"Are we just going to keep running?" Poe asked. "This doesn't…"

He groaned, shaking his head. "This isn't right. We can't escape, and running like this just means we don't know where we're running to. If we keep running we'll only die when we run out of fuel, but we will die."

"Or get captured," Finn pointed out.

"Which is probably worse," Poe muttered.

"But… I don't get it," Finn added. "Where is everyone? This ship's huge! Bigger than a Star Destroyer, right?"

"Much bigger than the older ones, yeah," Poe agreed, frowning. "The Raddus is a big bigger than that one we met on. Slightly, anyway."

"Then… where's the crew?" Finn pressed. "It should have a crew of, what… eighty thousand? I've hardly seen any of them."

Poe laughed.

"Man, sometimes I get a reminder that you worked for the First Order," he admitted. "No, this ship's mostly automated. The crew is about a thousand, instead of eighty thousand."

Finn's frown only deepened.

"Then we should be able to win a fight against a Star Destroyer, right?" he asked. "Not that monster behind us, but if we've only got a crew of a thousand and a Resurgent has eighty thousand then what's all that extra space being used for? Weapons? A Resurgent has fifteen hundred turbolasers, dozens of them are heavy…"

He looked perplexed. "I don't know, man, you're the pilot! I'm not even good at ground combat. But what's this ship good at?"

"Uh," Poe said, then went over to a display and keyed up a schematic display. "It's… no… it's not got… this is, uh, yeah. I never actually thought about that before, but the Raddus has hardly any weapons compared to a Star Destroyer. Sure, they're heavy weapons, the turbolasers are on par with the heaviest guns that a Star Destroyer has, but there's no light weapons… six proton torpedo launchers…"

He shook his head. "Yeah, what is all that cubage being used for? It's not weapons… we've got fighter bays, but not many of them, this isn't a proper carrier. The shields are tough, but…"

As he spoke, Finn's lips moved.

"So… this ship's got fewer weapons, but tougher defences," he said. "Right? Right?"

"Yeah, that's about the size of it," Poe confirmed. "Why – it sounds like you've got an idea, Finn?"

"Well – I guess maybe the designers were idiots, but… the only way this ship could beat Star Destroyers is in a long fight," Finn explained. "Yeah? And for a long fight, you need lots of-"

He cut himself off. "Can you check what's in the storerooms?"

Hux leaned back in his chair on the Supremacy bridge, and tried not to let his attention visibly waver.

They'd been pursuing for fourteen hours, now, and he'd insisted to be on the bridge for the whole of the chase… but that was something he was going to have to change soon.

The idea of letting someone else get the credit burned. He knew that the Supreme Leader would admit that it was Hux's idea that was letting them chase down the Resistance, but there was an enormous difference between that and being the one who personally ordered the destruction of the last Resistance cruiser.

It was why he'd kept up the barrage, hour after hour. If the enemy's shields so much as flickered he wanted them crippled – dead – he wanted the Resistance crushed, so they would never return.

He didn't want Kylo Ren to get any of the credit… or, if that wasn't possible, and it probably wasn't with the fighter strike the snot had launched, as little as he could manage.

Which meant no more fighter strikes. He wanted to savour this.

"...that's weird," someone said, and Hux stifled his initial physical response.

And a yawn.

"Report," he said.

"We're picking up something from the Resistance cruiser, sir," the technician replied. "Well, behind them… debris, it might be."

"Debris means damage," Hux said. "Did we get a piece of them with the last volley?"

He hated to say the next words, but he had to. "Or was it from the earlier strike?"

"I'm not sure, sir," the tech answered. "I'm running a back trace on the vectors now."

Hux rose from his chair, walking over to watch over the technician's shoulder, and his screen lit up as it displayed the vectors of the debris and back-plotted them.

They'd originated from the Resistance cruiser, all right, and nowhere near where Ren's strike had hit.

"Prepare for a full barrage!" he said, then the technician coughed.

"...sir," he said. "I've been trying to work out what happened. And look."

The man played forwards the recording of the last few minutes, including the most recent shield flare, and Hux's jaw worked slightly.

The shield flare had been as intense as before, and it hadn't been near the debris source either.

In fact, it looked like the debris source had been… one of the hangar bays?

"MYNOCK!" someone shouted, and Hux's head snapped up.

He saw red flares on the tac display. Incoming torpedoes.

A lot of red flares.

"Huh," Poe said, as a sequence of internal explosions gutted the Supremacy. "Who would have thought you could get such a good result just by dumping eight thousand proton torpedoes out the back of a ship?"

"All hands, prepare for jump to hyperspace," Admiral Holdo announced, over the comms. "All hands, prepare for jump to hyperspace – we're getting out of here before they retaliate!"

AN:

A few cues from Honor Harrington, perhaps.

The Raddus is curiously underarmed unless it's meant to be a "stay out of range and pummel the enemy for days" ship.