Taking From Black Kite To Wanderer-7 [II]

Outside the hulls, the silence of the void was absolute and cold and endless.

The Wanderer-7 hung forty meters off the raider's flank with the docking sleeve stretched between them like an umbilical cord, and below them both the asteroid belt turned slowly in the starlight. 

Sixty meters above the drifting rocks, clinging to the ventral flank of the Black Kite by the magnetic clamps in her boots, Elena Sterling held the heavy industrial plasma torch in both hands.

HZZZZZZZT!

A blinding lance of blue-white fire boiled out of the nozzle and screamed against the raider's outer hull.

She leaned into it with her eyes narrowed behind her gold-tinted blast visor, watching the thick slate battleplate turn molten orange along the cut line.