Last Stand (Stag Privateers Book 1)

the void sprouted life and became a vibrant garden.
Shifting his head slightly to activate his headset's mic, shipwide broadcast, he spoke in a calm, clear voice. “Combat stations.”
Red lights began flashing around the bridge, and throughout the rest of the Last Stand. Around him his bridge crew bent over their stations, eyes intent on their displays. Barix, of course, on sensors and hacking countermeasures, as well as waiting ready to handle interior countermeasures in case they were boarded.
Ali, Aiden's prototype adult companion, at the moment on communications parsing system chatter, as well as doubling up on the Ishivi's tasks. At least until she was needed for more vital work.
His gunner, ready with the weapons to surgically disable the target so they could capture it intact.
And in the engine room, at least he assumed, Barix's twin sister Belix ready to keep the ship moving, while in the shield room Fix stood ready to repel boarders and make emergency repairs.
They were all ready. They'd done this sort of thing countless times over the years. And, while he didn't want to tempt fate, this run was shaping up to be pretty smooth. Aiden followed the course of the target, timing everything with the sure familiarity of decades of piloting, and at the right moment eased his ship out from behind the cluster of debris and accelerated towards the other ship.
At the comms station, Ali spoke up. “At our current speed, we'll reach weapons range with the target at almost exactly the moment they pass by the package. Excellent timing, as usual, my love.”
“Brown noser,” Barix muttered, eyes still on his display.
Ali smiled at him sweetly. “You pride yourself on your superior intelligence and rationality, Barix Ishiv. Does it display either to good effect, when you criticize an AI for doing what I was programmed to do?”
The Ishivi scowled, and Aiden smirked at the slight man's obvious discomfiture; this was exactly why he loved his companion. He was glad he'd stolen her off a Deek cruiser a year ago.
Well, actually he was glad because of the fact that Ali was the ideal crew member. Not to mention for the other, far more enjoyable services she provided. But listening to her spear Barix with incisive insults was a definite plus as well.
“Have they spotted us yet?” he asked, accelerating fast enough that the inertial dampeners couldn't fully compensate, and he felt himself pressed back in the pilot's seat.
“Nope, and even if they do it's too late,” Barix replied, seeming eager to duck out of his verbal sparring with Ali.
At the weapons station, the gunner spoke up, voice clipped with military precision. “Target is almost within weapons range. Permission to open fire.”
Aiden bit back a surge of annoyance. Did he have to ask every time? Well to be fair, he probably did. It still irritated the blazes out of him. “Granted.”
“Target is within range of the package,” Barix added, mockingly mimicking the gunner's disciplined tone. “Detonating.”
The bridge had no windows, their view of space around them provided by the large three-dimensional main display hovering in the center of the room, directly in front of the pilot's chair. Even so, Aiden still squinted slightly as a visual representation of the nuke's blast made a growing sphere across the intervening kilometers towards the target.
With almost perfect precision, the gunner opened fire the moment the atomic in the utility bot detonated. High energy laser bursts burned through the distance between the ships, timed to hit just after the enormous explosion of fusion energy overwhelmed the target's shields and they collapsed.
The timing wasn't just fancy shooting, although the gunner was as stolidly proficient as always. And it was vital he was, since he needed his attack to hit during the window when the shields were down, at least if they wanted this to go smoothly.
The newer shielding systems could withstand just about anything, even something like an atomic. Their weakness lay in the fact that it didn't take much to overload them, and when that happened a single shield required several seconds to half a minute to clear the buffers and come back online.
That's why these days most ships were equipped with multiple layers of shielding, so when any one was overloaded the next could take up the slack until the first recharged. With the multilayered shields, the window of vulnerability dropped down to as little as a few seconds with the top end six-layer systems, like the Last Stand was equipped with, since it prioritized bringing up a single layer of the shield for emergency defense while the others came back up in sequence.
Capital ships could have as many as twenty layers, as well as enhanced buffers and other measures to ensure their shields were a nightmare to knock out. But a cargo hauler like their target probably wouldn't have more than two or three, although even that could be a pain to get past if they put up a fight.
That's where the atomic came in; the sustained energy from the blast would burn through each layer of shielding in turn, and might even damage the hull or fry some systems that weren't properly protected in EM shielded casings.
Theoretically, with their target's inferior shields and the massive overload inflicted by the atomic, there was plenty of time to get in the required hits before even a single layer came back up. But it was better to pretend as if they only had a few precious seconds of vulnerability that had to be exploited, just in case it happened to be true.
Not that the gunner needed a reminder to be efficient and precise, since he was never anything else; his first shot hit the shield emitters, knocking them out. His second hit the weapons, and his third the engines.
And just that quickly, the battle was over. The gunner turned to Aiden as if looking for praise.
Aiden looked away, ignoring what could've been a hint of disappointment, possibly even hurt, hidden behind that rigid discipline. He was probably just seeing what