"No wait!" Sayeeda snapped and cut the engines.

"Neil all power to the shields!" If Neil was confused or irritated at being overruled he reacted instantly, dumping the energy he had been sending to the engines into the shield generators. Beneath them the great merchant vessel began to move as its vast engines kicked into action, pouring a jet of plasma into space. The bioship fired, its shots missing the Highlander by meters and blasing the hull plate infront of them. A second shot hit the shields and warning alarms began to whine to life. A third blast shook the ship and Taya glanced at her captain as though she thought she had gone mad. The ship beneath them surged forward, beginning to pull away from their pursuers who still fired futiely at them. The reactors and thrusters on the freighter were many times the size of anything that could be practically mounted on a craft the size of the Highlander. The bioships engines, or whatever passed for engines, were all ready stressed to their maximum by closing the distance with an object moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light and they couldn't keep it up no matter how unusual their construction.

The shots faded away as the Freighter rocketed forward, its fuel consumption no long regulated by the demands of economy but by whatever maximum rate Neil could pump through it. A faint pink alarm began to pulse of Sayeeda's terminal.

"Capt'n we's be gown near on 0.4 C," Lonny warned. It would get difficult in the near future for the Highlanders engines to boost them free of the ships superstructure. She nodded decicievly.

"Hit it," she told Neil but the words had barely formed in her throat before the deck kicked her hard as all of the Highlanders attitude jets kicked hard, hurling them clear. The freighter seemed to slide slowly ahead of them and then suddenly it was speeding away and out of sight of the naked eye. The vessels path began to curve around the dense moon hiding it from sight.

"Well..." Sayeeda said into the silence. Neil had cut the throttle but they were still moving at nearly 0.4C out of the system. The Freighter emerged from behind the moon. Not as a ship but as an incandecent ball of fire and debris.

"What..." Taya exclaimed, clearly shocked.

"Must have burned out the fuel conduits and gone critical," Neil observed.

"But wont that spoil the plan?" Taya asked glancing rapidly between Neil and Sayeeda. The Captain shook her head.

"In space and at that speed, the impact of so much gas and junk is almost worse, look" she pointed an finger and dialed up the magnification. Half a dozen of the hive ships were balls of glowing fire now, as locked into landing approaches and without time to maneuver they were swept up in the debris cloud.

"You know, Its a shame no one is paying us for any of this," she grumbled but she clapped a hand on Neil's shoulder in congratulations none the less.