“One missile each,” Celesta said. “Target the trailing ship and come down the line from there. Let me know when the missiles are updated.” In her first engagement the Darshik hadn’t shown any capability to intercept or block their missiles, so she didn’t want to waste too many of her heavy hitters when she didn’t have to, especially with the ammo dump having just been blown up. “Make sure the Hornets are also getting active tracking updates,” she said as an afterthought.

“Shrikes are ready, ma’am,” Adler said.

“Fire first salvo!” Celesta ordered. “Helm! Full reverse, cut our relative velocity by seventy percent.”

“Missiles one through eight are away,” Adler said. “Tubes reloaded and all birds are tracking clean.”

“All engines reverse, aye!” the helmsman called out right before there was a sharp bang that reverberated through the hull and the lights flickered.

“Report!” Celesta said when her crew just looked at each other for a moment, apparently dumbfounded.

“RDS has failed, ma’am!” the helmsman called out. “We’re ballistic. Engaging MPD mains now.”

Celesta sat pensively as the deck rumbled gently from the main engines building thrust and coming up to full operating range.

“Main engines answer full reverse, ma’am,” the helmsman said. “We won’t be able to cut our velocity enough before we overshoot the engagement.”

Celesta pulled up the data from the helm and nav station and saw that her pilot was right: the RDS had pushed the Icarus to such a high velocity that she couldn’t slow down enough even with the powerful main engines burning full reverse. Since the MPDs were capable of equal amounts of forward or reverse thrust it wouldn’t accomplish anything to spin the ship for a braking maneuver.

“OPS!” she barked.

“Talking to Engineering now, ma’am,” Accari assured her. “They’re resetting the RDS pod power interface as we speak.”

“At least we know Commander Graham’s power interrupt works,” Barrett said. “Otherwise we’d be ballistic and powerless drifting right into the line of fire.”

“Tactical, do we have a shot with the auto-mag?” Celesta asked, ignoring her XO.

“Negative, Captain,” Adler said. “Our velocity is too high, we’re too close, and the Darshik ships are maneuvering too erratic—”a loud squawking from her terminal stopped her for a moment—“two of our missiles have been destroyed by an unknown enemy countermeasure.”

“Track the others,” Celesta said. “Helm! Engines to zero thrust and bring us about … we’re going to overfly the engagement no matter what, let’s at least get her pointed back in the right direction. Coms, inform the Amsterdam of our … predicament … and tell them we’ll be back as soon as we can.”

“Aye, ma’am,” Ellison said. He looked like he was about to say more but the tactical officer cut him off.

“Four missiles have struck home! Two targets destroyed, two adrift,” Adler said. “I’ve lost contact with the remaining two Shrikes.”