The Raccoon Shuttle... and Beyond!
As wild as Fyodor's suggestion had been, Navian wasn't getting much use out of emptying her borrowed gauss rifle through the shuttle's rear doors, as an alternative. She spent the magazine and made a token effort to secure the weapon back in storage, in the hope it wouldn't all become a debris field, soon afterward. That wasn't even the worst case scenario. If they hit the jackpot, it would all become a cloud of expanding vapor...
Navian ran through a number of dreadfully embarrassing scenarios in her head, and decided that if all her options were foolish, near-suicide, or, worst of all, would show hesitation and cowardice, she might as well try the most blunt and honest one. "Not practical, Zima-Hei. I shall unpack our positron beam launcher, jettison from the shuttle with it, and attempt to expend its charge on the enemy."
Using the edge of her Aspis, she slashed the straps away from the weapon, used one to tie her shield to her back, dragged out the PBL--just in time, as a gout of plasma reached through a breach to scorch the case not a foot from where the antimatter power supply had been--and, crouching under the mass of the weapon against the front end of the shuttle, she leapt with all the force she could gather, pushing off the walls, chairs, and stacks of supplies with the strength of her wings, to clear the rear doors.
In absolute terms, she was not travelling fast, and was not a much harder target than those standing on the roof of the disabled shuttle. Still, it seemed the crew weren't the targets, so far. At a few meters per second, she wouldn't be quick to reach the safe distance for them, so the threat was still present. That was a good enough reason to grab a hold of the weapon case--larger than she was, and fire her air shooters to set the PBL into a position from which she could straddle it and aim at a cloaked ship, like an artillery piece. She launch her first shot, a torrent of positrons streaming toward the foe.
BWOOSH!
It was seen as a bright white light in a beam, lancing out to the vanishing point. Though the kick was less than a kinetic weapon of equivalent size, it was more than Navian expected. She found herself slowly rotating, and flying away from her former trajectory. Would this be a problem? She had nowhere to go in range, nothing to do but to fire on the enemy. Though, it seemed she would be working to control her orientation, for at least as much time as she'd be firing the weapon...