“Including yours?”
“There’s a reason I’ve elected to keep it small. Dealing with my board members’ families is more than enough most days.”
“Christmas must be lonely.”
“The company Christmas party hosts almost twenty thousand people.”
“That’s not the same and you know it.”
“Do you have children, Doctor?”
Elsa shook her head. “No, not yet. But I play auntie to six, no wait, seven kids now. My siblings have been busy.”
Tyson forced himself to sit in the cabin’s only chair. A small, hard affair that encouraged anyone that sat in it for very long to stand and walk around again.
“You’re right. I’m not good at waiting, mostly because I’m crap at not having any influence over events. I could go harass the bridge crew, but that won’t change the laws of physics and get us to Grendel any faster. And whatever is going to happen there is probably happening right now, and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it until it’s all over.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
On Ansari’s outer hull, the protective cover on one of the eighteen laser array emitters slid open, exposing the focusing lens to space. It fired, invisibly discharging quadrillions of photons into the vacuum.
Downrange, two pinpricks thousands of kilometers apart, neither visible to the unassisted human eye, drifted into alignment for the barest of moments. The stream reached the first pinprick, which adjusted its angle ever so slightly to compensate for the superior resolution its sensors provided being so close to the target.
Milliseconds later, those same photons reached the second pinprick, which had grown from a speck to the three-hundred-and-thirty-thousand-ton heavy cruiser CCDF Carnegie. The beam sheared through one of the three pylons supporting the cruiser’s alpha ring with hardly a pause before burrowing into the engineering hull, shattering ablative ceramoplast armor before tunneling through three machinery compartments and two drone launch tubes.
“Solid hit!” Okuda shouted from her new assignment at Halcyon’s tactical station. “Ansari just took a chunk out of Carnegie.”
“Are we still getting damage updates?” Susan asked from her second command chair in as many hours. The Halcyon’s previous CO had been presented with an option between ordering her ship and crew into self-destruct to prevent Susan’s takeover, or surrender. They’d elected for the latter. Except no one else in the enemy task group knew that just yet. Susan wanted to keep that particular bit of bad news under wraps as long as possible.
“Yes, mum, we’re still looped into their tactical network. Damage reports coming in. No mission kill. Carnegie is still combat effective, but their negative matter condensers have taken critical damage. Alpha ring is dead. They can’t bubble out.”
Susan grimaced. It was almost worse than not having hit them at all, because without any hope of escape, the Carnegie had every incentive to fight to the death.
“Noted. Forward to Ansari. Where are those missiles Warner sent our way, Scopes?”
“Six minutes, twenty seconds out,” the young officer seated at the Drone Integration Station said. She hadn’t come over on Susan’s shuttle. Instead, she was one of the Halcyon’s original crew, and sister of Okuda’s marine currently securing the CIC against anyone onboard who might be considering a change of heart.
“Are we ready for the handoff, Culligan?”
“I think so.” She grimaced. “I mean, yes, mum. I have the data links and command codes queued up. Just never done it while everything was moving so damned fast before.”
“Don’t worry, Lieutenant, I’m not sure anyone has,” Susan assured her newest subordinate. “When the handoff comes, order those birds to go into erratic flight paths for two minutes. Make it look like our ECM jammed them up good and sent them spiraling. Then reacquire for the Paul Allen like they’re moving to their secondary target priority. Let’s try to keep our little secret just a few minutes longer.”
“Carnegie just splashed the monocle,” Okuda called out. That was to be expected; they were basically single-use items. “Fresh round of birds pushed out the tubes.”
“I don’t suppose we have any monocles aboard this bucket?”
“No, mum. Nobody expects frigates to pick fights with the big boys.”
Susan smirked. Today was as good as any to rewrite centuries of books on capital ship warfare. Her new toy only added three dozen ship-killers and a half-power laser array to the fight, but critically, everyone thought they were still pointed at Ansari. She could use the element to take one shot. It would have to count.
“Aspect change on Allen,” Culligan shouted. “She’s blowing a bubble.”
“She’s running?” Okuda asked incredulously.
“I don’t think so,” Susan answered. Up to this point in the fight, Carnegie had been doing almost all the heavy lifting, while the Allen held back providing fire support and antimissile coverage and Halcyon played forward observer. But with Carnegie hurt, and Ansari making a mock attack run on Halcyon, Admiral Perez had almost certainly decided it was time to put the enormous PAC to more productive use. Putting herself between the two other ships in her task group and the enemy made the most tactical sense, but it would mean an almost impossibly short jump, far less risky just to punch her fusion rockets up to full military burn and get there in one piece.
Which meant …
“Get Ansari Actual on the line,” Susan barked.
“Secure line, mum. Go ahead.”
“Miguel!” she nearly shouted, “Allen is blowing a bubble, they’re going to jump behind you and catch you in a flank between them and Carnegie.”
“We see it,” Miguel said through the whisker laser link after a second’s delay. “Not much we can do about it. Can’t charge up our own rings quick enough, not after purging our standby neg-mat in the beta ring. You’d better get ready to make your escape, mum. We’ll hold them off as long as we can.”
“The hell you will. This tin can isn’t built for endurance. We can’t run to the other side of this miserable system alone. We walk out of here together or not at all.”
“Then may I suggest you throw the missiles
