"Thanks for the reminder," Pike said sourly. "What's our course right now?"

"We're rendezvousing with the Coyote so Captain Accari can dump off PM Marcum on us, and then probably go roaring back to the border region so he can link back up with Admiral Wolfe."

"So strange thinking of the kid as commanding his own damn ship now," Pike mused, before his eyes widened and his jaw dropped. "Wait! What? We're taking on Marcum? On this tiny ship?"

"You two still not getting along?"

"To say the least. He's not my biggest fan. I think I'll be spending more of my time in the Broadhead."

"Whatever helps keep the peace." Celesta shrugged. "I'll be in my quarters when you're done down here."

"Understood."

35

"Good, good! Now, tell Alpha Squadron to sharpen their turn-in. Keep herding them down."

After the last thirty hours, the battle had taken on a decidedly different feel. The resurgent Xinjian forces had managed to knock out four more ships, destroying one completely, while only taking damage on one ship to the point it could no longer fight. The enemy fleet was losing cohesion, and there were some erratic actions from obviously frustrated ship captains that only played into Jackson's strategy. As he'd hoped, the Wolfpack ships were now all but ignored even though his orders to Captain Chang seemed to be coming from the Saber.

"Charlie Squadron has another dropping out, sir," Commander Hawkins reported. "They're pushing the engines too hard, I think."

"Unavoidable," Jackson said. "They need to keep ahead of the pursuing ships long enough for Bravo Squadron to reverse course."

Jackson was using a similar tactic he'd put together during the Battle of Nuovo Patria during the Phage War. Given that Kohl was supposed to be a student of his exploits, he was surprised the other admiral didn't recognize it and execute the correct counter-tactics to it. Essentially, he was organizing his squadrons into three concentric, counter-rotating rings that would keep squeezing down towards Xinjia while keeping the enemy ships tied up with pursuit. Once their flightpaths allowed overlap, the formations coming at each other would begin firing head-on into the pursuing ships of the squadron they were passing. It allowed for incredible closure rates while keeping the relative velocity manageable for the older ships. If he let them run flat-out, and they hit their Delta-V roll-off, they'd lose a lot of maneuverability.

The wildcard in all of this would be the Wolfpack. Once they were unleashed into the fray, Kohl would likely do something desperate and, Jackson hoped, expose his position. The smart money was that the Implacable sat behind that moon still since the number of ships that had climbed out of the system weren't the same as the number the Katana had counted, but without verification, he didn't want to move the Nemesis and expose her just yet.

"Bravo is starting their turns now," Hawkins said. "They don't move like Fed ships so this is going to be close."