“I most certainly am.”
“The hell you are. They’ll shoot you down the second you’re out the launch bay doors.”
“She wouldn’t dare.”
“She just tried to turn us to goo not ten minutes ago and you’re giving her the benefit of the doubt?” Miguel shouted.
“Don’t raise your voice to me in my CIC, XO,” Susan said, smoldering.
“With respects, mum, but it’s not your CIC anymore. You just handed me the baton. Everyone else heard that, right?” A round of nod and affirmations went around the room. “See?”
“Don’t you monkeys get it?” Susan threw her hands out. “I’m trying to keep from implicating you. All of you. I’m protecting you.”
Miguel crossed his arms. “And we’re protecting you. You can get on that shuttle, but I won’t give it clearance to leave.”
Susan stared at him with an infuriating mix of rage, admiration, exasperation, gratitude, and desire. All of which jockeyed for dominance until they all effectively killed each other, leaving her with resignation.
“We seem to be at an impasse, and the clock is running. What do you suggest?”
Miguel’s hazel eyes brightened. “I’m glad you asked.” He reached for the coms circuit and brought up the boat bay. “Sergeant Okuda, have you been listening in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. I want you to prep one of your scary black stealth assault shuttles for prisoner transport. With a full complement of marine guards. Our captain is a dangerous fugitive, after all. Very crafty. You have five minutes to prep.”
“What about the standard shuttle they’re already prepping down here?”
“You’ll be following it at a discreet distance, and it will be remotely piloted from here.”
“I want to go on record to say this is lunacy,” Nesbit said.
“Noted, CL.”
Seven minutes later, two shuttles launched from the Ansari’s boat bay. One running full IFF, active radar/lidar, and even blinking white, red, and green nav lights, while the other hid in the shadows of the first. Utterly, deadly silent.
Twenty-three minutes after that, the lead shuttle exploded into a shower of jagged, red-hot fragments under the assault of the Carnegie’s point defense lasers, swatted away like a house fly.
Miguel’s eyes flared with incandescent fury at the betrayal by ships, by personnel, of his own fleet. Fellow spacers who’d taken the same oath to defend the worlds of man and their patron companies as he had. Men and women who, as far as they knew, had just executed a fellow officer without the trial due to her. The fact they were mistaken did absolutely nothing to blunt the sharp edge of his rage.
“Weapons officer,” his voice smoldered.
“Sir?” Lieutenant Warner answered, her voice uncertain, not yet recovered from the emotional shock of the unexpected violence.
“Overkill something.”
Warner’s face keened into an ax. “With style, sir.”
Her purpose restored, Warner’s fingers danced and jabbed at icons, activating every offensive weapon and defensive system the Ansari mounted, lighting up the surrounding vacuum with a constellation of laser pulses, radar, electronic jamming, and fusion plumes like a stellar nursery.
With that, the real Battle of Grendel was underway.
The first shot came from the Ansari’s offensive laser array. Despite the distance, the beam reached out and linked up with a monocle drone Mattu had snuck into position at the first whiff of suspicion. The multi-gigawatt beam had diffused from thirty centimeters to more than ten meters by the time it reached the meta-material lens. But once it exited, it had refocused to nearly its initial width and concentration. A few thousand kilometers later, it slammed into the forward port quadrant of the heavy cruiser Carnegie, melting through a phased radar array, gamma ray telescope, and a point defense laser cluster before chewing through another two meters of ablative ceramoplast armor to vaporize a reaction control thruster propellant tank and two spinal-mount railgun capacitor coils in the ensuing secondary explosion.
A hell of a good start, but the IR signature of so much transfer energy passing through the monocle couldn’t be absorbed or radiated fast enough and gave away its position. It died a moment later, snuffed out by an answering laser it couldn’t catch from the wounded cruiser.
But, they still had two more of them, waiting in the black.
“Deploy decoys. I want them activated the millisecond they’re out of the tubes. Light up our deployed ship-killers and target Carnegie with the first volley.”
“Not the Allen?” Warner asked.
“No, we can’t saturate their CiWS until we put out that cruiser’s eyes. And we have at least a chance of swarming their point defense.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In the meantime, burn another monocle. That last shot was a beauty.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Charts? Bring us into position to bring our captain back onboard!”
“She’s angling away, XO,” Mattu said.
“She’s what?” Miguel’s head swiveled from the Drone Integration Station back up to the main plot. Sure enough, the IFF icon for the captain’s shuttle had altered course, taking it away from Ansari under maximum clandestine thrust. “Is she trying to get clear of our gooey zone in case we blow a bubble?”
“She’s already cleared minimum safe distance, sir, and still accelerating,” Broadchurch answered.
“Where the hell does she think she’s going?”
“Carnegie’s returning fire,” Mattu barked. “Multiple missile launches detected. Showing one-five contacts. Will be clear for maneuvering in three seconds.”
Miguel’s face twisted up. “They’re only launching them now?”
“Confirmed, sir. EM spike signature matches Mosaic-class heavy cruiser launch rails.”
Miguel shook his head. They hadn’t even floated missiles back before they entered the Ansari’s sensor envelope. Now his defensive systems would have a hard track on them from tube-to-target, sending hit probabilities through the roof. Overconfident, inexperienced idiots couldn’t even plan a proper ambush with a seven-to-one tonnage advantage. They’d expected the captain to follow orders and surrender the ship without resistance in the face of such overwhelming force. That plan out the window, they were improvising a battleplan, and it showed.
Ansari was still outside the effective range of Carnegie’s laser array, who obviously hadn’t bothered to launch a monocle drone, either. So, for at least a little while, all they had to worry about was swatting missiles out of the black.
