“Archangel Thirteen…” Her lips twisted at the number, wondering if it was going to haunt her, or make her haunt someone else. “Online, all systems check.”

The Odyssey and its prey were locked in a deadly dance across Tanner’s screens, and suddenly, he found that the waiting hadn’t been so bad, after all.

His sensation of helplessness was a hundredfold now that he was watching men and women with no allegiance to him preparing to fight and die for them all. If he could only send them the details that he could see from here. Let them know what their enemies were doing…

Tanner suddenly wanted to slit his own throat.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! You could have sent a transceiver to them. It would have been a matter of a few seconds’ work to set it up for them, he berated himself, cursing his stupidity.

“Admiral…”

Tanner ignored the voice. There was nothing they could do from here, anyway. It was all pointless.

“Admiral.”

All he had to do was think! Dammit. Wasn’t that what he was entrusted to do?

“Admiral!”

“What?” Tanner snapped furiously, turning on the voice.

The young woman flinched back, paling, but managed to keep her voice. “Sir. It’s the Forge. They say it’s ready.”

Oddly enough, in the very midst of the terror time, Weston found his mind wandering dangerously. He remembered that someone had once said that war was an interminably long stretch of boredom punctuated by seconds of pure terror. In this battle, at least, that statement had been stretched and distorted beyond all recognition as the hours of boredom gave way to an almost equal stretch of terror.

He watched the Odyssey buck and weave, spinning along the axis of its course while it registered energy leakage from the immensely powerful lasers flashing around it. Each punctuating moment brought its own thrill of terror, adding to the general chaos of the battlefield.

The sheer distance involved only served to heighten both the boredom of the hunt and lengthen the time of terror as the battle raged across distances unprecedented in the history of the Odyssey’s crew.

Weston forced himself back into the moment with sheer force of will.

“We painted her, Captain!” Waters yelled out eagerly.

“Refraction data?” he demanded.

“Aye, sir. We’ve got it!” Waters practically snarled, his tone feral. “We have her hull’s composition, sir.”

“Send the word to the laser crews! Make her ready for war, Mr. Waters.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

With the data from the laser bounce added to what they already knew of the Drasin hulls, they could adapt their laser frequency to perfectly target the enemy. So as Waters sent out the command with the information from the laser return appended, Weston tapped out a few calculations of his own.

“Mr. Daniels. Prepare to steady our course for a controlled fire.”

“Aye, Captain,” Daniels responded, shifting the evasive program over to automatic while he prepared the new course corrections.