Blood and Mercy

[Unseelie]

A trip to Ainu, at the head of a transport...Done it a thousand times, nothing at all out of the norm. Except, I don't expect to do it again. The Unseelie is more of an office than a transport, and I'll soon have it refurbished to cut the hold down to only what is necessary to supply the ship. I've missed it, for a long while. Actually trading on the edge, where you might be forced to depend on days old futures markets to guess what to buy...The simple prospecting, and the scuffles around the docks when you aren't sure who's cargo is who's...Business used to be dangerous. Then politics was dangerous, and there was no time for business, and I built it into a shipping company, one with orders and dockets, where the freight is waiting and regularly contract bound...its safe, simple, and easy to maintain. One last run at the bridge. Then I'll sit at a desk and arrange mergers and takeovers, run the spiderweb and try not to stagnate. One last run through Kusari Space, a diplomatic mission on one end, and mafiosi sub bosses at the other.



Juno was exhausted, and upset. There was a sizable faction on Ainu these days, the Kiretsu, who are extremely hostile to the queen, and her. Not only because of her relationship with Bretonia, but very simply because she had left. Spending her week at home had taught her one thing: Juno Kietan has no home. She wasn't watching the sensors the way she should have been, and so, when the ship began to shake, that was the first time she realized she was being followed. Not only followed, but followed by Katana bombers.

The armour was doing its job, keeping the supernova hail from ripping through the ship, but it wouldn't last. Juno jacked into the ship's neural net, and fired the rear cannons, narrowly dodging another supernova impact as sparks erupted to her left, she'd collided with an asteroid. Cutting the engines, she drifted on attitude thrusters around the enormous rock, then opened fire with her main batteries into one of the oncoming bombers. 8 splitter tachyon bolts shredded the shield and tore wings and guns off of a catamaran, then the two ships collided, grinding through one another with a shriek of atmosphere seals rupturing along the dorsal corridor. ShipSys slammed the doors to the bridge closed, sealing it off from the rest of the ship. Emergency decompression systems kicked in, and she was sprayed with a gossamer film that quickly tightened to an airtight pressure seal. Time was up, the Catamarans had come around. Juno cut on her cruise engines, and three agonizing seconds crawled by, another nova striking the hull. Finally, the cruise cut in, and the liner jackknifed around an asteroid, 3 clicks to the hole...snaking the path so that disruptors would strike the cockpit and not the engine, she shot to the hole, and then was squeezed, everything sideways, into Tau 29. Juno collapsed into the command couch just before a plasma bolt erupted from the hole and stripped the liner's shield. A pair of catamaran bombers followed immediately afterward, putting two more blasts into the ship as Juno jerked awake. Seals broke as the ship erupted, and the decompression sucked Juno back toward the inferno through the shattered hallways. Knocked unconscious in a niobium lined hallway, she was hidden so that when the Katana Pilots scanned for life an hour later, they found no residual heat.

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