"TEN SHIPS! You have to be KIDDING me!"
The coms crackle as Faye responds to Jet's relaying of the scan findings.
"They're just zip crafts and they're low on fuel, probably from trying to find us," Jet tells her. "Just use your soft touch to call them off, Faye."
"I know what to do," she snaps. "I hope you've stocked up on bullets in there," she says in a hurry, as the doors to the hangar open. As she waits for her path to clear she pulls on an old pair of fingerless gloves, made for the hard work the hands do when controlling a ship at high speed. They're too big, because they used to belong to Spike.
One moment everything is sane with her wheels on the floor of the hangar. Life is rosey with an up, a down, a left, a right, even an upside down, which can be chaotic but is preferable to the instant 'merry-go-round to hell' feeling that accompanies navigation in her little monopod. Everything jolts as her wheels leave the nice steady ground.
Involuntarily every muscle in Faye's stomach clenches in compensation for the feeling of directional ambiguity. The display tells her right where she is but she's never quite convinced. She leans over the controls – the seat is very cold, as is everything she touches - and blasts the craft towards the little glints of light reflecting in the sun that are now getting much closer.
Jet is sending her more scan info. Three of the ships carry missiles; she'll have to focus the most on them. If she can get another two to follow her away where she can take them out one by one without endangering the Bebop, Jet should be able to handle the other five. She hopes.
Faye asks her zipcraft what's around she can use. A gate into hyperspace is nearby. This is a lucky development. She flaunts her presence to the fleet of ships ahead. She knows they'll think she's making off with all the money they're after, especially since she's heading towards the gate, as if to escape. Or they know she's luring them, and they don't care, they just want to get rid of her. Either way, she's happy.
In a burst of speed, she directs her ship into the funhouse entrance, pleased to see that half the ships – two of which are carrying missiles – are following her. The controls are hot to the touch now. The ship's had its warm up. Now it's time to dance.
As soon as the five tailers enter the gate, one of them locks on with a missile just to see what she'll do. She ignores it and continues ahead, faking ignorance. The missile is fired. Faye watches it approach on screen. She decides to let them know who they're dealing with.
Faye's got no idea how it works, but there's ways to manipulate hyperspace. On her ship, Faye has a built in device that sends out an electric current all over the outer metal. It works as a theft-control measure and a very poor force field. So, she flips it on and steers over to the side of the gate.
The electric current from her ship touches the gate's invisible edge, and electrocutes it. Faye concentrates on holding the ship steady so it doesn't careen into the side. The missile has followed Faye's ship over to the side of the gate. It gets a little too close. The electric current surges through the missile.
Instead of exploding, the missile just slows down and then stops completely in mid-path. It's attached to the electricity and the hyperspace leaking into the current, wrapping itself around the missile in a mother's hug between hyperspace and reality. To the ship that fired it, it looks like the missile has just disappeared, the likely reason being that it's a cheap missile and it failed to impact.
All Faye has to do is wait for the other ships to get too close. They're approaching very fast now, as they think Faye isn't smart enough to avoid them.
"Too bad," Faye says, and as warnings begin to nag on the screen, she kills the power to the electric current, and turns full power over to the engines to accelerate away.
The missile detonates in a catastrophic ball of kinetic energy and explosive charge, safely behind Faye but taking out two of the ships behind her, which careen out of control and disintegrate into a million white snowballs of fire.
Faye's ship communicator begins to beep. Her pursuers are contacting her for some reason. She flips it on to accept, out of bemusement.
"Toe-hold a sailboat bored the terrible," a woman on screen mumbles.
"You smoke too much," Faye says back, dismissing her. She kills the communicator with a quick flick of the wrist and fires up power to her own missiles.
She takes a hard turn, as close to 360 as possible, 390 if she can get it. She feels her body twist with the circling and she hangs on to the hand controls to stay steady. Get turned around, she thinks somewhere in her brain that tells her how to do this instinctively, so it seems to require no thought.
A random question enters her mind, but there's no time to answer it. After this is over, what then?
Hard right, flip, turn and zero in. A little green triangle comes up on her ship's screen as delicate and precise as a Victorian table setting. The targeted ship begins to maneuver away and then targets her right back with a missile. It's fired and heading at her, but not before Faye gets a shot. Trigger finger. They exchange missiles.
The beeping warning increases with every second to tell her how much time she has until impact. Seven seconds. She's already locked on to the missile as she flies upward away from it. Five seconds. Firing her twin guns at it, she strains to control the ship with one hand while working the trigger with the other. Two seconds. She finally shoots it down in a bouquet of flame. The ship she fired at was not so lucky, and it explodes as Faye's missile hits its target. That was too easy. Where are the other two ships? She zips away from the falling and exploding ship ahead.
"Rrrrrrrghh—" A hard left. Buzzers begin to scream, and she's been locked onto.
They're both firing at me, she realizes. With a hard slide she stares down the bullets as they whir past. She can't let them hit her. All her stuff is in the ship right now. She had packed it, and there wasn't time to remove it before she took off. It's expensive stuff, she thinks, really trendy gear, and she was going to be outraged if any of it got hurt. It was easier to think of this little melee as defending her stuff than defending her life. Picturing her suitcase with a bullet hole through it, she digs in and puts all the chips out.
Somehow with a combination of insane steering and luck she emerges from their attack unscathed. She takes a gulp of air, having forgotten to breathe while getting out of that last bit of trouble. They're attempting to push her into a corner and let the sides of the gate take her out for them. Apparently the money she may or may not have no longer matters. Maybe it's revenge they want, for surprising the hell out of them and taking out three of their comrades.
She sprays some bullets around from her twin guns, a hysterical move which seems to make the two ship pilots hesitate. She twists and turns, feeling the controls hot against her hands even through the gloves, to maneuver into position to get a weapon locked on. Her ship must resemble a piñata being pummeled and jarred in every direction.
She's actually locked onto both of them. It's unbelievable. But they've turned and are heading back the way they came to the opening of the gate. They're running from her. She powers down her weapons. No reason to waste perfectly good missiles… but what could have caused that?
A flash catches her eye on her console: a message, left there for her to find. She cues it up and Jet's disembodied voice haunts her monopod.
"At the end of 'Autumn Leaves' there's a little piano solo… I wish you could have heard it. Everything stops and it becomes so mournful, like someone has come along and found out that Autumn is gone. Someone actually did care for her, and he's sad she's left him… You can see him standing in the doorway not finding her, in the song, looking out over a lonely room they once shared. But then the bass kicks back in and the saxophone offers its condolences, and the song goes on without her…"
It clicks off as she sits back, stunned. In a few moments she emerges from the gate and takes a look around to see how Jet fared.