He knew the alien command probably noted their arrival nine seconds before impact and would begin standard countermeasures against projectile attacks less than one second after that.

The ships would maneuver away from each other, spreading out as they targeted the incoming weapons with lasers and opened fire. Given the enemy’s performance to date, they’d hit the incoming weapons with laser fire within four seconds, not that they would have the slightest effect on the incoming energy pulses, as five of the six slammed into the fleet and more plumes of destruction rose up.

“Hit!” Waters’s fist clenched, a tight grin on his face. “They spread their formation at the last second, Captain.”

Weston grimaced, his professionalism offended, though it was good news. Against a pulse-torpedo attack, your best defense was to tighten your formation, presenting a smaller target for the charged weapons to lock on to. You would probably still suffer a strike or two, but the spread of the weapons was likely to push at least some of the shots out of range.

“Captain…I think we got one of them,” Waters said a moment later, looking at his boards. “In fact, I’m almost certain that I’m looking at a catastrophic failure of a reactor here.”

Weston called up the information and found he had to agree. It looked that the odds were down to five to one.

“All right, lock in firing coordinates for—”

“Captain!” Waters interrupted him. “They’re up to something! Fleet formation is breaking up…”

“He’s right, Captain,” Daniels added. “It looks like they’re spreading out…It might be a search patter—”

“Shit!”

“Waters!” Weston snapped.

“Sorry, sir.” The young man blinked. “But, Captain…I think they just engaged whatever stealth systems they’ve got…We’re losing them, sir.”

Weston glared at the young man, then flipped his display up, looking at the information as the hostile red icons faded, then finally vanished one by one from the plotter screen. Shit. “Hide-and-seek.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Hide-and-seek,” he repeated. “And they’re it.”

CHAPTER 34

“WHERE ARE THEY, Ithan?”

The young woman started as Tanner stepped up behind her, glancing back in surprise, then quickly caught herself and turned to the board she was watching.

“We’re not certain, Admiral,” she said. “We think that there are Drasin ships at these points…”

Tanner saw three fuzzy and indistinct symbols appear on the projection, separating quickly at the scale the system map was set at. “The others?”

“We don’t know,” she said reluctantly. “They must have some sort of cloaking systems, Admiral. They’ve vanished from our sight. We only catch intermittent signals from them now, and it’s not reliable.”

Tanner patted the woman’s shoulder. “And the Odyssey?”

“Gone from our scanners,” she said. “We lost them after they fired the second time.”

Rael Tanner, admiral of a nonexistent fleet, took a step back. The Odyssey had eliminated one ship—that they could tell—its reactor explosion illuminating its death for all the system to see. That on its own was a feat unmatched by any ship in the colonies’ fleet to this point.