"-And on the docks, come down in flocks, them pretty girls will say," T'Vrias said as she stood atop the captain's chair, her voice soft and gentle as she carried the verse by herself.

The men, for their part, quietly harmonized around her. The Lieutenant and Ensign from their stations, keeping ready for even the slightest discrepancy from the Nyos.

Captain Reinarr, quite happily, was kneeling down beside the chair and motioning up to her as if she were some form of angel instead of just the centerpiece for the song. Thankfully, her time of carrying the verses was coming to an end, and the others merrily joined in with her to finish it off.

"Well it's snugger with me than on the sea, on the Banks of Newfoundland!" She hooped with them and did a little shake in her skant uniform as she leapt down from the head of the chair, her wings outstretched and making her descent as light as a feather's.

"We'll scrape her and we'll scrub her, with holystone and sand, for there blow some cold nor'westers on the Banks of Newfoundland!"

They all shared a laugh and a round of applause to their performance, enjoying the relaxed atmosphere that had come with the longest orbit yet. The Meridian was currently performing a double helix orbit, giving the Nyos little bursts of signal to keep luring them away- and hopefully making them more and more paranoid as well.

So far, they'd been doing this for at least twenty hours straight. In return, they'd managed to punch a few holes in the massive warship, but had suffered at the expense of their primary sensor pod and an almost, but thankfully still intact, neatly cleaved off port nacelle. One EVA trip later and the worst of the issues had been silenced, albeit, without the proper tools, most were left unfixed for the moment.

This next encounter, Captain Reinarr had decided, was to be the crippling blow. They'd fire up sooner than normal and count on the increased power from the engines to deliver them past the Nyos before it could lock onto them. Meanwhile, they'd lay into the enemy ship with all of the Meridian's weapons locked and loaded, targeting for the maximum effect. With any luck, they'd disable the Nyos and be in a far better position to make arrests or call in other Patrol Fleet ships- or, if warranted, even one of Starfleet.

In the intervening period between then and the last attack, the bridge crew had read the same books and technical manuals thrice over, and had exhausted just about everything there was to do aboard a smaller starship like the Meridian. Without being equipped for such a long voyage, and having to keep all the systems dark in between each pass, those options had been limited quite severely. Thankfully, Captain Reinarr and Doctor Prinn had a well-rehearsed routine for getting around severe boredom: Old Earth shanties.

They'd been a favourite of Reinarr's from before the Academy, when he'd serviced an old wooden museum ship as a teenager, and he'd carried on his passion with him through to the Patrol Fleet. T'Vrias, being his unshakeable shadow through his meteoric rise through the ranks, had learned to tolerate, if not outright enjoy, them. When Reinarr had gained his own command, the tradition of singing the old shanties to pass the time had come right along with him.

Falling back into his chair, the Captain looked up at the old Eksokaisen next to him.

"We do have our fun, don't we, Doc?"

"Indeed, Captain," She nodded in agreement, "Even if you know the Banks is my least favourite shanty."

He waved a dismissive hand at her, "Oh, come on, it's perfect for you. Besides, the only other choice to headline the song is Grigori and it just wouldn't be the same that way."

T'Vrias chuckled with the Captain as they watched the system's sun rise to greet them as they crossed the apex of the planet again. She silently relaxed, ever so slightly, as the graveyard world passed beneath their line of sight. It would reappear once they began their run, of course, but it was easier to ignore the thousands of deaths when she couldn't see the still twinkling embers of the dying planet.

Another thought, however, still nagged in the back of her mind.

"Do you really still believe the Commodore is still in command of the Nyos?" She whispered softly.

"I'd bet the whole Federation on it, Doc. Nobody else could have," He paused, then added, "Would have done this."

"What makes you so certain? I know the Commodore is prone to his," She searched for the most appropriate word that wouldn't involve invoking an Eksokaisen squawking swear, "Extremes," She decided, "Yet it's hard to think of him, of any Terran, doing this. You're all so soft skinned, fair hearted. Bull headed, yes, but not monstrous like the Orions or the Klingons."

"We Terrans," Dash replied, using the same term Eksokaisens insisted on using to refer to humans, "Aren't as far removed from our violent past as the galaxy would like to think. Just a couple of years back marked the centennial celebration of the last time there was ever violence on a mass scale back on Earth. That's in my father and grandfather's lifetimes, Doc," He looked at her with a mixture of concern and somberness, "I still don't think everybody's over what happened back then, or what it's taken to get here."

"Your Terran history is indeed fraught with violence, but you have since overcome that," She placed a comforting claw on his shoulder, "Old as I am, I have yet to see such rapid development and change as I have seen on Earth replicated anywhere else."

"People can be very frightened of change, you know, of that undiscovered country."

"Perhaps, but there's little they can do now. With the Vulcans, the Klingons, hell, even the Ferengi, it's hard to go anywhere but forward now."

They held each other's gaze for a few moments, and Dash was just about to offer a reply when the proximity alarms chirped briefly. Turning away, they both returned to their duties.

"Alright, boys and girls, by the book, by the book now," Captain Reinarr said, straightening up in his chair and commanding the full authority of his crew, "Let's make this one count. Lieutenant Grigori, begin the targeting sequence. Ensign Marlowe, on my mark send the signal back to engineering to fire up the engines."

He had been uncertain of these maneuvers at first, downright petrified with anxiety almost, but they'd far and away surpassed his expectations of success so far. Now, brimming with confidence again, Captain Reinarr proudly ordered the Meridian to begin approaching attack speed. With all hands accounted for and all systems powering up to full, she roared to life and did just that.

The port and starboard phaser turrets began to warm up, the veins of electronics and tubing coming alive with the powerful promises of battle- preparing to unleash the full might of the Soyuz-Class border cutter on their unsuspecting target. Inside her engine room, six engineers clad in red and black bolt from one catwalk to the next, bringing the heart of the cruiser back to life in record time. The calls and shouts to action ring off the walls, only soon drowned out by the reactor core humming its way to peak efficiency. In the hallways and lower decks, the few scattered crew drop their leisurely attitudes and rush to their duty stations, prepared to do their part in ensuring the Meridian is ready for her next encounter with the warship they've been told is lurking just outside the hull.

On the bridge, the seasoned veterans await their moment anxiously, trusting in their crew to execute the plan to perfection. Ensign Marlowe steels his nerves and watches for the board to run green so that he can send the Meridian ploughing into action once more. As is so often the case for his short career, he is all too well aware that there will be no second chances.

Beneath the cutter, the Nyos continues its path, still chasing after the sensor ghosts of the past in an attempt to rid itself of what has become a considerable nuisance. Its running lights are off, and the only light to be seen comes from the ominous red of her nacelles and the barely visible whites of the bridge.

Passing the apoapsis, the Meridian runs hot and comes in with a roar to shake the heavens. Her forward momentum is so sudden, so severe in its dual battle to beat the gravitational fields of Corinth IV and the automatic defenses of the Nyos, that her bridge crew is forced back into their seats, holding onto their stations with all the strength they have. The assisted targeting subsystem is still offline, determined to be a nonessential system considering the skill and speed of Lieutenant Grigori, and her sharp teeth now bare themselves for all the galaxy to see. The second her sensors and scanners come online she appears as a beacon in the dark night, but to the crewmen aboard the Nyos she seems more akin to a shooting star riding hell for leather straight down towards them.

It's too late for either of them to turn away now, what could have been and what will are now irrelevant factors. If they even wanted to disengage, that is- with the fury that both ships unleash on each other it is hard to argue that they would have tried to do otherwise if given the chance.

One clean sweep, the Meridian running so close to the Nyos that the thunderous roar of her impulse engines make their way to every single deck of the massive ship, and the border cutter unleashes all she has to give. Merging into the shields of the Nyos, the Meridian's tactical officer finds little challenge in attacking the primary target. With the red tip as guidance, Grigori perfectly aims the weapons and blasts the starboard nacelle to smithereens. With quick adjustments, he also directs the fire into random areas of the ship, attempting to deal as much damage as possible in their pass. A number of phaser banks are, luckily enough, destroyed in the process.

One explosion after another rips itself into existence as the Nyos' weaponry assaults the small cruiser. The shields on the ship are shredded in an instance, her primary sensor pod becoming the first casualty and erupting into a ball of flames and scrap. A nacelle is traded for a nacelle, followed by the second nacelle also being ripped to pieces in an instant. If they had been activated, their destruction would've spelled the end of the little ship there and then- as it is, they had been shut off since the first pass, and now simply continue the earthshattering quakes that now wrack the cutter.

Compensating for the assault, Ensign Marlowe swings the ship around in a tight arc and brings her roaring back for one last desperate attack. Images and memories of the Challenger doing the same to a Romulan missile cruiser a hundred years previous flash into their minds, but the crew of the Meridian are not yet determined to share the same fate. Working what remains of the turrets, Lieutenant Grigori silences another series of phaser banks before sending one critical shot through to a central power conduit in the Nyos' hull, forcing the warship to fall silent.

One last shot is fired and the bow of the Meridian takes the full force of the blast, sapping the little ship of what strength she had left.

Two ships drift in the shadow of a dead planet and assess the situation, settled so closely together now that it would take only the softest nudge of a solar wind to push them together. Now, more than ever, the two ships are locked in combat- and only their commanders will determine who survives to tell the tale of the encounter.