Cataphractoi

  Miliam didn’t even bother checking where the damage was before contacting Abigail again.

  “Reset the barriers!” she urged the schor.

  “Done,” Miliam heard back a moment ter. It was too soon to feel relief, though. By the time the cruiser finished firing her own ship’s barriers had dropped by over a third. And that wasn’t even a full volley; some of its weapons were probably already recharging by the time the Astrum Vitae’s location was determined.

  Even worse, the cruiser had stopped firing almost entirely. That sounded like a good thing initially until one considered why. Considering how rapidly it had been shooting in the Astrum Vitae’s general direction previously, its weapons must have been operating at lower output in exchange for volume of fire. Since they were mostly shooting in the dark before, the captain had likely been hoping a lucky hit might reveal the corvette’s position even before his sensor operators pinned it down.

  Now that they knew where to aim, though, there was no reason not to use their weapons’ maximum output. The tradeoff was that their nces would fire more slowly now as they were forced to recharge fully between volleys. At most, the Astrum Vitae could survive one full volley unscathed and that was only because the Falcon Catcher was currently firing directly into the rear of the corvette’s wave bubble and they were now travelling at speeds that rendered railguns useless. The next volley would both deplete the smaller ship’s barriers and give the cruiser the data it needed to adjust its aim to compensate for the field of warped space serving as a secondary line of defense.

  Gncing at her map of the system, Miliam realized that her ship had long passed outside of the asteroid’s gravity well in the handful of minutes since the pursuit had begun. Now the only thing standing between her ship and safety was the cruiser’s EMCM. Theoretically speaking her own ship’s EMCM could counter the minor gravitational perturbations the Falcon Catcher was using to interdict it, but that would require Eun-ji to somehow predict the randomized pattern it was using.

  Which left escaping the cruiser’s area of control before being blown to smithereens. But although the range had now opened up quite a bit…well, Miliam wasn’t great at this type of math, but she was pretty sure her ship wasn’t making it out of interdiction range in time. She needed some way of throwing the cruiser off again. To get them to stop firing, preferably. But they weren’t going to quit chasing her ship until it was destroyed or had…escaped.

  Oh.

  “Eun-ji, can you spoof a translocation jump?” Miliam asked, going with the second choice because the first was too obvious, in part, but also because she knew translocation jumps had a much rger sensor signature. Maybe it would be like fshbanging the other ship’s sensors- there were no doubt ways of compensating quickly, but this was only step one of the pn.

  “Can I…yes! I think so, but we’re still in their interdiction range. Won’t they assume it’s a trick?” Eun-ji answered before pointing out the most gring fw in the pn. But that was fine. Miliam just needed the other ship confused for a moment.

  “Do you think it would give us enough cover for you to change up our EMCM and make them lose track of us?” Miliam added on.

  “It might, but we’ll still be on the same course, right?” Eun-ji asked confusedly.

  “Don’t worry about that, just try to be ready to cast the spells as soon as you can after their next volley,” Miliam instructed, turning her attention to her pilot next. “Aoibhe, how quickly can you change our course?”

  “At these speeds? Probably…a few seconds for every degree. But shifting the wave bubble like that will reduce our advantage in acceleration a bit,” Aoibhe replied anxiously.

  “That’s fine, we just need to be out of their direct path. Pull up hard when Eun-ji casts her spell and decelerate as fast as you can once the cruiser isn’t on a collision course with us anymore,” Miliam ordered, calling a bit upon the age-old maneuver she’d seen in so many movies where a fighter pne stalled its own engine to let a foe pass it by.

  “Aye!” Aoibhe acknowledged with gusto, indicating to Miliam that she saw the vision.

  Hopefully now that the cruiser ‘knew’ where the Astrum Vitae was, there would be a slight dey before they realized it slipped away. Between the confusion over how her ship had performed a translocation jump already, the mana pulse of a fake jump, and a complete shift in her ship’s EMCM it would, with some luck, be several second before anyone thought to check if Miliam’s ship had changed course.

  By then, her ship would already be out of its original position retive to the cruiser and decelerating, which would pce the Astrum Vitae well outside the pocket where the Falcon Catcher was searching for it in. Between that and the fact the cruiser’s interdiction field was being projected forward so it would reach further, the Astrum Vitae might very manage a real jump before the cruiser even noticed the deception.

  And it all hinged on starting the moment after the Falcon Catcher unched its next attack because that gave her a window where the cruiser had no way of verifying her ship’s position.

  “They’re firing again!” Min-ji announced. By the time she spoke most of the incoming fire had already struck the Astrum Vitae’s barriers, rapidly depleting them, and by the time she finished the st of it had been deflected by the wave bubble.

  “Eun-ji, are you ready?” Miliam asked tightly, fearing there hadn’t been enough time for the dokkaebi woman to prepare.

  “Just about…now,” Eun-ji replied, activating the spells she’d queued up before Miliam could respond. Hearing that, Aoibhe began adjusting the wave bubble to tilt their path upwards.

  As she waited to see if the pn had worked, Miliam thought her heart was going to burst from how loudly it was pounding, seemingly drowning out all other sounds on the bridge. She rotated the sensor plot to get an angle that showed the Astrum Vitae’s position ‘vertically’ in retion to the Falcon Catcher, not that the two ships had been rotated onto the same axis in the first pce.

  For all that both ships had reached speeds close to a full c, the icons on the dispy were moving at a snail’s pace. The Astrum Vitae was even now inching closer to the edge of the Falcon Catcher’s range, but that would take another minute they didn’t have. Aoibhe was gradually bending the ship’s course upwards though, second by second- and then the change in numbers reversed itself as the ship began to decelerate hard.

  The velocity of their wave bubble would take minutes to reduce all the way to zero, but that wasn’t necessary at these kinds of speeds to attain a massive change in retive velocity. With the cruiser still accelerating and the corvette effectively accelerating in the opposite direction, the difference in their retive velocities dropped precipitously. In just ten seconds the corvette fell back until it was tens of thousands of kilometers off from where the cruiser expected it to be.

  When the cruiser fired its next volley, instead of obliterating the Astrum Vitae like it expected, it merely threw an incredible amount of magic power into the void. Instantly the captain seemed to recognize what had happened as his ship’s interdiction field adjusted from a tight cone into a shorter ranged and broader one, but his scans and rapid fire attempts at locating his quarry again betrayed his second mistake.

  While the Astrum Vitae had tilted upwards on its own axis, the Falcon Catcher began by checking if it went down.

  As relief flooded her system, Miliam pondered whether that was just a bad guess or if it were psychological. Of the eight directions that Delve Lead Cwfisher could have picked, he assumed Miliam would have escaped downwards. From what she’d seen of the mirazar, they were amphibians. Had Cwfisher assumed she would dive because that’s what a mirazar’s first instinct when in danger would be? Or was it a coincidence? After all, her down wasn’t his down. He might have been checking to his upper right instead.

  “They’re adjusting their scanning area but they still haven’t started looking closer to themselves. I don’t think it’s occurred to them that we could have decelerated, yet,” Min-ji updated Miliam, although she was already following along on the screen which mirrored the sensor station anyway. She thanked Min-ji anyway.

  Regardless of the reason, the other leader only compounded his mistake by searching to the sides of his first guess instead of checking the opposite direction entirely. By the time he moved onto the right general direction, Miliam’s ship had grown so close to his that the angle was no longer sharp enough to net even a lucky hit. If he’d suspected she was decelerating it didn’t show; even now, when the railguns might have proven useful, they remained silent.

  “Make sure you’re ready on that jump, Aoibhe. I don’t think we’re going to get another chance,” Miliam reminded the pilot, her throat dry. Suddenly she remembered the mug she’d been gripping tightly for hours now to the point her fingers were stiff around its handle. Bringing it to her lips, Miliam discovered the drink inside was still warm, quickly finishing it off.

  “Aye, cap’n. I’m ready,” Aoibhe confirmed vacantly, her entire focus directed towards her job.

  The ships drew closer to each other far more rapidly than they had ever been moving apart, and the pace only grew by the second. It wouldn’t be long now before the Astrum Vitae could leave the system. But until they reached that point, every second brought them closer to destruction equally. With no barriers left to speak of, it occurred to Miliam that her ship was doomed if the cruiser caught on. It would take very little time for the other ship to adjust its interdiction field or shift its weapons’ aims.

  Once she realized that, Miliam quickly felt her blood pressure spiking again, the tension in her rising with every second that passed. She wouldn’t even have time to realize her death was coming before it arrived. It would be like flicking a light switch off. Whether that was good or bad she didn’t know.

  She wanted to say something; to encourage Eun-ji, who was currently all that stood between the entire crew and death. Speaking up now would only pressure the young woman or at the very least distract her, though. So it was that Miliam cmped down on her tongue, just short of drawing blood. Her own fate was out of her hands now. It was all down to Eun-ji’s skill and Aoibhe’s reflexes at this point.

  Until the end, the cruiser never stopped firing or scanning. They knew the Astrum Vitae had to be here somewhere because its wave drive was still active; they just couldn’t quite pin down where. As the two ships grew closer together, however, so too did the cruiser’s search area get tighter. Their sensor operators weren’t stupid; they’d begun to realize what Miliam’s strategy had been…but only too te.

  The stars outside the viewport doubled briefly, and then the Astrum Vitae had escaped the Falcon Catcher’s grasp.