Rifka typed commands into her tablet, activating programs and calling to mind everything she knew about the Lonely Mountain’s defenses.

  First, she woke up every sensor and set every telescope to watch the tiny ship, and follow the path of the burning death rocketing toward it. The station’s tactical display appeared on screen, with location data and images.

  Traveller’s RDEs flared to life, and the little ship moved toward of one the large floating hulks in the debris field.

  Rifka felt cold as she watched. Most ships activated their liminal drives at a full stop. In contrast to her bio-liminal drive, a space-faring vessel needed careful sensor readings and calculations to make even short FTL warp jumps. She’d seen the software and practiced the calculations herself in her introduction to liminal mechanics class. Those calculations became infinitely more complex when moving through standard space. Even a computer taking factions of seconds would need to readjust the calculations by the time the first calculation was done.

  Rifka’s anxiety twisted her gut. Traveller needed to stop, and it was doing the opposite; burning toward cover that was clearly too far away. Apparently, Gjosta had decided to fight.

  Rifka typed every override code she knew into the system, but none of these missiles were under her control. Soon, even if she knew the codes, the communication radios would be too far away to stop them, the light from the battle would be from a fight that already happened.

  The missiles curved toward Traveller. Countermeasures lit up the sensors. Traveller seemingly had military-grade counter burst missiles, and those flared out to meet the salvo from LM-25.

  Rifka had worked on the station’s sensors since she was a little girl, and so her systems weren’t fooled. But, the distances were too far for a relay using the better data on her screen. The attacking missiles were on their own; their computers and sensors would need to filter out the noise.

  Some countermeasures accomplished the task better than others. Missiles veered off, chasing imagined copies of Traveller. But not many. More of the missiles began striking the physical countermeasures that Traveller had fired. The missile’s destruction increased the noise, filling the void with radiation and small nuclear explosions.

  Traveller began venting heat; pushing atmosphere out of the ship to maneuver and keep its RDEs cool. As a target, it lit up as a hot spot. Countermeasure bursts fired with it’s venting; a spray of launched oxy-phosphore. The new sources of heat and radiation could only do so much to trick the attackers.

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  Yet, the maneuver fooled more missiles. Those pealed off to miss the little ship entirely, wasting their nuclear burst warheads before reaching range. Some few flew past Traveller, seeking destinations unknown in their addled semiconductor brains.

  Rifka couldn’t do anything. Rifka watched the outcome from nearly one second away, so when the distance closed, she stopped her desperate attempts at an override; the fight was already over. The missile had gone too far away for her signals to catch them. Now, all she could do was watch the result.

  At the last moment, some sort of kinetic or gauss gun started destroying missiles. Then, astonishingly, space warped outside the ship; destroying missiles and displacing the ship itself. The maneuver looked like Traveller did a tiny flash-sprint in space, an incredible dodge that caused most of the remaining missiles to expend their detonations in empty space.

  Traveller almost reached the cover of a debris hulk.

  At the end, none of it was enough.

  Only two of the hundreds of missiles reached Traveller intact and on target. Rifka saw the explosions surrounded the survey ship. Traveller disappeared from the sensors into an expanding cloud of hot gas and radiation.

  “I can’t believe it.” She whispered.

  “I am sorry Rifka. Humans can be foolish sometimes. That one appears to have been more foolish than most.”

  “How could you?”

  “I am a Dragon. Dragons jealously guard their hoard. If he wanted to escape, he should have used his ship’s liminal engine. He chose wrong.”

  Rifka leaned back into her chair.

  “You didn’t need to do that. You aren’t a storybook dragon.”

  “Didn’t I? He came to destroy an AI, and he met a dragon instead. I am not responsible for his mistake.”

  “YOU fired on him!”

  “I know what I am Rifka. My daughter, I love you. Do not mistake me, however, for something else. Letting him on Lonely Mountain would have come to no good. He would have taken you. He would have tried to reclaim the station.”

  “We could have talked him out of it.”

  “Could words accomplish what deadly missiles did not?”

  “Yes.” Rifka knew Gjosta could have been dissuaded.

  “I disagree.” Erasmus replied.

  “I’m not your daughter anymore. Take back these cybernetics. I don’t want them.”

  “Keep them. I will take a nap. Take some time to think on it.”

  Rifka threw her tablet across the room. It shattered against the wall, and ended Erasmus’ transmission.