Follow The Leader

The Nightstalker and its six escorts accelerated in pursuit of the cloud of fighters. The Eye was on tactical, and reviewed the sensor reports.

"Five thousand, six hundred and forty-three marks, accelerating at eight standard gravities from Suburbia Prime. They're sticking together." The Eye paused for a moment, and a cloud of tiny false-color dots covered the bridge's main view-screen.

Jolt, sitting in the captain's chair, narrowed her eyes. "Their energy storage capacity is limited. If they're going to jump, they'll have to do it soon."

She regarded the cloud of mauve-colored dots. "Do we have fragment bombs?"

The Eye checked her armory display. "Yes, sir, we do."

"Give me a rack of torpedoes with frag bombs. Thresher, relay that to our wingmen. Let's take as many of them out as we can while they're still vulnerable."

Thresher was at the communications station. "Done. They'll fire at our command."

Jolt turned to the First Mate, who was standing beside her. "Fire at your discretion."

The First Mate tensed and turned to a console. "Transfer fire control now."

The Eye complied, tapping buttons on her tactical console. "Done."

The First Mate entered an attack plan, explaining as he manipulated the controls. "If I understand you correctly, Captain, you wish to deploy the bombs just in front of the leading edge of fighters, resulting in kinetic kills as the targets accelerate into the shrapnel."

Jolt nodded. "Precisely."

The First Mate consulted his display. "Between our launchers and the other six ships, we have forty warheads for the first salvo. All racks loaded -- firing."

From the sides of the blade of the spade-like Nightstalker, small cylinders rolled from the launcher racks on the side. The escorting corvettes, stubby cylinders with a pair of movable, wing-like struts with thrusters on the end mounted on one side next to a heavily-armored bridge module, fired more missiles into the cloud of ordnance from their single launcher racks opposite the bridge.

Computers traded targeting information, then the thrusters of the missiles ignited. A standing wave of neutrino pairs was constrained on one side by a nanoscopic gravity gradient, created by a thin film of stable strange matter. To oscillate at its desired wavelength, the standing wave had to attempt to push the barrier out of its frame of reference; the magnetic moment of the neutral gravity band gap skipping forwards through space-time generated blinding light and heat, which was conducted away from the apparatus by a cloud of vaporizing coolant. The missiles skipped forwards through space, leaving a trail of glowing gas.

An additional set of band gaps closed around the standing wave, this time producing thrust not in ordinary space-time, but in the curved and distorted dimensions of hyperspace. The missiles seemed to curve away as their thrust vectors were forced into a time-line with a non-zero imaginary component, disappearing from the local light-cone on a partially time-like path to their targets. This similarity to a naval torpedo, skimming under the surface of an ocean, led missiles with faster-than-light thrusters to be called "torpedoes".

The torpedoes completed their brief parabolic skip in imaginary time slightly ahead of the front of the cloud of fighters. A charge of chemical explosive sent kilogram-sized chunks of iron into a cloud of kinetic impactors.

The fighters were already traveling at a quarter of the speed of light, following a common vector out of the Suburbia system. The oncoming projectiles vaporized the few fighters that were struck; the survivors scattered, and the advance halted as the formation began to dissipate like a cloud.

Jolt watched the screen as the interrocitor observed the flashes of the exploding fighters. The computer collated the casualty figures to her command display. "Excellent. The first salvo literally decimated the targets -- 10 percent casualty rate."

Thresher, manning the communications station, registered hails from a group of a dozen torpedo frigates patrolling the Suburbia system. With the advance of the fighters temporarily halted by the barrage from the faster corvettes, these vessels could surround and bombard the cloud of small vessels, closing off the escape vectors for the small ships. "We have fire support -- I think we have them bottled up."

The Eye scowled. "Wait a minute -- something's coming!"

Twenty huge battleships materialized from deep hyperspace, re-entering normal space-time in a scattered cloud that rapidly approached the cloud of fighters. The neutral particle cannon of the Reyll war-ships fired.

The beams faded away, twisting away into hyperspace, and re-appeared as scorching beams of energy that struck the approaching corvettes. One bolt struck the Nightstalker amidships, disrupting the main power reactor. The Eye cut the throttle rather than deplete the ship's supply of stored energy, as did the other corvettes. "Twenty marks -- out of nowhere! Main power down, recovery in thirty seconds. Breaking off pursuit."

The surviving fighters -- some five thousand ships -- returned to their former vector, approaching the battleships. Jolt and the First Mate watched as the fighters triggered their jump drives and disappeared, one by one, from the screen.