“Spinning up now, Captain.”

“Good,” Weston said, with some satisfaction.

The tokamak should have taken a great deal longer to bring fully online, but once again, what the chief promised was delivered. For now, he’d do what he could with what he had.

“Pulse torpedoes,” he ordered. “How many are in our banks?”

“Ten, Captain,” Waters answered.

“Prime them all. Standard spread. Fire on my mark.”

“Aye, sir. Priming tubes one through ten.” Waters reached out and toggled a series of commands.

“Fire.”

Captain Tianne stared at the data the computer provided for the sudden barrage of energy the small ship had flung at the Drasin. Whatever those were, they weren’t the product of a flat power curve, which meant that there was something exceedingly deceptive about that ship.

“Track those shots,” she ordered. “I want a full profile of that weapon.”

“Yes, Captain,” a young man at the weapons station said.

“What is our arrival time?” she asked, glancing over at the helm controls.

“Ten rotations.”

She watched the screen and the estimations for enemy contact with the ship designated Odyssey. They would have to survive at least four rotations of direct contact with the enemy before the Cerekus arrived.

The spread of torpedoes had left the Odyssey almost a full minute earlier, and the sensors were tracking their terminal flight when the enemy ships began spewing fighter craft like angry bees from a hive. The screens became a mash of conflicting signals just as the first pulse torpedo struck home.

The spherical, white blooms of energy lit up the sky, unleashing devastating energy all across the enemy formation, dying out slowly as the burning of secondary fires continued to blot out information on the sensors.

Someone whistled on the bridge, but Weston couldn’t tell who did it. He didn’t look too hard, either, as he was leaning forward and willing the screens to clear up.

Then the screens darkened, the energy dwindling as the last of the secondary explosions faded away, and a curse died on his lips as he saw the two enemy warships still coming.

“Their fighter wing absorbed the damage, Captain,” Waters reported.

Weston had already guessed as much. “I can see that,” he said. “Get a count of their remaining fighters.”

“Aye, sir.”

Weston pulled a display to him and grimly shook his head.

It was going to be bad—that was certain. The problem was that he didn’t see a way to make it any better.

“Team Two. Break formation and engage the lead elements.”

Samuels watched as the four-fighter group broke away from the main group at Stephanos’s order, accelerating out and away, forming up into a tight, staggered diamond formation as they did.

The alien bandits were coming in from the sun, and it was lousing up all their sensors as they tried to get an accurate count of the opposition.