Ted forced himself to remain calm and composed on the outside, even through part of him wanted to panic and the rest of him wanted a drink.  The crew couldn't see their commander panicking, not when they knew they were in deep shit.  He cursed inwardly as one of the frigates vanished, even as the remainder opened fire.  A second salvo of missiles headed towards the newcomers, forcing them to look to their own defence.  Farley hastily reprogrammed some of the missiles to take out incoming alien starfighters, using the nukes to sweep space clean.  The aliens rapidly adapted and spread out, refusing to allow the humans to pick them off again.

He felt a dull tremor running through the carrier as she altered course, heading up and away from the system plane towards Tramline Five.  For a long moment, the combination of ECM drones and nuclear explosions seemed to confuse the aliens, but it didn't last long enough for Ark Royal to break contact.  The ECM crews took advantage of the brief pause to launch additional drones, giving the aliens several possible targets to engage.  Ted would take whatever distraction he could get, but he knew it wouldn't last very long.  Ark Royal was the only target shooting back at the aliens, after all.

“Order the flotilla to cover our back,” he added.  He’d started the operation with twenty-four frigates.  Now, he had eighteen, several of which had taken heavy damage.  But it would be a great deal worse, he knew, when the aliens got into weapons range.  “And deploy the modified nukes, both types.”

One of the brighter eggheads on Earth had speculated that the alien plasma cannons used magnetic fields to keep the bursts of superheated plasma under control.  So far, duplicating the technique had proven beyond humanity’s technology, but the egghead had gone on to suggest that an EMP might successfully disrupt the containment field, causing the aliens to lose control of their weapons.  There might even be an explosion, the egghead had predicted, when the containment field failed.  At the very least, the EMP would cripple the alien ability to keep firing.

Ted had his doubts.  Humans had been building EMP-shielding into their technology since the day they’d first realised the potentially devastating effects of an electromagnetic pulse.  The first use of EMP-weapons in war had only underlined the dangers, forcing the development of countermeasures forward at terrifying speed.  Surely, the aliens would have gone through their own period of using nukes ... but the egghead had doubted that the aliens could shield their magnetic containment fields.  Now ... Ted braced himself.  The concept was about to the put to the test.

“Nukes away, sir,” Farley said.  Unpowered, the missiles would slip through the cloud of alien starfighters ... unless they got very unlucky and actually struck an alien ship directly.  “Time to detonation, seven minutes.”