"On your feet," the warden ordered. He gestured with the rifle. They followed Marchero out of the room and back to the tram station. The route back to the reception area took longer than it had on the way here, but passed through no communal areas, during which Williams dropped several hints about his opinions on the receptionist's behaviour. The warden dismissed the now nervous-looking receptionist and personally cleared the three for exit. There was a further delay whilst the shuttle returned to the landing pad, but eventually they were back aboard ship.
Williams escorted Marchero to a secure room aboard the ship, but Jalsa headed off towards the bridge. "Call in the escort craft," he instructed the pilot. "Have them stand a hundred kilometres outside scanner range. Send the order via upsilon code." The pilot spoke the order to the computer and keyed it to transmit encoded on top of one of the standard navigation frequencies. This took a while as the message was sent out heavily encrypted and in tiny chunks at seemingly random intervals.
They had been an hour from the prison when a short range transmission was received from the lead vessel of the group of three Iguanas that had been escorting the group to and from Tiriusri. They took up their positions and then vanished from long range scanners as they shut down main power to follow the shuttle as it coasted to its destination. Four hours later, and about half way into the flight the long range sensors located the output of a ship or ships running at high power in order to decelerate and intercept the shuttle. The shuttle fired up its engines, blinding out the image of the incoming ships but alerting the escorting Iguanas that it was concerned about the approaching vessels.
It was fifteen minutes later before the unknowns were detected by the standard short range scanner, and from then on they could be tracked even with active engines. High magnification visual monitoring revealed two ships, a Cobra MkI and an Ophidian. Not serious opposition to the three Iguanas, and probably third- rate bounty hunting opportunists. Such types were known to occasionally make attacks on vessels leaving prisons in the hope that they would be credited by parties who didn't accept that a period of incarceration had been sufficient punishment or who hoped for public recognition by taking out a particularly despised criminal. These indiscriminate killers were usually regarded in much the same way, and their life expectancy was never great.
The two ships were approaching backwards, engines exhaust flaring as they attempted to match velocities with the shuttle. They remained almost side by side, the faster Ophidian clearly not daring to fly far ahead and be left on its own. The Ophidian now raced ahead of the shuttle, loosing off a couple of laser shots in the process that had little effect. It circled round in a wide arc, its computers busy talking to its engines and directional controllers as it attempted to simulate inertialess flight relative to the chosen velocity.
The slower drive of the Cobra had failed to achieve quite as good a velocity match, and despite having turned to face the shuttle it had overshot and was still moving away as it attempted to bring the velocity difference down to a level where it was capable of inertialess manoeuvring.
This mistake left the Ophidian on attack approach whilst its companion was still trying to set up its run. It sported weak lasers, and on its own couldn't hope to make a quick kill. The shuttle swung around clumsily as it tried to evade the attack, but it was a slow and ungainly vessel. Normally an unarmed ship, this Naval version had been lightly armed and loosed a couple of pulse laser blasts at the Ophidian as it shot past.
By now the Cobra was fully under control, and attacking at a slower speed. Several laser blasts caught the shuttle, some of their energy leaking through the shields to lightly mark the hull. The Cobra accelerated again as the shuttle turned to face it, and jinked aside slightly to pass its target. At its closest the Cobra released a missile, but its attack angle was too shallow from this point and its speed too great for the missile to hit on that pass. Before it had time to turn again an ECM burst from the shuttle sent the missile into an erratic spiralling path before it exploded harmlessly against nothing.