"We'll still be able to get the job done, Agent Carson," Ross said. "I do hope you'll appreciate the fact we're proceeding despite being completely ill-equipped for it. If Xiao wises up and realizes he could wipe out all my ships before we could take out all of his, we're screwed."

"He won't," Agent Carson said, sounding supremely confident. "The man is an administrator with a star on his shoulder not a shipmaster or a combat veteran. He'll take the easiest way out that lets him keep his ships intact because, right now at least, he fears the Council's discipline more than he fears your mines."

"Listen, my people aren't really—"

"Relax, Captain," Carson said. "I have operational control of the mission. All the unsavory parts can be blamed on me."

"The admiral is asking what we mean by senior staff, sir," Easton called from the front of the bridge.

"Himself, his executive officer, the ship's chief intelligence officer, and his Council liaison political officer," Carson answered for Ross. When Easton looked back, Ross just nodded for her to do as the Agent instructed. The OPS officer waited as the operators belowdeck did the actual talking to the ESA flagship. A few minutes later, she held out a thumbs up.

"Admiral Xiao agrees to your terms, sir," she said. Ross nodded and pushed out a lungful of air he'd been holding in, not looking forward to this next part.

"Once the lifeboat crosses the halfway point, disable all the ESA ships," he said.

"Y-yes, sir," Easton said, her face paling.

"Steady, Commander," Ross said. "We need to make sure they can't fire on us when we move to recover, and we also can't risk them trying to flee. Those ships all have emergency backups they can activate to stay alive when main power goes down."

"Understood, sir."

Without any sort of further tricks or stalling, a single lifeboat blew away from the flagship with a puff as chemical rockets pushed it away from the old cruiser. The minutes stretched on, and Ensign Steger was able to see through the lifeboat's forward porthole there were six people sitting in there and moving about. Ross breathed a sigh of relief, half-expecting them to just send over a pallet of high-explosives on a proximity detonator.

"Go ahead, Commander," Ross said. "Set off two EMP bursts per ship."

"Batch transmitting the trigger codes," she said.

Like clockwork, vent stacks on the ESA starships began belching out superheated plasma as containment failed and their fusion reactors spluttered to a stop. The EMP being fired into an exposed ship was devastating, blowing out all the power MUX control systems and shutting the ship down cold. It would be a terrifying few moments in pitch dark with no internal communications before the hardened backup systems came online. As a lifelong spacer himself, Captain Ross didn't relish what he put those crews through, but he liked the idea of them attacking soft targets within the Federation even less.