Chapter Three: A Pure and Kindhearted Woman

Inside the Young Dragon mining barge, Liu Shaoyu was holding a paper copy of War and Peace, completely engrossed in the book. Suddenly, the ship’s alarm blared.

“Warning: Lock-on signal detected. Source at 30 kilometers. Prepare for impact.”

Although the Bumblebee’s radar had a monitoring range of only 15 kilometers, anyone who thought that Liu Shaoyu—a graduate of the Command Academy—would just fly a standard mining barge out into space would be sorely mistaken. While the Bumblebee’s hardware could never make it a strategic warship, minor modifications were certainly within reach, such as an upgraded radar. By purchasing detection components from the market and making some small tweaks to the circuitry and capacitor allocation, Liu Shaoyu had doubled the radar’s range. It sounded simple, but the underlying energy transmission theory was far from common knowledge among miners. Yet Liu Shaoyu was no ordinary miner. He had mastered such modifications by the age of ten.

And it wasn’t just the radar—apart from the ship’s outward appearance, he had modified nearly every system to some degree, spending every last credit in his anonymous account at the Universal First Bank. Such accounts required only a special number and a passcode for withdrawals, making them extremely popular among all walks of life.

These modifications turned his vessel into something that only looked like a mining barge. In truth, it was an attack ship with mining capabilities. The laser mineral extractor, for example, now had two modes. The first was the traditional function: breaking up ore with the laser, then pulling it aboard with a tractor beam. The second mode cut power to the tractor beam and diverted it to the laser, increasing output for far greater destructive power. Of course, this required widening the laser’s aperture to withstand the higher loads.

“Target lock in 1.5 seconds,” the ship’s AI intoned. Liu Shaoyu set the book on a small, purpose-built shelf and shifted into combat mode.

The sudden appearance of pirates thrilled him. Deep down, he was still the captain who once commanded fleets on the battlefield. Now, with no crew, he had to handle every operation himself, but all captains started from the bottom. Liu Shaoyu’s hands moved with practiced ease.

“Thomas, generate a full holographic map. Cease mining operations. Switch to full laser-output mode,” he ordered, his eyes shining with the familiar light of command.

“Target lock complete. Holographic map will activate in two seconds. Mode switch will take five seconds,” responded Thomas, the ship’s command AI.

While Liu Shaoyu worked, the pirates had finished locking on and preparing to fire. Five interstellar micro-missiles launched, spiraling toward the Bumblebee, streaking through the void and leaving long, glowing tails. Yet, just as they neared the hull—half a meter out—they exploded against a shimmering, nearly invisible energy barrier. The pirates frowned; they knew that telltale shimmer all too well—it was an energy shield. Such defenses were unheard of on a simple mining barge, and their confusion was only beginning.

The laser, which had been extracting ore, suddenly shifted from its usual blue-white beam to a pure, brilliant blue, and swung toward the pirate vessel.

The pirates barely had time to react before their ship’s armor dropped by thirty percent. Frantically, they raised their own shield, but another beam struck before the system was fully online, slashing the shield to forty percent and knocking out their engines. Vast sections of their ship were now exposed to space.

“Missile system ready,” Thomas announced.

“Fire.”

Two missiles streaked from the Bumblebee, trailing long tails. They struck the helpless pirate ship, which exploded in a burst of fire, reduced to a cloud of debris. Another pirate, who had been preparing to grab the cargo containers, stared in stunned disbelief. Abandoning resistance, he prepared to jump to safety.

Liu Shaoyu, just warming up, wasn’t about to let him escape. He locked onto the fleeing ship, intercepted its jump signature, and readied his own missiles.

But the pirate’s nimble raider had one key advantage: speed. Its engines flared, space around it rippled, and it vanished in a flash of light.

Now it was Liu Shaoyu’s turn to be surprised. “How did he get away so fast?” But he didn’t hesitate—using the stolen jump data, he jettisoned his ore cargo and initiated his own jump, disappearing as another fleck of light in the cosmos.

At that moment, as Liu Shaoyu’s ship departed, the space around the mining site rippled again—a massive freighter appeared, just finished its own jump. The newly arrived United Mining Transport freighter began scanning and found only ore containers and scattered wreckage—no sign of the mining barge.

“Could it have been hit by pirates?” wondered one of the crew, looking at the drifting debris. But there was nothing more they could do. They activated tractor beams, pulled the ore containers aboard, and prepared to jump to the next mining site. All they could do was report the incident to the customs patrol.

Liu Shaoyu’s jettisoned cargo was hauled into the transport’s vast hold, to be sent along with other containers to United Mining’s transfer station at Feyons. There, the containers would be sorted, the miners listed according to the codes on the containers, and credits tallied at month’s end. On the registry for mining barges in Liu Shaoyu’s sector, one was marked: Young Dragon.

As for the pirate who escaped via jump, the battle had left him terrified. He leaped straight to a rendezvous point with a pirate transport.

Space trembled and the pirate salvage ship appeared. The crew, feeling lucky to have escaped, hadn’t even finished their jump sequence when, to their shock, another ripple flared nearby—Liu Shaoyu’s Bumblebee arrived in pursuit.

Liu Shaoyu, just coming out of jump, waited for his systems to reset so he could scan and lock onto the pirate. But the sight before him left him speechless.

There, besides the fleeing salvage ship, was an entire pirate flotilla: a 2-kilometer-long smuggling freighter, a 331-meter pirate cruiser, and ten 97-meter pirate escorts. Their unified yellow camouflage made them stand out strikingly against the pale blue starfield.

“We’re finished,” Liu Shaoyu thought, never imagining that chasing a lone pirate would land him in the midst of a pirate fleet.

The pirates, just recovering their salvage ship and about to initiate a tractor beam, were suddenly startled by the unexpected arrival of a stranger. Although confused, their superior numbers made them unhurried; they all locked their weapons on the new arrival, waiting to see what would happen.

Liu Shaoyu suddenly felt as if he had a dozen guns pointed at his head. For the first time, he regretted his bold pursuit.

By interstellar custom, this was the moment someone would shout, “Hold your fire!” And indeed, what happened next would remain vivid in Liu Shaoyu’s memory for years.

A vast region of space began to ripple—the telltale sign of incoming ships. Then, a breathtaking sight: twenty starships materialized, the smallest a 346-meter light cruiser—ten of those—and ten more medium cruisers, each a kilometer long. Most striking of all was the central vessel: a fire-red dreadnought, armored and three kilometers in length.

Its scarlet hull gleamed all the brighter against the blue starlit void.

From this dreadnought, a powerful transmission echoed across space: “You are surrounded. If you don’t want to die, lower your shields and take your punishment like good little boys.”

Liu Shaoyu was left alone in the void, bewildered. This display was even more domineering than a fleet of warships spanning hundreds of kilometers.

The pirates were even more flustered. “What are we? Pirates, aren’t we? Shouldn’t this kind of grand entrance be ours?” Confusion and indignation mingled; they quickly dropped their lock on the Bumblebee and redirected their targeting systems at the intruding red dreadnought fleet, ready for a brawl.

As soon as Liu Shaoyu’s ship was no longer targeted, he breathed a sigh of relief and started his engines, eager to put some distance between himself and this gathering storm. Just then, a communication request came through.

On the holo-screen appeared a woman in a red leather corset. Before Liu Shaoyu could get a good look at her face, she spoke:

“Well, aren’t you a handsome young man.” Liu Shaoyu hadn’t expected the fleet’s captain to be a woman. Now he got a good look: she couldn’t have been thirty, with flaming red hair, heavily smoky eyes, and an air of explosive energy—whether from her genes or her race, he couldn’t say.

“Listen up, brat! Get your little mining barge out of here, or you’ll get blown to bits when the shooting starts. Off you go, run home to your folks!” With a string of fierce shouts, the communication link closed.

She looked better when she wasn’t talking, Liu Shaoyu thought. He’d never been scolded like this before. She clearly took him for just another miner. Which, at this moment, was exactly what he was. Resigned, he powered up his engines and pulled back from the edge of the battlefield.

An ordinary miner would have jumped away at once. But Liu Shaoyu was no ordinary man—he’d once commanded warships far grander than hers on his first assignment. This was nothing he couldn’t handle. So, after withdrawing several dozen kilometers, he cut his engines and switched on full-spectrum monitoring, curious to see how this formidable woman would deal with the pirates.

As soon as the previous transmission ended, the pirates had already gone into combat mode, shields up and missiles locked onto the enemy fleet. A wave of interstellar missiles soared toward the red warships.

But the red-haired woman’s fleet, shields already raised, calmly locked on with their scanners and launched decoys. The missiles exploded harmlessly halfway to their targets. Then, thousands of combat drones poured from the fleet, surging toward the pirates.

The twenty warships formed a diamond formation, with the dreadnought at its core. The dreadnought earned its name for one reason: its main batteries could launch interstellar heavy missiles—devastating weapons with armor-piercing capabilities that could shatter the shields of ships in their own class and inflict tremendous damage. If a single word described these warships, it was ruthless.

Utterly ruthless. The smaller cruisers on the perimeter bought the dreadnought precious time. Five heavy missiles erupted from its launchers, trailing fire, and streaked toward the 331-meter pirate cruiser.

Dazzling explosions lit up the cosmos. The pirate cruiser was obliterated, reduced to drifting debris. The shockwaves and shrapnel scattered the rest of the pirate formation.

The dreadnought’s allies unleashed their drones, finishing off the remaining pirates.

After the battle, clouds of wreckage floated through the void. The victorious fleet dispatched drones to scan and salvage the remains. These scraps could be melted down and reforged into new hulls, and the toughest cargo containers sometimes yielded unexpected treasures.

At that moment, the red-haired commander, gleefully collecting her spoils, noticed that the “little one” she’d warned had not fled, but was watching from afar. First surprised, then amused, she sent another communication request.

_______________________________________

Can anyone guess what this red-haired woman’s name is?