His team acknowledged him by the numbers, and Thane calmly armed the final system before he sent the targeting data to the Thunderbolts and haloed his targets.

“Commander, your screens!”

Thane looked down, frowning as his wingman called out, but instantly saw what had alerted the man. Dozens of enemy fighter class drones were launching into space from the targets, accelerating hard in Bravo’s direction.

“Damn. They spotted us,” he said, sounding bored. “Enterprise, Bravo Actual. Are you seeing this?”

“Roger, Bravo Actual. Alpha Flight is scrambling now.”

“Well, I suppose we’d better get on with it, then,” Thane drawled over his team comm. “Bravo Actual . . . Fox Three.”

The Vorpal Class Space Superiority Starfighter was intended as a multirole chassis, designed to replace the older airframes that had done the bulk of the fighting in the Block war and even made up the famed Double A squadron. Vorpals were long, sleek space frames built around a paired set of CM generators and four large vacuum breathing reactor plants that put out enough power to shove around a ship the size of the Enterprise itself.

Instead of the dual “six gun” missile launchers that were stored inside the older airframes, the Vorpals wielded four eight-barrel launchers mounted under each stubby “wingtip.” Not needing to worry about either weight or air resistance gave them a significant advantage in terms of payload, after all.

Bravo Flight was equipped with an antiship load out of Thunderbolt HVMs, semi-smart unguided missiles designed to impact their targets at relativistic velocities and kill with kinetic energy alone.

On Bravo Actual’s announcement of “Fox Three,” all twelve members of Bravo Flight put twenty-four Thunderbolts apiece into space in under three seconds.

Each weapon aligned on a specific target, precoded by the Vorpals’ pilots, and then engaged both their overpowered CM generators and their solid-fuel rocket motors. Each Thunderbolt flickered away, appearing like nothing else but instantaneous teleportation to the human eye, and lanced toward their targets more like lasers than physical weapons.

Three light-seconds away the Thunderbolts interpenetrated the Drasin fighter screen, but unlike many earlier engagements, there was little the fighters could do to stop them. The missiles moved too fast to track, given their size, and even along that narrow path, space was just too big to put up a wall even if you were willing to use your own body to do it.

Two of the missiles impacted with the enemy fighter screen, blowing through them like an icepick through cardboard, leaving nothing but expanding gasses in their wake. The rest of the Thunderbolts encountered no resistance as they continued on, hammering into enemy ships like the blasts from Mount Olympus from which they drew their names.

Under the combined force of two hundred eighty-eight kinetic weapons raining down on their position, the twenty-eight remaining Drasin ships within knife range of the Heroic Task Force vanished into plasma and memories.