Starship pilot who don’t need no fancy shields or lasers
"Well... they're gone, cap."
The Scanning Officer shot the Captain a quizzical look, just as puzzled by the last 5 minutes as the Captain was. The crew of the SNS Nelson blinked, finally breathing a sigh of relief. A quiet tension unwinding as a series of cheers slowly worked their way through the beleaguered freighter.
The pirates who'd been circling their disabled ship were now floating chunks of debris. Some crazy pair of morons showed up to their distress call. They weren't in a MK 18, a NGD Lancer, not even some Mars Scraper; no they rolled up in a spaceworthy replica F4-D Phantom II. When it came into visual range, the Captain could make out the distinctive two-seater Pilot/WSO configuration of the cabin.
These days, most dog fights are beyond visual range, but the sheer difference of the scale of machinery meant that the little fighter's scan signal was the equivalent to highly interesting space debris. If not for the thermals and the obvious signatures of a spoofed Scan ID claiming a NATO IFF, they'd have passed as a complete hallucination.
As the captain turned his pipe over in his hands, he thought to his great grand-dad's War over the Arabic deserts of Earth. How he'd managed to survive the Russians and their Beyond Visual Range missiles by hugging the ground like the pilots in Ukraine. No one had expected a Greek relic to get the jump on cutting edge SU-30's and MIG-29's, for the same reasons roughly that today's episode was odd. The jet for lack of a better word for it, came from the center of a dense cohort of asteroids with barely 2km of wiggle room between objects.
The pilot had come in at a knife-point, closing the gap to under 8km between and their smooth, faintly masculine voice muttered a "Fox 3" before deploying a flurry of radar-guided missiles. RADAR. In space! He'd found great marks too, striking what must have been intimately familiar weak points of the Mining vessels turned Pirates, detonating their oxygen supplies and wiping each of the attacking 3 vessels in about 3 minutes.
They didn't even let the escape pods jettison unmolested, strafing the survivors with what looked to be an autocannon mounted to the nose of their unusual craft. A second voice announced over the open channel "All bandits splashed, have a good day Nelson!", perhaps a woman's voice. What shook the Captain was the tail designation: His Great Grandfather's.
The ship disappeared from short distance scans not long after.
The captain considered it an omen, the whole episode reminding him of the stories of Dawson's Crew. The ghosts of the past aren't meant to take to space, especially not in Cold War jets.
