“Julianus is gone too, Commander.” Wentus was having trouble hiding the concern in his voice. Julianus was the fourth Alliance battleship destroyed. There was definitely some kind of weapon behind the moon.

No, a superweapon…

Vindictus’s fighters had whipped around a few minutes before, but they were cut off from direct communications. She’d had a passing hope that Hyllus would send one of his birds back with a report, but she knew it wasn’t possible. The squadrons had been moving fast, and it would take at least five minutes for one to reverse course and reach clear line of sight to make a transmission—especially since Vindictus was blasting full toward the other side. Kat wouldn’t know what she was facing until her ship came around the other side of the moon. In three minutes.

She sucked in a deep breath, a struggle at the high g’s her ship was pulling. She’d had years of training and experience, but she’d never quite gotten used to being squashed as her ship raced to battle.

“Bring us into orbit, Optio. Snap us around with a gravity assist. I want as much velocity as we can get as we come to bear.”

“Yes, Commander. Adjusting course and thrust.”

Kat nodded, staring ahead, trying to ignore the knot in her gut. This wasn’t her first time leading Vindictus into battle, certainly, but for the first time she had a feeling the result of the entire battle rested on her actions.

She knew she was acting on her own, without authorization, without even coordinating with the other ships of the advance guard. But there was no choice, no time to waste. There were almost a dozen battleships ahead of Vindictus, and they were heading directly into the enemy kill zone, their velocities too high to allow a course change in time. If she didn’t succeed, the Helians would hand the Alliance the worst defeat in its sixty-year history.

“Ninety seconds, Commander.”

Kat sat still, waiting. She could see the moon on the scanner, close now, Vindictus swinging around barely five hundred kilometers from the surface. The grav assist was a difficult maneuver, especially when it took a ship this close, but she was confident her people could handle it.

“All weapons, prepare to fire as soon as we come around…” She didn’t have a target yet, but she was confident there would be one. And whatever it was, it had to be destroyed.

“All primary batteries charged and ready to fire, Commander. Torpedo tubes loaded and armed.”

Her eyes darted back to the main screen. The icons representing the fleet were still there, but they had hazy circles around them, the computer’s way of indicating the information displayed was historical, that no new scanning data was coming in. The moon was between Vindictus and her fellow Alliance vessels. She and her people were on their own.

“One minute.”