Assuming the Drifters looked for them. Even Henry was surprised by how small the heat signatures the other Lancers left on his sensors were. The six of them combined were putting off less heat than a single old-style fighter at the same low acceleration.
“We are on our own for sensors now,” O’Flannagain reminded them all. “We have a loose contact on Bandit Two. Computers mark her at forty-five minutes from the edge of the meteor cluster and ninety from close contact with Raven.”
The CAG paused for a moment.
“If the Guardian finds Raven, she’ll kill her,” she said bluntly. “We are carrying almost all that’s left of Raven’s missiles. If we don’t take down that Guardian in the next ninety minutes, your bunks are history, folks.”
And so was Henry’s crew. He doubted he was much more motivated than his pilots—they were good people and he trusted O’Flannagain completely—but he remained responsible for all of this.
He was so very, very angry. A quick run-through of his screens confirmed O’Flannagain’s assessment.
“What’s the plan, ser?” Turrigan asked. With Gaunt dead and Phạm in the medbay, Turrigan was the only Lieutenant Commander left in the squadron. He was the official second-in-command, since no one was quite sure how Henry fit into the chain of command.
“Bandit Two is reentering the swarm through the debris cloud from the Alpha-Two charges,” O’Flannagain replied. “We’re thirty minutes from there if we’re careful. We’ll cut our accel at five hundred KPS and coast into the cloud.
“The grav-shields will draw attention eventually, but we’ll get as close as we can.”
“How close are you planning, CAG?” Henry asked. It wasn’t a challenge. He was out of practice at this.
“What’s the skip range on the penetrator busses?” she asked drily.
“It’s a half-second skip, and without a gravity line, they only carry their regular three-dimensional velocity in,” he said. He knew she knew the answer, but the other pilots might not. The old-style fighter missiles couldn’t fit shield-penetrator missiles.
“With just the launch velocity from the disposable cells, five hundred klicks,” he concluded. “We’re not getting that close.”
“No, we’re not,” O’Flannagain agreed. “But we’re getting as close as we can. Into laser range if they let us, people—and awful as a Guardian’s armor is, that’s still only ten thousand klicks with our onboard beamers.”
A stunned silence filled the squadron channel, but Henry simply nodded. This wasn’t a normal operation, where the Lancers would be primarily missile platforms extending the range and firepower of their mothership.
“This is do-or-die, people,” he reminded them. “Either we take out that Guardian or we and every member of Raven’s crew dies…and these assholes get away with blowing up the peace conference and our ambassador.
“They don’t get away,” he said flatly. “And if that means we fly right into that Guardian’s guts and rip it apart with our lasers, that’s what we do. The missiles should cripple her. If it’s down to the knives, we’re just finishing her off.”
He hoped. Because if it came down to trying to kill a capital ship with the lasers of six Lancers, they were doomed.
“Target is at one hundred thousand kilometers and continuing on course,” Turrigan said calmly. “Velocity is five hundred KPS relative to the swarm, one thousand relative to us.”
“Watch all threat sensors, stand by anti-radiation systems and prepare to fire,” O’Flannagain ordered.
ARAD systems in this case were counter-targeting systems, sensors that would detect incoming sensor beams and temporarily jam them. They’d also alert the fighters when they were detected.
They were well within missile range, and Henry could only hold his breath as the big Drifter capital ship continued on, seemingly oblivious to the six starfighters lurking amidst the chaotic debris field.
“Passive locks suck,” Turrigan muttered. “Even at this range, we could lose missiles.”
“No, we won’t,” O’Flannagain said with a chuckle. “Seconds count, but my sensors are ready to pulse the radar. We’ll have active targeting data.”
Henry was silent, his focus entirely on the hostile capital ship. The other two Guardians were now at least three hours’ flight away. If they took out this Guardian, that bought them time.
It wasn’t going to be enough—Battle Group Scorpius was still twenty-one hours away. It would be another ten hours before Rear Admiral Cheung Jian Chin even declared them overdue.
But every trick, every victory, every game, bought them another handful of hours. One of the Guardians was damaged—probably not as much as he hoped, as the collision had almost certainly spooked the Drifter crew more than it deserved—and if they took out another, maybe…just maybe, the remaining intact ship would leave them alone.
He didn’t buy that, though. They needed Raven to die, to cover any evidence that they had destroyed the peace conference. The Drifters hadn’t even been prepared to accept the chance that he’d doubt the Kozun had betrayed him.
Just like, it seemed, they hadn’t been prepared to accept the chance that the UPA would become competitors or enemies. Or that the Kozun and the UPA would come to an agreement. All of this had been done to protect the Convoys—but not from a real threat. From a potential threat.
“Sixty thousand kilometers,” Turrigan reported. “Velocity thousand-twenty-four KPS. Missile flight time twenty-five seconds.”
O’Flannagain didn’t respond. The seconds crept forward.
“Fifty thousand. Flight time twenty seconds.”
“Eighty percent of detection threshold, O’Flannagain,” Henry murmured. “We’re out of time.”
He heard the CAG exhale sharply.
“Firing radar pulse,” she snapped. “Fire all missiles on confirmed target and take GMS to full power.”
At fifty thousand kilometers, it was less than half a second before the targeting systems on the Lancer confirmed one hundred percent lock. Henry took another moment to confirm alignment with the rest of the squadron and then fired.
Twenty-four missiles blasted away from the starfighters, disposable launchers providing hundreds of kilometers per second of additional velocity while their own drives lit up behind them.
At three KPS2, the strange invisibility they’d enjoyed at lower accelerations vanished. Each of the six starfighters blazed like full-size starships as they charged forward, falling into carefully calculated gravity wells inside their defensive shields.
The Guardian might have been oblivious to their presence, but the Drifter crew had been prepared for an attack of some kind. Defensive lasers flared to life in the first ten seconds, targeting the incoming missiles—but they had never expected fire to come from that close without warning.
But it was still a ten-million-ton warship the best part of a kilometer long. A hundred lasers opened fire, filling the void around the Drifter ship with coherent light. A third of their missiles disappeared from Henry’s scanners…and then the rest disappeared a thousand kilometers short of the Guardian’s shields, shifting into a different level of the seventeen dimensions humans couldn’t perceive.