Sayeeda was thinking what her pilot was thinking. With a twitch of her fingers she thumbed the gunnery computer to life and waggled the control yoke, a motion designed to free the guns if rust or other obstruction had bound them. The rotated freely and the rangefinder panned across her screen.

"What are you doing?" Taya asked, a tinge of shock in her voice as the Highlander heeled over, altering course as rapidly as its compensators could handle.

"We are going to see if we can't give the bugs something to remember us by," she said, toggeling the firing switch with quick sure motions. The Highlander rocked as one of the smaller insect craft tried to vere to intercept, the plasma bolts blasted it into courscating flames as the chitin liquefied and flashed to steam under the hammering.

The Freigher a 60000 ton super hauler was on a balistic course for the moon. Even at this range they could see the hazy tail of gas and debris from where vast alien weapons had gutted the ship. The emergency beacon was still active and identified the ship as the City of Kronstat with a cargo of aluminum tailings. The Kronstat had obviously been burning hard for the planet in an effort to escape its atackers because it had an inbound velocity of nearly 0.35 C. The massive steel vessel was a coffin for her crew as no life signs returned from the wreck. Sayeeda imported the telemetry data from Neil's console.

"Looks like we'd need to go aboard and get the engines fired up. Needs at least a sixty second burn," she observed, verbalizing the calculation. The current course took the freighter straight into the small moon, but with just a small adjustment they could use the moons gravity to sling shot the derelict around into the mass of bio ships.

"Do you think we can get the engines functional?" she asked, her neutral tone conveying her relative lack of skill with starship subsystems.

[@POOHEAD189]