Steph let out a long sigh. “Thank God, sir. My team needs as much time as we can get.”

“See to them, and get some rest. We’ll call you if we need you.”

“Aye, Captain.” The pilot saluted, albeit somewhat sloppily, and smiled wearily as the picture flickered out.

Stephanos half turned, noting the three other pilots standing some distance behind him.

“Grab a shower and hug your bunks,” he ordered them. “We’re standing down for now.”

They didn’t cheer, or even comment much, which was a testament to how tired they were now that the fight-or-flight adrenaline surge had started to leave them. Instead, the three pilots just trudged toward the lifts, and Stephanos turned back to the airlock as it started to rumble back down to the flight deck.

Weston stood up, releasing the restraints that kept him secured to the command chair in case of extreme maneuvers or combat damage and walked over to where Ens. Susan Lamont was talking steadily over her damage-control channels.

“How bad is it, Susan?” he asked, leaning over her shoulder and resting a hand on the console.

“Could be worse, sir,” she said, tapping in a command. “CPO Corrin’s got the patch underway in the forward weapons control rooms. Should be another hour or so, and we’ll be ready to repressurize them.”

“Armor?”

“Four more hours, sir.” Lamont replied, glancing up. “We have a crew outside putting the slab into place, but we’ll have to recall them if that ship heads back in.”

Weston nodded soberly.

They certainly couldn’t leave men out in the black; if it came down to combat maneuvers, it would be nothing short of a death sentence.

“The flight deck?”

“That’s a bit trickier,” Lamont told him, calling up a schematic.

The picture on the screen showed an immense gash, right up the center of the lower flight deck. The edges were melted down from the extreme heat they’d experienced, and the beam width was over four meters wide at its worst.

“We didn’t lose much there since the deck is almost never under pressure, anyway,” Lamont said calmly, “but the enemy beam sliced through the CM circuits that made up the fighter traps. They’ve got to be rewired before we repair the deck damage. It’s going to be at least twenty hours, sir.”

“Fine. Good work, Susan.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, back straightening.

Weston moved across the bridge to the tactical console. “Waters.”

“Sir?” the kid said, looking up.

“How’d they get through our armor?”

Waters shook his head. “I’m afraid they just overpowered it, sir. No tricks, nothing fancy, they just burned right through it.”

Weston winced.

That was bad.

The cam-plate modifications were capable of reflecting away over 98 percent of the beam energy of any class-one laser. That meant that the beam power they were facing was such that less than 2 percent was enough to kill them.

Weston didn’t want to think of what would happen if they had to face more than one enemy vessel at once, or if one enemy got a lucky shot through one of the multitude of chinks in their armor where the cam-plates didn’t cover.