"Fuck! they must be crazy!" Wizzo yelled from his console.<br/>The bridge crew, and the rest of the ship, had suited up in skin-tight vacsuits, their helmets racked on their chairs beside them. It was a very old protocol, but hull breaches were nothing to take lightly.<br/>Sam leaned forward and studied the sea of dots on the plot that was the amalgam of all the ship's sensor feeds, watching. The red blip had been within 150 klicks of the relay station and was now holding station with the 'friendly' at less than that much. Above and below the hostile ship two artificial gravity waves  extended at least half that distance in either direction and thrice as far behind the ship in a wedge-like shape, its only telltale to the naked eye was the distortion of starlight it caused.  Had the ship not come in as close as it did, the relay would have been ripped apart.<br/><br/><i>Manticore</i>was under power, slowing down to come to a stop relative to their quarry, but still minutes out. "Open a channel," Sam said and the comms officer flipped a switch. "This is the Geminese Merchant Starship<i>Manticore</i>to the unidentified ship. By the Protectorate Accords you are bound by law to strike your wedge and surrender or we will use deadly force." He said in that calm authoritative voice so well-practiced from his Navy days.<br/><br/>They got dead air. He only wished they could shoot them. They were far too close to the friendly and even closer to the relay.<br/>The ship was technically expendable, the relay wasn't.<br/><br/>No one had time to think about what to do next for the raider fired a single small missile at the tender. The tender wasn't armored and the missile tore through the hull like it was wet paper. The small tender had a fission plant so there was no blast of fiery hydrogen plasma. THe missile's warhead went through the bridge of the ship and detonated in the crew compartments. The secondary explosions of all the myriad volatile elements aboard a starship reduced it to a lifeless wreck in seconds. Seemingly satisfied, the raider moved away, leaving the relay station alone.<br/><br/>Sam sighed in defeat as the viewscreen showed them what happened. "Beacons?" he asked calmly. THere wasn't time for any lifepods to make it out.<br/>After what felt like an eternity the comms officer shook her head. "Negative," she replied.<br/>He leaned back in his chair. "Bring us to 500 klicks, then send out the shuttles, we'll check for survivors and make sure the relay is in one piece. It's all we can do."