"Gerard, get clear of those ships," Reven snaps, setting his own small pod's tiny z-space engines to their encrypted rendezvous coordinates. "It looks like we have a couple of Bug fighters on our tails, too. Autopilot should detect them and go into evasive action, but start to engage your z-space drive, that's an order."
"Yeah, um, right, sir," Gerard breathlessly, grimacing as the autopilot narrowly avoids hitting the underside of the cruiser. He engages the z-space engine, which automatically sets the coordinates for their fallback point.
Reven himself swoops low to try and avoid the incoming fighters. Their drives would soon send them far away from any danger, but it was going to be a very close thing indeed.
"WARNING," is all Reven's computer says before, far behind them, the self destruct mechanisms built into the walls of their base implode the entire structure. At first great gushes of water exude up through the surface--partially groundwater, partially the base's primitive piping system. Then, what remains is vaporized into atoms, sending a tremendous shockwave through the moon and creating a fiery crater hundeds of feet deep. Whole sections of rock collapse into the gaping mess.
---
"Alright, Mar, let's hope we've both worked our magic," says Myitt tersely.
"Exiting z-space, drives powering down," the Cruiser's computer states coolly. Myitt quickly orients the ship into the correct upward position, slamming full power to the front shields and helping Zoshonel to blast both of the powerful Dracon cannons at the underside of Seran's Blade Ship.
They have emerged almost where they wanted to--at the Empire's failsafe point not far from the rebel base, at an almost vertical obtuse diagonal angle to the Blade Ship and a little off-kilter, but careening upwards several hundred meters from under the larger and more powerful ship. The Cruiser's boomerang shape is all too pertinent.
"Holy crap we're gonna die!" Myitt yells through gritted teeth as she fires again, getting close to the Blade Ship's underside. Too close! The Cruiser flies up and she pulls it into a backflip, narrowly missing the ship and coursing downward to right itself again for another pass.
They were fast, but one good hit from that Blade Ship and their sheilds would be history.
She barely registers the transmission from Temrash, indicating something about rebel pods being chased by someone he knew on the inside. "Hang on, Temrash, kinda busy here," Myitt says as they cruise closer to the Blade Ship's underbelly again. "Zoshonel, get ready for another shot."
---
"Looks like Seran and Myitt have jumped out," Corliss calls, tracking their progress on his personal computer links as he sits at the manual controls in The Vagabond.
