We spent the next two days relatively relaxed, me and Carolina played some games, Hook attempted it's deprogramming, and I continued to be unnerved by the massive tentacle outside.

  I had, on occasion when I had focused on it, saw lindworms swimming away from the stream and to the tentacle...

  “Note: Tentacle may be a hive for the lindworms, or some kind of nest.” I said to myself

  “What about the tentacle?” Hook replied

  “Never mind Hook.”

  I still had not told Hook much about it.

  I switched over to talk to Carolina, who was just waking up from her sleep cycle.

  “Carolina, we're getting ready to transit back to realspace. You may want to brace.”

  Carolina woke up and blinked blearily at the camera in her room.

  “Do I have time for a shower?”

  “Make it quick, about 15 minutes left.”

  While Carolina washed up I prepared the ship to transit back into realspace.

  “Anything I should expect near the transit point?”

  “Nothing in the logs, maybe some loose debris that tends to collect around transit points.”

  “Much chance of conflict?”

  “It's a generally neutral world, though the imperial fleet that Carolina was a part of may have decided to stake a claim... as of what I know they do not have an active garrison there. Also This vessel is registered, currently, as performing cultural research activities, so it is unlikely that the imperials will attack us on sight. It is possible, but not as likely.

  “Just in case let's run a check on our repair systems, damage control, and all the weapons we have left.”

  A list of diagnostics began running across my vision, my feed as I had begun to think of it.

  Everything came through as nominal.

  “Alright.. let's do this.”

  I swapped back to viewing Carolina, who was just coming out of the shower doing up her uniform, I tried not to notice the exposed cleavage.

  “Thirty seconds to exiting transit.”

  Carolina lay down in the bed, and strapped herself in.

  “Ready!” She called out after she had done up the straps.

  The countdown finished, and in the flash that appeared in front of me the null point that I had been staring at for the last three days filled my vision, obscuring everything else in the void.

  I juiced the drives and...

  All of a sudden we were back in real space

  And our comms were being filled with screams.

  My view came alive with active sensor pings and, screams for help, and life pod beacons.

  “Carolina, stay strapped in, shit is going down.”

  I frame-jacked myself up to as high a reference frame as I could to start making sense of all the sensor contacts I was seeing.

  The area near the planet was awash with jamming signatures, keeping me from getting a good read on what as going on, but I was detecting imperial signals, or at least my sensors were labeling them as imperial, mixed in were... other, disruptive signals.

  “Hook, what am I looking at here?”

  “The imperials are engaged with some force that isn't using IFF.” Hook replied

  “Isn't that dangerous?”

  “Very, but also useful if there are not many of you on another side. Not broadcasting IFF does make it easier to stay hidden in all that jamming.”

  “So it's probably a small pirate force what... running past the imperials?”

  “Or doing a raid, they may be trying to get the planets 'tribute' if it's that time, slip in, grab, slip out.”

  “What's with all of these distress signals.”

  “Likely some civilians got hit, maybe some pirate vessels got hit... We will see shortly.”

  “Should we approach?”

  “Yes, if we can take down some of the pirates we can register with the local bounty board, and that will likely give us planetary credit. Otherwise we will have to pay for your treatment by trading on board supplies, and planets are well known to rip off pilots if they can.”

  “Even in the future medical treatment isn't free.”

  “It is often free for planetary citizens, or at least heavily subsidized. Starship pilots are rarely treated with open arms however.”

  “Side effect of being able to just roll in on a planet and go 'mine now' I suppose.”

  I lit off the engines and sent us into a dive towards the planet, arming weapons and loading missiles and drones but otherwise keeping jammers off and emissions low.

  We burned towards the planet.

  ***********************************************************************************

  Thirty minutes later, we still couldn't get a glimpse of what was ACTUALLY going on in the battlespace... but the imperial IFF signal(s) that we were receiving were noticably weaker.

  “Hook, does that mean what I think it means?”

  “If what you think it means is that imperial vessels are being destroyed, then yes.”

  “But you said pirates would only keep their IFF off if they had a smaller force than the imperials... they shouldn't be scoring kills, let alone enough for me to detect a noticable drop in signal strength from their IFF with all this jamming up..”

  “You are correct... it must be something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Insufficient data.” Hook said.

  I settled in to wait, the jamming was getting less comprehensive as we neared the battle, instead of one giant sphere of distorted data, it was resolving into multiple overlapping spheres of garbled data.

  I started looking through telescopes, zooming in, and while I occasionally glimpsed debris, every time I managed to focus on an active warship for more than a few moments a strobe of intense radiation would strike and blind the camera.

  “Damnit.”

  “Dazzlers captain, part of most standard ECM packages, including our own.” Hook informed me

  “At least it's not enough to permanently disable the camera's.”

  “No, thankfully these are relatively low power dazzlers, those on larger vessels or on dedicated E-war vessels used by the empire would burn out sensitive camera's however.”

  I grumbled to myself, but began using snippets of what images I could gather to piece together a fragmented image of the battlefield while I was frame-jacked as high as I could go, trying to get an idea of what we were facing.

  I had put together images of two imperial ships firing on something, and was eventually able to piece together, well, everything BUT the image of the ship they were firing on. When I was done I sent it to Hook for review.

  “It's weird, the imperial ships dazzlers still let me get a glimpse of them, but it's like these ships radiate a dazzling effect constantly, like their hull is their jammer.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  I could feel Hook struggling to keep up with my frame-jacked mind, and I also felt it as it became alarmed and sent an alert to my feed, bypassing any attempts to talk, and dumped a whole article of data into my brain, with one flashing title at the top.

  BERSERKER

  I started to dive into the knowledge presented to me, but at that moment damage reports flooded my mind as SOMETHING started boring through our starboard hull.

  I rotated and dove, straining all of the ships systems and slamming massive G-forces into both my body and Carolina(thankfully my own chair seemed to be cushioning my body pretty well, but Carolina, was bracing all four of her limbs against the inside of her bunk while her straps strained to hold her.

  Slowly(well, very very quickly to any normal person, slowly to me) we shifted out of the line of fire, and I was finally able to put together what had happened.

  1: Some kind of directed energy weapon had hammered into our starboard side, frying the skin there, thankfully with the speed of my reaction it hadn't done more then make the surface a bit crispy, and I could already feel the self-repair systems moving to repair the armor. It had unfortunately knocked one of the sensors out on that side, so I had to wait until the ship rotated, slowly, before I could get eyes on the attacker.

  When I did I could not quite understand what I was looking at. It was pitch black, and I could only really tell what it was because the planet was large enough in my view that it acted as a backdrop to the vessel. It was a wedge or dagger shape, very similar to how Hook used to be shaped, it even had three weapon hardpoints arrayed much like Hook's old design.

  Zooming in I could see the other two of it's three turrets aligning to track me, the entire vessel was pointed towards me, which, with it's long dagger shape allowed all three turrets to track me relatively easily.

  Once more I rapid fired orders off to the ship, very first I turned on the radio jammer, I was spotted so no chance at stealth anymore, and I aligned both my radar jammer and dazzler at the enemy vessel. Almost immediately the beam of directed... particles? That was non-visible but that my hud had highlighted the path from the emissions of the particles it was impacting, much like you can see a laser that is being fired through smoke, only the smoke was ablated parts of my ship. As soon as I got the jammer and dazzler on target the beam that had been trying to track back onto us veered off, The jammers having successfully spoofed the enemies targeting data.

  “Yessss...” I said, broadcasting in the clear, though I was framejacked so high that both Hook and Carolina probably just heard a squeal of sound.

  “Right, time to fight back.” I once more spoke in the clear, more out of habit and to get my thoughts clear than anything. My ship continued to spin into the evasive maneuvers I had set for it. I tagged the enemy ship for the tracking plasma launchers and launched. The turrets were still turning to track onto the enemy ship but they fired as they turned, the plasma packets turning almost ninety degrees as they turned to track the enemy ship that was coming at our starboard side.

  At the same time I triggered the missiles launchers and sent orders to the combat drones, getting them launching. The drone bay was still cycling open as the missiles lit off, following the tracking plasma bolts in.

  Now it was time for the enemy ship, this Berserker, to defend itself. I could see with my sensors as little pulses of energy erupted out of the hull, not from any real hardpoints but apparently emitted from the hull itself, and attempted to intercept my bolts of plasma. The jamming seemed to help, the blasts of high energy particles lancing behind the plasma balls for the most part, but as they approached the enemy sensors were able to pick out the little bursts of plasma more accurately. The initial salvo had been fifteen strong, nine from the tripple barreled turret(each barrel launched three at a time, apparently) and six from the double barreled.

  First one went down, then a second, then the salvo seemed to cross an invisible line and five more exploded simultaneously, but afterwards there was no more pulses, almost as if the ship had expended itself. A thought entered my mind, and I swapped to an IR view, and the enemy ship glowed white hot in my vision. Comparing it to what it was a few moments earlier, I could deduce it had overheated itself shooting down the incoming plasma projectiles. The salvo impacted and covered its prow and starboard side in energetic plasma fire.

  It looked like triggering my plasma before triggering my missiles had been the correct bet, as now my missiles entered what I had termed the berserker's PD envelope, no fire was incoming.

  Halfway through the PD envelope, the missile must have detected something, as it blew apart.

  I hadn't been expecting that, but my sensors helpfully tagged one of the enemies point defense beams that had come near, near importantly, but did not hit, the missile.

  And out of the chaff of the larger missile eight smaller missiles flew out.

  One of them was broadcasting a jammer similar to the one I had pointed at the berserker currently, one of them was sporting a laser dazzler doing the same, a third was broadcasting a squealing radio jammer, and a fourth was firing small projectiles out ahead of it that had the exact same thermal and radar signature as each of the eight missiles.

  And behind those four... decoys? It felt weird to call them that with how advanced they were, but that is what they were. Behind the four decoys zoomed four missiles with no special equipment, just packed full of pain.

  With the new countermeasures in place, the next few shots attempting to intercept the missiles did nothing, and all eight projectiles impacted , severing the prow point of the ship and mangling it's underbelly.

  The other missile flew right in on the heels of the first, holding together until far later before exploding just shy of the enemy hull and ramming it's payload deep into the superstructure of the berzerker.

  “I wonder if I should call off the drones.” I said to myself, technically to Hook as well, but near the beginning of combat I had noticed that, with the draw on processing power from all of my other systems, it was operating at less than a 10th of the speed I was currently at. Hook had repeatedly said that it was more of an assistant to the ship, and while I had thought it would be more all powerful like the fictional AI of my time, I was realizing that myself, minimally augmented as I as, was far superior in this kind of situation. I wasn't sure why that was, in my head I was sure Hook should have been superior, but whatever the reason, I was able to react and make decisions faster than the AI... or whatever it insisted it was.

  Just as I was about to call off the drones, the enemy berzerker flipped, turning it's damaged section way from me and presenting only it's undamaged top and port side, and opened fire.