Funny Mental Insights: 19: Ninety-Five Percent

Prompt 19 was to begin a story with.. well....

"There once was a chance I didn't take," Cutter said. "A 95% sure shot. Only once, and I regret it. Burn 2 red 5 sec."

Matches pushed hard on the right thruster for five seconds, barely avoiding the laser bolt from the pirate ship on their tail. "I know," she said. "I still wonder how we've stayed alive so long."

Cutter fired two quick shots with the rear turret. "In a way," he said, "so do I."

Matches had no time to reply as she worked to pilot the 740 away from the pirates, who'd had a few friends join them, appearing out of the darkness of etherspace. This was no small task because she needed to rely on Cutter for the locations of the pirate ships. Cutter, in addition, fired the guns, and worked on the escape vectors. The escape vectors were more important. The guns cost energy, and the one thing they needed was energy.

The pirates fired a few times, but as often at each other as at the 740. That's the thing about pirates.

Cutter finished the calculations. There were two possible escapes. Success probabilities 75% and 14%.

Cutter told Matches a course, "250-80." It was the 14% vector.

Cutter understood the risk to the 740, to himself, and, most importantly to Matches. He was a computer, of course. But long ago, on his first mission on the 740, he had played the odds, chosen an approach to a station with a 95% SP. A wrench, probably discarded by some careless mechanic on the station, struck the 740's surge relay, causing no major damage to the 740, just a bright flash of light, a flash that blinded Matches. She would never see again.

Cutter will never make the mistake of playing it safe again. Matches means too much.

This work by Timothy H. Ruppel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.