within 100 meters are off limits to all Primes, and also to yourself, ma’am. According to our computer, that missile is designed to explode when any super-dense person comes near it. The only other hit we sustained did very little damage. We lost a few sensors and about half of our ECM capabilities. As of right now we have only three confirmed dead. We may have a problem with personnel. In order to confuse and damage the enemy I ordered all pods to be launched. About five minutes prior to that order, I ordered all personnel who were non-essential to the battle to get into the pods in case of forced evacuation. About a minute before we fired all of the escape pods I ordered everyone out, but not everyone may have made it. I have ordered a head count, and within a minute I should be able to tell you the extent of the problem. Lieutenant Elen-at is tracking all the pods.”
Then in a lower voice he added, “Ma’am, as I am sure you are aware, the pods have only enough air for about half an hour. We have no usable shuttles to rescue those people. I am informed that we have one tractor beam that still works, over by Bay 5. If you decide to rescue any missing crew, then all you need to do is throw the pods somewhere near that Bay, but time is of …” He paused as the report of the missing personnel began to scroll down his screen.
“Klomft shit,” he grunted as the report ended, “close to hundred and fifty people are missing, including some 20 slaves, including your two new ones. Ma’am, what are your orders?”
For the second time within a week she was hearing that her prized Fairchild was gone. Roughly shoving her emotions to one side in her mind, she concentrated on the task before her. “Have someone meet me at the airlock with a portable locator and a lap top. Lieutenant Elen-at, as I fly, I want you to feed me the location of the closest pod to me. I will start with the farthest. Captain, I don’t want to have to look at a pod twice, so I’ll need to communicate with the Lieutenant effectively. Lieutenant Elen-at, how soon before the first pod hits the earth’s atmosphere?”
“Ma’am, the first five have already entered. Within a minute about 20 others will. About fifty others will enter the atmosphere anytime within the next 10 minutes. They’re within the danger zone for the air supply, but they still have a chance of survival. The rest exceed an hour. Some a couple of days.”
“How many in total?”
“Slightly over three hundred, Ma’am. About 60 weren’t launched.”
“Ok, this is what I want to do: as I fly near a pod I will look into it. If it’s empty, I’ll turn my locator off for two seconds as a signal to you, so you can direct me to the next. If it’s populated, I will toss the pod back to Bay 5, and your team can snag it in with the tractor beam. I’ll start with the ones that will certainly die if left to themselves. I want all the pods that enter Earth’s atmosphere tracked until the signal is lost. Is that clear?”
Both Captain Luzar and Lieutenant Elen-at briskly answered, “Yes Ma’am.” As they set to work, Sh’Lyra turned to leave, stopped, then calmly walked over to a wall-mounted shipboard communicator. Calling her quarters, she contacted Janee and asked abruptly, “Slut, who was in charge of the slaves today?”
Gulping, Janee unconsciously dropped to her knees as she answered. “Half of them were under my control and the other half under Pam-eta’s control, Mistress.”
“Have the other Doms whip you both as hard as they are able until I get back. You might live.” Sh’Lyra pushed the off button so hard that it sank a quarter inch into the wall. Fortunately for Captain Luzar, a crewman running as hard as he could barely managed to get to the airlock with the required equipment before Sh’Lyra arrived. Without a word, she took the equipment and left the ship. As Sh’Lyra flew out into space to collect as many of her crew as she could, her mood brightened as she pondered on how much challenge and fun it would be to hunt and capture her Fairchild again.
No matter what the appearances, that slut was hers forever!
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