EVE Fiction

Orbiting a destroyer on just a thruster and a prayer, the noise of the klaxon vibrated Aristotle's pod like sweet jazz. Reunited with the ragged edge, he smirked a bit and put the heat to the cap injector. The alarm sounds slipped past his notice as the situation approached a rare moment of fate. With senses synchronizing into a waveform of unbridled concentration, he peered into the soul of his opponent and felt an invisible gaze staring right back.

There is no helmet fire in space; no measured fight against gravity playing with your clone's senses. The cold, venomous fingers of the void creep into your bones through the pod's orientation interface at the first chink in the hull. This venom numbs your extremities and spurs your brain into a desperate last dash to exceed yourself and secure victory at all costs. It was in the throes of that sensation that our boy found himself when the alarms went quiet.

He waved away the instrumentation overlay and glared at the aggressor's battle-worn ship from the cockpit. There was a ceasefire. A transmission soon came over the local channel: “So, I guess we'll finish this some other time.” With the target still locked and scrammed, Aristotle could see the other was well into hull as well. Another volley would have turned either ship into salvageables, but they had pushed their guns past the limits and wound up melting everything just a second too soon. And so he grinned, slapping off the scram and slouching back in his sweat-soaked seat to watch his opponent's ship warp off, trailing smoke. There was only one school of engineering where he could have learned to use the first law like that. He must have been a graduate of the Institute, too.