The jump to the rendesvous point went off without a hitch. After disengaging from the tanker, Black Prince had gone to battle stations essentially of the crew's own accord, and most of the rest of the squadron did so on arrival.

The course was a straightforward zigzag, to a light-year out and on the axis of rotation of the star, the system laid out in plan view below them. Dynamic and Hialaya Karu were there already, drifting and waiting. Lennart ordered the squadron to assemble on him, in the wave formation he had chosen.
First wave: Black Prince and the fastest ships of the group, and their supraluminal small craft, shuttles and transports mainly, the shuttles with pivot and turret guns, the transports with ion guns and torpedoes. Voracious started loosing her complement of Avenger and Assault TIEs, and older types they had booster rings for, the Actis and Nimbus, to join them.

That should give us starfighter superiority from the start, and a decent antiship punch to follow that in, Lennart thought - that had been the point of the plan. After that, who? My working assumption is that they will be caught out initially but react quickly, and microjump or jump out and return, attempting to gain a killing position on Black Prince.
The second wave exists to exploit that, jumping in to kill them while the flag leads them away. Most of the squadron should be second wave, but it was going to be a running, manoeuvring fight for the most part.

The ships that couldn't coordinate their actions well enough to perform effectively under those circumstances, or were physically incapable of the necessary acceleration, would have to form a third wave - jumping in when the fight had taken on more definite shape.

He com'd Falldess on the Karu-class destroyer. 'Any problems?'

'The, ah, the local crew were unwilling to part with her. I had to use Kor Alric's authority to pry her loose,' Falldess said.

'There's more to it than that, isn't there?' Lennart asked.

'Yes,' she admitted, wondering if she was going to make the situation worse for the local crew. 'Commander Carcovaan was very disturbed by the thought that he was going to miss his chance to make a name for himself and his crew.'

'Disturbed how?' Lennart asked.

'Initially, almost in tears.'

'If he took it that hard…' Lennart said disapprovingly, thinking Destiny, send me hard-nosed bastards who can carve their own way, whose hands I don't have to hold, because I don't know how much more of that I can do without snapping and ripping somebody's head off. Although, bearing Kor Alric in mind, not too many.

'At first, when it was just a shock. Then I thought he was going to murder me to get his ship back. When I showed him Kor Alric's authorisation, he sort of crumpled, but then dealt with it professionally enough,' Falldess said.

Carcovaan had been left out of the initial squadron lineup largely because of his ship. The slowest accelerating craft Lennart had been prepared to accept in the initial lineup had been the 2,680 'g' Demolishers. Karu class, although they had many other good qualities, were not fast. She and Dynamic would form the bulk of the third wave, Fist, Voracious and Perseverance the second.

The other reason was that Carcovaan had few negatives, but also few positives. He was average, maybe above average, but had never had, worse had never sought hard enough to find, the chance to distinguish himself. Maybe he would, if the chance managed to find him.

What else was there, in terms of unfinished business? Too many enemies - including the most personal of all, who mercifully had had the sense to keep out of the way. That was unusually tactful of Kor Alric, who must have been aware that the crew of the destroyer loathed him. Lennart was expecting a sly little probing call, another aggravation, which probably would have been enough to set him off.
The timing was wrong, though. Right now, it would suit Adannan to have Lennart unbothered, and at peak efficiency to defeat the rebels and carve their way through to Ord Corban.

'Skipper? We have a problem. Kind of weird.' Cormall, who looked fantastically out of place in full dress uniform.

'Weird. Around here that could be anything, but - Nygma?' He was about due to cause trouble.

'I think so. Being as how we're dealing with a master of deception and confusion, I could be wrong,' Cormall said, but from his tone it was clear it was so unlikely it could only be the rogue analyst.

'Sir, I've been using all the run time the ship had to spare, I've got better tools to work with, I thought I had a break into one of his data-dump accounts and tried tracing back from there. I had the brute force to cut through a lot of the clever puzzles he left, but-'

'That's a lot of excuses for a mistake you haven't told me you've made yet,' Lennart interrupted.

'Sorry, Sir, but, have you ever walked into an invisible house of mirrors? There are multiple feeds out. Each of them with feedback, and carrying data close to the limit of the human brain to assimilate, so suddenly I have forty-plus primary targets. I don't understand how he can be in that many places at once. Either he's single-handedly invented a new stardrive with journey times in nanoseconds per light year, or-'

Both of them said at the same time, 'He's gone massively parallel.'

'Ah, dreck,' Cormall added.

'Contact them. Contact them all,' Lennart said.

The chief petty officer did; the holodisplay filled with changing mathematical symbols, a strange pseudo-equation of dancing randomised nearly-logic. All with little green hats.

'Doctor Nygma?' Lennart said, dreading the answer.

'Yes,' All of them said, in quadrodecaphonic sound.

'The conclusion you expect me to come to as a result of this display - you have, haven't you?'

All the mathematical symbols looked shiftily at each other. A lemma picked a fight with a theorem, and the set of all sets that include themselves decided to blackball one of its members, just to see what happened.

'Yes.' 'No.' 'Conceivably.' 'Indeterminately.' 'Stochastically.' 'Suppose that I are not confused…'

'Next question,' Lennart said, carrying straight on. 'Did you think this was actually necessary, or just too much fun not to do?'

Again a scattershot of random, nonsensical, head-bending answers, which Lennart guessed distilled down to, 'A bit of both.'

'You do realise,' Lennart said, and stopped himself before he could ask the open-ended question "what the consequences of this are going to be" the answer to which could have gone on forever, 'what you have to do now? Survive, and bear witness?'

'Some of us are not carnivorous. We want to marrow witness instead,' the one nearest the front said.

'Fine,' Lennart said, determinedly ignoring the discussion of the theory and iconography of the cybervegetable that started up in the lower half of the holotank. 'We found you, but…you know your own trade best, I'm sure. Good luck.'

He broke the connection.

'Kriff me sideways with a zombie rancor. How did that happen?' Cormall asked.

'I wouldn't say that in earshot of anyone from Engineering if I were you - and I should be asking you that anyway,' Lennart said. 'He must have created an emulation of his own mind, and spread it throughout the sector HoloNet. With all the classified data in his brain - Black Sun might not have the skill to track all of him down, but the Ubiqtorate are going to kill him. I hope we haven't just given memory room to one - or several - of him?'

'Sir, I don't think so, but I could be wrong,' Cormall said, honestly.

'Glorious. Well, don't let him, or them, interfere with ship systems.'

'Aye, aye, Sir,' Cormall said, but Lennart's mind was already moving to the next problem. Something he had failed to do consciously and explicitly, worse, something he had been particularly insistent on in the exercises - enemy intentions analysis.

In the rebels' position, he would be sending out whatever he could spare to launch spoiling attacks, scattershot across the sector. There would be plenty of targets, too soft or too confused to resist effectively. Even strikes that failed would achieve something strategically, spreading confusion and helping to cover the evacuation.

The fact that they hadn't indicated that they were going down the other route, making one big fight out of it. That was why he had requested support from 851. They could do hunter operations throughout the sector, or reinforce the pursuit squadron at Ord Corban.

Most of the unplanned acquisitions, the remains of Third Superiority Fleet, would attack as part of wave three. HIMS Fist had the acceleration to form part of the first wave, but he wanted her as one of the key pieces of the second. The holes had been crudely plated over - the welding was still glowing hot, but the repair job should be robust enough to stand having a shield spread over it, hopefully. The other reason that with the loss of most of primary sensor function and thirty percent of the EW emitters, she was less fit to fight a high speed, long range running battle, so phase two it would be.

As an academy tutor, I would mark this plan down on several grounds, Lennart thought, one of them being violation of unit integrity. I had intended to work up to efficiency and deploy in that standard pattern formation, but now I'm winging it, he thought. With one more line and one more light destroyer than I had expected, so it's not all bad.

With a little bit of retroactive polish, this might almost look like I planned it.

Group Captain Vehrec was one of the last out of the old Venator's fighter complement, he was still trying to make sense of the deployment plan.
Caliphant was with him on the bridge, and said, 'Well, you should be happy with the battle plan. Especially the bit that says "and then we make it up as we go along.'''

'Yes, it does,' Vehrec said, looking down at the datapad in hand.

'We were lucky in that last fight. We were just a big dumb ox, trying to squash the enemy with dead weight. The crew are happy about it, I'm happy about it, but we were slow and we fumbled a lot. I should be bouncing off the ceiling here; guns and glory, yee-hah, woohoo, all that, going around and telling everyone how wonderful they are. Instead-' Caliphant said.

'You're worrying too much. When the shot starts to fly, they'll shake out. They're a bit overconfident now, if you can calm them down without going too far the other way it would be good, but they'll do.'

'What I am concerned about,' Vehrec continued, 'is the booster rings.'

'The what? You're serious.'

'Of course. Look, we hyperspace in, eleven squadrons, and ditch six squadrons' worth of booster rings - they haven't been in production for fifteen years, there are damn few left to turn up. As soon as you come in in wave two, get the retrieval tugs and tenders out.'

'We're making a combat drop, we're going to be…oh. I see where you're coming from there. Right, can do,' Caliphant said. Worrying about an absurd little thing like that, at a time like that, would be a good way to get the crew indulging in some nice, comforting, stabilising, panic-preventing routine.

'Good,' was all Vehrec said. He was thinking, Antar Olleyri may have the rank, but I'll be the man on the spot.

With thirty-plus transports and as many again armed shuttles on top of the wing, that's upwards of a thousand antiship torpedoes, and the combined energy firepower alone reaches the low gigatons; hitting secondary targets is going to be fun.

Lineup complete, and move in from assembly area to the target.

The rebels could hardly fail to notice the shoal of hyperdrive signatures coming their way, but they could be prevented from doing so until it was too late.

Primary entry point was just above the ecliptic and to sunward, a quarter AU off the mainworld. One hundred and twenty-four light seconds - less time than it took to raise a shield.

Black Prince, the elements of the strike line committed and the shoal of fighters and armed transports emerged as planned, in a system full of energy and drive flares. The rebs were still here, and they were busy.

The Actis and Nimbus squadrons ditched their drive rings, fanned out, Black Prince went on to a standard shallow evasive weave while gunnery picked the first target of the day.

EW was already registering panic, confused crosstalk on rebel command wavebands; no time for code cracking yet, but traffic analysis indicated near panic. Possibly simulated, could have been an ambush - if it was, their own side were in ignorance of it.
Too many lower echelon units trying to contact higher, too many people talking at once. It was chaotic enough to escape stylisation. All recorded for subsequent analysis, of course.

The outworlds, their defences were already partially disassembled for relocation. Relatively easy meat. A few salvos in their direction might arrive before they had time to raise a full shield - LTL fire crackled out at the nearest outworld and the asteroid stations.

Some small ships out there, freighters and transports, escort corvettes - the smaller ships of the squadron could be detached to deal with them, and lay siege to the outworlds.

Would that draw the rebel heavies in their direction? Lennart hoped so, knew that his own nav team would be plotting microjumps out there as a matter of routine.

Of the three primary targets, the two large rebel ships and the main world itself, One and Indivisible - the Lucrehulk - was in orbit - no, actually anchored to a skyhook.
As conversions, and huge ships with a lot of space to play with, there were so many variants - scan called this one a late model combat carrier. Fairly impressive; a worthwhile target. Her powerplant was spiking as she ran up to full output, very fast reactions over there. One to watch. The skyhook, though, was inherently more vulnerable.

This would be the first test in combat of the new axial battery; the structure was there to take the load, the field generators were all in place and functioning, but it was still fresh pants on standby status. The Lucrehulk would manage partial shielding before the ship's fire could reach her, the hook wouldn't. Overkill time - the three huge four hundred and eighty teraton guns cracked out one shot each, everyone involved with their fingers crossed.

The ship shook, and one of the displays flickered, but a sequence of three forest green tracer lashed out downrange.

'Good. Roll us to bear, main guns single shot and target match your yields, LTL change target, mainworld, priorities for both shield generators, ion cannon, light turbolasers, heavy turbolasers in that order.'

The object was to render the planet vulnerable and exposed to further attack. Killing the light turbolasers before the heavies - Lennart had faith in his own ship's footwork, they could evade enough of the main defence batteries' fire, but the smaller craft he was less sure of.

'Heavy axials, your target is the One and Indivisible,' Lennart stopped before he could give a fire order. The thing was just sitting there. Playing chicken, to all intents and purposes. If the Empire wanted the planet intact, he couldn't afford to go around making half-petaton holes in the landscape - bold to the point of insanity. 'Shoot once it has cleared the silhouette of the planet.'

The gunnery liaison on the bridge parsed that into an order, transmitted it.

Black Prince turned to bear, and sprayed out shot after shot, a sparkling green bridge of tracer extending towards the planet.

Bridge? Too friendly, insufficiently aggressive an image. Then again, hadn't that been part of very early artillery terminology? Being 'shot into' a position, on a pont au feu - a bridge of fire to get the men over the obstacles. That fitted.

Hyperspace scanners picked up the first return fire coming their way. Predicted endpoints - all around them. A loose barrage-cone, the rebels' best chance to score some hits. Black Prince could take what was coming, but it was beyond the surge capacity of the frigates, beyond the total load of the corvettes.

Another good reason to detach them to pursue a secondary target.
'Blackwood, you're subformation leader. Hit planet III, maximum burn out of the cone of incoming fire then dogleg. Their smaller craft, and that could be anything up to line destroyer, will probably bounce you. Be ready.'

To Brenn, he added 'Set up a nav solution for wave two, running update - use Blackwood's location as the end point, double usual safety offset.' The fighter wing bridge liaison was instructed, 'Pattern Delta, variant three. Target mainworld.'

That was an essentially cylinder-shaped attack, the fighter wing fanning out to avoid fire directed at the ship and moving forward to englobe the target. Variant three was to lead with the fighters, bombers relatively close behind, to draw defending fighters out and destroy them.

They would be striking at the same targets the main batteries were; Lennart expected to have to pull his guns off the planet and engage warship targets well before they got there.

He accelerated Black Prince outsystem at a tangent to the planet, passing out of as much of the cone of fire as possible and rolling to keep the fire arc open. Shielding down there was starting to come on line, but it would not have built up to full strength, nothing like. Possibly enough to stop light turbolaser fire, though.

'LTL, change target, One and Indivisible. He's inviting us in, he's refusing to come out and fight. He knows that we have him in a foul position. He'll raise shields and shelter under the planetary defence until something happens to distract us. Could be worth a fighter strike - thinking of that, helm, sell them a dummy, down twenty starboard thirty, hold that for eight seconds then resume normal evasion. These fabian tactics begin to irritate me,' Lennart said.

'Could they be doing something as simple as waiting for orders?' Brenn speculated. 'Command absent or dithering, so the bridge team spool the ship up fast but there's no-one with the authority to actually take her out to fight?'

'Tempting, but a damn dangerous assumption to base our approach on. Guns, hold fire on her now, keep stripping away the planetary defences, and let's see how she reacts to having the skyhook shot out from under her,' Lennart decided.

'First of our shot will hit in three seconds,' Rythanor announced. 'Looks good.'

Hyperwave scanners, instantly responsive, registered the impact of the first shots two minutes before the light could reach them. From that account, it was going to be a hell of a fireworks show.

The skyhook had managed to raise partial shielding, which had been a mistake - it meant that it absorbed all three half- petaton hits and erupted along the upper two thirds of its length.

The planet itself - there were gaps in the defence net anyway, things removed and sold off long ago, torn down by the rebels to relocate to other bases; time to a firing position where they could hit the Lucrehulk without turning the planet behind it into a cinder from near misses and overpenetrations?
Time to exploit those gaps, burn them large enough to go in after it? It was a ridiculously large piece of live bait, after all. Lennart wanted to tear the holes in the planetary defence net open wide enough to force the rebs to come out to meet him, not to go in and get shredded by what there was left of it.

Rythanor turned round to report, saw the captain was looking intent over his shoulder and was aware of it anyway. Ion drive flares; One and Indivisible was moving at last.
One hundred and thirty seconds from anchored and taking on freight to clearing the dockside? Helped slightly by the fact that the dockside had ceased to exist, of course.

'Guns, port - no, Starboard-2 switch to flak bursts, lay a shot on it every twenty seconds.' Probably not enough to stop it trying to launch fighters, as a continual blizzard of explosions would have, but enough to cook a lot of them.

The first shots from the planetary defence guns were starting to arrive, now. If the spreading stream of fire from Black Prince was a bridge, the converging effect of the defence batteries was a sandstorm of red and orange.

The light guns had reacted fastest, but it was near the limit of effective range for dual purpose turbolasers firing from or through an atmosphere. Good enough for their light guns to hit fighters, though, one reason Lennart had got his away so quickly, and good enough for his to do counterbattery on their light guns.

The heavies were pounding the planet as well, and scoring hits; there were four iridescent purple-blue mushroom shaped explosions where nodes of the shield network had been destroyed. Not mushroom clouds, they were inevitable and there would be enough of those later anyway, but as the shield generators were hit and destroyed, that release of energy came flooding out of the partially spread surface of the shield bubble.

Damn the Force for its inconvenience, Lennart thought, I think I can actually hear the planet screaming. Not the rebels, the world itself.

If it was, small wonder. Even on a precisely targeted fire plan - and the gun crews were doing a superb job - there were still hundreds of teratons a minute being pounded into Ord Corban. It would be another hundred seconds before it became clear to the telescopic eye, but the hyperwave could detect and the ship's computers infer from that what was happening.
The planet's surface would be rippling, earthquake after earthquake, some of them the small and local concussions of TL hits, but at least two triggered fault lines.

The green flowers of impact would become less and less clear through a grey-brown haze of dust and atmospheric ejecta. The oceans wouldn't have started boiling off, not yet. A few more petatons for that.

And this was an aimed, necessary-force fire plan, against legitimate military targets.

The destruction of which was, in itself, a visual spectacle worth paying attention to. The green flare was followed by a white aftershock of the target detonating, which faded to a white-hot molten glow surrounded by a literal ring of fire, once the radiation intensities from the hit faded to a temperature at which chemistry was possible. Whatever they hit, if it didn't burn, it was vapourised down to its constituent elements, and then the vapour burned.

The planet's atmosphere would be absolutely foul, but the planetary facilities would survive a near miss, or this kind of punishment to the world around them. There would be enough left to drop troops on, when it came to that.

'We're doing too well, we shouldn't be doing this much damage, this soon,' Lennart said, hauling himself back from sightseeing mode to the situation at hand.

'We're beyond normal effective aimed fire range. By the book they would have expected us to manoeuvre closer, before springing any ambush.' Brenn pointed out.

In theory, aim a jump far enough outsystem to avoid giving warning from bow shock, and the normal-space emissions would give you away anyway. Arrive close enough to have no realspace warning, and anyone worth the effort of attacking would have sensors to spot the bow shock and have shields and weapons up and ready.
The solution was a radically irregular hyperspace path in, waving your course track across the sky drastically enough to give warning to everyone but the target. It placed a lot of stress on the ship, another reason why wave one had been the high-acceleration ships, they were built to withstand that kind of punishment.

'Emerging this far away to draw them out, then jumping something in planetward for hammer and anvil, out here where we have room to fight? The problem with inflicting confusion on the enemy,' Lennart said in his lecturing voice, for the benefit of the bridge crew, 'is it makes the part of your own plan where you have to predict what the enemy thinks they're trying to do into a cast-durelium bitch…is that the first of the heavy shot coming our way now?'

'Yes, Captain,' Rythanor confirmed.

The incoming fire display showed the light guns sending wavering streams of tracer, hosing on and off target, but the first of the multi-teraton defence batteries, slower to get into action, just getting their bolts out to them now. Black Prince was in the fringes of the shot pattern, evading from entry proving valuable after all.

'Helm, we'll take this clump of shot bows on,' Lennart drew a highlight around one cluster of bolts, 'then I want a base course track like this.' Tracing it on the display, the computer taking account of the ship's velocity and delta-V, adjusting it back towards the possible.
Not that it needed much in the way of revision, it was a feasible, arguably necessary move. Ride out the first close smear of shot then break outwards to the edge of the barrage pattern, and spiral inwards around it towards the planet.

Subject, of course, to modifications. Once they realised the blind barrage was largely ineffectual, the rebels, such of them as were left, would start playing the great old gunnery guessing game. Predicting his location on the basis of his intentions, and firing concentrated salvos at that point, as he tried to guess where they would fire and be anything but there. Lennart had lost rounds, even sets, but never the game. Not yet.

'I suppose it's possible that this might hurt…' Lennart said, again for the benefit of the bridge crew. 'Deflectors eighty forward.' The shields shifted to meet the attack as the first rebel heavy shot rolled in.

Planetary defence came in many forms, most of them driven far more by politics and the contrary forces of penny-pinching and paranoia than any real need or rational threat analysis. Virtually every civilised world worthy of the name had shields that could take a stray burst from freighter and liner ion drives, which would do to withstand LTL if it came to that.

Above that, the sky was the limit, up to and including ultraheavy shielding like Alderaan's, which was designed to survive the heaviest attack anyone thought feasible, a battle squadron of ten Mandator dreadnoughts unloading on it at full power for ten hours. Correction; had been designed.

Defensive firepower was much more variable. A former fleet base would have been designed to be a match for the heaviest ships it was intended to protect. That would have been, in theory, a medium cruiser.

Sixteen batteries, common buried command centre and dispersed, robust sensors serving three ball-turret four hundred teraton heavy turbolasers, spaced twenty to forty kilometres apart with point defence around each. Being a planet, half of those could bear on any given target.

Twenty array batteries, each of twelve forty teraton heavy turbolasers, again, half of which could bear.

Lennart wasn't worried too much about the forties. His ship could take that, had done so before; it would take a lot of concentrated hits to get through the shielding. The four hundreds could prove a problem.

The first splash of fire burnt through the space around his ship; two small twitches, concussions as one shot hit on the port side of the superstructure, one aft and starboard.

Not bad shooting, but not a problem yet.

If they couldn't put enough fire from those things into Black Prince at this range fast enough to overload the shields, and unless Lennart was spectacularly stupid and allowed his ship to be hit they couldn't, then they had to either move the planet to him - which was not entirely ridiculous but certainly beyond the means of the rebellion - or get him to come closer.

Which he would have thought One and Indivisible was doing, but for the absurdity of being prepared to sacrifice a medium cruiser to kill a destroyer. They had to hope for extraordinary luck with the bigger guns, or they had to come out to meet him.

And damn the Force again, for trying to think of ways it could make itself useful. Although to call the Jedi to mind, not many of them would have said what amounted to 'neener neener neener', even if projective telepathy did work that way.

'Fighters coming up, lining up to microjump out to us, five or six squadrons, exit point - hmph,' Rythanor gave a little grunt of amusement as he marked their point of emergence on the main tactical map. Predicted position from where Black Prince had been two hundred seconds ago - right in the middle of the cone of fire.

'So there were failures of coordination on the rebel side from the word go,' Lennart said, thinking about it. 'let the fighters emerge, let them take losses, then pull the LTL on to them once they've managed to form up and made themselves a nice compact target again.'

Gunnery acknowledged, then there was a kick on the port side over the extension. One of the four-hundreds had got lucky. No penetration, no bleed through, a lot of heat to be got rid of.

If they had made the standard approach to an undistinguished planet, that the standard defence setup was intended to face, they would have come out at one light second. That was close enough to the planet that bow shock would have given the defenders enough warning to raise theatre shields and arm guns. Then they would have commenced a fairly predictable run in, straight and level to release fighters and dropships.
A well drilled defence force could have managed an eighty plus percent hit rate under those conditions, and a standard Imperator class destroyer would have been lucky to last twenty seconds.

Against Third Superiority, they must have been either very startled, so much so they only got a few batteries into action, not possible considering the ambush, or they had actually been shooting to cripple and capture. Fist had been truly fortunate to make it out. Either that or Tevar was better at the footwork than she realised. There was some revenge to be had there, too; how soon to bring them in?

Assume the rebel trap had already failed, bring the entire squadron in to pound the planet? Rely on 851 as backup to cover what else may happen?

Peltast, Daring, Speaker, Varangian and Tigress were within reach. Tector, Allegiance, Imperator-II, Venator, Imperator-I in that order. A lot of firepower, and a lot of men hungry for action and advancement too. Arguably, he was letting his own squadron down by failing to secure as much of the glory was possible for them. Although that was more like counting reptavians before they hatch.

Careful, he warned himself. If they're trying to lure me into a false sense of security in turn, then they could be doing a much worse job. And absolutely, above all, ignore that surge of triumphalism that came from the dark side.

Black Prince was in what her helm control team unofficially called reluctant film star mode; an unrolling red carpet spread out beneath her, which she was doing everything possible to avoid having to walk down.

The heavies were a deeper, more crimson red, beautiful in its own terrifying way. Looking ahead, down the hyperwave's advance scan, the focus of fire wobbled, billowed, narrowed and darted to one side - that was the dummy, and it took them well clear.

Too much shot in the air to evade on an individual basis, and even their 'towed array' - the hyperspace orbiting scanner - was now coming close to being washed out - part of that was jamming, too. Relatively light fire pattern, starting to slacken considering so many of the defences had been hit, but, what was their jamming intended to achieve? Especially timed to coincide with…

'Helm, take us across this track here,' Back into the fire, skimming the edges of the concentrated stream.

Brenn looked at him, Lennart could hear the wheels of his mind turn, then he said 'You really think they're that good?'

'Well, it's about time they showed some evidence of competence.'

The destroyer curved back along the column of crimson and scarlet, five red flowers on the outer hull of bolt impacts being partially deflected, four forties and a four hundred. Painful, but compared to what they had already dealt out, trivial. Lennart glanced at the shield status board; ray shields had equalised from the forward-heavy setup, back to a more even, and more tactically appropriate, spread. Good. That was what he had been about to order, anyway.

This was what it was all about, the intelligent anticipation, everyone knowing their part and able to count on each other to do theirs in turn, the collective machine, the finely honed skill that made the ship what it was.

In fact, right now the least trustworthy part of the system was himself. Was there any possibility the Force was leading him into error? That he was overestimating his opponent, or just plain wrong? It was certainly possible that he could waste enough time second-guessing himself enough to put the ship in danger.

An entire planet is shooting at me, Lennart thought, and I'm wondering where the nearest psychiatrist's couch is. Well, it's not as if they're doing a particularly good job of it.

The superluminal sensor picture was blurring and clearing, fading in and out as the control team gained and lost ground against the planetary ECM. Lennart turned to look at the gunnery liaison, said, 'Do something about that, would you?'

Gunnery were already bumping up the planet's antenna grids on the target priority list, before he had finished saying it.

Lennart had been a passenger on board 'The Old Warhorse'- HIMS Guarlara- transferring from one staff command to another once, eighteen years ago, and it had been one of the eeriest experiences of his life.

Utter, total, absolute silence on the bridge. A look, a gesture, a nod, a raised eyebrow - attention was drawn and orders were given without a single word being spoken. The bridge team had been drilled that well, knew each others' minds that thoroughly.

It had been an inspiration, but to try to follow that example would have led Lennart right back to the psychiatrist's couch. Kriff, it had taken him years to get his crew to the opposite state, where he could say something that imprecise and they could extract his intention from it, and use their own judgement as to how to implement it.

'Skipper, One and Indivisible is warming up her hyperdrive,' Cormall reported, in one of the moments of clarity.

'What does Blackwood's sensor picture look like?' Lennart asked.

'She's in the fringes of the cone of jamming as well, doesn't have our power, they are, wait, tentative contacts, bowshock focused on them, multiple, probable frigate class. We show two,' Rythanor reported from the master station.

'Brenn, nav course to support Blackwood?' Lennart asked. This would have to be done fast, more shell game than leapfrog.

'We jump to support them against this pair, One and Indivisible jumps us, that's their plan?'

'I do believe so,' Lennart said. No, wait, plan B. The bridge team saw him thinking. 'Do you have a course set for Ord Corban?'

'Place the endpoint,' Brenn said, calling it up.

Lennart dotted the pointer in place, on the night side where their vector would carry them on past the world, a crossing target. 'Initiate.'

Black Prince leapt into hyperspace again, a short hop - now this was what you could call ripping the tiger's tonsils out. "Gravity well" was an inherently fuzzy concept. "Inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them"- there was no edge and no end.
Practically speaking, what mattered was the ability of the ship's tensor and stasis fields to overcome the stress that accelerating tachyonically under tidal pull placed on the ship.

This was going to be rough. Fun, but rough. Black Prince plunged deeper into the system's gravity well - a huge number of prayers suddenly offered up to deities of excrement and durasteel - emerged, a sprawling, off centre blue-white flare, a mere two planetary diameters from Ord Corban.

Less journey time than it took a rebel signal-interpreter to boggle at her board and yell, 'What in the name of the Force are they doing?'

'Guns…' Lennart said, watching the main sensor board pull itself back together. That had been the point of the exercise. Clear line of sight to One and Indivisible. The Lucrehulk's entire underside was a mix of half-molten and carbon black where the skyhook had gone up, a few patches where local shields had been active and had held. That would soon change.

'…converged sheaf, my mark. Fire.'

Over the engine bells. One time - on-target hammerblow, a single three thousand, four hundred and eighty-eight teraton strike. The rebel ship's shield took the first impact, but there were power surges through its hull as it strained to do so.

Helm slid Black Prince away from the inevitable rebel reaction as the planetary defence batteries reoriented themselves, sideslipping and counter-rolling to maintain alpha.

The second full converged salvo burned into the same shield panel, and while the generators tried to mutually reinforce each other, tried to share the load, they failed.

That was beyond even single shot battleship firepower, it was beyond the usual simultaneous-impact fire of any line or light destroyer, it was enough to cause an electrical explosion that ripped plating off the aft of the ship and a trail of burnt, ionising air and vapour.

'Captain, Blackwood wants Voracious' wingco shot and tried in that order. Says he's opened fire on him,' Rythanor reported.

Lennart glanced at the main board; there were indeed torpedoes in the air, heading in the rough general direction of the light forces wave one. 'Most of the fighters following him are ours, trust them,' Lennart said.

The third salvo - a little longer to charge - crashed out. One and Indivisible was in the middle of her run to hyperspace entry; under tachyonic drive, main engines no longer essential. Which was just as well, considering two of them were destroyed by the impact of the green wall of bolts.

Four impacts on Black Prince's belly, three forties and a four hundred. They were close enough to the planet for proper aimed fire - in both directions; Lennart looked to helm and nodded. They flared the engines, surge forwards and roll port, reverse roll and spin port to maintain bearing, yaw on to target.

The planet was a mess. At this range, it was possible to see what a disaster they had made of it; there would be no-one going for R&R on those beaches for a long, long time. It was, however, still more or less functional as a military base, and even if it could no longer properly defend itself, it could try to take them with it.
Run the rope out as far as they could, get some fire in, then move clear before the planetary defence started lobbing eight petaton converged sheaves back at Black Prince.

'Skipper, what about-' Rythanor said, again; Lennart knew the sensor board was about to provide its own answer.

One and Indivisible made a clumsy exit from hyperspace, in ambush position on a ship that wasn't there any more, ready to support the emerging Munificent-class frigate and MC40 attempting to engage Light Forces Detachment One.
There was a second slight drawback to the rebel plan; their Lucrehulk had a salvo of antiship torpedoes headed up its backside.

'You realised he had planned that?' Brenn asked Lennart, trying not to be too surprised.

'I thought that was what he had in mind, yes,' Lennart replied, coolly.

'Do you think we should have Vehrec tested for Force sensitivity as well? Might take some of the heat off you,' Brenn said.

'Kriff, no, I wouldn't wish that on anybody, it was just intelligent anticipation.' Lobbing a torpedo salvo, on IFF homing, at the space where you suspected an enemy ship was going to emerge from hyperspace, was a neat stunt if it worked.

At least, Lennart profoundly hoped Vehrec had remembered to call for torps on IFF only homing.

'Speaking of intelligent anticipation, and heat,' Lennart said, looking at the image of the planetary defence batteries turning to bear. One of them vanished in green fire as it was on screen, but there would be others.

'Clear, or to target?'

'Clear,' Lennart decided. 'Call in wave two on the One and Indivisible. We move to open space on overwatch and then, when the rebels react to wave two, we move to intercept whatever that is.'

Brenn announced 'Point Delta', and Black Prince leapt to hyperspace, for the fourth time that day.

'Captain, engineering would like to remind you that you're burning energy as if it was going out of fashion, and rebel deliveries to us really aren't sufficiently dependable,' the engineering officer detailed as bridge contact man looked up and said.

'Tell Mirannon, I can arrange for him to trade the rebel chief engineer's problems for his own if he likes,' Lennart bounced back, grinning. 'Galactic Spirit, I love this job.'

The waiting ships of Wave Two - most of them still trying to work out what that meant - did have some sensor feedback from the other craft of wave one, in addition to what their own hyperspace sensors could tell them.
'In case I forget,' Lennart had told Kovall on the Blackwood, who realised that meant 'In case I'm too busy and/or dead to order it.' So the second wave were mostly getting their tactical picture from the recon variant strike cruiser. And boggling at it.

'Well, we should move in now, if only to relieve him. Captain Lennart's obviously completely lost his mind and thinks he's flying a TIE fighter,' was Fist's navigator's opinion.

'Maybe so, but it seems to work for him,' Tevar pointed out. The mood on her improvised emergency bridge was sour, at best. She would have thought 'foul', but that brought the walls to mind. They were in what had been Damage Control bunker Dorsal-140, the main maintenance and repair centre for the bridge tower and its electronics. It had seemed an efficient shortcut at the time; instead of moving the equipment to the problem, move the problem to the equipment. Less awkward than trying to run her ship from gunnery control again, the space simply wasn't up to it - too busy, too crowded with other things, other noise.

So here they were in a cramped, but at least armoured-walled space, a rough replica of a starship's bridge, airlock unclosable because of all the hastily laid cables connecting the desks and vidpanels to the ship's main computer net. It was claustrophobic, but then claustrophobia seemed to fit the bill now.

'He can't do that!' Tevar's navigator expostulated. 'It's simply not possible. You cannot handle a capital ship like that.'

'Evidently, he can. Engines?' Tevar said, meaning the engineering liaison to the bridge.

'Well, it's not mechanically impossible. A ship with that loading and structural uncertainty being handled like that, though - she should get pulled in for major refit, and a court of inquiry for her captain for half tearing her guts out. It can be done, but not without consequences,' the engineer said.

'He doesn't seem too worried about consequences,' Tevar said, nodding at the sensor table and meaning Lennart.

'A crew prepared to take that flying scrapheap into action would have to be capable of anything,' the engineering liaison said. He stopped himself just sort of asking the question that was on all their minds - what the kriff they were doing there.
They hadn't been present for Lennart's discussion - bombshell, really; also hadn't spent two hours on the com to their parents asking them to confirm, to fill in the blanks, and what to do next.

In theory it was culpably disloyal to do anything of the sort; for an Imperial officer to solicit the private opinion of any civilian, however well connected and however closely related, on how they were to go about fulfilling their duty was not permitted. Worse, it was a sign of weakness that an ambitious crew would take advantage of, although she wasn't overly worried about that now. She didn't think anyone was crazy enough to want to be in the hot seat.
It had been useful. She had tried not to worry her mother and father, tried not to make it sound as if she was saying, or even thinking loudly, goodbye. They were going to be busy enough dodging assassins.

What they had been able to tell her tended to confirm Lennart's story, out of sector interests - outer rim thugs and core world money - long on resources and short on compassion. Bribery and assassination, blackmail and sabotage, very fast and very dirty. Individuals were discredited, family names dragged through the mud, dirty secrets dug up. Shamelessly populist and power-hungry, they soon had the majority of the people baying for the blood of the old ruling class, and all done with the full panoply of the New Order.

Some of the accusations were true, of corruption within and conspiring against the Senate, aid given to the Separatists back in the war and associations against the Empire. Some of them were entirely unbelievable of course, but all of them, even - no, especially the unbelievable ones, 'they' had managed to find evidence to hold up in court.

The old ruling families had not gone quietly. House Tevar had fought in the invisible war, won a few battles, lost a few; the family portfolio was thinner than it had been, and there were two uncles no-one ever spoke of any more.

There had also nearly been a fiance. It would have been an arranged marriage to a potential ally, one of the few honest believers in the New Order to arrive in sector, an ISB Special Investigator and anticorruption crusader who was starting to make a name for himself, and trouble for his bosses. Hjalmar Amarin, foully murdered by 'revanchists'; some parts of him had never turned up, although his colleagues had each been sent a lobe of his brain, and his genitals had been posted to her mother. Her family had not sworn revenge, war of the knife and to the bitter end; that would have been nothing but complicated mass suicide.

They were not great enough to be worth exterminating root and branch, they had at least had the chance to swallow their pride, and had officially made their peace with the new powers of the sector. They had hidden what they could and took what steps were available to safeguard what was not, such as steering a daughter of the house into a navy command.

That and worm away, rebuild power and contacts and prepare for a chance at revenge.

Which, thanks to the madman who was now throwing his starship around as if she was a fighter, was now a distinct possibility. Her parents were going to be very busy over the next few days. She, at least, was going to be very busy for the next few minutes. After that, everything got uncertain.

One thing Lennart had said that did stick in her mind: throw the peacetime system away. You are not flying a capital ship. Worst mistake - and believe me, there's a lot of competition - that Tarkin ever made, he had said.

Small scale system should have been abolished with prejudice and that should have been hammered into BOSS's heads with, well, with hammers. Bureau of ships and services, gang of rat-bastard inbred yokel bureaucrats, how much worse a combination could there be?

Anyway, Fist isn't a battleship, or a carrier, or an assault ship, or a multirole cruiser, or any such nonsense, he had said. She's a line destroyer, a heavy skirmisher with speed a weapon and a defence. Handle her like a battleship, a big, slow stable gun platform, and you're doomed, manoeuvre and you might survive.

Which he was demonstrating, in spades. Black Prince was in far better shape than she appeared under the skin. Tevar watched the action play itself out, the dash out of the cone of fire, the mottled ship playing with the rebel barrage, dancing in and out of the fringes and taunting them. The flagship took a few hits, nothing desperate, only four or five heavies, which compared to the fire she was spitting out, was nothing. Impressive. Not the easiest example to follow, stuck here in the bowels of a damaged ship now going back to beg for more.

The light forces she watched shake themselves out into formation, the recon conversion Strike frigate and the two Fulgur in arrowhead. They moved, accelerating out of the shower of energy bolts - the rebels could have scored if they'd followed them up, but they hadn't, foolishly choosing to fire on a target that could withstand their shot.

The rebels arrived, two frigates, the old Munificent and an MC40. In theory, it was an even match in terms of tonnage and raw power. In practise, a heavy and a medium frigate against a medium and two light frigates, two heavy two medium and three light corvettes - interestingly asymmetric.

The rebels were probably wrong to rely on a Munificent, especially one that was being handled was if it was a large ship. Further illustration of the principle.
They were in a good initial position but a bad vector, with the Imperial ships receding rapidly from them, and alerted. The old Clone War frigate carried two eighty-teraton turbolasers and enough lighter guns to push the single salvo firepower up near that of a Meridian, but they had made a lot of tradeoffs to get there. They gave up a lot of damage tolerance with that hollow, bitty hull, they didn't carry enough power generation to get anything like the same rate of fire out of their heavy guns, and worst from the rebel point of view, the structural strength the open hull gave away limited its maximum acceleration.

In a way, it was very characteristically Rebel, trying to do hit and run in a ship that couldn't run, and handled like it was half shot already. Mind you, that led to thoughts about how often they got away with it.

In theory, the slowest ships in the strike line had an eight hundred and fifty 'g' advantage - and the fastest a twenty-one hundred 'g' edge. They could treat it as if it was standing still. Detached Forces Wave One took full advantage of that, accelerating into the attack and firing a narrow basket - a small grouped, coordinated area shoot, converging on the Rebel flagship.

The MC-40 moved away from its partner to avoid getting caught in the crossfire, but it could only lay sixteen guns on target, and chose the wrong one by shooting for Blackwood.

The Imperial medium frigate was, in theory, outclassed. In practise, Kovall took his ship out of the group, accelerating away at a tangent, varying thrust randomly, twisting and rolling, trying to force the rebels away from a consistent stream of fire to an open sheaf shoot that she could take relatively easily.

Provided it wasn't a full power shot from one of the eighties that connected.

The rebel gunnery was a little better than the Imperial, but the Imperials had a much easier target - advantage the Empire's green cone of light against the scarlet line the Rebels were drawing on the sky. If the rate of shield depletion was a guide, the rebels were going to lose.

Then things got very strange indeed, as the wave of Imperial fighters, detached on their own target, stood on their tails and fired a torpedo salvo at the Imperial flotilla. Fortunately, no-one had time to say or do anything that would later prove to have been embarrassingly silly, because then the obvious target emerged, one slightly singed and somewhat dented Lucrehulk.

That was when Wave Two's order to commit came through.

The drop point in the accompanying data was close to Wave One, close enough for mutual support to begin with, low and on the bow of the rebel ship; did she have a useful alternative? Anything to add? To calculate an alternative entry would take two minutes, at least. Valuable time.

Tevar was the ranking officer of the wave, a commander on Perseverance, a senior lieutenant of all things on Voracious. This part of the battle belonged to her.

For a moment, the thought occurred to her to take this lot, these ships away, and go and pursue the Moff and his friends, go and rescue her parents. Only for a moment. Even if they would follow her, there was the fact that the Moff was next on the hit list.

Still - one transport. Her personal shuttle, with a picked unit - headquarters guard team. That, she could spare. Surely it was not beyond the bounds of duty to safeguard the lives of two valuable members of the notability of the sector, even if they did happen to be her own kin.

She gave the order quickly, then added, 'On the flag's course, initiate.'

One and Indivisible was not having a good battle, so far. Ambushed, dock shot out from under her, and then with the base's computers she had plotted a jump out to try to get the drop on the Imperial destroyer. They had expected Lennart to jump inwards, they had been prepared for that much. What they had thought was that the Imperial ship would be slower to calculate and slower to manoeuvre.

The aim was to catch Black Prince as she was committed to jumping in, get a minute or so free and clear to pound the smaller ship, and then if that was not enough catch her in crossfire with the planet's defence guns.

Instead, the Imperial ship had been faster, had hit them - hard - and then manoeuvred clear, leaving them with nothing in range but a handful of slippery-difficult light ships to target.

Engines damaged, it could not pursue, but powerplant and weapons were fine. No issues there. Just an enormous weight of fire, weapons fit to match the planet below, concentrated and coordinated.

The light force elements had scattered as the cruiser had emerged; corvettes and frigates had no business getting into a stand-up fight with anything that big.

Lennart had taken - no, had made - the one chance that the smaller units needed by maiming the cruiser too badly to let it pursue them.

They could out-accelerate the One and Indivisible by twenty-five kilometres per second per second, and almost all had the sense to do exactly that, opening the range and radically zig-zagging to avoid the howling walls of red light coming from the cruiser.

It was no unitary big gun ship, vaguely symmetrically laid out but a mosh of twenty-fives, thirties, forties, fifties and fifty-sixes, seventies and eighties, one-twenties, one-fifties and one-eighties, two hundreds and two hundred thirties. They seemed to have a few each of most of the heavy turbolaser models made. More than enough power to put behind them, though.

The Fulgurs' turrets were carried on the widest points of their hull, and could bear aft. Blackwood and the two Carracks had limited aft fire, the Bayonets had almost none. What harrassing fire they could give to cover their retreat, they did.

The first casualty was the Iron Turnip, a victim of her commander's enthusiasm. The Bayonet class medium corvette had tried to yaw to return fire, open her broadside and bow arcs on the 'filled doughnut' of the Lucrehulk.

Lennart and Kovall both commed her commander, one to tell him to get back in formation, one to order him to keep running.

Two inaccurate volleys from a rapidly banking ship were all the Turnip got off, as it tried to prolong the burn back into a course away - but for that time, she was a relatively stable target.

The first glancing hit was from a 120- teraton turbolaser, and blew out the shields with a huge, chemical looking explosion of vapourised durasteel from the little ship's belly. Crippled and drifting, a handful of life pods made it out before a pair of eighties scored a direct hit. Gone.

One of the Marauders made the mistake of trying to deploy her fighter squadron. TIE/Ln and Bombers, incapable of jumping in. With bombs and antiship torpedoes, they probably were the most effective weapon available to the little ship, but now was not the time.

The inevitable happened - forced to choose between running a straight course for deployment and an evasive pattern for survival, something went wrong.
One of the /sa bombers, freshly deployed, found its parent ship forced to break off and evade, turning right into it. The Marauder was more than 400 'g' faster than the bomber, and ran it down - one of the bombs prematured.
Between the damage and the confusion, the Marauder ceased evading long enough for a 50-teraton bolt to catch it and flash it to vapour, too.

That was the end of the first phase, the mad scramble clear when all of the Imperial ships could be engaged.

Now it was time for the Rebel gunnery officer to collect the batteries back into a coherent fire plan, and eliminate the scattered Imperial light forces while Nav worked out a pursuit plan for that damned destroyer.

Just the right time for three Imperial destroyers to emerge from hyperspace, then.

Fist, Perseverance, Voracious and their escorts flashed back to baryonic space in the planned position, fifty thousand kilometres distant from One and Indivisible, turning as it did had put them behind and below.

'Away retrieval tugs and shuttles,' Caliphant remembered to order. He got blank, disbelieving looks from most of the bridge team. 'Oh, yes. Fire.'

All three destroyers had a shot at the already damaged section, and decided to take it. The distance was too short for the rebel to react, it tried to twist out of the way and expose fresh shields and gun batteries - not fast enough.

The Imperial ships all fired in their own styles, Fist in controlled three-gun salvos, Perseverance in solid block salvos, Voracious in a continuous sequential fire.

In its own way, a Lucrehulk was as exoskeletal as her smaller confederation relatives, built around her long curving hangars each capable of holding tens, hundreds of thousands of droid fighters - far more small craft than the Alliance could ever hope to find crews for.
Whoever had refitted this example had been well aware of that, and had chosen to fill the innermost staging hangars with structural bracing and ablative-absorbent foamcrete. That was probably all that saved her, as the Imperial destroyers pounded in salvo after salvo. The Alliance cruiser twisted and bucked under the pounding, fireball after fireball splattering her port limb as she painfully tried to manoeuvre clear, and failed.

The port quarter prime shield generator was one of the casualties, converting a temporary gap in the defences into a permanent one.

The weapon galleries along the port side of the arc of the ship died or fell back on emergency power as the main power trunking was shattered, the incandescent flowers of vapourised metal almost hid the ship; eventually her frantically driven thrusters managed to swing the battered cruiser round far enough to cover the gap.

Not quite in time to forestall a wave of fighter torpedoes. Fired blind, they could not, could not possibly, have been targeted on a specific component, a specific weakness, in advance; just as well they didn't need to be. Passively targeted, little advance warning, a ship under heavy attack from another quarter might be forgiven for missing the incoming. Were it not for the consequences.

In avoiding one threat, One and Indivisible turned directly into another. The gaping hole in the ship's structure presented itself to the Imperial salvo, and they took full advantage.

Damage to sensors, power systems, weapon mounts - point defence did what it could, but that was hardly enough. Of the two hundred and fifty heavy warheads fired, a hundred and forty managed to detonate inside the ship.

The fireball burst out of the length of the port arm of the cruiser, the structural strengthening overwhelmed, the bays consumed in the rolling blast wave. Every joint, every weak point slashed open, and nine twentieths of the cruiser's firepower and half her fighter complement obliterated.

The rebel ship benefited from one miracle when the after main sectional bulkhead held, but she needed more than that. Her situation, blind to one entire side of the sky and barely able to manoeuvre, could fairly be described as desperate.

The planetary defence batteries were too far away to offer anything except narrowly targeted fire which would almost certainly miss, or broad arc barrages which would inflict at least as much damage on the cruiser. Her own fighter complement could launch to try to hold the Imperial warships off - but they were going to have to face the sublight capable fighters pouring out of Fist and Voracious, and their escorts in wave two.

The MC-40 was facing down too much opposition. It could resort to maximum possible evasion, keeping Imperial eyes and guns on them and drawing fire off One and Indivisible, but throwing their own aim off so far that they had no chance to achieve anything.

The other choice was to slow down, evading less drastically and allowing their own fire a chance to achieve some damage. Unwisely, the rebel ship chose the second option.
That was exactly what the Imperial ships were wishing for. The rebel frigate intended to fire a brief, concentrated salvo out of all sixteen guns that could bear, against a ship small enough to actually take out, then go back to evasion. It got the first part right. The reb settled onto a shallow curve and hammered out a burst of red at the most effective target it could find, one of the two antifighter Lancers that had survived the previous battle along with Tevar.

The target was a little slow, a little dozy, nothing for its own guns to do yet so the Lancer's crew weren't fully alert. That made it a good target, and the stream of rebel shot burnt away the unfocused shielding, carved the aft end of the Imperial ship apart and opened up the main reactor.

Imperial return fire did nothing so elegant; then again, with twenty-three heavy and over two hundred medium turbolasers, it didn't have to. Brute firepower was enough to pound down the Alliance ship's shielding and rip the structure apart, leaving it a melted, broken wreck. Fair exchange for a Lancer.

That left the fifty or so smaller ships, between them the same firepower as a destroyer, free to concentrate on the Lucrehulk.

So far, the Imperial plan was working. With a crippled ship stranded in mid system and the planetary defences with a huge breach carved in them, the Rebellion's options reduced to two:
The first one being, admit defeat. Accept the loss of Ord Corban and One and Indivisible, but refuse to incur further losses by reinforcing failure. They still had two large, valuable ships, what they had managed to strip already, and their most important gain, personnel who had had a chance to work with and learn on heavy shipyard equipment. It would be a severe but not total loss.

Option two, the one the Imperials were hoping for, was that the rebels were too badly stunned, too poorly coordinated and too fixated on their previous victory to realize actually what the situation was, and that they would reinforce. The locals certainly had no intention of stopping fighting; the maimed Alliance cruiser managed a half-turn, partly on steering thrusters and partly on recoil, rolling to present what batteries she could to the Imperial ships tearing into her. At that point, the Imperial plan, or lack of plan, became a problem. Coordination; what did they do now? Manoeuvre as a close line of battle, move out on independent vectors to englobe - and in either case, where to? Sweep round and head for the planet, burn to remain on station, holding point in the mid system, return to rendezvous point, what?

Blackwood compounded the problem by reporting incoming. Predicted drop point ten thousand kilometres sunward - along the threat axis - from the One and Indivisible.

Tevar was wrong; the ranking officer on station was actually Konstantin Vehrec. He knew what he intended to do; englobe and do as much damage as possible to the emerging rebels before they had time to work out where they were and what was going on. It was always dangerous, almost always more so than it needed to be, jumping into the middle of a fight. Emerging on the edge was a much sounder tactical option, most of the time.
It was definitely tempting, to detach some of the small craft with torpedoes to bounce the latest batch of rebels on entry, but he had a job to do, which was looking less like a planetary strike now than it was a planetary blockade.

Lycarin knew exactly what he wanted to do; go for the bold and brash, engage at close quarters. He accelerated towards the predicted emergence point.
Caliphant's decision was informed by slightly more tactical subtlety. Voracious was inherently more fragile than the other two ships, although she could still hit hard. Taking account of both those things- ten degrees down and sixty degrees starboard, off the threat axis, avoid being led into a crossfire.

Tevar had the largest and most dangerous, also the most obviously damaged ship. She would be the obvious target.

The most effective thing she could do would be to take off at a tangent between that of Voracious and Perseverance, keeping close enough to both of them for mutual support, and until that threat did materialize keep firing on One and Indivisible.

Black Prince was monitoring the situation, and it was good, as far as it went. The flagship had a better read on the incoming, anyway.

'This should be interesting - I wasn't expecting that at this stage of the action. Right thing for them to do, though,' Lennart said.

Brenn knew what was coming, and interrupted his commanding officer with the obvious answer to the obvious question; 'Commit wave three now, let them deal with it.'

'Leaving the last of the heavies to us. Seems to make sense,' Lennart agreed.

The long range plot showed the full subsector. The approach path of the rebel ships was visible, as were the projected tracks of the other units of 851. They were on a converging spiral pattern, a classic hunter's move spiralling in on Ord Corban, with a close pass at Iushnevan just in case. They were the final reserve. Might not be necessary. Hopefully.

'Final drop point, formation centre…here,' Lennart decided, marking the tactical map up. He chose a point on the opposite side from the direction Wave Two were manoeuvring in, cover their tails from the incoming Rebel strike. Thirty thousand kilometres off.

'Send them out, and signal Perseverance, tell Lycarin to get the hair out of his arse and vector twenty degrees to starboard to cover Fist. He's making far too easy a target of himself and that thing can still shoot, even if it can't manoeuvre.'

By the time that order got to him, Commander Lycarin was only too happy to obey. He had made a mistake, and the splatter of turbolaser fire around his ship was hammering that in - his shields were already fully focused forward and having lumps carved out of them.

The rebel cruiser's main reactor was shock damaged and unable to sustain full power, the secondary in the core ship was running on maximum rated, and the guns were taking as much of it as they could stand. The gunners were jittery, and their systems were not fully effective - Fist had the only really heavy ion cannon in the squadron, and she had been using them. The Lucrehulk was a big ship with a lot of mass, worse dead-weight that could be used to soak up an ion bolt.

They had made some difference, but not enough to save Perseverance from her commander's gung-ho stupidity. His shields were coming apart, the rebel was only too happy to have something solid to shoot back at, even if their hit rate was low.

Black Prince's wake-up call came just in time; Perseverance broke off the attack entirely, and threw the base course out of the window - wild swooping curves, maximum effort into evasion.

Perseverance could return fire with her missiles, over her shoulder - it was far from optimum but it was the best she could do. They made more difference by getting in the way of rebel shot than anything their hitting would achieve.

There was one saving factor; not all the Lucrehulk's guns could bear on her. The hull form made it impossible, unlike their equivalents in size in the Imperial fleet they simply had no alpha arc. That left the rest of her guns free to spray fire at the smaller craft of the force.

Perseverance transferred shield focus aft, which saved her engines and bridge from being ripped apart- briefly; the light units didn't have that much resilience to begin with.

The minelayer variant Strike, Havoc, caught a burst from the cruiser; a solid medium type, she could take about one and a half petatons total, any single hit of a hundred teratons would blow out a shield panel. Her shields flared out in one blaze of vapourised durasteel, and her bow blew apart. Havoc firewalled her engines and tried to manoeuvre; one more good reason for Black Prince being on overwatch - she could send the crippled 'cruiser' - medium frigate - an escape course. The maimed cruiser managed to run up to hyperspace, flashing past the crippled rebel and clear back to the initial rendezvous.

One tactical option closed down. It would have been useful to be able to mine the emergence point - and even now, perhaps they could learn from the rebels and do a distant ballistic drop. Let Havoc stabilise and do damage control before putting that one into practise.

The rebel gunners were still reacting to circumstances, still scattering fire across the Imperial squadron. If they had held the focus of fire on one ship after another, or two, they would have been able to do real damage and reduce their numbers much faster than one or two guns going after each Imperial. They didn't.

On the other hand, the Lucrehulk, even in that state, still put out nine petatons a second. Wide, scattered fire still carried a lot of power. It could do damage. Enough to beat the imperial ships off before they could kill it? Probably not. Not without help. Which was on its way. Wave Two had relayed data from the flag and Blackwood, and their own sensors confirmed by acquiring the incoming thirty seconds out.

Two rebel major warships; they flashed back into realspace in close company, the Alliance regional support force MC-80 Mon Evarra, and the formerly Imperial star destroyer Reiver. Eight smaller ships with them, a Dreadnaught, an Acclamator, a Neutron Star, two Quasar Fire and four light corvettes.

Brenn noticed Lennart studiously refusing to take any special notice of the Mon Evarra. Which was odd, considering she was the ship Black Prince had been ambushed and heavily ionised by. The ship that had landed them in this sector, in this mess, in the first place.

'Kor Alric's going to be disappointed in you,' he said to Lennart.

'Specifically or in general? The rest of the squadron can handle them. Quick massed fire, knock them out then turn back on the cruiser. That,' he said referring to the image of the last inbound on the main sector map, the former flagship of the Hundred and Eighteenth Republic Fleet, Admonisher, 'is our personal prey.'