The wind howled past Jocasta, whipping her hair out behind her like the pennon of a lance as the VEC tore through the hot slightly irradiated air. The six skimmers were bearing down on them out of the sunset, brilliant white bolts of energy lancing down to blast the landscape into long streaks of fused glass and shattered rock. They weren't millitary models but they were armed, and had obviously been souped up to the characteristic efficiency of those who had a lot of time on their hands and a belief in the talismanic machismo of fast speeders. Each of the six speeders raised a long rooster tail of dust, stretching back to the horizon like the back blast of a surface to surface missle. Dirk wrenched the controls hard enough that Jocasta was flung bruising against the doorframe. Years of training in zero-g prevented her from being thrown overboard as she looped one of the restraint harnesses around her arm. More las fire streaked past, close enough that she could taste the ionization in the air as a sharp ozone tang.

Ahead of them a vast outcropping of boulders rose like a half finished mesa. Dirk was angling the VEC toward it, using the angle of intersection to screen them from enemy fire for a few seconds. After that though they would be in the open for long lethal seconds. Jocasta blinked through the menus of her implants, routing instructions through her network.

"If you are going to do something, now is the time," Dirk said in a stony voice. He probably expected her to leap up and open fire. A tactic which, while cinematic, was unlikely to bring down six skimmers without a hell of a lot more ordinance than she currently possessed.

"I am doing something," Jocasta replied without amplifying the statement with an explanation that would take her attention away from the task she was performing. The VEC howled into the shadow of the boulders, banking hard and throwing up a tornado of grit as the grav plates thrust hard against the sand and rock, bouncing them away like a bowling ball caroming off a bumper.  The stream of laser fire died away for a few moments as they were obscured from view and then the first three skimmers howled around behind them. The lead skimmer exploded as though struck by an invisible cannon ball. Its front engine cowling deformed like a slow motion image of a bullet striking armor plating, compressing the powercells until they ruptured in a shower of blue white electrical flame. The nose dipped as it lost power, tapping a rock and shredding the whole front section of the craft in a shower of debris. It cartwheeled across the desert at several hundred miles an hour, alternatingly striking the ground with nose and tail and spraying pieces, both mechanical and biological in all direction. One of the other skimmers veered sideways into a boulder and detonated in a sooty red fireball that blossomed around the rocky outcrop like a breaking wave. The other, catching a piece of fender across its starboard engine, dropped, tapped the ground and then shattered away in a cartwheel that ended in a terminal but unspectacular wreck amid the dunes to their left, little more than smoking metal and shimmering heat haze.

"Halfway there," Jocasta remarked, as her optics changed the status of one of her recon drones to 'non-responsive'. Rather an economical description for having been kamizazied into the front of an enemy skimmer. The drone had only weighed a hand full of kilos but a combined impact of over four hundred kilometers an hour, it had been as effective as a rocket might have been.

"This still leaves us with three to worry about," Jocasta remarked, as though that basic math might have escaped her new taciturn bussiness partner. She pulled her little snub pistol from her purse and checked the load, eyes twitching furiously as she fed commands into her net.

"Which might be a little trickier..."