“Aye, ma’am,” Accari said. The young officer had been on the bridge for almost all of the battle after the Darshik had sprung their ambush, but he showed no signs the stress or fatigue were getting to him. He was as crisp and precise as when he’d first come on duty, and Celesta was imminently thankful for that. Even though he was only an ensign everyone knew his service record, and even officers that outranked him tried to emulate him.

The Icarus was flying a shallow arc to get around the primary star, and now that they were relatively close to the Class G2 main sequence yellow dwarf it seemed the Darshik weren’t able to keep trying to jump in to close the gap between them. Celesta had been operating under the premise that the intrasystem jumps were just a more accurate version of their own warp transitions and that the enemy would be hesitant to perform them down closer to the star. Her theory had so far been proven correct as the enemy had tried three different times to jump in close behind, one time forcing her to launch a salvo of Hornets to give them something to think about while they escaped.

While the small jumps were an enormous tactical advantage for the enemy, their ships didn’t appear to be able to overtake the Icarus in real-space. That gave them some small window to take a breath and think, but Celesta knew that once they came out the other side of their arc and headed back up the well towards Epsilon jump point that the Darshik would be able to get ahead of them and lie in wait. Then all she would be able to do was try and dodge their plasma weapons while fighting her way up to a safe range from the star to transition.

“OPS, go ahead and prepare a com drone for immediate deployment,” Celesta said. “Include the complete ship’s log since transitioning into this system as well as the sensor and com records. When Flight OPS gives you the ready signal, get it moving back through the Juwel jump point.”

“You think they’re setting a trap up ahead of us?” Barrett asked.

“It’s their only course of action,” she said, nodding. “They can’t keep up with their subluminal drives so they have to try and coordinate their forces with intrasystem jumps and have them in place when we come around the star. They’ll have plenty of warning and we won’t be able to deviate too much if we want to hit the jump point before being swarmed.”