"Oh for Stars sake!" Jocasta snapped, jumping to her feet and pitching the remainder of her beer into the recycler. She gave Neil a sour look.

"If these are friends of yours and they break my ship, I shall be very put out!" She declared jumping into a nearby grav chute. The area of localized gravity made her 'fall' upwards and so she gracefully landed on the command deck. Cygi was already in position, for once she appeared as she was programmed, a featureless female figure of silvery light standing in front of the signals console. Jocasta dived into the pilots chair, grabbing the controls as dragonfly drones zipped around her, fastening her crash webbing. There were six incoming swarm missiles, a full salvo from a converted torpedo boat that was several hundred thousand kilometers behind them. It had been lurking in a line of regular traffic which had caused the sensors to disregard it. A second ship, a converted bulk freighter was pulling out to join it, though it seemed to be armed only with beam weapons. 

Jocasta wrenched the controls sideways, putting the Dragonfly into a long corkscrew that slewed it around its central axis. Reaching the edge of PDS range the swarm missiles burst, deploying a payload of a hundred small seeker heads. Six missiles became six hundred. Jocasta fired her PDS. Three rear mounted 20mm beams lit, pulsing gogolwatts of brilliant blue green beams of energized particles backwards like laser lights at a rave. She waggled the Dragonfly's ample nacelles in an attempt to sweeps as many warhead from the void as she could. Each time a beam touched a seeker head it burst into a brilliant brief star far to the rear of the Dragonfly. A counter appeared next to her holographic piloting rig. 823, 761, 503, 255, 190... The surviving warheads hit. Jocasta was slammed forward against her restraint harness as her status boards went red, system after system reporting overload. They had been firing EMP rounds or half the rear engines would have been blown away, but there was still a certain amount of explosive splash from the warheads rocket drivers.

"Mother fuckers!" Jocasta yelled, ripping open an emergency panel on her control chair. She pulled a pneumatic lever on a telescoping optic fiber. An old fashioned artillery gun unfolded from the hull and rotated around, providing a low tech gunsight view through the optics. Both the enemy vessels were coming on fast, intent on boarding. Jocasta centered the gunsight on the the freighter and pulled the firing lanyard. She felt the gun crash through the hull and saw an explosion blossom on the bow of the overconfident freighter. Its forward section blew out in a spray of escaping air which torqued it sideways and away from the Grasshopper. A low powered beam from the missile boat swatted the old fashioned gun a moment before it's boarding claws clanged against the hull.