Free Hegemony by Mark Kalina

with tears in her voice.
     
    Diamond Dust's crew tried to escape; a dozen escape pods erupted from the ship in the seconds before the raider made its blazing closest approach. Rilk and the rest of the crew of Ulia's Flower watched the raider's lasers track and vaporize the escape pods, before ripping open the Diamond Dust , shattering her huge hull in a ripple of silent flashes of laser light and vaporized alloy. The raider swept past the expanding cloud of debris, venting laser coolant, still firing at the wreckage, tearing the largest pieces into smaller and smaller debris.
    The second raider was less than eight minutes away.
    "We have to try the FTL!"
    "It won't work. Damn it, Kiril, it will not work," N'tasa's voice was less than calm now. Rilk wondered if she was upset about her impending death or about her husband's loss of composure.
    "We're going to..." Rilk tried to find his voice. He had given so many orders, routine orders, here. Now was a hell of a time to stumble his words. "We are not going to try the FTL. We are going to try something, though. We've got a shot at this."
    Kiril was still saying that the FTL had to work, had to. Rilk ignored him.
    "I want the lasers ready. Don't open fire yet; we can't do much to that bastard with them, but they can blind some of his sensors."
    "That won't be enough," said N'tasa. Rilk wished Kiril was... wasn't losing it. He'd have the best insight on what sort of effect the lasers would have against military sensors.
    "You're right," said Rilk. "It won't be enough, and it won't be all. The raider is five minutes outbound, and he's coming in at more than four thousand kilometers per second. That is very fast. Too fast. He will have a very limited time to shoot at us. They've used large laser arrays so far; no missiles, no interceptors."
    "Who'd waste warheads on us?" said Kuper, with an edge in his voice.
    "Just as well that they don't. Wait for it. Damn it all, wait for it."
    "Wait for what?"
    "Not now!" said Rilk, trying to ignore everything except the interface, the data stream. He had to start... right now.
    "What are you doing?" said Kuper.
    "He's running the cargo-mover," said Gala.
    "It's too late to dump cargo. We can't vector away."
    "It's a shield," said Rilk. "The ore will disperse, but for a while it's going to make a shield for us. He's going to have to fire through the ore. Now, as soon as he starts firing, lase him back. Blind him. He'll have to compensate at the last moment. He might not have time to adjust for the blinding laser. And stand by for acceleration. I'm going to try to keep the ore cloud between us and him as he passes."
    "It won't work," said Kiril.
"Shut the fuck up !" said Gala, yelling the last word.
     
    Two minutes. A single minute. No time at all.
    The inbound ship was clearly visible, a dark spindle of metal and composites with a halo of plasma thrust streaming behind it. The telescopes could see the shape of it, narrow and lean, studded with weapons and radiator spines and sensors. More than four thousand kilometers closer every second.
    A dorsal weapons mount suddenly flared to life, and tons of ore dust became incandescent as an anti-ship laser burned into it. The hull of the Ulia's Flower creaked and groaned with the energy that leaked though the expanding cloud of ore. Warning lights flashed.
    Her own small lasers fired back, trying to blanket the raider's sensors with searing light, trying to blind the raider. The 'liner suddenly rang and boomed as thermal shock ruptured a hull frame. The surface of the hull was vaporizing, melting under the raider's beam, but the ore cloud prevented the full force of the laser from striking, keeping the beam from focusing precisely on the Ulia's Flower with a shattering thermal shock.
    The 'liner's drives lit and thundered, pushing at emergency-maximum power, more than half a gee, as Rilk flew the giant ship to keep the cloud of ore between himself and the raider.
    The raider seemed to be firing