“Just do it,” he growled.

There were downsides to having a first officer with a newly discovered sense of humor, he decided.

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 24

AEV Boudicca

► Cardsharp grunted through gritted teeth as she whipped her ship through the raking enemy fire, trying to simultaneously avoid as much of it as possible while keeping the Boudicca’s main guns lined up for return fire. The good news was that they were pretty much surrounded, so giving her gunner decent shots at the enemy was easy, but the flip side was that evading enemy beams became close to impossible.

Warning alarms had long since been filtered out of her conscious thoughts, along with everything else. She was focused so deeply on what she was doing that the captain had been alerted five times that her brain waves appeared oddly low.

After the second alert, he stopped bothering her about it.

“Point defense stations,” he called somewhere deep in the background. The words weren’t for her, so she didn’t bother listening to what else he had to say. But part of her noted that the point defense stations redirected their fire to one of the ships on their port side and a hole had opened up in the enemy formation.

Cardsharp didn’t think about it. She hit thrusters and spun the Boudicca on its axis before throwing all military power to the drive, accelerating the ship through the opening. Three of the smaller parasites closed in on the Boudicca’s port flank, which had lost half of its laser emitters some time earlier.

You shouldn’t harass a fine lady like the Bo, Cardsharp thought savagely as she again hit the thrusters and put the ship into a flat spin that turned into a spiral, slamming the rear gravity bulge of the Boudicca into the closest of the three ships.

The bulge acted like a moving hill slamming into a car that had its transmission in neutral. The parasite ship slid off uncontrollably, rammed into one of its fellows, then ricocheted off in another direction as the Bo continued through the spin and slipped the rest of the way out through the hole, bringing her main guns to point back the way she’d come.

Cardsharp threw the drive into reverse then, backing the Boudicca out of the furball as its lasers savaged anything and everything that followed.

Dimly, she noted some of the enemy ships blowing up for no reason she could spot. While she would probably be extremely curious about that later, for the moment Cardsharp was just pleased to be free from the dog pile.

►►►

► Captain Alexander Dogavich of the AEV Boudicca hid a grimace as his chief helmsman, or woman as the case was, used the ship’s drives as a weapon with all the brute force and subtlety of some of the less reputable members of his old nation’s Spetsnaz.