Pharris watched on the viewscreen as Slug landed on the station with a bounce. As soon as Slug got up and began walking, Pharris turned to the helm and began shouting out orders.
"Bring the engines to 110% , Get us the hell out of this mess, Launch chaff and ECM pods! MOVE! "
Four ECM pods left the torpedo tubes, promptly cloaked and began emitting the same sort of EM noise made by a poorly tuned Cloaking device.
Suddenly, the Ops manager called out: "Sir! we just got a redlight on the #5 airlock! someone just left the ship!"
"Mag! the Bastard!" Pharris was enraged at himself for letting Mag get out, but he was busy.
A moment later, engineering had powered up the reactor past the redline, and the Barbarossa kicked it self out of the fray, and began to really move.The helmsman hands flew over his controls, taking the Barbarossa through a grueling set of twists and turns through the Asteroid belt, and eventually out into the core of the system.
free of the asteroids and the fighting, the helmsman finally relaxed his grip on the controls.
"Allright, what now, Skipper?"
Pharris looked at the holo-map of the system, they were on the opposite side as the Saril Prime, but there were other planets, which were all heavily colonised, as well as several space stations. because of the density of the population there was an extremely large ammount of commercial traffic, espescially between the inner planets. It would be relatively easy for a cloaked ship to dissapear into the haze of ships, trash and exhaust trails that marred the orbits of the inner planets.
Pharris explained his plan to the helmsman "Put us in a slingshot close around the star, so that we'll cut in through the edge of the major traffic lanes, and then whip around the star, putting us out right near the planet before we have to burn to slow us down, got it?"
"Yeah, I think so..."
"Run it by the numbers, kid; I don;t want to have to make an correction burn till we're about to hit Salril Prime."
The hemsman pulled the numbers out of the computer, moved the ship into position, and fired the engines for exactly 37.6 seconds, committing the ship to an arc around the sun, and eventually towards Saril Pime.
"ETA in Seventeen Hours." he reported
"Good, XO, you have the bridge"
Pharris walked to the turbolift, and hit the button for sick bay.
---------------
One of the men was unconcious. he had been anestetised by the doctors who were busy trying to graft skin over the third degree burn that had revealed part of his ribcage through the light body armour he had been wearing. The other man was awake, but sporting a nasty concussion from the blaster bolt that had caught his helmet. Captain Pharris picked up the piece of reflective crystal coated helmet, felt the scorchmark, and the deep indent where the bolt had hit.
"You're a lucky son of a bitch, you know that?"
"I'm sorry I let him get away, I should have-"
Pharris cut him off.
"don't worry about it, he won't get far, we've got the Rougue, and I just ordered the prize crew to get away from major systems and to watch their back till we get return."
They chatted for several more minutes before Pharris returned to the bridge to find the communications officer looking at a monitor at the comm station, listening intently to someone chattering in Salrian..
"What's up?"
The Officer pointed to the screen and grinned
"Salrian Pan-Galactic News Network, the biggest news network in the entire empire, and I just picked up the Saril Prime station: check out the headlines!"
On the screen(which was actually a 2d rendering of the normally 3D holographic monitor, there was footage of the battle, with a voice over in Salrian.
"what's he saying, he's talking so fast..."
The comm officer was fluent in Salrian, as well as many other languages(which made talking to alien border patrols much eassier) began to translate the news broadcast...
"he says that there was an invasion fleet that attempted to run the blockade of this system, but that the attempt was quelled by the supreme Salrian Navy. He says that the goal of the attack remains a mystery, as the attacking ships were Salrian themselves. Of the dozens of attacking spacecraft, only four are reported to have escaped, while the Salrian imperial navy only suffered minor casualties..."the video switched to a live feed from a reporter in a spacesuit standing at the scene of the battle.
"Things have just started to calm down now. as the last of the enemy ships was disabled not ten minutes ago." The camera panned out over the wrecked hulks floating, some intact, some torn to shreds, but what was incredible was the thousands of bodies floating around the scene. Some of them were wearing space suits or emergency survival pouches, but many more were not. The reporter began to explain. "there are many survivors, as you can see, The Salrian Navy rescue squad is just beginning to pick them up, and they will most likely be sent to one of the interrenment camps where they will be tortured and interrogated to determing the true cause of this intended invasion of the Salril Prime System." An advertisement came up for Salrian tentacle ointment, Captain Pharris smiled, and returned to his seat.
In a few hours, he would be ready to rip up some of the Salrian internal traffic routes. Not very profitable, but it would certainly add to his reputation, and to the embarassment of the Sals: The SS Barbarossa slipped by the heaviest defences in the universe, to singlehandedly terrorise shipping in the Salrian core system.
Pharris went back to his cabin to catch a few hour's sleep before they would begin the reign of terror.
(This message has been edited by Captain Pharris (edited 09-24-2000).)
