“Fuck that,” Callie said. “Shoot their little pods out of the sky, Ashok, and then we’ll board them.”

“Targeting.” Ashok was silent for a moment, then said, “Uh. Shall, what just happened?”

“The ballistic cannons seem functional. The error wasn’t on our end.”

“What error?” Callie said.

Ashok made a buzzing sound of consternation. “I shot metal projectiles at the pods and the bullets veered away and spun off harmlessly through space, like… I don’t know what. Like they were pulled off course by a big magnet, except they’re non-ferrous, and also I don’t see any giant magnets floating around out there anyway.”

“Target them with the energy weapons,” Callie said.

“On it. Crap, Shall, what am I looking at?”

“We fired three simultaneous beams, targeting four pods – two were on a fortuitous linear arrangement – and while all three beams appeared to strike home, the pods are still coming.”

“Wait,” Callie said. “We fired directed energy weapons at them, and hit, and they’re still coming? What the hell are those pods made of?”

“It’s the stealth tech, cap,” Ashok said. “Gotta be. The same deflection technology we’ve got – Warwick got it from Liars in the first place. We’re shooting at the places where the pods aren’t. But if they are using the same tech we are… Hold on, I can calculate the likely offsets… Permission to unleash hell, cap?”

Callie gripped the jumpseat, wishing she was the one running the board. “Yes.”

A tense few seconds passed, and then Ashok whooped. “Got ’em! We fired on empty space a few degrees off from their apparent location, and now our sensors are showing debris and the false images have disappeared.”

“We only got five of them,” the ship said. “One of the pods adjusted its course dramatically and we only struck it a glancing blow. Let me see. There it is, sailing past us, on a trajectory to nowhere in particular. We must have disabled it.”

“Nice shooting, boys,” Callie said. “And the EMP torpedoes?”

“Should impact in under a minute,” Ashok said. “Drake, do you want to slow us down? We’re getting awfully close to our friends there, and I’m not a hundred percent sure how big an effective radius those torpedoes have on impact. Experimental Liar tech is notoriously short on documentation, and the station personnel hadn’t done much in the way of testing yet.”

“Affirmative,” Drake said. The ship decelerated, and the pressure on Callie’s body eased. She unstrapped herself and walked over to the tactical board, her magnetic boots keeping her steady. The board showed little glowing representations of the two ships: the sharklike contours of the White Raven and the seven-armed star-shape of the Liar craft, with the EMP torpedoes a spray of converging blips–

That converged on nothing. They appeared to pass through the Liar ship, and continued moving on the other side.