Dax could 'feel' his 'face' pulled up in a death's head grimace/smile as he kicked the port overburners on and pulled a turn with enough force that his entire ship groaned around him. He popped flares on his port side, letting the plasma charge dazzlers spread out in an arc from his port side as he deployed one of his last high EM decoys out his starboard side and threw two 'whisper' decoys from the top and bottom. As soon as he was would appear to be halfway through the turn he cut his engines and dropped all his reactors but the zero-point reactors.

The trick worked. The Leviathan's missiles went off as the plasma flares dazzled their onboard VI's, the two Hellcannon shots obliterated the high signal drone, and the rest of the Leviathan's munitions spent their fire and fury on the quieter drones.

Hellbeams scorched the space where Dax would have been if he'd kept making the curve.

Old, but just as smart and canny as the newer ones were. Maybe smarter, Dax thought to himself. He reached out to tickle Fido's petting nerve, a nervous habit he'd developed over the eons, and just found emptiness.

The rage almost choking him thickened. Wrath filled his non-existent limbs and made his missing heart hammer in his chest.

I just wanted LEFT ALONE! he screamed at the Leviathan, the scream never leaving his organics.

The Leviathan was probing for him, trying to find him, going into an evasive pattern as best a craft the size of Australia could manage.

Dax's computer's had gamed that evasive pattern as the one with the highest probability and the VI who had come up with it danced and capered as it was allocated more RAM for decision making.

The creation engine was working overtime, pulling down his noble gasses that he'd siphoned from the gas giant and compressed until they were metals, converting them to matter and that matter into weapon munitions, repair parts, armor to replace what had been blasted away.

It had reached the point where it wasn't able to create nanites as fast as the strain of overwork was destroying them. The "bottom" of the creation engine was filled with a layer of 'slush' that was composed of nothing but dead nanites.

There! His weapon bays were reloaded, stocks reloaded, the rest would have to wait. The creation engine was stuttering now. The Leviathan had turned to face away from Dax, presenting the rear of the massive ship, the thrusters that were the size of some cities.

Dax threw it in maintenance mode to clean it, used the zero-point reactors to jumpstart the other reactors, locked down his disaster frame, and punched the engines to red-line.

He jumped from .34C to .65C in less than 60 seconds, just like the sleazy AI in the DASS black market EVR showroom had promised. Dax had the feeling of his face being pushed back, squeezed by a giant fist, and his lips flapping with the acceleration.

I wonder what ever happened to my face, Dax thought. His subconscious was running overtime, helping the supercomputers with their computation by providing chaos and randomization strings, which caused odd thoughts at odd times.

The price one pays.

Dax had known the big bastard was trying to sucker him so the sudden slow twisting flip and the Leviathan firing off all its weapons at once came as no surprise. Hellbeams, plasma missiles, laser heads, nCv shells, and more raked at him.

Dax saw one VI jumping up and down, trying to get attention, but the others were saying he was slow and stupid and wrong.

The VI was claiming there was a main gun battery that was going to be fired into the corkscrew arc Dax was taking for a white knuckle run along the more cratered side of the Leviathan. The other VI's said it was stupid and the main batteries hadn't fired in the last three times they had a shot so Dax's near hit must have disabled them.

A memory of a Biological Artificial Sentient plasma blast hitting the APC he was in on Rigel-6 suddenly flickered through his mind in an electronic tic of time.

Dax hadn't survived every war since the First Digital Sapience War by going with what everyone said all the time. He'd learned to trust his instincts, and his subconscious agreed with the VI.

The ship screeched in pain as metal overstressed, a hyperalloy strut cracked with a bang, but Dax reversed his spin, going from clockwise to counter-clockwise through the corkscrew.

The Leviathan's main batteries tore open jumpspace, ripped through it, becoming wrapped in a band of hyperparticles that made up jumpspace, then exited back into realspace where Dax would have been if he hadn't pulled the reverse. Realspace exploded, the very fabric of spacetime inverting for a split second before returning, dark matter coalescing and boiling away, jumpspace boiling, tears and ripples visible to the naked eye for a heartbeat as fire boiled out of the tear and shadowy talons reached for where Dax would have been.

Even a miss by nearly two hundred kilometers boiled all the ablative armor off of the side of Dax's ship, destroyed the last of his reactive armor on that side, stunned the repairboi VI, and killed a half-dozen warboi VI's. Dax didn't have very many hashes left that he hadn't used already, reusing an old one gave the enemy a chance to figure out their algorythm the same way they could predict a human mind that wasn't outfitted with a chaos seed generator and Dax had no desire to let the Leviathan begin predicting his actions.

One of the VI's suggested that Dax use a handful of fission weapons on the Leviathan, crater its armor more, another suggested a fusion beam at the big central engine, and another one suggested that Dax dress up in a costume and dance the flamingo to escape the wolves that were after him.

Dax went to emergency evasion, rotating the ship and firing the engines at overburn as he rotated his ship according to the dance instructions.

Secondary batteries lashed all around him. His ship took three hits, but none penetrated the armor. His shields held against the attempt to shred his computer systems, and his personal shielding built into his disaster frame kept the secondary attack against his computer systems from attacking his very brain.

The fission missiles launched got through the Leviathan's defenses and exploded inside one of the massive engine thrusters, blowing through the side of the thruster, venting the energy into the spaces beside it and pushing the thruster nozzle to the side.

The Leviathan cut the engine but used the energy to pull around in a turn.

It's acceleration dropped noticeably.

Still the fight raged on, Dax getting close then backing off, cycling through weapons in a random pattern, constantly looking for any edge.

He learned not to get too close when his upper thought processes suddenly shut off. Even the VI's went still, frozen in mid caper and giggle and gibber and scamper.

The firmware embedded in Dax's R-Complex went live, realized it was in charge of a ship, and took heavy evasive action, getting the ship away from the huge predator as fast as possible. The chaos generator embedded in Dax's still working subconscious started throwing out random strings to help the Rboi while Dax's firmware ordered a hard reboot.

In the three seconds Dax's brain was frozen both his decoys were destroyed but the Rboi got him out, got him through it, even as it gibbered in panic and fled for its life.

I want left alone was the first thought that came to Dax when his higher brain functions rebooted.

Old and mean, Dax corrected himself. He ordered the VI's to load the C+ cannons with war-shot. No hyper-shot, no dead shot, but full blown war-shot. They were illegal in CONFED space, illegal to own and manufacture. Loading small hyperspace engines into the traincar sized slug, iron over lead with a xenon core. Dax deployed his last two running-mate tethered drones, loaded up with missiles and a plasma wave phased motion gun on each.

//jump jump jump//

Hearing Fido faintly tell him goodbye, not through the radio, not through the coms, but through some shared link they'd created over the eons that had no scientific basis for its existence, Dax was resolved to give his companion every edge he could.

He dumped his mags.

Missiles spat from tubes all down the sides of his ship. Torpedoes fired from the forward and rear bays. Antimatter beams lanced out, lasers glittered in the darkness, and more. Dax sent a brace of dispruptor beams to where the jump-wake would be. Dax returned fire with the C+ Cannon, going from just heaving train cars at the Leviathan to true C+ slugs. The rotating barrels fired, thumped, fired, thumped, then started jamming up. Cannon two and four broke rotator chains, Cannon one shredded a track, Cannon three blew a recoil buffer. His two running mate drones spit out all the missiles, fired the plasma wave phase motion guns, then reconfigured themselves into smart-torpedoes and started their runs.

Main strut four howled as it twisted. Strut 19A snapped. Deck 15A2 buckled. Nanite slush tank two ruptured and spilled H2O slush into space.

Dax fired up the creation engine, ignoring the warning that it was still 18% slush and at 60% heat. He ordered the VI's to get in there, get on the damage to the internal structures, fix the C+ cannons and the three jammed missile banks.

With a grimacing excuse for a smile Dax knew Fido had gotten away as he dropped his speed and jetted for the nearby asteroid belt. He knew that the Leviathan would chase him, not Fido, in order to get rid of the vessel that could actually hurt it, damage it, sting at it.

The C+ warshot hit first. The micro-engines flickering them in and out of the lower hyperspace bands, changing direction as the internal guidance warboi yammered at them to. Barely in realspace for a second before the micro-engine threw it into the bands to low to be of real use but still moving the light C+ Cannon slugs at 5C. The missile came out of hyperspace both in and not-in Leviathan, most of the slug nothing more than the crazed physics particles that inhabited the border between realspace and hyperspace and the hyperspace bands. Not the more calm particles of the higher bands, but the ravening half-mad particles of where two incompatible universes rubbed against each other, screaming at each other over the speed of light.

The giant Leviathan actually staggered, two engines flickering and going out, one jetting out a huge plume of energized particles before going dark.

The lightspeed weapons hit, carving into the bottom of old craters, fingers pressing into old wounds and scars, searching for a weak point. Armor blasted away, craters deepened, and finally internal spaces were breached. One of the plasma wave phase motion gun blasts hit the main battery of the Leviathan, the explosion from the plasma that contained more than its share of subspace foam charged particles, detonated with a flash like a dying star, twisting and warping the batteries.

YOU SHALL BE CONSUMED roared into every stray electron trace on Dax's ship. Half the VI's, most of the older ones, who were now nearly three hours old, were killed outright by the roar. The younger ones shrieked and babbled back, some filled with rage and bellowing out their wrath and desire to inflict pain.

Those Dax slid into the weapons.

All of you assholes say that, Dax thought to himself.

The missiles deployed their submunitions and went off, the torpedoes went in on ballistic trajectories but the mechanical triggers held, going off and driving nuclear shape charges into the armor.

One hit an old crater, some relic of a forgotten battle on a star system that was now barren wasteland, that some poor bastard had paid deeply to inflict. The lance of the shape charge drove deep into the Leviathan's flank, tearing through maintenance spaces, and into an open space the size of a metropolis. In the split-second before the secondary buster charge went off it relayed what it saw back home with malevolent glee at the fact it got to blow all that stuff up.

Dax realized what the huge space contained at a glance. What was packed into the space, making it nearly a solid mass of interlocked machinery.

He'd seen them before on dying worlds.

Locust Class Precursor replicators, each the size of a space station.

Can't stop you, can't kill you, but I can wound you, Dax spat in the foes direction, physically firing more missiles. Can't let you get to inhabited space easily.

The disruptor beams passed through Fido's jump-wake, destroying and twisting the traces, preventing anyone from figuring out where it had gone.

Dax felt like hell. His left eye was swollen shut, a couple ribs cracked, two broken, his knuckles bruised and a couple bones in his hands broken, one ear was gone the other burning and throbbing, he felt himself spit out broken teeth and felt the blood flow down his face from a bloody nose and split lips.

His ship was badly damaged.

CONSUME started to be bellowed out.

Dax fired off EM flares and dazzlers, the strobing hash of electromagnetic energy and graviton pulses matched with dark-matter pulses interrupted the Leviathan's screech of rage.

He was into the asteroid field. It wasn't like it was depicted in so many vids, more debris scattered across entire light minutes, the larger ones thousands of kilometers apart than a densely packed field of rubble. Still, it had what Dax needed.

His debris shield flared wildly as Dax hit an asteroid twice his size. It wasn't solid, more a collection of rubble and dust that had gathered together over the millions of years. If it wasn't for the fact that Dax was moving at nearly .5C the asteroid would have come apart like a soft muffin. Instead it was obliterated by the shields, the kinetic energy of its impact dumped into Dax's energy reserves. He dumped his drive cores to add to the flare and fired off a pair of dazzlers on short life high intensity.

He cut his engines, shut down everything but two zero-point reactions, the warbois, the toolbois, and the creation engine. The creation engine slowly cooled, recycling the dead nanites making up the slush and reclaiming what pseudo-matter was left in the slush.

From the outside Dax's ship looked like a chunk of metal heavy debris.

Dead on the stick.

The Leviathan slowed and started scanning where it had detected the massive energy flare, the debris field from the flare spreading out.

It didn't compute that the small annoying ship had been destroyed. It was capable of withstanding a direct hit from its main guns and had proved too tenacious and full of tricks.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE it screamed.

It knew that the smaller craft was in there.

It would find it.

It would devour it.

Then there would be only one.

I just want left alone