Sabatine cooked a simple meal of stir fried vegetables with some diced meat from a recent hunt and a pungent tamrind sauce she had been saving for a special occasion. Given that she might be dead in the next hours or days it seemed the perfect time. She opened a couple of bottles of cold cider, enjoying the bite of the booze with the spicy food.

"Think they will come tonight?" Tiber asked as they sat on the porch and watched the end of the road.

"Nah, by the time the survivors clean their trousers out, and get up the balls to tell the big boss it was a bust, it will be after dawn."

"Probably after noon by the time he finishes raging and decides what to do about it."

"What do you think he will do about it?" Sabatine asked. Tiber made a face and struck the top off another bottle of cider.

"I bet he heads over here with every swinging dick he can round up," he replied. Sabatine sighed and looked out over the farm she had spent the last few years patiently building from her land grant.

"Yeah... that is what I figure too."

______

It was nearly dusk by the time the thugs finally arrived, rolling down the road in the back of large flatbed trucks. They dismounted as soon as they reached the boundary markers and shook out into a respectable skirmish line. They made no attempt at stealth, opening fire with shotguns and rifles when they hit the fruit trees and disturbed the wind chimes Sabatine used to keep the birds away. Sabatine winced each time they fired, high powered weapons maiming and killing trees she had planted on the first days of her retirement. When they reached the house without opposition, they threw crude incendiary bombs, petrochemicals in water jugs with fuses of soaked fabric, through the windows. The house, being a colonial hab model was largely fire resistant, but the mob raised great cheers as fire blossomed within. It was only then that Sabatine acted, bringing the engines online and lifting the assault boat out of the grove of wild trees in which it had been concealed, its roaring down draft blowing a storm of leaves in all directions. The pair had been watching the 'assault force', if such a term could be applied, on the excellent sensors of the assault boat. Now the lifted over the panicking thugs. They opened fire as the vessel swept over them fanning the flames into high intensity. Despite being less than fifty feet away the number of hits they heard through the hull was embarrassingly few.

"Contact," Tiber announounced from the gunners station as he settled his targeting reticule and fired. The air screamed as the particle beam ripped it apart, the lance of blue green energy pulsing out in a continuous flow. It struck the first parked truck two hundred meters behind the frantically firing thugs. The greenish cargo hauler transformed into a miniature mushroom cloud of fire and smoke that rained debris for a hundred meters in all directions. Tiber drew the beam along the line of trucks, each one adding to the conflagration as starship grade weapons atomized their light civilian frames. Tires and debris bounced out of the fratricidal explosions as the gunship swept over, the sensors neatly compensating for the thick pall of smoke that surrounded them. With a three second burst of the beamer Tiber destroyed every vehicle the assault force had brought with them. 

"All tangos down," Tiber said in tones of grim satisfaction.

The loss of irreplacable vehicles to a remote rim community was immeasurable, but more importantly it stranded every thug that Gorm could summon 16.23 clicks from town. Sabatine grinned viciously as she turned the gunship north towards the township. It was time for Gorm to see how he liked losing everything he had worked for.