Finally.
Kier had not realized how much it had subconsciously grated on her to be missing half of her Makos in battle.
Shortly, she would come out of jump and retrieve them, injured as they were, and go hunt Keller properly.
RealSpace.
WHAT?
“Director Xi, we have an emergency,” War Advocate Ro said simply.
“I’m aware of that,” she snapped. “Full speed now. The Eldest has favored us, to drop us out of jump right on top of Keller. All weapons target Auberon, and then jump clear to Point Gabriel.”
Truly, luck, but the worst, most sour kind.
Keller had obviously found Energiya, plus the two wounded cruisers. Had driven them off, apparently with even more damage, if the expanding plasma cloud was any indication.
But Steadfast at Dawn was almost exactly on Keller’s beam, crossing her T at medium speed that even now began to accelerate as her engines went into overdrive pushing.
Kier felt a moment of ecstasy as the first Mag-Shear beam caught the Star Controller broadside, a little aft of center, like shark’s teeth into the side of a swimming seal. And she had managed to come out on a plane slightly below Auberon, so ten of the Pulse beams and six of the Flicker beams had a tracking arc.
The savagery inflicted was so great that the screens had to dim the image. The Mag-Shear ignored the carrier’s shields, and the rest of her beams shattered them like a melon dropped out of a window.
I have you now.
Incoming fire from all directions as those pitiful little escorts opened up on her alone, ignoring the Makos. A tiny voice in the back of Kier’s head approved their targeting decisions, even as the massive influx of energy overwhelmed her Power Absorbers on all sides, preventing her from shuttling energy around to protect a weak side.
And then they kept firing, even as the second Mag-Shear beam carved a channel across the bottom of Auberon’s keel.
The cruiser at the aft of the Fribourg formation fired those terrible, heavy beams that smashed Steadfast at Dawn’s port Power Absorbers. The other two fired only with the lighter beams, the ones known as Type-3, and even then they did remarkably little damage at this range.
Kier made a note to study the logs later and see why the weapons had changed so markedly from what she expected.
“Warning,” a calm, male voice intoned. “Overload imminent.”
Steadfast at Dawn himself, speaking to everyone. He did so infrequently, relying instead on Entity Advocate Au to be his voice most of the time. But the ship knew the situation as well as Kier did.
It would be a razor-thin margin, but Steadfast at Dawn had crossed the Imperial formation now, presenting the stronger aft Absorbers as Keller’s escorts recharged and prepared for another salvo. They would pound on panels still fresh and ready to drink their fill of hostile fire.
She would escape this hit-and-run accident that she had stumbled into.
Except.
The Imperial cruiser at the front of the formation, the one that had barely fired at all, was apparently rotating on a flat axis yaw, while spinning like a porpoise. Somehow, they were using just gyroscopes to drag the massive vessel around like a spinning knife. She checked the readout, but VI Ferrata made no sense to her as a name.
More barbarisms.
And then VI Ferrata opened fire with those terrible beams, catching Steadfast at Dawn just aft of her bow. It was a raking shot, but the enemy had enough parallax to just catch the overloaded forward panels and shatter their hold. Steadfast at Dawn managed to capture most of the energy by routing it to the rear panels, but now they themselves were at risk of collapsing and exposing bare metal to hungry teeth.
The cruisers at both ends of the formation fired…something.
A beam struck instantly at this range. Missiles had to accelerate slowly from a dead stop, even as madly as they did.
From both bows, the cruisers launched small lozenge-shaped objects, ovals with flat tops and bottoms, glowing red hot. And traveling at a significant fraction of light speed, right at her.
And Kier had nothing on a bearing that she could fire back at them before impact, with the Flicker beams still focused on shredding Auberon.
“Impact warning,” Steadfast at Dawn said calmly.
At that last moment, Kier was sure both devices somehow exploded before impact, transforming somehow into a pair of gigantic, white hands formed of plasma, that clapped together around her, a fly suddenly killed in mid-air.
Crunching darkness.