Cataphractoi

  Watching the mirazar cruiser circle the asteroid was like being trapped in purgatory; there was nothing that could be done to affect the situation and neither could Miliam leave the bridge as long as the ship was there. The rger ship circumnavigated the pnetoid three times over in almost as many hours, all while the Astrum Vitae grew more and more distant, but even now the two ships were close enough that an attack unched by the cruiser would strike the corvette in less than a second. There was no way to reach the bridge in time to react except to already be there.

  Frankly, it was a miracle they hadn’t spotted the Astrum Vitae or even the vault yet. By Miliam’s reckoning that was only because the Falcon Catcher still didn’t know for sure what it was up against and was keepings its distance from the unnamed asteroid. A zealot though he may have been, Delve Lead Cwfisher was cautious and patient enough that he didn’t seem to be willing to enter scrying range of the rock until he was certain it was safe.

  “Uh-oh,” Min-ji whispered just loudly enough for Miliam to hear.

  “What’s uh-oh? I don’t like the sound of uh-oh,” she demanded, eyes snapping to the dokkaebi sensor operator, who gulped visibly.

  “IUNS Falcon Catcher is unching shuttles,” Min-ji revealed. It didn’t click at first why that was so bad, but Miliam realized the problem after gncing back at her dispys. Shuttles could give the other captain just as close of a look at the asteroid as scrying, but without risking his ship. While the cruiser only appeared to be carrying two of them, eventually the shuttles were sure to happen upon the cavern containing the vault- and then it would be obvious his prey was escaping.

  Miliam hadn’t even known ships carried small nding craft like that, but that was besides the point.

  Problem was, there wasn’t anything she or her crew could do about it. Really, the only thing they could do was accelerate further when the cruiser’s sensors were obstructed by the asteroid, but the Astrum Vitae didn’t have the fuel for it. Those thrusters were for maneuvering and nding, not spaceflight. Clearly the time to fall back on the wave drive was approaching, but when was best? When the Falcon Catcher spotted the Astrum Vitae, or when it was blocked by the asteroid?

  Waiting too long could be fatal because there was no guarantee Miliam’s ship could survive the cruiser’s opening volley, but jumping the gun might deprive them of valuable time they could have used to gain that much more distance. On the other hand, the cruiser would need less than a second to clear the asteroid if they detected a wave drive activating on the other side and their interdiction would definitely be in pce before the Astrum Vitae reached safety. Even now it would take several seconds to exit the rge asteroid’s gravity well from what was essentially a cold start as far as the wave drive was concerned.

  “Min-ji, shout ‘now’ the moment you detect the cruiser firing at us and Aoibhe, bring the wave drive online as soon as you hear her,” Miliam instructed after making her decision. In her opinion, the time gained by staying hidden outweighed the slight bit of forewarning they would have obtained by activating the drive while the cruiser was blocked.

  Whether that a was a good judgement call remained to be seen.

  “Will do,” Min-ji acknowledged.

  “Ready and waiting,” Aoibhe chimed in, hands tightening on her controls.

  “…with your permission, I believe I will move to the cloister,” Abigail volunteered unexpectedly. Taken aback, Miliam looked her way; out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Aoibhe’s head as she jerked in surprise, barely stopping herself from looking away from her station.

  “Since when are you a barriermaster?” asked Aoibhe without turning around, voicing the question Miliam was thinking.

  “I am not one. It is up to you, Miliam, whether you believe an amateur is better than no one at all,” Abigail replied honestly.

  “How should I know!?” Miliam practically yelled in response. She lowered her voice before continuing. “Be honest. What’s the best case and the worst case?”

  “At best I manage to correctly anticipate what type of damage to counter and buy us additional time. At worst I am incorrect and our barriers fail to stop an attack entirely,” Abigail answered evenly, as if discussing the weather.

  “…and which is more likely?”

  “Neither, I would say. I may perform an educated guess due to the circumstances and rule out many of their options, but that still leaves several possibilities. Anything slower than light by too wide a margin may be discounted in a chase scenario, but that still leaves directed energy, temperature manipution, disintegration, railguns, and more. A seasoned operator may be able to select settings that counter several at once instinctively; I will not be able to account for more than one intentionally,” Abigail expined patiently.

  It was a risk, just like every other choice Miliam had to make right now. But so was using the default settings. Nothing would pierce them without being impeded at all, but they would be drained far more by any given hit than something more specialized.

  “Then…go, but don’t mess with anything unless I give the okay,” Miliam decided, essentially punting the decision down the road. At the very least it was probably better to have Abigail in position just in case.

  “Very well,” Abigail agreed before leaving the bridge.

  That left Miliam watching the dispy intently as the Falcon Catcher’s shuttles hopped from ravine to ravine, exploring the asteroid’s surface gradually. They appeared to be ignoring anything too small to fit a corvette, but the search pattern they were following would bring them to the pilfered vault before much longer. Knowing which ravine it was in at least gave Miliam and her crew some warning about when they would be discovered.

  “Not much longer,” she muttered to herself as one of the shuttles hopped to the next crater. The moment was growing closer and her anxiety and restlessness were spiking once again. It was beginning to require physical effort to stop herself from unleashing her nervousness. Time advanced inexorably towards the moment of revetion and Miliam felt her limbs tensing as the seconds ticked past.

  One of the shuttles entered the crevice containing the vault. As soon as they investigated the inside of the structure time would be up. There was no way of knowing how long it would take now; it was all hidden by the asteroid’s surface.

  IUNS Falcon Catcher began to turn.

  “Now!” Min-ji called out a fraction of a second before Miliam even perceived the flurry of projectiles and spells that lit up her screen, chasing sensor ghosts and decoys spun off by Eun-ji.

  Wordlessly, Aoibhe triggered the ship’s thrusters in full reverse, killing its momentum as the wave drive came online and began to bend space itself. The distance between the two ships should have rapidly increased, but the cruiser was already changing direction, preventing Miliam’s corvette from escaping. A cone starting at the cruiser’s position faded in as it began to actively interdict a wide area around the Astrum Vitae, though Miliam noticed it wasn’t centered properly, which hopefully meant they hadn’t quite narrowed the smaller ship’s location down yet.

  “They’re hailing us again,” Eun-ji notified Miliam absently, most of her attention taken up by maintaining the ship’s EMCM.

  “Ignore it,” Miliam ordered, preferring to have Eun-ji focus on the more important of her jobs. She could have accepted the hail herself, but there was no point, and Miliam really didn’t want to give Delve Lead Cwfisher a chance to psych out her crew.

  Tapping first the icon for her own ship and then the other’s, Miliam checked the numbers that popped up on screen representing the approximate range between them. It was slow, but the number was increasing gradually, and it seemed to be accelerating as well. As expected, the cruiser couldn’t accelerate as quickly as a corvette- on of the few advantages Miliam held here.

  More armingly, the incoming fire was becoming more accurate. It was happening in fits and spurts as Eun-ji adjusted her spells, but she was one person against an entire team. Skilled as she was, she could only stave off the inevitable for so long.

  “Why aren’t they firing missiles…” Miliam asked herself as she watched events unfold. As a generalist design, she had assumed rangers would carry missiles in addition to nces and railguns, but so far only the tter two weapon types had come into py. Were they holding them in reserve until they had a target picked out? It couldn’t be that they cked missiles entirely. There weren’t enough weapons firing right now to account for the extra space that would leave.

  Miliam jabbed the intercom button so hard her finger ached when the answer came to her.

  “Tessa, prepare for a saturation attack!” she barked into the comm. There was no way the Falcon Catcher had no missiles, and they’d only be wasting time by waiting for a target lock. That left one possibility: they were unching missiles already, but they hadn’t lit their drives off yet.

  The bubble projected by a wave drive was just that, a bubble. That meant there was space inside that volume that wasn’t taken up by the ship creating it. Normally unching missiles during a pursuit without activating them would result in them being left behind, but if they were pushed out of their tubes at a low enough velocity…

  It was possible Miliam was giving either herself or the enemy captain too much credit here, but she could live with that. It was better than being caught by surprise. And if she were correct, hopefully she’d noticed early enough for Tessa to prepare.

  A lucky shot gnced off the Astrum Vitae’s barriers, draining them slightly. Miliam heard Eun-ji click her tongue as she redoubled her efforts, and for a few moments the cruiser’s weapons were drawn off target to the corvette’s port, but they quickly began to close in again.

  “Incoming missiles- a lot of them!” Min-ji announced suddenly, confirming Miliam’s fears. Dozens of missiles appeared on screen, met almost instantly by point defense sers coordinated by Tessa which began picking them off. The range was short though- not nearly enough that she could eliminate them all, especially not while cking two entire turrets. As the missiles approached, Miliam realized this was exactly the situation where a novice barriermaster might come in handy.

  “Abigail, can you tune the barrier for missiles?” she asked the schor waiting in the ship’s cloister.

  “Indeed,” answered Abigail simply. Miliam didn’t know how to check if the change had been made since she’d never had anyone manning that station before, so she just had to trust the job was done. There wasn’t time to do anything more, as the first missiles were already in range.

  Nuclear explosions blossomed across the tactical map and lines crisscrossed through space to show the path traced by the bomb-pumped sers those warheads powered. Each missile sent dozens or more beams of focused energy through space, all aimed in the general direction of their target. As vast as space was, those sers had a tiny chance of hitting anything, but even after Tessa reduced the number of missiles by half there were hundreds of beams searching for Miliam’s ship.

  Several lines intersected with the Astrum Vitae and were bent off course by the ship’s barrier. As the explosions and sers faded from the plot Miliam began to breathe a sigh of relief, but her breath caught in her throat as the ship suddenly shook and she realized she’d made a critical mistake. It was a simple one. One that may not have even been avoidable. Had she made another choice, her ship might have been nothing more than an expanding cloud of debris by now. But having escaped that fate, Miliam had another problem to content with.

  Because the instant those sers had been deflected, the Falcon Catcher knew precisely where the Astrum Vitae was hiding.