Free End of the Line by Bianca D'Arc

Chapter One
     
    She saw the incoming fire too late to
save her ship. The one-man fighter was going down, and if she
didn’t pop her canopy in the next five milliseconds, she was going
with it.
    Lisbet realized she had no
choice. Hitting the catastrophic
failure button, she checked herself out of
her ride split seconds before it blew into a million little
weightless bits. Out in the nothingness of space near the galactic
rim, she was in no man’s land where rescue was hard to come by. She
had either a long wait or a slow death to look forward to in the
next few hours.
    The enemy jits had won this battle,
though hopefully not the war. Skirmishes on the rim had escalated
in recent years as the jit’suku empire looked for ways to gain a
foothold in the Milky Way galaxy. The expansion from their home
galaxy was fueled by the comparative ease of travel via an
inconvenient wormhole and several jumpoints that had been created
before humans had realized how the jit’suku truly viewed the human
race.
    Inferior. That’s what the jits thought
of humans. Inferior in every way to their war-mongering race.
Though they looked very human in appearance—if built on a bit
larger scale than most humans—jit’suku society was one that most
humans had a hard time understanding.
    They prized warriors and seemed to
scoff at diplomats or anyone who wanted to negotiate peaceful
coexistence. The only thing the jits understood was conquest, it
seemed.
    Which was why they’d been fighting so
long and so hard out here, on the rim of the Milky Way galaxy.
Lisbet was just the latest in a nearly endless rotation of human
fighter pilots who had drawn the dreaded duty of patrolling the
rim.
    Vast reaches of emptiness between
nearly lawless stations, dangerous jumpoints, and the occasional
star system, rim duty was enough to drive anyone crazy. But she
welcomed the emptiness of space and the loneliness of her own
thoughts after the humiliation she’d been through.
    She’d been on this patrol for over a
week with nothing to report. Then this.
    A jit’suku battle cruiser had appeared
as if from out of nowhere, and blasted her before she could even
get a message out. It had been lying in wait behind an asteroid.
Lisbet had known to be cautious, but honestly, her thoughts had
been elsewhere. As soon as she spotted the giant ship zipping out
from behind cover of the asteroid, it had already been too late.
Her signals had been jammed and a blanket of weapons fire had been
sent the distance between the two ships in all her possible
trajectories. She’d been dead already, and she’d known
it.
    Popping her canopy and stranding
herself in the middle of nowhere in the emergency pod had been her
only choice. Not a great one, but there had been no other way to
get clear of all the incoming fire. The bastard giving orders on
that battle cruiser hadn’t been taking any chances that she would
get clear and report back. He had thrown everything but the kitchen
sink at her and she hadn’t stood a chance.
    “ Human, this is Captain
Fedroval of the battle cruiser Fedroval’s
Legacy . Warrior to warrior, I give you the
choice. Would you prefer the fast death of missile fire or the slow
death of suffocation when your air runs out?”
    For a moment, Lisbet thought of
ignoring the short range communication from the cruiser. He was
still blocking her long range transmitter, but he had allowed her
enough bandwidth to broadcast to his ship. Big of him. Damn,
jit’suku bastard.
    “ How do you know I’m not
the advance scout of a much larger force? Could be my battalion is
hot on my heels and will pick me up after they blow you to kingdom
come.” Oh, how she wished that were true. She’d get a lot of
satisfaction right now at seeing the jit’suku ship blown into a
million pieces.
    There was a slight delay in the answer
she’d expected would come back right away. He probably knew she was
bluffing. If he’d been hiding out behind that asteroid for any
length of