Taking Space

DEADLY DANGER

Hundreds of red beams of lasers lit up the darkened space as they burned through the dust particles in the asteroid field.

Michael slammed the controls down and to the right as hard as he could, and the ship lurched into action, sending Steven bouncing off one of the cockpit walls. The first barrage of laser fire shot wide of their vessel, but the endless streams of deadly light left searing flashes across their vision as its aim corrected and brought to bear on them.

The first beam plowed into the stern shield as mike punched the ship into full speed, flipped the pilot switch, and shouted, “Daniel get us out of here!”

Daniel looped them up and around a large asteroid using it as cover, and the continuous rain of lasers bit hard into the barrier in between them instead of their aft shields. However, they were surrounded on all sides, and while Daniel's maneuver hid them from one assault, it left their lower hull exposed.

Two g*n emplacements released rivers of glowing red beams into their shields.

Dan continued his upward roll around the ship-sized bolder trying to get away from them as well but was meant by five more transformed asteroids that instantly opened fire on them as well.

The front viewport lit up with a cloud of red so bright it momentarily blinded them as deadly pulsating spread impacted on their shields.

More alarms sounded as the ship's shields reached their limit.

Michael turned off the logic drive and shouted, “Catherine angle what's left of the shields, try to stop anything from hitting are the cockpit. And Daniel fly straight at that asteroid!”

“But you jus-”

“Do it now!”

Catherine's hands flew over the console as she tried to shift the remaining shields to meet each laser and Daniel desperately popped and weaved as he aimed the bow of their craft at the space station-sized asteroid mike had indicated.

Catherine turned sheet white as a beam hit a part of the ship she had diverted the ragged shields from. The impact shook them as it burned a deep gouge into the outer plating. “Transfer the stored energy in the weapons to the shields now!” she shouted.

“No! Just protect our cockpit, it's all that will matter in a moment,” Mike shouted back as he took manual control over the weapon systems.

Giant red Crosshairs displayed on the forward HUD as Michael initialized the particle beam cannon. “Level out the ship! Give me a clean uninterrupted shot.”

Daniel, realizing what Mike was trying to do, stopped his dodging ballet, pointed them at the asteroid, and flipped a regulating lever. Channeling all the energy from the engines into the shields, he let the ship's inertia carry them forward.

Mike opened fire. And a massive continuous particle beam shot out boring deep into the asteroid.

Michael kept the beam going even when the overheat warning light blinked. Alarms sounded, and he overrode the Auto emergency shutdown.

Still, he kept it going until it melted into slag and its beam wobble back-and-forth as its aiming systems disintegrated in the heat. Finally, he turned it off while the heat in the cockpit grew to unbearable levels.

The beams after image still lit the viewport as he immediately launched a trio of antimatter missiles down the long tunnel the beam cannon had gouged out.

Once more the forward-facing screens flared blindingly bright as the military-grade weapons slammed into their inert target.

The explosion slowly dissipated as their spacecraft borrowed headlong into the explosion and the last of the shields finally blinked out of existence.

Hundreds of lasers tore into the back of the ship, shaking the entire spacecraft.

In seconds their engines were torn to shreds, but their inertia kept them going straight into Michael’s heavy weapon-created tunnel. Then they were inside the asteroid cutting them off from the line of fire.

As the ship finally stopped shaking Steven scrambled across the floor, reaching his seat, and strapped himself in just as they exited the tunnel.

The cockpit turned a bright red hue as the viewports displayed a large spherical cavern coated in a red-hot melted lava rock ripped into the giant asteroid by the missiles.

Their pirate ship screamed towards the far side of the cavern at a deadly speed.

Michael scrambled at the controls flipping the logic drive back on at the last second.

The ships maneuvering jets roared to life snapping them hard against their seat straps, but there was too much remaining inertia and too little time.

They hit the far side of the cavern’s wall in a crunching impact that sent a spray of melted rock flying.

Arcs of bright blue light flashed along the walls of the ship as a severed conduit touch bare metal. The dynovamator screamed in protest then shut down, leaving the acrid smell of electricity floating in the air.

The lights shuddered, and the viewports blinked then died as the lights faded sending everything into blackness.