Free We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) by Dennis E. Taylor Page B

reasonable and predictable tactic, but I had no intention of being predictable.
    I spent a full five milliseconds mulling over my options. In short order, I had a rough plan.
    Fortunately, the ship had long since been fully prepped, and could leave any time. I blew the grapples and brought all flight systems to full function. While I waited for physical reality to catch up with my awareness, I sent a query to my libraries about the approaching missiles. The libraries gave three possible models, with generally similar flight characteristics. I chose the most pessimistic and calculated a takeoff vector as close to 180˚ to the missiles’ vector as I could safely manage.
    As soon as sensors indicated that I was free, I gave a burst of the SURGE drive, just enough to clear the station. I rotated the ship and cranked up the reactor to maximum. That’s going to be hard on fuel reserves, but I guess being blown to smithereens would be harder. When reactor output rose to the required level, I engaged SURGE at maximum acceleration.
    The ship shot away from the station in the opposite direction from the published launch trajectory. The first missile went right past me, its trajectory unaltered. I realized with a jolt that it had locked onto the space station. The second missile was altering its trajectory to follow me. I hoped that the published specs for the reactor and SURGE drive were accurate. If my acceleration fell short of expectations, I wouldn’t be able to avoid interception. And that would be the end of Heaven-1. And of me.
    While I waited for velocity to build up, I checked the progress of the voice transmission. It now sat at “Missiles detected heading your way. Get away…” I checked acceleration using SUDDAR to monitor the increasing distance from the station. Calculations indicated a steady 2.5 g acceleration. The SURGE drive seemed to work on the entire ship, so there was no way to measure it internally.
    The space station began firing on the approaching missile. The weapon appeared to be some kind of Gatling gun. I hoped they knew what they were doing. If those bullets ended up in a periodic orbit, they’d be coming back, sooner or later.
    The flash of an explosion in the distance saturated one of my cameras. It couldn’t be either of the missiles, which were still accounted for. I did a quick calculation and realized that the explosion came from where the missiles had originated. Someone had blown up the shooter.
    A second flash indicated the destruction of the missile that was targeting the space station.
    This was all fine and interesting, but I still had a missile on my tail. Given enough time, I could outrun it. I did another quick millisecond calculation and realized that I could almost outrun it. Sadly, almost wasn’t good enough.
    Normally, you’d use chaff against a missile, but I doubted I had anything like that on board. I had six mining drones, which were equipped with small SURGE drives of their own. Well, okay, maybe I could give the missile something else to blow up.
    I activated and ejected two of the drones, with orders to ram the missile. As they flew toward my pursuer, I positioned them in a fore/aft configuration. Hopefully the lead drone would take the missile out; but if it missed, the second one would have better targeting information. I didn’t know if I’d have time to launch more drones if the first two failed.
    A bright flash of light behind the ship saturated the rear camera. What the hell? That couldn’t be the missile, which was approaching from a different vector.
    I waited a few seconds for the cameras to recover, then checked the rear view. The station was an expanding cloud of rapidly cooling debris. Dr. Landers’ voice transmission was still coming, so at least he hadn’t been on the station. The message now included “…quickly as you can. And disable…”
    How could the station have blown up? All the missiles were accounted for. Speaking of which, I checked my