The Book Was Never Hers to Write

Rather than let Kyphos's unfinished business rest, a wing of Columni hybrid ships came hunting for Besk within the hour, and Lord Scolorusk opened with a line she clearly liked the sound of. "Let's meet upon the field of battle and see which among us writes the full story. After all, history is written by the victors." Besk didn't answer with a speech. He answered by baiting her fleet to the edge of the asteroid field and detonating the outer rocks the moment she closed the distance. "Paragraph one: know your surroundings."

Debris raked her shields and, worse in her accounting, spilled the wine from the chalice she hadn't set down since the engagement opened. "Vermin! You dare! Energy weapons. Destroy one of his support ships. Make him weep for his soldiers." The shot never had a chance; her fleet was still outside effective range, and Besk let her burn the ammunition finding that out for herself. "Paragraph two: proximity of your opponent. Best not to waste energy and effort unless you can actually hit your opponent." She threw her own chalice at her comms officer rather than absorb the correction quietly.

What followed was Besk narrating her tactics back to her, numbered, while she supplied the fury to match. When one of her cruisers slowed from accumulated damage and broke her formation, he pressed the gap rather than the whole line, angling his trio to let her lead ship block her own trailing fire. "Paragraph three is all about focus under pressure. Don't spill." Scolorusk, raging and unstrategic in equal measure, force-choked her own officer mid-sentence and ordered everything she had onto Besk's flagship directly. "Target the bridge!"

She charged nose-to-nose rather than let him set the terms, bringing every ship in with her at once and denying his pincer the gap it needed to close. "I'll show you patience. As I take days to flay you alive!" Besk didn't change the plan for the threat. "Patience is a virtue, after all. Keep at her. Keep moving and make her flinch." When she finally ran her lead cruiser broadside against Integrity at point-blank range, demanding the cannons vent his hull, the hull did buckle. But proximity cut both ways, and Besk's return fire from that same range hurt her more than the gambit was worth. "Space his crew!"

By the time she was cackling about her shields being more advanced than his, the numbers had already stopped agreeing with her. "Paragraph seven say my shields are more advanced than yours!" Besk let her lead ship overextend past his formation and turned to put concentrated fire into her engines from the rear before her escorts could catch up and cover the same trick back onto him. "Seven was more about hubris. Eight will be about luck and hope." Her shields held to the end. Her round count didn't. The book closed on her terms, but not with the ending she'd promised.