The admiral looked over to the compressed map, eyes noting that three more Drasin were now on the display within two light-minutes of them. She scowled, running the numbers in her head, and realizing quickly that they didn’t make sense.

They can’t have this many ships in system, can they? It would take thousands, hundreds of thousands, of ships to cover this much space with this level of density.

“Go active with FTL scans,” she ordered. “Maximum available power.”

“Aye ma’am. Full power ping.”

The sonic signal of the burst echoed on the bridge as the blast of FTL particles expanded out from the ship and into the system. Reflections of tachyon particles were also extremely faint, which made long-range detection from an omnidirectional pulse difficult at the best of times. It became easier by orders of magnitude, however, when the ships you were looking for had lit off their drives and were in motion.

“Holy shit.”

“Commander Michaels, please,” Gracen snarled, though mostly just to keep her own traitorous mouth from echoing the sentiment.

The long-range pulse showed forty Drasin with their drives lit off, all within five light-minutes and closing. The system beyond that also showed a few active drives, closing on the squadron’s location, but it was clear that the enemy’s attention was focused right on the squadron and nowhere else.

Gracen slumped at her station.

How the hell are they tracking us?

“They’ll be on us en masse in less than fifteen minutes, Admiral,” Susan said seriously. “We can’t take more than four on one in a straight-up fight.”

“I am aware of that,” Gracen said. “Power to the waveguide cannons. Target those ships still outside knife range.”

“Yes . . . I mean, aye ma’am,” Milla said from the weapons station. She tapped in the codes, shaking her head as her expression creased with worry. “Ten ships are within the minimum range of the cannons.”

“Leave them. We’ll have to deal with them later. Fire on the remaining ships as she bears.”

“Aye ma’am. Firing.”

The big waveguide cannons on the Odysseus pivoted out from the ship, locking onto targets as much as several light-minutes away as the ship charged the transition generators and prepared to engage. The guns fired into the silence of space, no flames, no recoil, just barely visible distortions in space time and an imperceptible blast of tiny particles.

“What the . . . damn, I’ve never seen anything like that before, have you, Captain?”

Eric glanced up from the controls of the heavy lifter, looking over at the pilot. “Seen what?”

“That,” the Colonel said, nodding out the windscreen of the cockpit.