Except…
She didn't waste time running the idea through her tactical assessment routines. If it wasn't going to work, she'd be dead anyway. The timing of it would be extremely delicate, nanosecond fine. It was a chance, nothing more than that. It was all she had. She needed velocity, though; despite the long burn of the Dragon's reaction drives, she wasn't going fast enough. She instructed the metaspace projectors to spin up. She'd take the 50% chance, that was the least of the risks. The projectors would draw a fraction of energy away from the drives, enough to reduce her acceleration a little, but she hoped to compensate for that. Compensate and more.
She gave the jinking halo of high-g nukes their autonomy, instructing them to maintain their defensive shield around her. She needed all her attention on herself. She angled the Dragon so that the apex of its pyramid was pointing forwards, the square of its base directed aft, then programmed the coordinated sequence of events she'd need, not trusting herself to trigger them at precisely the required instants. There could be no room for error.
The emerging Cathedral ship was a ghost ahead of her, the background stars visible through it, but it was becoming more solid with each millisecond. It might emerge into normal space already firing. If it had been her, that's what she'd have done.
She triggered her sequence of instructions. Events ran rapidly, several things happening in rapid succession.
The two remaining high-g nukes, the ones she'd kept in reserve, launched, firing directly behind the Dragon.
The energy hull she'd been maintaining around herself throughout the battle reshaped itself, all forwards and lateral protection dissipating as she amped up the aft energy wall to beyond its maximum capacity. She was relying on Ondo – or whoever had constructed that part of the ship – to have built in enough tolerance for the power overload, as least for a few seconds.
The Dragon's beam weapon arrays fired simultaneously, blasting their energy in lashing arcs around the ship, focusing especially on the materialising Cathedral ship and any other Concordance vessels that were vaguely near. Partly it was a defence, partly a smokescreen.
The nukes in the defensive halo detonated mid-manoeuvre, giving her a brief moment of safety from the marauding Void Walkers, further adding to the confusion.
The two nukes she'd fired behind her also detonated, their close-range gigaton explosions coordinated to the nanosecond. The high-energy wall of particles from the two blasts slammed into the aft square of the Dragon, hitting the overdriven energy hull, transferring their momentum. The Dragon lurched forwards, throwing itself at the materialising Cathedral ship, the burst of acceleration brutal. Selene, isolated from the worst of it, still felt like she was being smeared against her seat.
The Concordance ship was suddenly huge in front of her, vast enough to swallow the Dragon whole. The background stars, the spangle of the Diamond Road, were still visible though the enemy craft, but they were fading as the twisting, organic lines of the craft took on solidity. The fact that she'd lowered her forwards energy hull to amp up the aft ones made little difference: a Cathedral ship this close could atomize her ship before she even had chance to scream. Her only hope lay in speed: of reaching the vessel before it fully materialised. And, if she'd timed it right, of passing through it even as it did so.
The aft energy hull finally overloaded, and the Dragon's voidhull began to superheat. More alarms wailed as the ship's systems predicted immediate destruction.
She hit the leading edge of the Concordance craft's voidhull. She'd reached her first objective, placed herself inside its attack range, and now she had to hope that she hadn't left her own translation too long. There was a tiny amount of residual power in the lateral energy hulls. She shunted it to the Dragon's leading edge. That was where the immediate danger lay now.
She passed through the emerging Cathedral ship in the blink of an eye, the ship's decks and chambers and spiralling corridors and walkways briefly visible. She'd been faced with two options in her calculations: attempt a ghost translation like that at Maes Far, or trigger something altogether more dangerous, but also potentially much more destructive. She'd gone for the latter. She'd destroyed one of the small, fast Void Walker attack ships, and that had felt good, but a Cathedral ship was something else.
In the end it came down to a delay of a mere three nanoseconds to the metaspace translation. The Dragon remained solid, real, for that extra time, the Cathedral ship completed its translation, and was suddenly solid while an extremely fast-moving bulk, the Radiant Dragon, tore through its interior like a high-velocity projectile ripping through a body. For three nanoseconds, she gouged a path of destruction through the enemy ship, then burst out of the other side, ripping the vessel open to the void.
Her own energy hull depleted completely from the sustained series of impacts, but the unprotected voidhull, abraded and damaged, held. Barely. Behind her, the ruined Cathedral ship vented debris and oxygen, the hole she'd ploughed through it a ragged tear in its aft fuselage. Explosions bloomed through it; there was no way it could survive such overwhelming structural damage. A single figure, limbs flailing, flew free as she watched on maximum magnification. It couldn't be Godel as her broadcast had come from a different ship, and most likely it wasn't an Augur at all, just some lowly crew-member. Still it was another victory won. Two Concordance ships destroyed. She'd take that.
The Dragon finally jumped, phasing out of normal space and into the grey void, leaving behind nuclear blasts and beam-weapon shots and exploding
