✦ ✦ ✦
“Sh-shield cell utilized!”
“Good. We’ll fly close to the asteroid’s surface and take out any turrets that remain.”
The attack just now should’ve destroyed about 70 percent of the turrets, but some were still left. I’ll focus on the relatively dangerous missile turrets first. “Mimi, contact the others. Have them send us the locations of the pirates’ missile turrets.”
“Understood!”
The Krishna had high-grade sensors for a small ship. Still, they were weaker than those on the Black Lotus and the Antlion. Pooling our sensor data would provide much more accurate information.
“Get ready—we’re about to go for round two.”
“All right!”
This time, the pair responded energetically. Kugi seemed to have bounced back, which was good. Okay… Time to pluck off the pirates’ limbs.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Huh? That guy’s got some skill.”
The kid was practically crawling along the repurposed asteroid’s surface, accurately taking out the pirate base’s turrets as he did so.
Nicholas interrupted my thoughts with a panicked shout. “This isn’t the time for that, Captain!”
“You really do lack composure,” I chastised him. “That’s why you’re not popular with the ladies, Nicholas.”
“We’re currently being blanketed by lasers and seeker missiles! I think I’m relatively composed under the circumstances!”
The pirates were indeed firing lasers at us, but they were weak beams that we could easily stop by focusing our deflector shields to the front. As for the seeker missiles, that robot maid’s ship was shooting them all down with lasers, so there was no way the missiles would reach us. This job was a piece of cake. Sheesh.
“Multi-lock compleeete.”
“Aye. Fire numbers one through four!” I cried.
A large wave of stalker missiles flickered one after another in rapid succession as they burned their propellant, chasing after the swarm of pirate ships.
Pirates cried out.
“What?! Missile alert!”
“Wait—those aren’t seeker missiles! They’re way too small!”
“They’re fast! I can’t shoot them down! Gaaah!”
The panicking pirates tried to destroy the stalker missiles, firing their lasers and multi-cannons wildly, but there was no way that would work. A stalker missile’s warhead was only a third the size of a seeker missile’s, and their fuel injectors fired sporadically, making their trajectory hard to calculate through optical or thermal data.
“Ahh, what a wonderful sound. I never get enough of hearing them scream.”
“That’s creeeepy.”
“What are you talking about? Listening to pirates shriek is a mercenary’s favorite pastime. That’s the melody of the battlefield, so to speak.”
“Whaaat?”
Lattis still thought like a normal person. From a normal person’s point of view, enjoying your enemies’ screams probably was creepy. Not that I cared.
“Hit confirmed. Ship exploded,” Nicholas reported.
“What dirty fiiireworks.”
Three stalker missiles per pirate ship: That was the Annihilator’s guaranteed pirate-killing recipe. The first missile took out their flimsy shields, the second destroyed the ship, and the third was insurance in case either of the prior two missed. If a pirate somehow survived, that was what my heavy laser turrets were for.
“This really is an easy job. We barely have to move,” Nicholas commented.
“It doesn’t seem like our allies are having as easy a time of it, though.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Shield cells!”
“Okay!”
“Seeker missiles incoming!”
“Chaff and flares too!”
“All right!”
The pirates’ resistance was stronger than I’d expected. There hadn’t been anything wrong with Granny Celestia’s information, but the guy in charge of the base’s defenses seemed surprisingly capable.
While we distracted incoming seeker missiles with chaff and flares, I accelerated the Krishna and escaped the missiles’ tracking range. Of course, those missiles didn’t just magically disappear; instead, they crashed into the pirate base and exploded. Although it was unintentional, my evasive measures were fortunately damaging the base.
“Brace for a sharp turn!”
“Okay!”
“All right! Mwgh?!”
Pushing our thrusters to the maximum, I distanced the Krishna from the asteroid’s surface. Then, cutting flight support, I used its side thrusters to execute a spin. As I’d predicted, a swarm of seeker missiles appeared not far away. The Krishna’s missile-alert system had been screaming nonstop for a while now.
I fired our flak cannons, shooting down the seeker missiles that chased us. Then I dove straight into the explosions, switching the Krishna’s heavy laser cannons from automatic to manual targeting.
I held my breath, slowing time, and navigated our ship through the explosions, anxiously aligning the heavy laser cannons’ frustratingly slow crosshairs with the seeker-missile pods targeting me.
One…two…three…four…five…six…seven. Okay. “Ha…! That’s the last of them!”
“We’ve taken down all the seeker-missile pods in the enemy base!”
“Th-three shield cells left!”
“That’s plenty. Let’s destroy the remaining laser turrets too.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
✦ ✦ ✦
Once we’d destroyed all the pirate base’s turrets, successfully eliminating their methods of resistance, the Black Lotus contacted me.
“Good work, Master.”
“Yeah. I’m exhausted. Everything okay on your side?”
“Yes,” Mei replied. “We suffered no damage. However, the other group claimed most of the pirate bounties.”
“No helping that. Their ship’s designed to hunt pirates.”
“It was incredible,” Elma chimed in. “Maybe I should install some stalker missiles on the Antlion too.”
“Not a bad idea. That’d increase your ammunition expenses quite a bit, though.”
A stalker missile cost about the same amount as a seeker missile, but since each individual stalker missile was relatively weak, you had to shoot a lot of them. They were definitely easier to use, but once you factored in the costs…
“So how’s our progress?” I asked.
“We are bombarding the vital parts of the base one at a time, aside from the main generator,” Mei answered. “It should not be long before we take them all down.”
“Okay. Keep it up.”
The Black Lotus’s nose emitted a ferocious flash; an explosion in the pirates’ base followed. What were we doing, you ask? We were reducing their numbers through artillery bombardment.
Essentially, to make it safer to salvage the goods the pirates had stashed, we would first riddle the base with holes so it was no longer airtight. It goes without saying, but to survive, normal humans and humanoid beings required pressurized spaces properly optimized for breathing. There were apparently a few races that could survive in outer space just fine, but they were extremely rare. Thrown into outer space without protective gear, people generally died within a minute. The same thing befell people inside a structure in outer space that ceased to be airtight.
Humane treatment? Never heard of it.
Well, it wasn’t that I didn’t understand where that concept came from. As someone born in modern Japan, I didn’t have zero misgivings about this. But mercy wasn’t going to save me from lethal lasers. I valued my own life, and my crew’s lives, over those of pirates and their potential victims—who might not even exist.
“Good work,” Celestia told me. “Those were some nice dance moves.”
“Yeah, thanks. Everything good?”
“I’m barely breaking even on my ammunition costs. Running a business with thin profit margins but high expenses is tough.”
The image of her smirking face rose unbidden in my mind. It was true that she had likely spent an arm and a leg on ammo, but we’d just destroyed a pirate base. And in addition to the usual bounties, we’d also earn a subjugation bonus. So this job hardly had “thin profit margins”—not that I was going to argue with her. I’d be taking 70 percent of the sale profits earned from the materials we salvaged from the base. When all was said and done, we’d both probably walk away having earned about the same amount off our spoils.
“I’m going to take a break while we wait for her to finish mopping up,” Celestia told me. “You guys know where the storage area is, right?”
“Mei never makes mistakes. Don’t worry.”
“Okay, then. I’ll contact you once we’re ready to go. Then it’ll be your turn to take a break.”
“Got it,” I agreed.
It seemed that Celestia didn’t want us to drop our guard completely yet. We’d removed all the pirates’ potential methods of resistance, but it was still possible that new pirates unaware that their base had been destroyed would show up. Therefore, relaxing too early was risky.
“The job isn’t over until we return to the colony,” I told the others. “Stay focused, and let’s go.”
“Understood!”
“Yes, my lord.”
It was good to see that Kugi was back to her normal self. And, now that I thought about it, Mimi had kept calm the entire time. She must’ve gotten used to this. It was about time to think about raising her percentage of the profits from the spoils—starting with those from this job.