The United Colonial Defense Force Rolling Thunder sat in complete darkness. It clung to an asteroid drifting in a lazy orbit, dull gray metal blending in with the rock’s surface. The bulky UCDF cargo transport had been in its hiding spot for the better part of the past week while its small crew of five worked tirelessly. Moving in an asteroid field without having previously planned trajectories and rock rotations was dangerous, but in Captain Meisha Al-Jihlani’s eyes,the close calls were worth the risk.

  The Rolling Thunder had been hauling its normal payload of planetary defense cannons, mining equipment, and starship fuel for an outer rim colony. Nearing the end of their scheduled flight, they had received news via instant communications that a pirate flotilla had raided a colony not too far away from their flight trajectory. Reports said that the pirates, armed with four civil war era destroyers and two battleships, had burned half of the colony Harmony in nuclear fire before the colonists had submitted to their demands.

  The death toll was massive, and the raid had been labeled one of the largest terrorist attacks in centuries. Besides those killed in the bombardment, millions of tons of minerals had been taken, as well as thousands of people who would fetch a high price on the black market slave trade. This flotilla had turned towards the Rolling Thunder afterward and had been burning fast since.

  Pirates were common this far from Sol, commonly hitting outer colonies who lacked defense cannons and would escape into the void before UCDF forces could retaliate. Patrols and fleets were sent through to fly patterns around the high value colonies; but naval ships were expensive and Earth and its sister colonies could only provide so many to defend their distant relatives. The pirate fleets, even with their outdated ships, had been able to avoid any major fights with the vastly superior UCDF fleets.

  Meisha’s crew had sent out the SOS as soon as they knew the pirates were getting close. Her navigator, Juliette Quacita, had been emphatic that they needed support as soon as possible. She begged the UCDF to send reinforcements. To the pirates, it was a payday that was too rich to miss, and the Rolling Thunder’s high tech scanners had confirmed that the only ships in the sector were the pirates.

  Captain Al-Jihlani and her crew didn’t have much they could use to fight. The heavy transport ship was built for hauling thousands of tons of cargo, not intense combat. Its small point-defense turrets, meant for shooting down incoming missiles and debris, were no match for the sheer volume of cannon and torpedo fire the pirate flotilla could dish out. If the pirates caught them out in the open, the Rolling Thunder would be turned into a debris field within a matter of seconds.

  Meisha personally had never seen combat. She had graduated at the top of her class in the academy only recently, but had a fire in her that not many other captains possessed. Her crew, likewise, were strong people and had faith that their plan would work. They had voted on it over dinner one night knowing that if they followed through, they would be disobeying orders from the Admiralty. If they did nothing, the pirates would continue to terrorize the colonies, and thousands more lives would be destroyed.

  “Do we really want to go through with this?” Meisha asked herself as she stared into the radar screen in front of her. She studied the red shapes of the pirates inch nearer to her little blue dot, inching closer to the weak transport.

  The bridge of the Rolling Thunder was almost pitch black, with only the lights from data readouts painting the crew’s faces in gentle shades of green and blue. Their breath formed clouds of vapor in the cool air as the ship worked to lower the transport’s heat signature and render them undetectable. Even in the frigid air, Meisha was sweating. She wasn’t scared, but waiting had always made her jumpy.

  They had to be lucky. If the pirates caught on or detected them early, it would be over. The Rolling Thunder would be destroyed in seconds; atomized before it could even fire up its reactors. Their timing had to be perfect and their execution instant. No room for hesitation or doubt. In the vacuum, even with meters of heavy armor plating and bulwarks to keep precious oxygen inside, a single well placed shot could kill them in seconds.

  Meisha pushed her thoughts of timing and execution aside and adjusted her military cap, brushing her dark hair out of her eyes. It didn’t matter how nervous she was. If they failed, more people would die. This was a lucky opportunity, and she wouldn’t let it slip through her fingers. The captain turned to look at her Data Analyst.“How are we looking, Aymer?” she murmured, as if to speak any louder would alert the enemy.

  “As good as we could be given the circumstances.” The grizzled analyst responded. “SOS beacon is still pinging away and we’re still on the opposite side of the rock from the enemy approach vector.”

  Meisha nodded, running down her mental checklist of the plan one more time. “And we’re anchored?” She asked, glancing at the ship’s head engineer.

  Kamir gave a quiet chuckle. “I sure hope so, I used all the supports we were hauling. If that's not enough to hold us and the guns to this rock, then I don’t know what else will.”

  “Range?”

  “ETA two minutes until they’re in the hole.” Weapons Specialist Amade reported. The tiny lady flicked from screen to screen, checking on their weapon and ammunition status. “You should be ready soon.”

  As Meisha ran down her checklist, the red threat outlines of the pirates drew nearer. As far as space combat went, this was going to be much closer than standard doctrine. A normal battle would take place thousands of miles apart, with starships firing cannons based on advanced imaging and sensor packages alone. It was rare to spy another ship with the naked eye. This battle would take place in the tens of miles. It was suicidal.

  “Today we are sending a message.” Meisha growled. “Pirates are going to be a lot more cautious when they hear about one ship wasting a whole flotilla.” She donned her headset and visor, blinking a few times as her eyes adjusted to the captain’s overlay. The screens of her crew appeared on the top of her vision, allowing her to enlarge one with the movement of her eyes. The ship’s general status and condition filled the rest of her view, leaving a small window to see her own screen. To an untrained individual, it would have been data overload. To Meisha, it was comforting.

  “They’re in range, cap.” Quacita said from the pilot’s chair. “Want me to open a broadcast channel for you?”

  “Do it. Give me visuals on them as well.” Meisha ordered, her voice more steady than she felt.

  Her screen filled up with an image from one of the Rolling Thunder’s exterior cameras. The situation was grim. Four small gray ships; hulls pocket marked with carbon scorching and small dents escorted two massive ships in similar condition. Each one boasted an impressive armament of cannons, torpedo launchers, missile batteries and point defense turrets. They were older and in poor condition, but they could still fire. The massive battleships shoved asteroids out of their path, creating more instability in the field of rocks. They were hunting for their prey, homing in on the SOS of the Rolling Thunder.

  Meisha cleared her throat and keyed open the comms channels for their local group. “Attention Pirate flotilla, this is Captain Meisha Al-Jihlani of the UCDF Rolling Thunder. I’m offering you a chance to surrender. If you do not agree to power your reactors down and allow us to lock down your ships, we will engage and use whatever force we deem necessary to make you comply. Am I understood?”

  She didn’t expect the pirates to respond, but one did. “Rolling Thunder… net shows that you’re just a transport. What are you trying to do here? We have six thousand hostages onboard we nabbed from Harmony. You shoot at us, they die. How about you turn yourself in to us or we gut our prisoners.”

  “Collateral Damage. If their sacrifice means I can turn you into dust, then it is what it is. Consequences be damned.” Meisha said calmly, hoping the pirates would buy her bluff.

  “Cap, are you sure they have the civvies on the second battleship?” Aymer asked. “We can’t mess this one up.”

  “It's their oldest ship, and most damaged. Less effective electronic countermeasures, less weapons. Notice how it's hanging in the back of the flotilla? They have to be there.” Meisha replied. News footage taken from the devastation on Harmony had only shown one ship landing on the planet while the rest used shuttles or rained fire from orbit. The older battleship had to be the prisoner ship. If she was wrong….

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  They were wasting time. For this to work, the Rolling Thunder’s execution had to be perfect. “I take this as your refusal to surrender.” She snapped back over the comms, before closing the channel. “Amade, are they in the hole?”

  “Yes ma’am, right in the center. Any more stalling and they would have drifted past.”

  “Perfect.” Meisha took a deep breath to steady her nerves. “ Let's stay focused. Aymer, ping em.”

  In mining and resource exploration, ‘pinging’ was the act of using a mining probe to send out energy waves in all directions to reflect off rocky surfaces and map out a three dimensional path of the cave or asteroid. This process could greatly affect a starship’s targeting data if the probes didn’t report their information back. It just so happened that part of the Rolling Thunder’s delivery included five hundred of these drones. They had been arranged in a rough sphere around Meisha’s chosen battle space, and all at once they started pinging.

  The pirate flotilla lost everything but visual targeting as each drone bounced multiple energy waves off their hulls and sensors, overloading electronic eyes and filling their aging supercomputers with millions of zettabytes worth of junk data.

  “Burn them.” Meisha growled. At once the dark interior of the Rolling Thunder brightened with red combat lighting as the ship’s massive fusion reactor rumbled to life. Its thrusters fired on full blast, pushing it forward and in turn rotating the asteroid that it was anchored to. The two gigantic planetary defense cannons that had been installed on the opposite side of the asteroid crested the horizon and came into view of the flotilla, already online.

  The data from the mining probes was fed directly into their targeting systems, painting a perfect picture of the ships. The cameras of the Rolling Thunder dimmed to protect its crew’s eyes as the four hundred foot long railguns accelerated their massive titanium slugs to half the speed of light. The recoil of these two shots spun the asteroid, and the Rolling Thunder’s engines screamed as it tried to counteract the force of the big guns.

  The first two destroyers shattered like ice, vaporizing as the shells slammed into the bow of the ships before detonating their nuclear warheads in the center. Debris exploded and riddled the surrounding ships, damaging hull plating and sensors. A secondary explosion from one of the destroyer's older nuclear reactors superheated the asteroids nearby, causing them to glow bright red and further confuse the now panicking pirate’s targeting.

  The lead battleship had seen where the first shots had been fired from however, and turned its weapons to the now fast moving asteroid that Meisha and her crew were attached to. Its cannons shook, sending a steel swarm into the rock and knocking the asteroid’s path off course.

  “Adame, how long until those guns fire again?”

  “About a minute longer for the railguns to charge up, ma’am.” The weapons officer responded.

  Kamir flicked his view to Meisha’s terminal. “Captain, the rock can’t take another hit like that. It's shaking loose and the stress from our anchoring is going to tear it apart.”

  “They can’t target us electronically but they have us visually.” Aymer warned. “If they throw enough at us at once, it won’t matter.” As if reading his mind, the pirate vessels opened fire with everything they had at the little asteroid. Torpedoes, hundreds of thousands of bullets and cannon shells all flew in a cloud of silver in the direction of the Rolling Thunder. The pirates began to distance their ships while their ambusher was pinned, burning forward to try and flank the brash UCDF captain.

  Meisha had counted on it. The starship fuel they were hauling had been left drifting among the clutter of the asteroid field. With some delicate work from Kamir and a few mining charges, they had been repurposed into fusion bombs, which triggered at this moment. The fuel exploded, vaporizing nearby rock and sending shockwaves and debris into the pirate ships. It didn’t do much damage, as the thick armor of the aging civil war ships had been built to withstand much more efficient atomic blasts. But it did disrupt their movement and buy the Rolling Thunder time to change its position..

  Meisha was running out of tricks. “Amade, where are those guns?”

  “Charged ma’am and waiting for the asteroid to level for target acquisition. Who are we aiming at?”

  “The last two destroyers. Faster ships with more guns, I want them gone. Quacita, level us now so Amade can fire these shots. If we wait, we're dead.”

  “Aye Cap, leveling now.” The Rolling Thunder jerked as its inertial drives fought to reduce the extreme pressure of the ship’s sudden change. The Asteroid shook again as the defense cannons fired a second time, obliterating the final two destroyers and leaving them in a field of debris. The two battleships fired another massive salvo in retaliation, sending another wave of steel shrieking towards the transport. It was time to go.

  “Kamir, let us loose.” Meisha ordered. Within an instant, the tethers lashing the Rolling Thunder to the asteroid detached and the ship shot forward, free from its burden of moving the tons of rock. The cannons would be destroyed, but it took another wave of punishment away from the UCDF crew. However, they had to ditch it faster than Meisha expected. She was out of tricks. Two battleships against a transport were better than six, but not any more survivable. Unless…

  “Quacita, maneuver us as close to the lead battleship as possible. Right over their reactor placement. Amade, spin up our PDTs. They can only target visually, so either they shoot and hit themselves, or we drill through their armor and into their reactor.”

  The Rolling Thunder promptly reacted to its captain’s orders, flying towards the battleships and weaving in between cannon fire and torpedoes. Smaller caliber bullets bounced off their hull and alert sirens began to blair. They had a hull breach.

  “Kamir? Where is it?”

  “Maintenance bay 04, nothing critical. Sealing the bulkhead and letting it depressurize.” The alerts died down as the ship’s systems determined nothing else was breached, and they continued to edge closer to the massive battleship. The larger ship tried to outmaneuver the smaller transport; but with its cargo gone and thrusters at full strength, the UCDF ship was more nimble. Quacita matched their movements with micro adjustments on her controls, and in an instant the ship’s smaller point defense turrets spun up and began firing hundreds of rounds.

  The battleship's aging armor broke after seconds of sustained fire, and the bullets drilled into the ship causing violent depressurizations and destroying subsystems as they reached further and further. Lights began to flicker across the battleship’s hull as systems crashed. The wounded pirate ship tried to shake its mosquito off, but the transport stayed firmly matched with its movement. After a few more seconds, a shockwave rocked the Rolling Thunder.

  Amade spun to look at Meisha. “That was a pulse from their reactor. It's melting down!” As the weapon’s officer spoke, escape shuttles began jettisoning from the battleship.

  “Distance, Quacita, now!” Meisha shouted, and the ship burned away from the now drifting battleship not a moment too soon. The aft end of the pirate vessel exploded outward, leaving the front half leaking atmospheric vapor trails and sparking cables. The decompression would have killed anyone unlucky enough to be in a breached section. Enhancing, the cameras could see a few bodies drifting from what was left of the battleship; frozen in last second poses.

  Meisha opened the communications channel again, adrenaline coursing through her. “Remaining pirate battleship, do you surrender?” She snarled. “If not we’ll burn you too, regardless of the civilians.”

  “Holy hell yes we surrender!” A new panicked voice responded. “We surrender, we’re powering everything but life support down please hold fire!”

  Meisha leaned back, and sighed as she realized she had been holding her breath. Truth be told, if this final ship had resisted, she didn’t know what she would do. Looking at her clenched hands, she relaxed them as her adrenaline began to wear off. It had all happened so fast. Looking back on it now, the whole idea seemed insane.

  “I said we surrender! Please don’t kill us, God damn it!” The pirate pleaded, his voice even more desperate than before.

  Meisha blinked a few times, and realized she hadn’t responded yet. “If I see so much as an engine flare or a rotation of a barrel, you’re gone. And if you harm those civilians I know you have on board, you won’t make it to the nearest UCDF compound. Do you understand?”

  “We understand, you won’t see anything out of us and we won’t mess with our prisoners.”

  Aymer glanced over at his captain, relief on his face. “Captain, I count almost twenty new contacts that have entered the sector. They’re still about ten hours away but are burning fast towards us. Requesting a secure channel through InstantComm. Want me to patch them through?”

  Meisha gave a nod, and opened up her quantum communications channel to hear a warm and friendly voice.

  “Rolling Thunder? This is Admiral Fairweather. I’m here with carrier battle group Denali. We received your call for aid against a pirate flotilla. How are you holding up?”

  “Well Sir.” Meisha replied, grinning at her crew. “We saved you a ship and a half. Could use your assistance with securing our prisoners and search and rescue for survivors. I think my crew and I need a break.”

  “I won’t lie, captain, I’m very confused.” The admiral replied. “We received an SOS from a transport ship, and here I am looking at a destroyed pirate flotilla and a blubbering prisoner ship.”

  “It's a long story, sir.”

  Fairweather chucked. “I’m sure it is. I’d love to hear it as we escort you back to Earth. I’m sure this will be one hell of a debrief.”