With the division of labour decided and the mission contracts accepted, the four members of Section Six quickly made their ways to their respective ships and undocked before heading off to their own areas of mission responsibility.

"I'll see you guys in a while then!"

The moment he cleared the station's docks, Kelly punched the throttle and his light fighter, the Headhunter, zoomed off, quickly clearing the gravametric disturbance of the large mass of Carkul Station and engaged supercruise.

Checking the set of missions he had received, he adjusted his course towards the part of the system he was responsible for.

"Ah, it feels like it's been so long, I'm excited!"

"Be careful, alright?" Susannah's voice came across his ship's comms.

"Technically speaking, this is the first time any of us has engaged in real combat. If anything feels off, disengage immediately." Hawkins cautioned.

"Just run away. It's not like anyone can catch you." Sherry added, in a half mocking tone.

"Yea yea. Nobody's faster than my Headhunter."

Kelly's precious ship, the Headhunter, was a Kual Engineering Falcon class interceptor. It's tiny body was shaped like a wedge with an elongated bubble for the pilot's canopy and a pair of large cylindrical engines taking up the rear half of the space frame. The body was painted hot rod red with a pair of white stripes running down its length.

Falcon class ships small, lightweight, and had powerful engines. They were the fastest of all ships in Stella Nova in raw speed, and amongst the top handful in agility. But they achieved this performance by sacrificing almost everything else. They had fewer armaments compared to other combat specialist ships of its size, weaker shields, weaker armour, and little capacity for both internal and external extras.

Kelly had further pushed the limits of his ship to bring his Headhunter to one of the fastest in the game. The shields were comparatively weak, though not entirely a pushover unlike the armour which was almost the same as being naked. Almost everything was put into making the ship as fast as possible without sacrificing its bite. The headhunter had almost no non-combat features installed aside from a small cargo hold that was usually kept empty to keep the weight down.

For armaments, the Headhunter had a pair of nose mounted phased neutron blaster, a weapon that fires a burst of neutrons through a phased array that partically leaked hyperspace into realspace within the weapon's barrel, destabalizing the neutrons and reducing their half-life from ten minutes to only a few miliseconds. The neutron decay unleashed a large amount of energy, but the uncharged nature of neutrons meant that there was a limit to how tightly the particles could be fired. This was a weapon that was extremely powerful at close ranges both against shields and armour, at longer distances the dispersal and short half-life meant that the phased particles quickly became little more dangerous than typical background radiation.

Its other weapon was a nose mounted torpedo launcher. Torpedoes were large guided weapons that could do significant damage to ships of almost any size. Only the number of torpedoes the launcher had differentiated between the ships that used them. Able to take out a small or even most medium ships in a single direct hit, aside from the limited ammunition, which was three shots on ships as small as the Headhunter, the only weakness of them were their sluggish nature. They flew slowly and had poor agility compared to missiles, so were comparatively easy to shoot down. Large ships would fire volleys to make it difficult to shoot the torpedoes down, but a small ship like the Headhunter was forced to time its shots to avoid enemies from shooting the projectile down.

This was Kelly's baby that he had been working on and optimizing for years. Even though he did occasionally use other ships, he always came back to the Headhunter, as anything else always felt too sluggish for him.

A minutes after entering supercruise, Kelly was the first to arrive at his designated mission location. Despite having the furthest to go, even in supercruise his Headhunter was faster than the others' ships by a large margin.

Checking his ship's sensors, he compared what it showed to what he saw through the cockpit's bubble canopy. Ahead of him was Carkul Five, the fifth of seven planets in this system. This planet had a large ring system, and most of his missions were within this dense space.

Normally logic would dictate that a ship that was slower and more durable would take the mission in a dense field of ice and rock, but Kelly preferred racing through these sorts of environments. It was difficult to get a feel for one's speed without something to compare, and the Headhunter's shields weren't so weak that a single head-on collision would tear pop it like a bubble.

It didn't take long for the interceptor pilot to find the readings he was looking for on his ship's sensors. A series of hits, warm, energetic objects moving amongst the sea of ice and rocks.

Getting closer, the ship's scanners was able to identify the objects flying ahead of him. A group of ships wandering around, poking at the frozen minerals and extracting materials.

"There they are. Sigma Drones."

Sigma Drones, according to the mission description, were originally a fleet of self replicating exploratory ships made to explore the galaxy back in the early days of superliminal expansion. The Sigma Corporation, a company that made most of its profits making military drones, jumped on the bandwagon at the time and converted its combat drones into exploratory drones. But the process put down layer after layer of programming creating countless unforeseen bugs, and rushing the first drones into production and sending them out before any real regulations could take hold, the drone fleet had already started to expand uncontrollably before problems were even discovered.

The biggest one, was that they ended up becoming completely uncontrollable. They rejected control commands from the company and just continued to expand. And due to the military AI that lay underneath all the exploration and self replicating subroutines, any attempts to move into territories established by Sigma Drones would be met with lethal force. They were even able to absorb in the wreckage of other ships and integrate the technology, always making sure that they wouldn't become obsolete. But despite how aggressive they were, they were also good at hiding when the situation was too unfavourable, so completely exterminating them has so far been an exercise in futility.

Thousands of years later, for the most party they have been relegated to a nuisance. While strong in large groups, they were usually found in smaller groups, easily picked off and treated more like space vermin than a real threat. It wasn't like they couldn't become a significant threat, and exploring new systems always held the danger of discovering large colonies of Sigma Drones, a threat to even a properly organized fleet.

Most of Kelly's missions revolved around these Sigma Drones.

Whether that meant that there was a significant infestation or just that a minor one's gotten a bit out of control due to the system not being properly cleaned up for a while he had no way to know. But as this wasn't a well paying job, he had no interest in taking the time to investigate.

Just get rid of the dozen drones he found at the designated coordinates and move on.

Punching his throttle, the Headhunter rocketed through space as Kelly powered up his weapons.

He jerked his controls here and there, testing its response. The ship's controls were a little different from the setup he normally used at home, so there was a certain degree of adjustment he needed to do.

It didn't take long before he ran out of time and instead he adjusted his trajectory and aimed directly for the closest drone. The moment he was in optimal firing range, Kelly pulled the trigger. A pair of translucent white streams of particles flickered out in a tight cone though space and bombarded his target, the gamma ray bombardment from decaying neutrons ripping through its limited shields and then its unarmoured hull fractions of a millisecond later.

Confident in the damage he had done, the interceptor pilot adjusted his aim and fired a second burst into another drone. The result ended up being the same: a hunk of broken metal spinning out of control from a cloud of expanding dust.

"Heh. They're not so different from Termite Drones."

Termite Drones were a type of enemy mobs used as cannon fodder in Stella Nova. Weak ships that used numbers to their advantage. They were normally the enemies used to train new players, but in large numbers they were also used as the basis for harder fights that often required a large number of players to engage.

Passing through the broken formation of Sigma Drones, Kelly stretched the distance between them until he reached a comfortable range and turned his ship around before starting his second attack run.

This time, the drones were aware of their aggressor and turned to attack. But just like how their shields and weapons were of inferior quality, their abilities matched their physical capabilities. Lasers and bullets flew wide as Kelly jinked back and forth, his course changing far faster than the drones could follow, and another drone went up in a flash of light.

A few more passes and all the drones had stopped moving.

"Yup! Nobody can track my Headhunter when going at top speed!"

Happy with the results, Kelly approached the debris field and slowed down. Opening up his cargo hatch, a collection of tiny drones flew out as he sent out commands to them.

"As expected. Nothing good huh?"

Staring at the results of his scans, he clicked his tongue. Not like he had actually expected anything good from such weak enemies, the results were still disappointing.

Regardless, he ordered the little drones to grab various ship parts of scant value that survived the battle, and once they returned he closed the hatch and turned towards his next destination.

There were still another seven jobs like this one he had to do.

 

The next to arrive at their destination was Hawkins. His ship, the Serenity, was the second fastest of the group, though that only put it around average. His place of responsibility was also not nearly as far away as Kelly's.

The Serenity was an Alliance Industries Dragonfly class heavy fighter. An elongated and flat boxy body with a pair of engine pods stretched out from a pair of lateral beams. As its type suggested, Dragonfly class ships were large and heavy for a single person military style craft. It was the sort to rely more on powerful weapons and even more powerful shields than speed and manoeuvrability to win fights. Painted gunmetal grey with red stripes along the length of the engine pods, the two words that best described it was aggression and reliability.

While its survivability was amongst the top class from the beginning, Hawkins pushed its medium range offensive power as hard as possible. The Serenity wasn't a ship made to fight by itself, but when it had to, it was made to shred its opposition before they could position themselves into the Serenity's blind spots.

A set of four particle accelerators were mounted in the ship's nose, each one gimbled at a moderate sacrifice to power in favour of computer assisted aiming. The particle accelerates each fired a blue stream of energized particles in a tight beam towards its targets. While the beam lacked instantaneous power, it was the sort that could easily be sustained for a long period of time. Instead of damaging at its target in a single intensive strike, it continued to bore a hole through the target over a handful of seconds, and continuing for as long as Hawkins could hold his aim. And with the computer able to adjust the trajectory of the beam to further increase accuracy, few ships could avoid being saturated with the beam of particles that flew at a significant percentage of the speed of light.

But for when the number of targets were too great to be dealt with by the particle accelerators alone, the Serenity's engine pods also each contained a pair of multiple missile launchers. Smaller and less powerful than torpedoes, multiple missile launchers fired clusters of homing missiles aimed at disrupting its targets just as much as dealing damage. The missiles' speed and accuracy make it an immediate threat to those it chases, while its numbers make it difficult to shoot down without a large number of countermeasures. A weapon system that is perfect to give more opportunities for Hawkins to finish off his enemies using his ship's particle accelerators, presuming the missiles don't end things first.

"Alright. Let's see..."

Hawkins compared his sensor readout with the mission description. He was also hunting Sigma drones, but his target location was an area of the system's asteroid field where they had been spotted quite frequently.

"Three groups, eight, six, and eleven is it?"

The mission Hawkins was going for didn't specify the number of targets needed to complete it. Rather, only the location where the drones were spotted, with the goal of exterminating them. After all, it wasn't like it was possible for the mission givings to accurately know how many targets there would be unlike in a game.

Though there were missions that used quotas rather than exterminating entire groups, those sorts of missions generally were part of something bigger. At minimum, they were persistent missions to deal with a known outbreak of hostiles, all the way up to being parts of special events where large number of pilots were supposed to take part in.

Of course, that was when Hawkins was playing Stella Nova. A game with organized events where epic battles were simulated for their players' enjoyment.

This here, at least as far as Hawkins could tell, was real life.

Things like organized events to hunt enemies for people's enjoyment didn't exist.

This was a job, one of many which he had to complete quickly or else face the ridicule of his fellow squadron mates.

Hawkins cut his ship's thrust as he got within firing range against the targets.

Selecting his primary and secondary targets, he flipped his firing controls into a pair of two particle accelerators. Then, once his ship's momentum came to a stop, Hawkins deactivated his computer's flight assistance, and with a couple nudges of a thumb stick, Hawkins's heavy fighter started to drift laterally.

With all his preparations done, the slender man gently pulled on the flight stick's trigger.

A pair of blue streams of light soared through the void of space faster than the eye could see, leaving only after images trailing behind. The coherent stream of energized particles scattered as they collided with Hawkins' first target's shields.

Blue and white rippled from the impact, flowing like angry waves from the point of impact. But in just a span of a second, the blue and white angrily scattered like the wind and the particle stream bore into the target ship's lightly armoured hull. The hardened steel panels changed from dull grey to bright orange then white before yielding and the beams started slicing through vulnerable inner components.

The first drone's energy signature flickered and died in less than two seconds; Hawkins changed to his secondary target with a single button press and the same happened there as well as his ship's weapons automatically adjusted their aim within the limits of their housing. All the while, the pilot selected a new secondary target to be queued up for extermination.

And within the span of a minute, all targets within the local area were nothing more than hole riddled scrap and expanding vapour.

"Hmm...there was more than expected, but still..."

Hawkins surmised that the Sigma Drones that were the target of most of his missions were no stronger than the Termite Drones from the game. Unless if their numbers came in at least upper double digits, he wouldn't find them as an even a minor threat.

Even still, Hawkins diligently piloted his ship over and collected anything he felt could be sold for a half decent price.

Money was very tight at their current junction, so even a little extra profits from selling off junk like this would help them out.

 

The next one to exit supercruise was Sherry.

Sherry's ship, the Valkyrie, wasn't a military ship in design unlike Kelly or Hawkins' ships. It was an Shinsei Industries Nebula class exploration ship. From above, the Nebula class a flat, wide bodied ship, like a stretched out flying hexagon with a raised cockpit in the nose and pair of stubby wings angled downwards at 30 degrees. Large thermal radiators formed as a pair of stripes on either sides behind the cockpit. Below, the engine blocks bulged suspiciously in a pair hidden by the little wings, while the belly swelled out in front of them until closing down to a sharp nose under the cockpit.

As Sherry's ship was an exploration type, there were a few peculiarities that made it stand out from the military oriented ships two of her compatriots flew. While military ships featured loads of compromises to push their compact capabilities to the limit, exploration ships eschewed those particular compromises for more general performance while maximizing efficiency where possible. Especially when it came to energy usage.

The enemies of exploration ships was fuel consumption and heat buildup, so they tended to be especially proficient at those two feature even at the cost of other performing factors. The Nebula class was no exception. Despite its comparably large profile, the ship didn't have the capacity for comparable number of weapon hard points. Nor was its speed and manoeuvrability comparable to military ships of the same size class. And its armour definitely wasn't there to compensate any of those points being lacking.

That said, while its efficiency as a direct combat craft was low, the Nebula class wasn't weak either. Its four under slung weapon hard points. were of proper size, paired two and two under the nose and huddled in the crooks of the wings. The nose hard points. had plasma cannons installed, high powered weapons that fired super heated plasma in magnetic containment fields. The projectiles were slow in flight, but the damage they did was a good step or two higher than their weapon size suggested. And on top of that, they used the same fuel as the engines for ammunition, so together with the ship's already large fuel tank, the installed secondary tanks, as well as the fuel scoop to refill those tanks using the corona of various stars, the Valkyrie was a ship that had surpassing combat endurance when it was called for. All the while, the plasma cannons were powerful enough to be a threat to larger capital ships.

And in addition to those powerful plasma cannons, the other two hard points. carried torpedo launchers like that of Kelly's Headhunter for an even greater instantaneous punch against tough targets. Though the larger hard point they were mounted on meant that Sherry's torpedo launchers had more ammunition to feed from, becoming that much of a greater threat against targets that the few volleys Kelly could throw off would be insufficient against.

But while those were the weapon systems of Sherry's Valkyrie, what made her ship stand out was the way all these parts were integrated together with a particular subsystem that occupied the majority of her ship's internal compartments. Those were modules known as thermal blocks. These were components that specialized in storing vast amounts of heat, normally used in conjunction with a particular feature common to all ships: silent running. Silent running is when a ship's systems shuts or blocks off all sources of electromagnetic emissions, or in other words, cuts all radio transmissions and blocks its heat signature from any potential observers. This means that the ship is reliant and passive methods for observation defence, but is extremely difficult to detect while in this mode. The biggest disadvantages is that the ship's shields cannot be deployed without ruining the ship's stealth as well as the function being limited in duration as heat builds due to the ship's various modules.

This is the purpose of thermal blocks, which gives the ship an additional place to temporarily store excess heat its radiators cannot expunge. Though even without this, all player owned ships can cool their hulls and use silent running for a few minutes anyways, together with the high efficiency of the Nebula class as well as a large quantity of thermal blocks, Sherry's Valkyrie is capable of sustaining silent running for hours at a time if needed. And even when she needs to break stealth to expunge the stored heat, the large radiator strips meant that she could quickly return to silent running in short order.

And all that was in addition to the fact that her ship was equipped with disposable heat sinks, a piece of equipment that could have a large amount of heat transferred to them before being expelled as a stream of hot plasma.

"Ah, there they are!"

Within moments of exiting supercruise, Sherry spotted her targets. Fourteen automated drones hovering around a cluster of asteroids.

But unlike Kelly or Hawkins, her first act after identifying her targets wasn't to engage. Instead, she manipulated her ship's system information and started manipulating them.

"Nice! There's so many more functions now!"

The stealth specialist grew excited seeing all the subsystems that weren't visible back when she was playing Stella Nova. Details that a game normally wouldn't bother showing that also provided evidence that she was in reality.

With a practised hand, she manually shut off various systems, even things that the average pilot would consider essential, like the shields. Even the internal lighting was turned off, leaving the girl with nothing but her instrument lights to illuminate her.

Though she had tried to turn off the inertia generator, it turned out that the device was deeply connected to the engines and thrusters. Shutting it down disabled both the other two, though thinking back to the lore of the game, the inertia generator was the entire reason why the ships could provide enough thrust quickly accelerate a ship without exhausting the fuel tanks in only a few minutes. Though it was unfortunate Sherry couldn't shut it off to further reduce power consumption, and thus heat buildup, she couldn't doubt that it was a necessary system to keep online.

Lastly, after one final check of her passive sensors to confirm her targets, she even turned those off. Only the bare essentials to keep her ship running plus her plasma cannons was left. Even her oxygen scrubbers were turned off, leaving her with only the emergency oxygen tanks to sustain her. Though Sherry had made sure to have some of the best life support systems installed on her ship, which included high capacity oxygen tanks to both supply her with breathing air as well as keeping her cool as they slowly vented their contents without using any electricity.

With everything she could do to reduce the thermal load on her ship done, Sherry closed off her ship's radiators to finish the process of going into silent running. Then, she nudged her throttle and felt her body being pressed into her pilot's seat as her ship accelerated towards her target.

Once Sherry estimated her speed to be sufficient, she dropped her thrust and let inertial guide her to her targets. Unlike the others, it took her a while even start engaging her targets. But also unlike her comrades, her ship was set up for indirect combat, and had the highest mission endurance by a wide margin while being the most flexible in mission types. She specialized in solo engagements, but had no problems operating in tandem in a squadron as long as the other pilots were aware of her play style.

And after a few minutes drifting in space, Sherry reached her targets and looked closely at them through her cockpit canopy.

"The basic style is similar, but the details are pretty different huh?"

While there was still quite the distance for visual observation, Sherry was still able to get a general grasp of what her targets looked like. While there were many similar points to the termite drones she was used to from Stella Nova, as the group had theorized before each going after their own targets, it was clear that these machines had their own distinctive features, even if in the end they were superficial.

"Oh well. They're still slag."

With a quick adjustment of her thrusters, Sherry lined up her first target and fired off a blue/white ball of plasma from one of her cannons. Her ship's thermal reading spiked for a moment before the weapon quickly vented what waste heat it could and her ship drew away what remained, storing it in the installed thermal blocks.

The pilot's target, on the other hand, fared a little worse. With a bright flash of white light, what was once a drone ship patrolling this region of space had halved in mass in an instant, becoming an inert piece of debris as it slowly tumbled end over end.

The other drones quickly responded, turning its sensors this way and that, but it was unable to detect the ship who's thermal signature was only a fraction above the cosmic background radiation.

Barely moving her fingers, Sherry tapped her thrusters to keep her trajectory unpredictable while she gently pulled the trigger, letting out plasma balls one after another.

If her opponents were living pilots, they would have quickly fallen into a panic, but these were machines. Though unfortunately for them, their orderly way of responding actually made them easier targets for Sherry as their responses were extremely predictable. Without any erratic manoeuvres or any attempt to run away, the entire group was laid to waste in only a handful of seconds.

"Phew. That was exciting."

Despite how calmly she dispatched her targets, the young pilot's body was tense with the stimulation. The thrill of the hunt wasn't lost to her even though her hunt was done with so slow and methodical. No, her thrill was from being the silent owl, not the quick cheetah nor the powerful tiger.

Stretching her body to let out the tension that had built up, Sherry turned to reactivate a few of her systems as she went back into her post hunt mode. After one thorough check of her passive sensors, she finally opened her ships radiators, allowing her ship's thermal blocks a chance to recharge, as well as the life support's emergency tanks while she launched automated drones to go and collect saleable scrap and fill her cargo bays.

As she sat back, basking in the feeling of a successful hunt, a thought came to her.

Unbuckling her seat's harness, Sherry floated up in her cockpit. Artificial gravity was another system she had turned off that wasn't originally in the game, but since it was something that was more of a convenience feature rather than a necessity like inertial dampening, the pilot didn't bother turning it back on.

She was curious as to why she didn't feel sick from the feeling of weightlessness, but all she could do was chalk it up to the nature of her new body.

And speaking of her new body, Sherry opened up a storage locker in the back of her ship's bridge-like cockpit, pulling out a life sized snowy owl plushie. It was one of the stuffed toys that Susannah had gifted her and Sherry had snuck onto her ship before the group launched from the Blue Steel earlier in the day.

"I'm a real girl now, so this much is okay, right?"

Despite her original protests regarding the gifts before, the reason the newly reborn girl didn't acquire any cute toys for herself wasn't because she didn't like them. The proof was in the effort she put into making her character as cute as she was, and her selection of clothing after arriving at Carkul Station.

Sherry happily tightened her harness once again and secured the stuffed toy between her legs as she hugged it.

"From now on, this really is fine, right?"

Whether her words were a confirmation or a reassurance, not even this newly reborn girl was quite sure.

Even still, the little pilot plotted her next course and continued her work.

 

Finally, the last to arrive at their destination was Susannah.

Susannah's ship was quite different from the others'. While Kelly and Hawkins' main ships were military fighters and Shelly's was an exploration ship, Susannah's was a luxury liner.

Technically, the White Star was a Valen Industries Porpoise class luxury liner. Quite a bit larger than the other primary ships of her squadron mates, its features and appearance were also quite a bit different. Prioritizing aesthetics and comfort of its passengers above all, the Porpoise class actually strongly took after its namesake in appearance. Its pearl white panels and jet black observation windows formed the gentle curves and fins resembling that of an aquatic creature. Only larger, much larger, to the point that this ship series was only a step or two smaller than a corvette class.

But while its appearance was important, as well as the capacity to be fit with luxury passenger compartments, the other design requirement was for the ship to allow comfortable cruising under all but the most extreme situations. Due to that, luxury liners had extremely sturdy hulls, paradoxically giving them some of the toughest defensive capabilities of all ship types. Though all the mass that such features added up meant all luxury liners had extremely poor handling characteristics, no matter how much one tried to improve the ships' thrusters.

Susannah though, embraced these qualities of her ship, and instead chose to focus on some of the Porpoise class's hidden strengths. Its large size, one of the largest of individually piloted ships available in Stella Nova, also had surprisingly good weapon hard points. Specifically, it was capable of housing the largest hard point available in the game, and Susannah outfitted her ship around that one weapon.

A gauss cannon. A comparatively primitive weapon from the perspective of the futuristic Stella Nova, it was simply a series of magnetic coils that propelled a metallic shaft to a significant percentage of light speed. A brute force solution to the firepower problem, and while the system required a large amount of power to run on top of having a slow fire rate needing to recharge its bank of capacitors after every shot, the upsides were the weapon's extreme range and its versatility that came from being compatible with several types of ammunition.

The three most common were the solid penetrator round, a simple tungsten rod made to penetrate even the most hardened defences, the soft tumbler round, a lead based rod designed to spread its damage to as wide of a surface as possible on poorly armoured targets, and finally the canister round, a projectile that contained countless steel balls, releasing them in a cloud against small or difficult to hit targets.

After that, the remaining two of the White Star's weapon systems were multiple missile launchers, the same as the ones mounted on Hawkins' Serenity. These were the White Star's primary defence against enemies that tried to stop her long range bombardment.

In addition, all eight of the White Star's utility hard points. had CIWS installed on them. Similar to Flak Cannons, CIWS, or Close In Weapon System, was a module that were made to automatically fire upon hostile targets at close range. While Flak Cannons had much greater range, the CIWS were capable of doing damage against targets larger than missiles and remote drones. Even after getting past the White Star's powerful main weapon and many missiles, any hostile still had to contend with being bombarded by this CIWS that had no blind spots.

And of course, that was presuming that Susannah was alone. Due to the nature of her ship, she was rarely alone.

But against something like these Sigma Drones, none of the members of Section Nine doubted that there would be any problems considering the missions they were taking.

Susannah's targets were clear on her scopes. She casually selected the canister rounds for her gauss cannon, and after setting the range, she pulled the trigger. Despite the large energy drain and momentum her main weapon imparted, Susannah barely registered the entire lack of feedback from the weapon's firing. Any other ship would groan as the frame absorbed the intense acceleration the gauss cannon imparted on its projectile, or its lights might flicker from the weapon burdening the ship's systems as it recharged. But the Porpoise class, that prioritized the comfort of its passengers, and by extension its crew, its extensively reinforced frame didn't buckle in the slightest from the weapon's firing, nor did the recoil from the weapon have any noticeable effect on the ship's powerful inertial dampeners, nor did its extremely high power burden even hint at causing issue to the ship's energy systems.

Moments later, there was a tiny flash in the far distance was the only evidence of the canister round exploding, releasing its payload of countless metal balls before it was followed by a large burst of clouds forming where the pilot's targets existed mere moments before.

"Aaaand...that's all of them."

Confirming the results of her weapon, Susannah put on a smile as she congratulated herself for a job well done. After a few moments of basking in the warmth of victory, the tall woman set about to fill her ship's large cargo hold with whatever scrap she could find before moving on to her next mission.