Because Van was having to feel his way through the dust and debris, the frigate was gaining, and would be back in torp range within minutes. He eased more power to the drives, trying to stretch the time before he’d have to go into combat mode, whether he wanted to or not.
Another series of warnings flashed amber from the monitors. Van grinned as he located the debris and one chunk of ice. He shifted the nets, reinforcing the area around the irregular mass of dust and ice, while easing the Joyau around his catch, then using the photon nets to hold the chunk of ice just before the Joyau. The Revenant’s EDI detectors would not register a nonradiating mass, and even closer in, laser imaging would not show something the size of a groundcar as separate from the Joyau itself.
Van turned the Joyau head-to-head with the frigate. With the added mass of the ice, his acceleration wasn’t what it would have been, but the closure rate was great enough in any case.
As the Revenant frigate had slowed, the corvette had crept forward so that the pair were again overlapping screens.
Van continued to accelerate.
The moment he was within torp range, he fired the first of his torps head-on at the frigate. After a moment, he fired a second.
The frigate responded with a pair of torps, followed by two from the corvette.
Van waited, watching, calculating. Then he cut all power to everything except shields. “Desensitizing.”
He could sense the wash of energy, and the Joyau’s shield indicators flickered, but stayed in the green.
Immediately, Van unshuttered and checked the monitors.
Four more torps were headed toward them, and they still weren’t close enough for what he needed. He watched as the two ships launched another set of four.
“Desensitizing.”
He kept the Joyau shuttered through two sheets of energy from the torps, and this time the secondary shield generator dropped into the amber and stayed there. He couldn’t afford to wait any longer. He pulsed the nets, then reversed the drives for a good minute to decelerate, the joint effect launching the ice comet fragment toward the shields of the frigate. Then he began launching his own torps, two at a time, until he had six running toward the two Rev ships. He hoped that the generally nonreflecting ice mass would not show on the Revenants’ monitors until just before it impacted their shields. It shouldn’t, but…
In the meantime, four torps flashed toward the Joyau.
Van desensitized the ship, boosted all the power he could into the shields, sent out another round of torps, and waited.
When he unshuttered, he had only one shield generator—but there were expanding rings of debris and energy where the two Revenant ships had been.
He took a deep breath, then turned to Eri. “Time for you to go to work. Number two shield generator’s gone.” He returned ship gravity to one gee.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Used the photon nets to scoop up some ice cometary fragments. Then we went head-to-head with the frigate, and I used the nets to throw all the fragments at him—and I added six torps as well, fired as quickly as possible. They’d overlapped screens. So when the frigate had to contract his screens to deal with the ice and torps, I sent a double volley at the corvette. Screens couldn’t take that, and just before they went to amber, I fired more torps at the Rev.”
“Before they went to amber?”
“There’s a moment of instability when shields are overlapped if one fails. I was trying to take advantage of that. It worked.” This time, anyway, he added to himself.
“At the cost of one shield generator. If you had to fix it…you wouldn’t be so cavalier about it.” The impish smile negated the words.
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“How much time do I have?” Eri unstrapped.
Van checked the monitors once more, but there were still no other Revenant ships in the system. In fact, there were no other interstellar ships in the system—unless the Beldorans had one in total standby and shut down. “Until someone else comes out of jump. That could be ten minutes or ten days.”
“When I tell you, you’ll have to depower the entire shield section.”
“Let me know,” Van replied. He concentrated on watching and studying the plots and EDI indicators. The mining tugs continued their deliberate progress toward Beldora itself.
All told, Eri spent almost two hours aft and below before she returned.
Van looked at her. “Yes…no?”
“Yes. In a way. You really stressed the shields. The main shield generator won’t last fifteen minutes under attack. The secondary will manage five—if we’re lucky.”
“Then we’ll have to be prepared to run and jump. But we need to finish up here.”
“Finish up? There are other ships?”
“No. Not armed interstellar ships. Mining tugs. The Revs are into destruction on the cheap. Take an isolated system, wipe out its small defense force, then drop rocks from beyond orbit on the most inhabited areas. When the steam and dust have settled, the planet’s ready for Rev recolonization. No unnatural radiation. No survivors who could claim it was much besides a strike by a fragmented asteroid.”
Eri winced.
“We’ve got some torps left, enough to take out the tugs.”
She nodded.
Van turned the Joyau in-system.
Hours later, the Joyau swept down toward the first mining tug. Van captured a few images, verifying that the captured tug was using its shields and screens to herd debris inward toward the single inhabited planet—Beldora. Then he fired a single torp.
Four hours, and eight torps, later, the Joyau was outbound on a supraecliptic course. There were no operating mining tugs, not that Van could determine, and still no other Revenant ships. That was just as well.
Van studied the empty screens. He’d stopped the invasion—for the moment, but he couldn’t exactly patrol the
