“And that led you to decide to launch immediately?” Mimi asked.
“Yep,” I confirmed as I booted up the Krishna and launched its self-check program.
The Krishna was probably fine, since the twins never slacked in their duties. Still, it was best that a pilot never skipped running the self-check program and verifying with their own eyes that nothing was amiss. It wasn’t good to assume that the mechanics had done a perfect job, and that there wouldn’t be any issues. In the end, the girls were humans—well, dwarves—which meant they could make a mistake.
“Um, Master Hiro… I’m sorry to cause you problems all the time.”
“You haven’t caused me any problems, Mimi. Even if you had…”
“Even if I had…?”
“Well, I guess if it’s for your sake, handling a few problems is nothing.”
“If you’re going to start a sappy line, make sure to finish it,” Mimi giggled.
So she says, but I started to feel self-conscious halfway through saying that. Forgive me.
Kugi sat in the copilot’s seat. She seemed lonely, so I stroked her head. Her tails started wagging, which was extremely cute. Still, I really wished she’d hold back a bit; I wasn’t some kind of gigolo. Besides, my capacity for cuteness was already overflowing.
Yes, criticize me all you want, and say it’s a bit too late for such regrets, or that they’re all the consequences of my own actions. If I’d known that things would end up like this…I’d probably still have made the same choices. I figured I just had to accept my fate and deal with it.
“Um…will we approach using thermal stealth this time as well?” Mimi asked.
“I’d like to, but that’d be quite difficult. We’re targeting a base inside an asteroid belt, and based on the data Granny Celestia provided, we probably couldn’t get close using thermal stealth.”
I projected that onto the Krishna’s main screen. As I’d pointed out, our target was inside an asteroid belt, and the asteroids around the base were quite dense outside its frontal path. That meant we’d have to be careful to avoid asteroids while approaching the base. Unfortunately, activating our thrusters while we were in thermal-stealth mode would immediately reveal our position, so that wasn’t really doable.
“Then how will we… Oh. That again?”
“Yep.”
“What do you mean?” Kugi asked, confused by our exchange.
As for what I meant…
“My lord! We’re going to crash! Crash!”
“It’s fine, it’s fine.”
Kugi screamed as if the world was about to end. She was definitely overreacting, though. We were indeed charging through the asteroid belt at top speed, but I wasn’t the kind of loser who’d let his ship collide with stationary rocks. Even if we hit any, we had shields, so it wouldn’t really matter. Probably.
I did have to concentrate on the main screen, so I couldn’t check on Kugi. Still, I figured she’d probably fallen backward, teary-eyed, with drooping ears.
“Once we’ve made our way through, we’ll most likely start fighting immediately, so be ready. Focus time, focus time.”
“Wh-what?!”
“Everything will be okay, Kugi. Master Hiro won’t crash into mere asteroids. He had no problem weaving through denser swarms of crystal life-forms.” Mimi’s voice sounded a bit flat as she said that.
Are those two okay? Since even I had to focus while charging through the asteroid belt at this speed, I still didn’t really have the freedom to check.
“The sensors have picked up something, Master Hiro.”
“Well, it’s normal that they’d have defenses set up.”
Pirates tended to be brainless idiots, but they weren’t so dumb that they wouldn’t put defenses around their base. Usually, at least. Some groups might really be too disorganized to do even that, but at the very least, the pirates we were attacking weren’t.
“We’re about to arrive, then.”
“Yes, we’re about to—we’ve arrived.”
With my peripheral vision, I noticed a light representing an allied ship appear on the radar screen. About ten seconds before the Krishna exited the asteroid belt, that allied ship arrived and warped out of FTL travel with truly perfect timing. Such precision was definitely Mei’s doing.
The Krishna’s sensors picked up a fight breaking out between the pirates at the base and my allies who’d just arrived. The initial strike was likely a shot from the Black Lotus’s large electromagnetic launcher. The pirates’ attention had been focused on the Krishna, causing them to react late to the sudden appearance of the Black Lotus, the Antlion, and Granny Celestia.
Since they’ve landed a blow… “Fire reactive anti-ship torpedoes one and two!”
Having just exited the asteroid belt, the Krishna launched the two torpedoes from its lower hatch. They sped toward the pirate base’s turret cluster at an incredibly high speed. Reactive anti-ship torpedoes didn’t have very much momentum in and of themselves. When you fired them normally, they were as slow as turtles. But if you launched them from a ship moving as fast as the Krishna was moving, momentum would help the projectiles travel insanely fast.
“Kugi, prepare a shield cell.”
“A-all right.”
As I heard Kugi’s fainthearted response, a ball of light formed along the side of the Krishna that faced the pirate base. Our torpedoes had exploded, unleashing a powerful wave of light and heat. That heat wave washed over the asteroid’s surface, including the cluster of turrets, blowing them up. Aftershocks and debris assaulted Krishna’s shields.