He started to report it, but Jacquelyn Harmon had already seen it.

“Engage now!” she barked.

“She did what?” Citizen Rear Admiral Kellet looked up from the com screen and blinked at Citizen Lieutenant Commander Morris.

“She brought up our EW without orders, Citizen Admiral,” Morris repeated, and Kellet frowned.

“Excuse me, Ron,” she said to Citizen Admiral Porter and reached for the interrupt switch. But the display blanked, banishing Porter’s image before she could hit the button, and then it lit once more and Citizen Captain Hall’s face looked out of it.

“Froggie, just what the h—” Kellet began.

“Ma’am, CIC has just—” Hall said simultaneously, but a third voice cut them both off before she could explain.

“We’re being hit with lidar!” Olivia Morris shouted. “Multiple emitters—very close, Citizen Admiral!”

· · • · ·

“Locked up!” Thomas snapped as the ranging and targeting pulses from his lidar came back to Harpy. “Firing—now!”

Ninety-six LACs fired ninety-six grasers within the space of barely two seconds. Their angle of closure was too broad for them to get shots up the open after aspects of the Peep ships’ impeller wedges, but they weren’t shooting at ships. They were firing at missile pods, and they killed ninety-three of them in the first salvo.

The pods were utterly defenseless, following docilely along behind their mother ships, and grasers which could blast through a ship of the wall’s armor ripped them to splinters with dreadful ease. When a weapons-grade energy beam hit a target, it didn’t melt that target. The energy transfer was too enormous, too sudden. Natural alloy or synthetics, ceramics or human flesh, it vaporized explosively, literally blowing itself apart with fearsome force, and some of the first salvo’s targets’ sister pods succumbed to proximity damage as fragments blasted into them like old-fashioned prespace armor-piercing shot.

But the LACs weren’t counting on that sort of fortuitous kills. Their fire control lashed the other pods viciously, despite the fact that the laser emissions were giving the Peeps’ targeting beacons of their own, and a second fusillade of grasers ripped out even as the Shrikes’ missiles tubes went to maximum rate fire.

“What’s out there?” Jane Kellet demanded harshly. She felt the edge of panic trying to ooze into her own voice and throttled it savagely before anyone else heard it.

“I don’t know, Citizen Admiral!” Morris replied, fingers flying over her console as she, CIC, and Oliver Diamato all tried to make sense of the preposterous readings. “There are—”

“LACs!” another voice came over the circuit, and Kellet’s eyes snapped back to her com as a sidebar identified the speaker as Citizen Commander Diamato.

“Explain!” she snapped.

“It has to be LACs, Citizen Admiral,” Diamato said urgently. “It’d take a dozen Manty battlecruisers to produce that much graser fire, but not even Manties could get something that big this close. And if they were battlecruisers, they’d be firing lasers, as well. And all the point sources, it—”

“Missiles incoming!” CIC reported.

· · • · ·