Stephanos thanked his savior briefly before turning his attention back to the battlefield. The Archangels had acquitted themselves well in the battle, but the sheer force of numbers was beginning to wear them down. He knew that if something didn’t happen soon, things would go from bad to disastrous.

He needn’t have worried. Captain Weston had commanded the squad long enough to realize their limits.

A shadow passed over his cockpit as the bulk of the Odyssey slid into the dogfight, its short-range weapons blazing as they intercepted enemy missiles and fighters alike. Within moments, the battle had been turned to a rout as the enemy fighters peeled off and fled back to their carrier.

“They’re firing again. Minimal damage effect. The cam-plate modifications are holding.”

Captain Weston nodded. He hadn’t expected anything else. The capital ship’s lasers were only class one, so they couldn’t adjust the beam frequency without severe modifications; the fighters, however, worried Weston. “Have all local defense weapons continue to fire on the enemy fighters,” he ordered. “Then lock onto the Drasin mother ship and prepare to fire.”

“Aye, Captain,” Waters replied. “I have telemetry coming back from our targeting laser systems now, sir.”

“Good,” Weston replied. “Send the numbers to the computer, and have it adjust the heterodyne frequencies of our main array to match the highest absorption level we can hit.”

“Yes, sir,” the young man said, sending the command and data into the computer with a flick of his wrist.

It only took the computer moments to analyze the return bounce off the laser they had painted on the enemy ship, carefully filing away various snippets of information about its molecular structure, heat expenditure, and perhaps, most importantly, frequency absorption rates.

The computer took that information, sent it to the main laser array, and adjusted the frequencies of the primary heterodyne coils to produce what should be an energy beam that would induce massive, critical failure in the chosen target.

However, in that short time, something outside had changed.

“Captain! We’re reading—” Waters began to speak, jolting in his seat as his displays went haywire for a second, then totally dead.

Weston tried to say something, but his breath caught in his throat as he clutched at his chest in shock. A sweeping wave of dizziness dropped him to one knee. Around him, the same thing was happening to the others on the bridge, and through the ship, the scene was the same.

In the space of seconds, the NACS Odyssey was drifting, unguided in space, her crew dropping to the deck plates like proverbial flies.

“Jesus H. Christ, Steph…What the hell is that?” Brute asked in shock as the Archangels broke wide, circling back around.

The battle with the fighters was all but won when the enemy cruiser entered into the picture. The enemy ship had closed with the Odyssey while the Archangels had turned and burned with their alien counterparts and, using that damned stealth signature of theirs, had managed to get closer than anyone in the flight group had realized.