While they waited the interminable seconds for the next antimatter missile to load, Scoggins asked, “Results on the first Exploder?”
“Vaporized them, hon,” Commander Ford said with a wolfish smile.
She let him get away with the familiarity this time. He was her husband, after all. Right now the elation of the plan’s success had her in its grip, and she forced herself to concentrate. “Where’s that second Exploder?” she growled.
“Coming up now.”
Scoggins cheated with her time sense, tweaking it so the seconds passed quickly, though that caused the swarms of enemy looming in front of Conquest to deploy even faster on the screen. Suddenly, witch-lights flared among the enemy, ripples of color and brightness in complex waves and densities.
“What the hell is that?” Scoggins asked.
Lieutenant Fletcher replied, “Some of it’s laser fire. No threat at all at this range. A little is some kind of plasma discharges aimed at us, but we’re too far away. The majority seems to be communication lights among themselves. Millions of them.”
“James –” Scoggins said to Ford in a tone of warning.
“Firing now,” he replied hastily. “Exploder and missiles away.”
“Pulse, mark,” Okuda said immediately, and the displays blanked as Conquest bolted. “Dropping, mark.” Scoggins mentally counted this pulse as the ship’s third capital action of the five their capacitors allowed them, a convenient shorthand.
Another mothership, looking much like the first, appeared in front of them, only this one was surrounded by its enormous, already expanding swarm. The enemy now resembled the biggest hornet’s nest Scoggins had ever seen.
“Alpha strike. Target the mothership.” Fourth action, and an Exploder would get intercepted by that mess.
“Aye aye, Skipper,” Ford said with relish. This time he got to fire with his own hands, or at least it would feel that way in VR.
The swarm was already turning and firing thousands of weapons toward Conquest when her primary weapons array speared death into the mothership core.
First, the three gargantuan Desolator-built particle beams bored a hole through the intervening thousands of boats to touch the mothership. Attenuated by the interfering escorts, the energy blew through the organic resin of the latticework and barely singed the armor of the enemy core, but it cleared three cylinders of space.
Space for a million ferrocrystal spheres to pass and strike the target at 0.3c.
The streams of railgun shot slammed into the mothership’s hull and each immediately fused, every one releasing power equivalent to a tiny nuclear blast. The inexorable tide of sun-like heat quickly ate its way through the core’s heavy armor in three separate places. Once the lines of shot chewed through, the resulting plasma, stripped ions and superheated gas propagated throughout the interior of the flattened sphere very much like the sledgehammer had done to the Io base, but more so. Ironically, the mothership’s heavy armor became a liability, holding the expanding hell within the vessel it was supposed to protect.
Inside, everything ignited as lines of blasts marched through its structure, ruler-straight. Even substances not normally flammable – foodstuffs, metals, even ceramics – burst into flame and consumed themselves in a firestorm that snuffed out every living thing within.
Gutted, the core spewed a blazing jet of gases from its entry wounds and spun broken through the void like a firework pinwheel.
“Yes! Yes!” Ford slapped his console with fierce joy, echoed by others on the bridge.
“Well done,” Scoggins said with a pleased shudder. It was one thing to launch SLAMs or deploy Exploders and run, not seeing the results, but quite another to witness the kill with a warrior’s dark satisfaction. “Mister Okuda, take us out of here.”
“Pulse, mark. Dropping, mark.”
Fifth action.
“Capacitors at two percent,” the Engineering station reported. “Full charge in sixty-three minutes.”
Now the holotank and flatscreen displays – really just images in her head, Scoggins reminded herself – showed Conquest hanging in space twenty million kilometers out from Sol’s south pole, exactly opposite from where they had launched the SLAMs and well away from any action. This position allowed her, and the admiral, full visibility of the theatre of battle.
Drained of stored power, Conquest waited. Had they not been in VR space, Scoggins would have ordered everyone to take a break. Instead, she toyed with the idea of using the AI’s control of VR time to skip forward, but decided against it.
Beside her, Admiral Absen paced about the bridge, looking at the holotank from all angles and issuing terse orders to his forces strewn around the solar system. “Captain, take a look at this mothership,” he said after he was done. He pointed to one Scourge carrier separated from its fellows, on the opposite side of the sun from Earth.
Scoggins nodded. “That’s the one we left alone, heading for the Meme Destroyers.”
“Just what we need,” Absen replied. “He’s out of position. Probably figures he’ll be last to the buffet, so he might as well try to grab a snack while his buddies are distracted.”
“You have a sick sense of humor, sir.”
“It’s been said.” The admiral pointed. “Hmm. What’s this swarm cluster? The one that’s heading to the solar north? We can barely see it.”
Scoggins stared, leaning over the railing and putting her nose into the holotank. “Michelle, magnify that, will you?”
The fuzzy icon expanded rapidly until it resolved itself into a swarm of Scourge ships. “What the hell are they doing out there?” Absen asked. “Replay the record and tell me where they came from.” The display reversed time, showing clearly the enemy group had been launched from the lone mothership.
“They’re heading for where we fired the SLAMs from,” Scoggins realized aloud. “Probably thinks we have something permanent there, like a fortress.”
“Clever bug,” Absen said, “but not clever enough. Half his swarm is going for the Meme, where I hope they’ll be savaged badly. The other half is on a wild goose chase...”
“And the mothership’s all alone, heading away from the sun,” Scoggins finished. “Bughouse.”
“Yes.” Absen made one more circuit of the holotank, looking at the display from all angles. “Put me through to Vango and Bull.”