“Ihejirika, analyze those birds,” Henry snapped. “Some of them are conversion warheads and some of them are disruptors, but the disruptors end up as pure kinetic weapons—most of which the gravity shield is going to tear to pieces.
“I need to know how many of each they’ve fired.”
“I’m not sure we can ID that, ser,” his tactical officer replied. “Not with two and a half minutes to do it in.”
“Try,” Henry ordered. “If we can prioritize our antimissile lasers, we can survive this. So, try.”
More missiles blazed out from Raven’s launchers as he spoke, the battlecruiser’s response pitiful compared to the tidal wave now sweeping toward her.
Still almost two minutes until the first salvo connected. The distances involved left even the fastest of weapons taking seeming ages to connect.
“Third salvo away,” Ihejirika reported. “Drifters are continuing to hold on to their remaining missiles. Surely, they’ll launch before we hit them.”
“That depends on whether they think they’ve already killed us,” Henry said grimly. “We might take some of them with us, but there’s no point wasting missiles on an enemy that’s already dead and just hasn’t realized it yet.”
“Ser.” The tactical officer response was clipped. “We…think we’ve found a pattern in the incoming fire.”
“Show me,” Henry ordered.
Ihejirika took control of one of the big screens around Henry, zooming in on the swarm of missiles heading their way. There was nothing to the interweaving weapons that looked unusual to Henry.
“It’s not much,” his subordinate told him. “We wouldn’t have noticed it if we hadn’t been looking for it, but the trailing missiles have a different radiation signature. They’re carrying plutonium-based fission devices—igniters for their conversion warheads.
“The lead missiles don’t have enough plutonium aboard to flag at this range.”
One hundred and twenty missiles blinked, suddenly acquiring a mix of orange and crimson icons.
“It’s not a perfect distribution, but they tried to send the disruptors ahead of the conversion warheads, to bring our shields down before they hit us with the plasma bolts. Three-quarters of the salvo are disruptors. The last thirty are conversion warheads.”
Ihejirika paused, as if running numbers in his head.
“We can probably shoot down thirty, maybe forty missiles,” he noted. “Usually, I’d say we could take thirty conversion warheads, but…”
“But our last estimates say they only need fifty disruptors to knock out our shield,” Henry finished. “Even the disruptors can hurt us, but we’re not going to take many hits from conversion warheads if we don’t have the shield.
“Target the conversion missiles, Commander,” he ordered. “We can reset the shield and we can hope to dodge any un-warheaded missiles that make it through, but we can’t survive conversion warheads. If the shield is going to come down either way, I don’t want there to be a fusion bomb left out there.”
“Understood, ser,” Ihejirika paused. “We could use O’Flannagain’s missiles, ser. What’s she doing?”
“Her job isn’t to save Raven, Commander,” Henry said calmly. “That’s our job. Her job is to make sure there are none of those fighters left to tell their motherships where we’re hiding.”
“First salvo impact in thirty seconds, sers,” Lieutenant Ybarra told them both. “Enemy salvo in defense range in fifteen seconds.”
“You have your orders,” Henry replied. He leaned back in his chair, doing what he could to take in the entire battle. “Carry on, Commander.”
In the absence of gravity shields or other passive defenses, most Vesheron fighters that Henry had seen over the last two decades had been true TIEs: since they couldn’t take a hit, they were left with pure maneuverability as their defense.
They were expendable, lethal missile platforms manned by that seemingly universal cultural group of youths convinced of their own immortality. The UPA had never leaned into that standard, equipping its fighters with both gravity shields and antimissile lasers.
The Drifters, it seemed, were more in line with the UPA’s policies. The incoming fighters opened fire as the UPSF missiles closed, rapid slices of coherent light glittering across the void.
“Enemy starfighters are equipped with rapid-tracking pulse lasers,” Iyotake reported from CIC. “They’re almost certainly intended as pure antimissile lasers—energy levels appear to be in the one- to two-hundred-megawatt range. They might cause our people a headache in a dogfight, but that’s not what they’re built for.”
“Eight warheads survived to convert,” Ihejirika reported. “Scans suggest seven kills.”
“Ten percent in the first salvo, Commander, well done,” Henry replied. They might just make it through this yet.
He turned his attention to the Engineering section.
“Henriksson, we’re going to lose the shield,” he told the young officer. “I want it back up as quickly as physically possible. We have at least a hundred seconds this time, but we need to get that time down.”
“Understood, ser,” Henriksson said, her voice shaky but level. “Song says thirty seconds, ser. We’ll try and get it in less.”
No one verbally reported when the enemy missiles entered the range of Raven’s defenses. Icons started waterfalling on one side of Henry’s displays as their defensive laser installations started reporting capacitor-drain and -recharge settings.
Without the main guns, they were dedicating an entire reactor to feeding the dozens of quarter-gigawatt lasers across the hull. Normally, they were often the poor sibling when it came to power draw.
Today, their capacitors were being kept at full power. There was a minimum-cycle time on the weapons, but Henry had never seen it tested.
“All conversion warheads destroyed!” Ihejirika snapped. “Disruptors impacting the shield!”
The scream of a gravity-shielded warship undergoing resonance disruption was familiar now. They’d probably work out a control or mitigation for that in the future, but at that moment, the piercing shriek tore through the bridge—and then the gravity shields flared out.
Henry held his breath for a second. Five. Ten.
Then he exhaled.
“Report,” he barked.
“No impacts,” Henriksson told him, sounding astonished. “I repeat, zero impacts. Shield will be back up in eighteen seconds.”
“Ihejirika?” Henry asked.
“We shot down forty-two missiles,” the tactical officer told him. “The shield ripped apart over sixty, and Commander Bazzoli dodged the rest.”
Henry looked toward the front of the bridge, where his navigator seemed half-frozen, the woman nearly hyperventilating as she looked down at the emergency manual joystick in her hands.
“Commander, well done,” he told her. She didn’t respond. “Commander? Iida!”
Her first name snapped the woman out and she sucked in one final breath before regaining control of her breathing and releasing the emergency joystick. She looked back at him and nodded.