“From considerably farther away,” Samakro reminded him. “If we get close enough, the Dreadnought can blast them whenever it wants to and the acid still won’t have time to dissipate before it reaches the viewport.”

“Worth a try,” Kharill agreed. “Okay; breachers prepped. Call it.”

Samakro counted out the seconds to himself, trying to gauge the right time to fire. Too soon and they’d be wasting their last breachers in a useless attempt; too late, and they would risk the two gunboats beside them waking up and adding their own bit of catastrophe into the Springhawk’s current mix. “Stand by to fire: Three, two, one.”

With a soft triple-jolt, the three breacher missiles blasted away, skimming past the gunboats on their way to the Battle Dreadnought.

They’d barely cleared the gunboats’ hulls when six spectrum lasers lashed out from the Dreadnought, catching the breachers and blowing them to shreds.

Sooner than Samakro had hoped. But with breachers, destruction of the missiles themselves wasn’t the last word. The released masses of acid were still in motion, the tendrils still twisting and spinning as their initial momentum continued to carry them toward their target. Unless the Dreadnought could get out of the way—and the acid was already too close for that—it was going to get hit. Samakro held his breath…

And then, almost at the last moment, one of the Nikardun patrol craft shot in from the side, braking hard to put itself directly in the path of the three incoming acid globs.

“It’s not big enough,” Kharill muttered hopefully. “It can’t block all three of them.” The words were barely out of his mouth when the Dreadnought again opened fire.

Only this time, the target was the Nikardun patrol craft in front of it. Even as Samakro felt his mouth drop open in disbelief the ship exploded, scattering debris in all directions.

And the debris cloud, unfortunately, was big enough to block all three acid globs.

“Curse it,” Kharill bit out. “These guys are crazy.”

“Springhawk, what’s your status?” Ar’alani’s voice came over the speaker.

“We’re still here, Admiral,” Samakro said. “But we wouldn’t turn down any timely aid you wanted to offer.”

“Timely aid it is,” Ar’alani said grimly. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to go with this, but so be it. Do you remember the maneuver Thrawn used against the Paataatus when he first took command of the Springhawk?”

Samakro looked up at Kharill, found the other staring back with a sour expression. They both remembered, all right. “Yes, ma’am,” Samakro said. “When?”

“Hold behind the gunboats you flickered another few seconds, then come out and angle toward low orbit. I’ll tell you when to go dark.”