The deck officer approached Praxa­medes with a dataslate in hand, clearly agitated. Praxa­medes glanced at Aeschelus to see if he had reacted to her overly strident call. The captain was engrossed in the ongoing assault, working with the telemetristika and her servitors to represent the progress of Nem­etus’ boarding action on the main videolith. The lieutenant turned his attention to the simulation playing out on loop across the dataslate screen.

He saw an outline of the enemy ship threaded through with dotted grey lines, which moved and pulsed along with an advancing time­stamp. Thicker blots correlated with the reactors, engines and gun decks, and he realised he was looking at a representation of the augur data taken of the energy grid of the enemy ship. Areas thinned and thickened as power was diverted to and then used by weapon batteries and void shield generators.

Most of the lines faded out, leaving the limping, defenceless vessel that now floated in the void just a few thousand miles away.

‘Comprehensive, but I don’t see what’s so urgent.’ He attempted to hand the slate back to Lerok, but she did not take it.

‘Pay closer attention to the timestamps, lieutenant. I checked with the gunnery files and our surveyor readings. Their void shields fell at four minutes and seven seconds from our first firing. Captain Aeschelus directed fire at the aft sections five seconds later and a targeting solution was laid in at five minutes and seventeen seconds.’

Praxa­medes chafed at her unconscious rebuke but let it pass. Her agitated state and momentary loss of decorum suggested she had cause for such insistence. He checked the slate again.

‘That seems consistent,’ he said, reviewing the advancing timestamp in slower increments. ‘Five minutes and thirty seconds into the engagement, the main reactor is hit and its power output goes offline.’

‘Yes, but given the delay between the firing order being issued and the time for our munitions to travel what was then fifteen thousand miles, the reactors went offline before our shells even hit.’

‘Augur data also has a delay. This is within a margin of error.’

‘If the very first impacts somehow went straight through their armour and hit the reactor immediately.’

‘That would be the luckiest shot I’ve ever seen,’ admitted Praxa­medes, viewing the timed loop again. He was so caught up in the nature of the revelation that it took him several seconds before he realised its significance. ‘The enemy deliberately shut down the reactors?’ He looked at Lerok. ‘Damage limitation? It may have saved the ship. Had the reactor been fully operational when breached–’

‘It’s faked!’ blurted Lerok. She jabbed at the dataslate in Praxa­medes’ hands, her finger bringing up a closer schematic of the reactor decks. A plume of heat – presumably plasma – shot upwards from the breached ship.