When Selin hurried back to the bridge, everyone had already gathered.
“Identification scan shows…” Selin tapped the main console twice, and her expression immediately tensed. “Engineer Association…”
It wasn’t strange for ships belonging to the Engineer Association to show up in the Debris Belt. Their greatest hobby was scouring all kinds of debris belts and ancient planets all day long.
But an Engineer Association ship cruising around with its identity beacon on was either calling for help or marking an important discovery for its home port. Besides, she’d even been forced to make a jump.
Selin raised a hand and projected the target’s optical sensor outline onto the main screen.
Everyone thought the sensors had malfunctioned.
The Scavenger was 130 m long, a respectable ship by pirate standards. Tough, fast, and durable. Honestly, the four people aboard had never thought she was small.
But beside that thing, the Scavenger looked like a ridiculous barnacle clinging to a whale.
It was a standard medium Engineer Association Armed Logistics Ship, 12 km long. Ninety-two times the Scavenger’s length. The Engineer Association’s standards had never been meant for ordinary people.
Her hull was a neat rectangle, as if made from sintered dark gray ceramic and metal. Fine, evenly spaced maintenance seams and guide lights ran across its entire surface. Unlike the aggressive design of a warship, her shape was calm and restrained, every part made for efficiency.
But now, that order had been completely torn apart.
A horrifying gash split the starboard side toward the rear, the entire outer hull ripped open, its edges curled from the heat. Red emergency lights flickered in compartments exposed to the vacuum. Most of the pure white guide lights on the hull were broken, too.
Lights still shone on the bridge atop the ship, but a faint, incongruous glow of fire could be seen inside. The automatic damage-control system was spraying foam. The recent jump had clearly inflicted even more damage on a hull that was already in critical condition.
Of the twelve neatly aligned cold-fusion engines at the stern, only three were still barely functioning. A faint, pitiful blue-white glow occasionally flickered at their nozzles, lasting a few seconds before going out, then coming back on. Two sets of attitude-control thrusters had completely failed, leaving only the small thrusters on the port side to sputter out dying jets. They slowly spun the entire ship at an unnatural angle.
At the bow was the Engineer Association’s emblem, a silver-white insignia. It was still there: a regular hexagon enclosing an equilateral triangle, with a tiny dot in the center. But the insignia had been ruthlessly burned away, leaving only a blurry outline.
“……”
The Scavenger hovered in front of her for a long time. Selin’s fingers hung over the navigation console, making no move to operate it. She stared at the image on the screen, her pupils constantly shifting focus, as if trying to make sense of something beyond her understanding.
“Any response to the active scan?” Captain Gorgon asked quietly from beside the viewport.
“No. The beacon’s transmitting, but there’s no response.” Selin slowly came back to herself and shook her head.
“What about the onboard systems?”
Selin’s fingers tapped across the panel. “Reading scan data… The jump was a random short-range jump. She just initiated autopilot. There’s minor output from the attitude controls, but she isn’t evading us or trying to drive us off.”
“What does that mean?”
“She’s still flying, but she either hasn’t seen us or doesn’t care.”
Gorgon was silent for a few seconds. “Ulga, get the weapons ready. Selin, move closer and take a look.”
The Scavenger slowly approached the ship. When the distance closed to 100 km, the optical sensors picked up more details.
There were several holes running through the hull. They hadn’t been shot from the outside; their edges curled outward, as if something had exploded inside the ship and blown through the hull.
“The shape of those bullet holes…” Selin raised a hand and enlarged the image. “They’re energy weapon impacts, fired from the inside. Did they open fire inside the ship…?”
Selin’s voice held a trace of disbelief, but she soon noticed a blind spot. She kept adjusting the image: eight times, sixteen times, thirty-two times. The pixels began to jag, but the outlines remained clear.
“No, that’s not it…” Selin pointed at the holes. “They’re arranged too regularly, one every 1.5 meters, following the main corridor. The security system did this. But… that’s even more impossible. Internal security systems usually fire stun rounds or flechettes. These look like particle-beam impacts.”
The air on the bridge froze for a moment.
“Ha, that’s interesting.” The gunner’s voice came from behind the weapons station. “Are you saying the Engineer Association’s onboard AI went crazy?”
Gorgon put both hands on the navigation console. “Selin, you—”
He didn’t finish, because all the lights on the bridge turned a glaring red with a “pop.“
The image on the main screen jolted violently, then was completely covered by 37 huge, flashing characters that appeared in rapid succession: 123456…..37!
“ACTIVE TARGET LOCK WARNING!!”
Boom—
With a deep rumble, the distant giant ship moved. Its attitude-control thrusters—the small ones on the port side that had still been sputtering along—suddenly fired in sync. The burst lasted 0.5 seconds, with even thrust in a single direction.
Its rotation corrected by a few degrees. Not much, but enough to adjust the firing arcs of all 37 Ablation Laser Turrets still operational on its starboard side and lock them onto the Scavenger’s frail hull.
“She hasn’t fired yet.” Ulga kept a hand on the firing trigger but didn’t press it. There were 37 targeting markers, each corresponding to a turret, and every turret had enough power to punch a massive hole straight through the Scavenger’s hull.
“Confirming threat level takes time…” Selin’s hands flew across the navigation console, nearly leaving afterimages. “We haven’t been classified as a—!”
Whoosh—
A dark red beam grazed the Scavenger’s port side. The ship jolted, and the alarm let out a piercing shriek.
No warning. No test shot. It had fired immediately.
“We’ve been hit! Port-side burn, no penetration!” Selin screamed.
“Her system isn’t confirming threats at all. It’s just calibrating.” Ulga’s voice came from the weapons station. “The moment she saw us, she fired.”