After some deliberation over the relative merits of lighting oneself up like a christmas tree or trying to hide behind a big freighter still swarming with energy leeches, K'pok ran her own scan to locate the unknown ship that was scanning her. She determined that it was a smallish scout, probably Ackâlian, and about half an hour out of weapons range, assuming she was right about it being a small scout. It was decided, after a full and frank exchange of views, that K'pok would lure as many of the leeches as she could off the crippled freighter and lead them off towards the mysterious incoming vessel, leaving the other three to deal with the remaining critters mano-a-leecho in honourable hand-to-hand combat.
Our doughty heroes got themselves kitted out with K'pok's riot foam dispensers, the plan being to encase the leeches in the stuff and then pry them off the hull once they'd been rendered inert. One by one, K'pok shoved them across the intervening space with her tractor beam, leaving them to float off before thrusting in to buzz the remaining leeches in the hopes of atracting their attention. She was moderately successful, managing to entice a couple of dozen to detach from the Hzeel ship to chase her off into the void, leaving only fifty or so for Jek, Weptish and Measure to deal with. Once sure that no more leeches could be tempted off, K'pok set off at a sedate pace to intercept the gatecrasher.
Regrettably, K'pok's aim wasn't quite what it might have been, and although Jek and Measure were on-target, Weptish wasn't, and found himself about to miss the freighter by a substantial margin. Fortunately, Weptish being space-born, he is as at home in zero-G as a fish is in water, and was able to correct using his suit thrusters, arriving not too long after the others. By that time, Jek and Measure had found out to their disgust that riot foam doesn't set in vacuum, and so all they'd achieved was to squirt some streams of silly-string off into the æther. A certain amount of low-level swearing occurred. Fortunately, Jek had brought his trusty crowbar, and Measure his equally trusty shotgun, and they began the arduous task of quartering the hull and physically beating the leeches into jelly. They were soon joined by Weptish, who with equal foresight had thought to equip himself with the biggest wrench he could find in the ship's engineering supplies. It was a messy job, not made any easier by the masses of leech fragments floating everywhere from the first passes with the sand-caster, but after a long and tedious time they finally clobbered the last of them into scintillating smithereens. After as thorough a search of the hull as they could manage, they made their way inside and up to the bridge.
Meanwhile, K'pok and the incoming vessel approached their intercept point. She put her foot on the accelerator, leaving the swarm of leeches directly in the path of the oncoming ship and made a big loop back towards the freighter. The other ship ploughed straight through the swarm without any obvious effect that she could detect, closing the distance between them rapidly. At closer range her scan was considerably more detailed, and she determined that the other vessel's main reactor was displaying some alarmingly erratic behaviour. She hailed them, enquiring whether they required any assistance. They replied with a traditional Ackâlian greeting which, in rough translation, goes something like "Worthless Terran scum! Surrender immediately! You are now prisoners of the glorious Ackâlian Empire!" This cheery hello was immediately followed up by the release of three high-G missiles, which forced K'pok into some extreme evasive maneuvering; she managed to account for two of them with her puny bow laser, but the third exploded close enough to her to cause some minor damage to her drives. Now unable to outrun the Ackâlian scout, and having no luck at all with her attempted negotiations, she was forced into a vicious dogfight which went on and on and on and on and on, each ship dodging and firing, each doing puny amounts of damage to the other.
Eventually, a lucky series of shots by K'pok did sufficient damage to her foe's drives that she could break off the combat, and limp off back towards the freighter, leaving the Ackâlian more or less adrift. Her scan showed her that the other ship's reactor was becoming wildly unstable, but they responded only with insults and threats to her offers of assistance. She did the Vulcan equivalent of a shrug, and began to make her way back to rejoin the others on the Hzeel ship.
When she was about half way back, her sensors showed a violent burst of energy from where the Ackâlian had been. The others, on the bridge of the Hzeel ship, saw a sudden bright light far off in the emptiness of hyperspace.
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