Ted felt the seconds ticking away one by one as he reviewed the data they’d pulled from the Russian network.  The last Earth had seen of the Battle of New Russia – when the recording starship had made its escape – the aliens had been ripping the defending fleet to shreds.  But there was more.  Some of the Russian starships had made a final stand, fighting desperately to protect their adopted homeworld.  Others had withdrawn into the outer reaches of the system to prepare for the day they could return to New Russia in triumph.

They hadn't been willing to commit themselves, Ted discovered, not entirely to his surprise.  By any reasonable standard, Ark Royal was badly outnumbered and outgunned, leaving the Russians convinced that they had to make a hit and run attack, rather than chasing the aliens out of the system.  But they had agreed to record the course of the battle, just so Earth would know what had happened.  It was the most Ted could reasonably expect of them.

“Sir,” Farley said.  “The mass drivers are ready to open fire.”

Ted smiled.  One of the little realities of interplanetary combat that civilians were persistently unable to grasp was that an object, once in motion, remained in motion.  There was no need for a rocket engine to push the object forward, not like there would be in a planetary atmosphere.  The mass driver projectiles would keep going until they ran into something ... which, in interplanetary space, wasn't too likely to happen.  It was one of the reasons humanity had shied away from using mass drivers as weapons.  One could be fired at a starship in orbit and miss, hitting the planet instead with terrifying force.

“Good,” he said.  Fourteen of the escorting frigates had their own mass drivers, ready to add their fire to Ark Royal’s own.  The targeting wouldn’t be precisely accurate, but hundreds of solid projectiles would be rocketing through space occupied by the alien formation.  Unless, of course, the aliens decided to move before the projectiles reached them.  “You may fire at will.”

The display changed as the first stream of projectiles launched from the giant carrier, rocketing away at a fair percentage of the speed of light.  Ted silently calculated the odds against the aliens spotting them in advance, then silently prayed that the aliens didn't have a piece of technology that shattered humanity’s preconceptions.  The search for a FTL sensor had been one of the holy grails of human technology for so long that most naval officers had come to believe it was impossible.  But they’d believed the same of long-range FTL tramlines.

“Projectiles away, sir,” Farley said.  On the display, the frigates were launching their own projectiles.  “Impact projected in two hours, forty minutes.”