Chapter 43. Guns Blazing.


    Both missiles flew true, and the badly wounded halfling ship couldn’t maneuver and didn’t seem to be firing any point defense. Its comrade was content to move away from the stricken ship and instead of fleeing, it tried to close in on the Canon. Watkins shifted his main guns onto the bigger threat, beams already reaching out toward the target.


    “The two ships are communicating but it’ll take me a bit to crack their encryption. Unlike the kobolds, these halflings seem to care a bit more about operation security,” Lani said as Watkins also detected a burst of comms traffic that passed between the halfling vessels.


    “We’re in point defense range now, firing up ours,” Watkins said. He targeted the undamaged halfling ship not only with his two main guns, but also with his four point defense lasers. With both vessels aggressively maneuvering, it wasn’t easy to get a lock with all four of his point defense weapons, but at any given time, at least two of the guns could be brought to bear on the target.


    “Scratch one Halfling ship, but I don’t think we’ll get much in the way of salvage out of that one,” Lani said.


    Watkins shifted a tiny bit of his focus to review the sensor feed, watching as both missiles slammed into the target. On had hit just past the bow and the other amidship. His missiles didn’t carry a large warhead, and the catastrophic destruction of the ship breaking apart was likely due to whatever energy source they used to power their vessel going into meltdown.


    A bit of the aft section, along with their main drive thruster, seemed to be mostly there, but the rest of the ship was now just a cloud of rapidly dispersing smaller bits that weren’t worth the time of chasing down. There was plenty of salvage to be had after the battle, with both the station and the kobold vessel waiting for his attention.


    With his focus split, Watkins also noticed something new in his core interface. A notification icon showed three low priority messages were waiting for his attention. As he watched a fourth notification was added, and this time, the icon blinked with a more urgent orange color instead of the low priority green. Opening the notification would have to wait, the second halfling vessel was proving a more difficult target to engage than its comrade.


    The first vessel only had limited maneuverability, but this one seemed to have additional maneuver thrusters mounted on it. It still wasn’t quite as nimble as the Canon, but it was close and was still closing the gap between them. The closer the two ships got to each other, the better the railgun aboard the halfling vessel performed. Even with its crude targeting systems, the computations that targeting system had to make were becoming less complicated by the second.


    Watkins was landing hits on the halfling ship, and a main gun blast had opened a wide gouge in the bow of the halfling ship. To their credit, the halfling crew managed to seal off the breach quickly, but the unmistakable effects of atmosphere leaking were noticed by Watkins’ sensors. Like a stab in the back, Watkins felt a railgun round hammer into main drive.


    One drive nozzle was obliterated and the second was showing a red danger to operate icon in his core interface. He had to shut down the main drives until the drones could make repairs. A team of five drones was assigned to the task, but for the moment, it left him with just his maneuver thrusters to work with.


    The halfling ship was desperate to get closer, obviously wanting to board and end the gun duel it was ill-equipped to win. Watkins maneuvered to keep away from the enemy, and while they could close the distance between them, he could keep them from getting at his boarding hatch. He had the firepower advantage and put it to good use. Beam after beam, from both main guns and point defense lasers, lashed out at the halfling ship. The enemy’s bow was being cut to shreds, but they seemed unconcerned about the damage as they hurled toward the Canon.


    Another railgun round hit on the starboard side of his ship. The round failed to penetrate the armored hull, but it did crack the armor over the fabrication room and a drone was assigned to do a temporary patch to seal in the atmosphere. His MOBS could survive for a short time in a low atmosphere environment, but it took power to replace lost atmosphere. Watkins needed all the power he had to operate his weapon systems along with the maneuver thrusters that were the only thing preventing the halfling ship from boarding them.


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    “How many crew do you estimate are on that ship?” Watkins asked Lani. He was starting to warm to the idea of possibly letting them board. The other vessel had been completely destroyed, and Watkins wanted not only the railgun schematic, but also a peek at any other tech the halflings might have at their disposal. His rough estimate, assuming some minor casualties from the damage he’d already inflicted, was that anywhere from 20 to 30 of the halfling crew remained.


    “A vessel like this probably doesn’t have more than 50 crew at a maximum. These are rather slapdash converted freighters, though, and that could mean they’re either packed to the gills with crew for boarding parties or they are running on a skeleton crew to conserve resources. I guess that’s my long way of saying, I have no idea,” Lani admitted.


    “Your estimate is higher than mine. I was considering letting them board and then trying to take their vessel after we wear them down,” Watkins said.


    “Taking that ship mostly intact would be a huge boost for us, but I’m afraid we might be overrun with numbers. Remember that we only command a limited number of MOBS at one time, and they’re not equipped very well,” Lani added.


    Watkins considered his options, at first, he was tempted to scrap a few more drones and add to his total number of MOBS. That was a non-starter with his ship and several important systems like the main drives and shields that would need major work before they were functional again. At least 15 of the MOBS, the number initially assigned to board the kobold station, were also armed with laser pistols taken from the kobolds.


    He also had to take into consideration that his troops would be fighting on their own ship, getting all the advantages the defender had. He was also able to fabricate replacements, which, just like the kobolds on the station, the halflings weren’t able to do. That would give him an eventual numerical advantage as the enemy took casualties they couldn’t replace.


    He had some defenses already in place at the shuttle bay, and even with some of his drones out fixing the main drives, he could have additional defenses up quickly enough. It would just be more of the barricades, but those could make a big difference in both protecting his crew and buying time for replacements to be printed up and thrown into the battle.


    As he considered his options, another railgun round hammered into the bow, warping the door to the upper torpedo tube, but failing to penetrate the hull. His last missile was now locked in an inoperable tube. A pair of drones were sent to unload the missile from the tube and reload it in the still-operable lower tube. A potential magazine upgrade that could do that automatically was filed away for whenever he got back to researching upgrades to the torpedo tubes.


    “What’s your opinion Lani, do we risk letting them try to board?” Watkins asked. He valued Lani’s opinion, not to mention they would share the same fate if they lost a boarding action. As he waited for her reply, Watkins landed another main gun hit amidships. A minor explosion from the area of impact blasted out a bus-sized section of hull. Atmosphere and what his sensors categorized as biological matter, were ejected into space.


    “That hurt them badly, I think,” Lani commented. Even if the enemy board and win the fight, your core and my server are hidden well enough that we could eventually rebuild and fight back,” Lani suggested, seeming to warm to the idea of fighting this out in a boarding action.


    “What about the fabricator? They could steal it, or destroy it when pillaging the ship?” Watkins asked. It would do them no good to survive and hide after the battle, only to locked away helplessly.


    “It’s too large for them to easily haul to their ship, and even if it is destroyed, as long as some of it survives, your drones should be able to rebuild it. I don’t recall the halfling species being particularly bright, and unless they have an advanced scientific team, or catch the fabricator in the act of producing something, they’ll likely not know what it even is. As long as we keep some drones in here with us as insurance, I think we’ll be fine even if our MOBS lose the initial fight,” Lani offered.


    Watkins watched the rapidly approaching halfling ship. It hadn’t been deterred by the heavy blow that had just struck and moved even closer as a pair of point defense lasers burned through the thin hull of the enemy ship, adding to its woes. Bright flashes erupted all along the ships hull, and for a moment, Watkins was worried it was about to have a catastrophic reactor explosion like the first ship had experienced.


    He realized what had really happened a second later, and threw all the power he could manage into the maneuver thrusters, desperately trying to bring them out of the line of fire. Those explosions weren’t from ship damage, they were from the halflings firing off every beehive point defense weapon that they could aim in his direction.


    With the distance between them narrowed, Watkins had little time to maneuver his ship out the path of all those projectiles. He succeeded for the most part, but a sound like hail hitting the roof of car was heard as hundred of the pellets from the beehive weapon struck.