Skimming Stars

Once her ship finished glowing, Tala pushed off the canopy to get back into the pilot's seat, where she promptly buckled up as the Computer's count of the people locked onto her reached the seventies.

"Computer stop counting for fuck's sake!" Tala shouted as she quickly pulled up her personal connection to the System. The Computer stopped, and somehow Tala felt it was surly.

She had many, many options and a lot of unspent XP. But most of her options had been severely limited by her License Level. Now that she was in a better ship, those options had opened up.

"Come on... come on... Decades of watching * Trek better fucking pay off..."

She wanted to remember an episode that would help in this situation, but flashbacks were time-expensive and * Trek didn't have a science-magic system fucking with the genre outside of the holodecks and space-time gods...

And time travel, psychics, reality manipulators, musical-inducing subspace anomalies, wormhole gods, Napoleon fanboy gods, automated whale enthusiast probes, galactically upgraded probes, prototaxites stellariation, main-character plot armor, and mirror-universe hijinks - the last of which she suspected she was performing just by being here.

Quickly she selected and maxed out what she could in Gravitic Acceleration Resistance, Basic Piloting, and Combat Maneuvers.

The she swapped over to the ship menu and maxed everything she could into engines, the FTL drive, shields, and maneuvering thrusters. It would take another 10 ticks, slightly longer than an Earth second, to add the features using the nearby materials.

When she tried to do the same for the starter-level cloaking shield, however, she got a notification:

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Insufficient Exotic Material: Paracausal Temporal Crystal

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"Fucking-Shit-Crap-Ass..."

She quickly ran out of English swear words and so switched to Bisayân, even though the Computer's universal translator kept translating her own words back to her in English. English was her first language after all, so it made sense the computer would prioritize the language she was most developed in - brain-matter-wise.

The tingling in her body finally stopped as her new pilot skills settled in. A realization struck her. "I can't get a fucking cloaking device because I don't have a fucking time crystal?!"

She didn't so much "know" the science behind what her ship needed as she "understood" what the System was trying to tell her.

"No cloaky without doing science to find cloaky crystals. Fuck my life."

With that problem identified, she set it aside to focus on what she could do now. There was no way she was going to outgun an entire system's worth of ships.

"Computer plot a course to start skimming matter from the star."

"Working..."

As soon as the Computer said that, something exploded through the asteroid she was hiding in.

"Shields At 99%" the computer announced once the chunks of rock stopped hitting them.

"Well at least I'm immune to tiny slow rocks now," Tala said.

A moment later, a ship that looked like a tug and another that looked like a fighter hovered down, facing the opposite direction before they started turning.

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Upgrades Complete

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As soon as the system informed her, Tala slammed the throttle of her interface forward and sped between the two ships, leaving them spinning in opposite directions as she bumped them with her shields.

"That was too fucking close," she said as she rocketed - anti-gravitically impulsed, really - into the black of space.

She'd gone off the optimal skimming course to escape, and so she slowed engines and pulled Vicky into a switchblade turn, spinning into an almost 300-degree turn - here angles were measured from 0 to 400 - to put herself on track to the star before pushing the engines back to full.

The whiplash she should have felt was oddly muted as she did so, more like a gentle roller coaster than the neck-snapping maneuver the unimproved her would have experienced.

She had little time to contemplate the implications of modifying herself, as her sensor readout - newly upgraded - showed a lot of triangles headed her way.

She was faster than most of them, but not all. But she had the advantage of being far closer to the sun.

"Computer, calculate a gravity slingshot towards the nearest place to generate a slip space rift! Time it to enable maximum fuel intake!"

"Working... Maximum fuel intake with projected path 30%."

"Add one revolution."

"...62%."

"Add another!"

"...98%"

Tala pushed into the angle that would take her to the limit of her safety, well within the star's corona.

"Computer start gathering fuel. Let's get this over with."

"Advised: Fuel Scoop Cannot Engage With Forward Shields In Place."

"Graaagh! Computer lower the forward shields!" Did she have to command every little thing around here?

"Lowering."

A new gauge appeared, showing the steady progress of her ship gathering fuel.

"Advised: Thermal Buildup As A Result Of Aft Shield Capture Will Exceed Safe-"

"Computer lower aft shields!"

"Lowering."

The first shot to try to hit her landed far forward. She watched as the red energy pulses scattered into the star, making insignificant plumes of stellar gas rise.

"Caution: Incoming Missiles."

"Gaaaah!" Tala let out her frustration as she zoomed in her local map screen, seeing the enemy missiles as tiny yellow arrow lines homing in on her.

Her one hope to keep fueling enough to escape meant dodging while maintaining her flight path and elevation above the star.

If she was forced too low, she'd get caught in the gravity and die; too high, and the enemies would have a much clearer shot. And there were a lot of them shooting at her now.

Out of instinct more than a particular plan, she drifted her ship through the arc of a coronal mass ejection before curving back onto her path.

The missiles trailing her flew into the arc and promptly exploded, little squares appearing on the map triangles to show they were trashed.

By the time she was halfway around the sun, her enemies seemed to finally realize what she was doing.

A few fools risked chasing her, but she didn't need to evade them long before the sun on their ships' bellies fried their systems.

The lucky ones pulled away, but the unlucky ones became fodder for her EP pool.

The smarter ones took up positions as close as they could and fired down at her from relative safety.

Their shots were light - meant more to disable than destroy - but that didn't mean she could afford to take many of them.

Solar ejection arcs quickly became her second-best friend after Vicky - the glitch not the ship - and she flew beneath as many as she could to shake the missiles coming after her.

By the conclusion of her first of three revolutions around the sun, she had run out of Bisayân swears, swear phrases, and orisons to gods both Abrahamic and pagan. She switched to Chinese, which was definitely not her best language.

Her path around the sun was growing increasingly erratic, waving back and forth across the "optimal line" as her mind worked overtime to translate the incoming fire icons on her local display into maneuvers and actions.

By the time the Computer decided to warn her about her elevated heart rate and dehydration, she was well into an elevated state between panic and action. And she'd stopped swearing, which meant she was now all action as she dodged, spun, and occasionally flew backward to fire on an enemy that proved resilient enough to stay with her for more than a minute.

All the moving around was playing havoc with her ability to gather fuel, but Tala could feel in her bones that if she stopped doing the things she needed to survive, then the panic would win well before she died.

Yet some distant corner of her mind summoned up an amusingly helpful memory. "Fear is the greatest destroyer..." she said, quoting her favorite Captain from one of Earth's greatest works of science fiction.

She dodged under another mass ejection, shaking a flock of missiles.

"If I am afraid, it is because I am smart enough to recognize the danger before me."

She jinked as a shot hit her shield, the first one to get through all the sensor noise put out by the sun.

"Shields At 91%" the Computer warned.

That was it? Some scientific instinct told her that the enemy shots were not only less accurate because of the sun, but were less powerful because of the solar output disrupting their magnetic confinement.

Another part of her mind told her the enemy shots were all like trying to make a torpedo go into an exhaust port, only realistic.

She let out a relieved laugh and got back to work, arcing into her third and final pass.

That was when the big guns arrived.

She came around the sun to find an enemy cruiser parked just above her plane of flight. It opened fire on her as soon as she cleared the horizon, ironically taking out two of the latest idiots to dive for her rear.

"Fueling complete. Re-Establishing Jump Parameters."

The new flight path went directly past the enemy cruiser. Tala was too focused to swear. She needed a plan and she had maybe thirty seconds to-

"Computer, raise aft shields!"

"Raising."

It was an insane plan, gathering the plasma of the star inside her shield envelope. Utterly suicidal in the face of oncoming fire and reliant entirely on the fact that she could actually see the elevated bridge of the ship in front of her.

The tactical readout showed they were enduring the star only because they'd put everything they had into their bottom and side shielding.

But somewhere in the madness, she felt the hunger for all the EP a ship class that wasn't even on her list of available evolutions had to offer.

And if these fuckers wanted to be the big dick on the table, she was going to cut off their head!

"Caution: Compromise Imininent."

Tala ignored the Computer.

"Fear exists for one purpose: To be conquered!" she shouted as she jackknifed her ship sideways, letting momentum continue her forward path. "COMPUTER LOWER AFT SHIELD NOW!"

"Lowering."

The moment her aft shields disappeared, all the built-up plasma from the star collided with the bridge of the enemy cruiser, right as they realized what was coming and started to move.

They were too late.

The solar plasma scorched the bridge clear of life, and in the chaos of its attempted maneuver, it began listing toward the star.

As Tala straightened out her flight path, the cruiser became caught by the nose, its engines pushing it deeper and deeper until it contacted the surface of the sun.

Its shields failed completely then, and the explosion tore a pillar of fire through the black behind Tala as the star's fire followed the new path of least resistance into the sky before arcing back down.

A string of explosions followed, but Tala had a bare half-tick to admire her handiwork before she was clear of the star and barrelling toward the nearest patch of empty space.

"Activate Slip Aperture!" she declared with a triumphant laugh.

As the sky ripped open to reveal the blue-white light of her salvation, Tala reached backward and flipped her enemies the bird.

A moment later Vector Free entered the aperture and she was safe.