Junebug rode the shock of the impact instinctively, bending her knees and staying on her feet. It was an instinct she had picked up in her decade of driving and crewing armored vehicle. More often than not you jounced and crashed your way across broken terrain, plunged down hill sides and hit unexpeted ditches and craters. You needed to be able to keep your feet, to man your gun, to react even if you were smashed into the sides of the fighting compartment like popcorn kernels in hot oil.

Combat she understood too and within moments of the AI revealing they were under attack she was dashing for the ladder up to the main deck. She hit the ladder at a run vaulting up the runs three at a time and reaching the gunnery station a moment before another blast rocked the ship. With calm precision she bought up the PPI and a shield read out. They were down to about 70 percent now, blinking an unhealthy yellow in the corner of her screen.

The enmey ship was about 3000 meters back and burning hard, it had obviously been lurking in one of the rings of asteroids which dotted the system and the angle of the burn was bad, forcing it in on an unhelpful angle. Sayeeda flipped the weapons console live and rotated the guns to bear. THe enemy was now directly behind them which gave her little in the way of difficulty, its own momentum making evasive action difficult.

The main guns thundered as she pressed down on the firing stud, hurling a bolt of plasma many times the calibre that a ground vehicle could mount back at the ship pursuing them. Its shields blossomed under the strike and it began to vector thrust to make itself a harder target.

"Booster, how long till we clear the gravity well on this heading?"

[@POOHEAD189]