Mao uncoupled from the huge nickel-iron monster that she had been using as a crude, but effective, ablative shield.
Even the lasers onboard the Juggernaut-class she was trying to avoid would have taken hours to burn all the way through, but someone onboard the warship had realized that if they focused on a calculated spot, they could generate jets of iron plasma on the surface of the rock and spin it around to bring Mao's tiny Verdance-class into line of sight.
Mao keyed up another torpedo and sent it off on a course designed to stay in the sensor shadow of the asteroid long enough to get out of range, and then loop back within fifteen seconds. It wouldn't be anything but a distraction, but distractions were all she could hope for, being hopelessly outgunned and rapidly running out of places to hide.
They'd be expecting torpedoes, of couse, they were standard on Verdance-class and above. What they wouldn't be expecting, though, were the dancers. Mao'd had them added by a third cousin, strictly off the books, with salvaged parts and no records in the ship's logs. She'd had to pay mega, even with the family discount, but it was the only chance standing between her and a few exawatts of monochromatic light.
She punched the keys for manual control and to launch a dancer at the same time, jerking the yoke back hard. She could hear the low hum of the dancer cylinders rotating into position, and the chunk as the 40 kilo can jumped out at 150 meters per second. She caught a brief glimpse of the thousands of meters of reflective ribbon spooling out madly behind the can, and jerked the yoke to push the ship on a reciprocal heading.
The idea was to juke out the targeting systems on the Juggernaut bad enough for just a moment so as to require human intervention, buying precious fractions of a second. The Jug wouldn't be expecting dancers from a Verd, so at some point, a human would have to be in the loop if even to confirm the Jug's suspicions. By moving away from the Jug, while being obscured by the dancer's ribbons, she was hoping to get into the asteroid field proper, where she could cat and mouse her way with ease. The field was so dense, the Jug wouldn't even be able to fit.
She cut the jets just as the HUD showed her out of the sensor shadow of the asteroid, trajectory perfect, and allowed herself a brief glimmer of hope before the dancer exploded in a puff of plasma and the laser began raking back down the line of foil. The brightness on the HUD compensated automatically, but part of her knew that the foil was burning brighter than a star, and wondered at it, while the rest screamed obscenities and punched codes.
The jig was up, so she punched max acceleration, and another dancer on a path designed to have the can intersect the beam's path directly, without unspooling the foil first. It would maybe buy her another second, maybe diffract the laser enough to matter. There was another chunk as the dancer leaped away, a blinding light that even the HUD had a hard time compensating for, and a whoop from Mao as the torpedo forced the lasers to retarget.
The torpedo never even got close, the Jug having twigged to it long before - but then, it was never meant to. It had done its job and bought the half second necessary to swing behind the next metal mama.
She anchored to the far side, and weighed her options. The HUD told her the Jug was maneuvering to get a better view, and to orient its second battery to cover for another "sneak" torpedo. Likely they realized what she was up to, blowing her last advantage. They almost immediately started spinning her new rock around, and she still had one more jump to the relative safety of the crowded belt.
She punched two of the remaining three torpedoes on opposite courses and set the dancer to intersect the Jug.
There was a dazzle as the first of the torpedoes was immediately blown away, the chunk of the last dancer launching, and then-