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of battle-destroyed wrecks. They were mostly used by off-world mercenary units and the so-called scavenger packs, small bandit armies composed of deserters and renegades from both sides of the war.
    But what the hell was a senior Souther command staff officer doing flying about in something as undignified as a junker?
    "Coded transmission hidden inside their craft ID beacon checks out, hon. They're definitely carrying someone with VIP status," reported Gabe, almost as if he could read her mind.
    "Not for much longer," said Rafe, watching as the two remaining Grendels streaked towards the vulnerable shuttle craft.
    It was a miracle that the shuttle had survived this long. Rafe suspected that the Grendel pilots' plan had probably been to capture the Souther craft and its human cargo intact, sending out radio warnings that they would blow it out of the sky unless it landed now in Nort-controlled territory.
    Now, however, with Rafe arriving on the scene, the Norts had apparently abandoned this plan and now wanted to destroy the shuttle and whatever VIP passengers it might be carrying.
    She pushed her Seraphim hard to gain on the Norts and their quarry, locking onto the nearest of the Grendels. Missile lock-on tone pinged loudly in her helmet speakers, but she didn't fire, knowing if a missile missed its initial target then it could easily mistakenly lock onto the shuttle craft as its secondary alternative target. Instead, her finger went to the firing stud of her fighter's main guns. The finger hovered there, waiting patiently for the right moment to unleash the power of the four forward-firing lascannons slung beneath the Seraphim's nose cone.
    The Seraphim jolted violently as it rode the turbulence from the engine wash of the two Nort fighters. Close enough to feel the heat from your target's engine thrusters meant close enough to fire and Rafe's finger stabbed down on the trigger stud just as, a moment too late to save itself, the Nort fighter directly in front of her deployed its rear defensive measures.
    A hail of small objects fell away from the tail of the Grendel, just as Rafe's lascannon bolts ripped into it. Anyone watching might have thought the hail of objects were part of the Nort fighter, fragments blown off by the lascannon hammer-blows which smashed apart the Grendel's entire rear section in one furious burst of fire, but Rafe knew better.
    "Scatter mines!" she called in warning to Gabe, wrenching at the flight controls in an effort to evade the hail of explosive devices coming flying towards them.
    Their fuses were proximity-sensitive and they exploded all around the Seraphim, filling the air with fragments of flying shrapnel as the Souther craft tried to weave a course through them.
    Rafe heard warning alarms sound. Shards of metal tore through the cockpit floor and she felt something punch into her lower leg. Wetness spread there, inside her flight suit, to be cut off a moment later as her enhanced GI body detected the damage to it. The coagulants in her better-than-human bloodstream stopped the bleeding almost instantly. Any other pilot would also be terrified by the fact that their cockpit had been holed and that its interior was now possibly contaminated by the deadly toxins that were ever-present in the Nu Earth atmosphere, but Rafe's GI immunity system made her invulnerable to the worst of just about anything the planet's super-polluted environment had to throw at her.
    Despite the agony from her leg wound - it would be a few more seconds before the chemically-boosted contents of her bloodstream would manufacture enough stimulants to kill the pain. As the damage alerts lit up her instrumentation panel and filled the comms channels of her helmet speakers, Rafe kept her attention locked on the task of saving her craft. Only GI reactions allowed her to jink her fighter out of the path of the flaming, expanding mass of wreckage that was all that now remained of the enemy Grendel.
    Her Seraphim wasn't out of