Expecting no problems, despite the previous miss, the soldier took his time aiming. To date, the ground weapons on this world were laughably ineffective.

The roar of sound and light staggered him, and he fell back in surprise and shock, a burning pain erupting through his body. As if from a distance, he could hear the others calling for him, but it was too dark to find them, and soon their voices were lost in the blackness as well.

With the immense acceleration that an Archangel was capable of, it took Stephanos only moments to find what he was looking for and reach it. He was mildly surprised when he realized that the Drasin was still on his tail but berated himself for assuming that he’d lose it that easily. He’d have to do better now that he had located one of the Trojan points of the system, and he’d use the asteroids in the area to make certain of it.

It was difficult to remember that the technological edge he was used to having in previous conflicts wasn’t certain out here. The fact that the technologies they had encountered were so wildly different than Earth’s made it even harder to understand, or even make an accurate guess.

He jinked the fighter under a tumbling mountain, firing his retro-thrusters as he passed it, cutting forward motion to almost a standstill in an instant and climbing vertically in relation to his fighter to hide behind the asteroid.

The CM field that surrounded his fighter allowed for such insane maneuvers, and it was one advantage that he seemed to hold over the enemy pilot. The Drasin fighter ripped past, decelerating wildly as it spun around to aim at him, but Steph had precious seconds in which he could react first.

He loosed three rockets, haloing the target in his helmet HUD long enough for each of the “fire and forget” munitions to accelerate away from his plane. Then he keyed the vertical thrusters again and dropped under the mountain, rotating back the way he’d come, and fired his main reactors.

Behind Stephanos’s fighter, the alien craft shook under its own heavy power as it decelerated toward the retreating target. Its sensors reached out ahead and detected the munitions that were hurtling through space toward it, and it briefly contemplated its options.

After a split second, it locked the rockets up and opened fire.

The Archangel standard munitions were powered by the same technology as the fighters themselves and were, in many ways, even more effective since the mass involved was considerably less.

As the rocket left the CM field that surrounded the fighter, it lurched into what could be described as real space, its acceleration limited enormously by the laws of physics as they applied to normal dimensional space.

It took only tenths of a second for the rocket’s own CM fields to power up, reducing the appreciable mass of the munitions to a number that infinitely approached zero. When that happened, it accelerated on its predetermined course like a laser beam.