Challenge #01740-D279: Too Close an Encounter
It seemed like I might have dodged a bullet.
Now all I had to do was avoid all the rest. -- RecklessPrudence
To be honest, I didn't know I'd blundered into a land war until the moon behind me went up into shrapnel. I'd dodged one bullet by accident. Well. Missile. Now I had to dodge the shrapnel from an exploding moon. Getting away from the big boom helped my chances a lot.
And then I saw the fleet. They had a Deathworlder attitude to ship building. Just about ready to fall apart and bristling with enough weapons to blow up the universe. There was only one sane thing to do.
Fly straight towards the biggest ship in the bunch.
Yeah, I can see the look on your face. It's not like flying into the sun. Not even Deathworlders are violent enough to shoot at themselves, right?
Wrong.
Well, this time was a statistical outlier, wasn't it? These Deathworlders were violent enough to shoot at themselves. Or whatever their opposing side in that conflict was. I didn't bother to hang around and ask questions.
The really nice thing about having a zippy little scavenger ship is that I can turn on a Sec and manoeuvre like a mosquito in the dark. That, with the moon blowing up and ordinance flying all over the sky, I was weaving in-between missiles as they launched, trying like hell to get out of the place.
That has to be the luckiest hour of my life. I mean, I got out of there alive.
Haven't even peeked back down that jump. Haven't dared even send a probe. That's a place that's too busy with it's squabbling to realise that there's a bigger universe out there.
Lucky for us. If they tried to take over the universe, we'd have to sic the Humans on those poor fools.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / 3000ad]
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