TSJ 2 - Jerusalem Burn

Even living on the stations and ships his whole life, Lonk has never grown used to high gravity as he did in the last couple of months. He would never admit it to his companions, but anything above 0,6g used to tire him. Both his companions were ex-military and therefore used to high-g shenanigans. The tolerance he managed to acquire rather quickly in his time with them. Lonk took small solace in the fact that while Shiro was ok with the acceleration, even she wasn't able to hold her lunch on the surface of Terra they recently visited. He knew that Humans evolved on Terra, but to him, it felt deeply unnatural and frankly, open sky terrified him a little, as he was used to physically see what held the air he breathed. And don't even get him started on the horizon. Any good-mannered horizon should curve upwards.

"Hey, buckle up, both of you!" Sigi's voice tore Lonk out of his revelry.
"What?" he asked in his surprise.
"Buckle up, cap, we're closing in on the cultist ships and they're sending a welcoming committee." the large marine explained, as he himself buckled up.
"How many and what type?" came Shiro's muffled voice.
"Four, all small, looks like lightly armed yachts," he answered her as he pulled his helmet on and watched all status indicators go turned to green "seal ok".
"Depressurising," Sigi already slipped into combat mode, "going dark," and gravity disappeared with lighting shifting to red as Lonk watched pressure indicator on his display drop.

More than an hour has passed in silence with only an occasional sideways jerk as Sigi slightly changed their trajectory, so they weren't where they should be. Firefly was about to pass the formation of enemy ships when he noticed the blinking icon of the incoming broadcast - weak, short-range. He opened it up and played the video message it contained. "This is Mark Wattney of the Punishment. I'm speaking to the unidentified vessel. You are trespassing on private property, turn away or you will be fired upon," said a man on the video while staring intensely in the camera. "I have a firing solution on all 4 ships, 8 torpedoes, and 2 shots from the railgun. We can fire on your mark, cap," came Shiro's voice as if in the reply to the cultist.
"Sigi, you ready?" he asked and when the pilot murmured an agreement added: "blast them!"

Lights came up as the ship shuddered and twitched under him. After about ten seconds, Shiro's voice confirmed the destruction of three of the enemy ships with the remaining one tumbling uncontrolled. He opened a channel to the remaining one. Which happened to be the Punishment - the one with "Captain Blondebeard". "Hello, this is Lonk Seldon, KMDA Firefly, we know your ship is disabled and we give you one chance - surrender or be destroyed." On that, the enemy ship turned into a short-lived sun. "Wasn't me" came from both Shiro and Sigi. "Looks like they really didn't want to surrender, bloody fanatics" he chuckled. To him, it was one less thing to worry about.

***

Firefly's drive came online and offline three times in rapid succession, just as Sigi instructed her, before once again going dark and altering the trajectory.
"What in the space was that?" Lonk's voice asked from his helmet speaker.
"I wanted them to know, that we are coming for them," he answered.
"And that seems like a good idea to you?" Shiro joined the discussion.
"Yes, let them know. Let them be nervous, make mistakes."
After that, neither of his companions spoke again, but Sigi could almost hear their eyes rolling.

Another hour passed in silence, with Sigi thinking that space combat can sometimes be really asymmetrical. An hour of sitting and planning, then 3 seconds of action and then another hour of sitting. If you aren't dead, killed by something you barely saw coming, if you even did. Like Jim - his copilot on the Wildcat - he didn't even see it coming. Sigi shuddered and forced his thoughts to dwell on more pleasant things - like the pleasant evenings he spent with Shiro on their way from Terra. Or the way they had Heimlich their dear captain when he choked on his food because Shiro came to breakfast in his navy t-shirt. That made Sigi chuckle and his mood improved significantly.

Displays all over the ops deck flashed a red warning of an unidentifiable event. A massive heat signature appeared on the radar. The thing had to be so powerful, that Sigi's mind struggled with it for a moment. Nothing he ever saw, even on paper, had this level of power. However, he assumed it was only waste heat. And he was proven right when about one degree from their vector a couple thousand clicks in the direction of their flight something massive came to life. Something that had to be an enormous ship drive and Sigi had to aggressively alter their trajectory, flipping the ship almost ninety degrees around her short axis and pushing at full power with all her landing thrusters, so they weren't slagged by being too close to the engine's plume.

"What the fuck was that?" Lonk asked over radio.
"No idea, but it's huge," Shiro's voice stated the obvious, her tone making it clear that she was just as baffled as the two men.
"It's accelerating slowly, but we can match it with our thrusters ... for couple hours at least," Sigi informed his companions.
"Do it, then all to tactical," Lonk replied in his captain voice.
A minute later they all stood around the holographic display in front of the captain's chair, looking at the crude data of massive ship drive.
"Has either one of you ever saw anything like this?" their captain asked but was met negative answers, "Does either of you have any idea what it could be?"
"Besides a ship drive? No," Sigi answered truthfully, while Shiro just groaned denyingly.
"Can we ask Hanz?" Lonk asked, mostly for himself as he was already rummaging through the controls, "No, shit."
"If we can spare a torpedo or two, we can rig them as crude probes and scan it with active scanners without revealing our position," Sigi proposed in pensive voice.
"Or we can just blast it," Shiro added her opinion to the table.
"No way - we have no idea what it is or where the girl is," Lonk dismissed her idea right away and was met by her disapproving grunt, so he turned to Sigi: "How long would that take?"
"If the two of us worked together ... an hour, two tops?"
"Ok, let's get to it. Shiro, hold the fort."

***

Almost two hours later, all three of them stood once again around the hologram and looked in awe at the construct on the display. A central pylon with over ten kilometers long, at least two hundred meters in diameters with twelve Heavy freighter ships attached in fours at each end and in the middle. From the sun-facing end of the pylon came the stream of energy that while being way off charts only accelerated the whole thing at about 0.2g - slow enough, for the comparatively tiny Firefly to match acceleration comfortably using only thrusters.

"What is this, and where is it going?" Lonk asked the question they were all thinking.
"Not Solaris, but by the direction, Alpha Centauri looks off too," Sigi answered, after consulting the display once more.
"Maybe outer Oort Cloud?" Shiro proposed.
"Maybe, does their current vector intersect with that of any colony?"
"Doesn't look like it," answered Sigi after some more searching.
"Well, either way, we can't let them get in their destination, wherever that is," Lonk concluded as the feed went out.
"Looks like they blasted our probes," Sigi chuckled, "Took them long enough."
"We have what we need, let me take a look at their security, maybe we can locate the girl without having to search the whole thing," said Lonk already seating himself back in the captain's chair.

Both her and Sigi went to their seats, only to find that the enemy launched six more ships to look for them. More armed yachts with little chance to detect their actual warship especially with her running dark. Even though there was no such thing as absolute stealth in space, warships had hulls made in the way that they minimized their radar return and running on battery power made them not much warmer than the space around them. Stil detectable, if you knew what to look for and had the right tools, but much more difficult to do so. Firefly shifted under her as Sigi moved them out of the way of the approaching patrol she studied the weird ship on her display, running some tests and searching the internet for even conceptual drives with a heat signature of this magnitude. And in the end, she did find one. An old scientific paper on the feasibility of using anti-matter as an interstellar drive fuel. The study concluded, that while it was possible, the practical hurdles were massive and with little more searching, Shiro discovered, that the related research program was stopped in favor of improving the proven laser-sail propulsion.

"You guys might want to see this," she said on the open channel and sent the paper to both their consoles.
"Looks like you found it," said Sigi and gave her thumbs up.
"Found what?" came Lonk's confused voice.
"The propulsion technology this thing is using. Even though it never made it past the prototype," Sigi answered for her.
"I have a bad feeling about it," Lonk mused after a short moment of thought.
"Really, Star Wars? The last five trilogies are pure crap," interjected Sigi.
"What's Star Wars?" once again confused Lonk asked Sigi, who rolled his eyes almost loudly.
"Why?" asked Shiro.
"Why what?"
"Why do you have a bad feeling about it?"
"Don't know yet. I'm pretty sure it's nothing though."
"Ok, did you find her?" Sigi once more entered the discussion.

Lonk once more got to typing on his terminal but after a while sighed and threw up his arms, admitting defeat. "Sorry, can't get into their system from here, at least not without revealing us.
"Looks like we are going to have to do this the hard way," said Shiro with a smirk towards Sigi.
"Only it's still accelerating, remember?" Sigi buzzkilled her enthusiasm.
"Then we take jetpacks," proposed Shiro.
"Nowhere near enough power."
"Then we surf on a torpedo."
"YOU WHAT?!" Lonk blurted out.
"Wait, she might be onto something," Sigi came to his partner's defense, "how do you propose we do this?"
"Don't know yet, you're the brainiacs, you figure it out - I just throw ideas" Shiro snapped at him.

Sigi turned back to his terminal and she saw him pull out torpedo schematics. In the meanwhile, Firefly has collected enough data from her passive sensors that she had a reasonably accurate model of their patrol pattern. To be honest, Shiro was a little disappointed by the cultists' lack of imagination, having the ship fly in staggered circles around the main pylon. Shiro input the firing solution to disable all enemy ships with minimal usage of torpedoes. Terran gunships had miserably small torpedo magazines, their design being oriented more towards more compact shape and size more optimized for defense and CQB. If she didn't know herself, Shiro would almost think that she missed the spacious, armed-to-teeth corvettes of her previous employer. However badly it ended, those things were something else. Was it even her previous employer? Did she still work for Fred? Maybe she should send him a message, so the old man wouldn't worry. Shiro didn't understand, why would the OPA leader care about her as much as he did without ever even hinting at anything sexual, always acting like her father or favorite uncle.

Shiro was startled by a hand on her shoulder. Her own hand quickly snapped upwards to pull the attacked over her, but when she looked up, the hand turned out to be attached to Sigi.
"Did you zone out?" he asked and then added, "we have the torpedo ready"
Shiro unstrapped and followed him down to airlocks, where Lonk was already waiting with two torpedoes laying on the deck.
"You better hold on tight," said Lonk with a grin, while pointing at one of the torpedoes.
"You better be kidding," she answered him with a glare.
"Loosen up, of course, I'm kidding," added Lonk quickly and opened a locker, producing a jetpack with a gutted torpedo attached to it, "you just have to keep it at low power and your knees under your chin. I'm pretty sure you can do the second part," he added with another grin but was once again met with Shiro's glare.
While they were talking, Sigi took out his jetpack and attached it to his suit, then waited for Lonk to help Shiro attach hers. Not that she needed his help, those things were made so one person can attach and detach it just fine, even more so with training. However, she appreciated it as a gesture, that captain did with an occasional apologetic smile that in the end made Shiro smile back at him. Wait, what? She smiled back at him? She appreciated his help? These two must be rubbing off on her more than she thought. But it was a good feeling, something she didn't feel in a long time.

***