Not that Ian blamed him. Anything to do with antimatter was not something to be happy about. That stuff was proof that hell existed and could be brought into the universe by humans in all their foolhardy hubris.

►►►

IBC Shion Thon, Flagship, Third Reconnaissance Squadron

► “Contact in ten.”

Misrem waved the announcement off. She could read the numbers as well as anyone and better than most. The navarch already had the targets divided up and assigned, planning to hit all three ships at once with multiple beams. The scanners indicated that the armor on these contacts was similar, if not the same, as the shifting armor on the previous target they’d eliminated.

Given Aymes’ earlier encounter, she was confident that she understood the nature and inherent weakness Imperial technology simply could not overcome. Lasers were, individually, very specific by their nature. If you could scan a laser quickly enough, and adjust your armor’s reflection quotient to match, then defeating any given laser was simplicity itself.

She was honestly surprised that the Empire didn’t have this technology in their archives. The concept was obvious, and she was certainly looking at evidence that proved it was far from physically impossible.

However, the weakness was significant once you recognized it. Multiple lasers with different specific frequencies would ensure that all but one beam would have the intended effect. That would force the enemy to use much less effective general armor settings. Good armor then, certainly, but not the impenetrable sort it held the potential to be.

But no matter how this one was cut, they were going to be taking a massive amount of data scans back to the Empire. That alone might be worth the cost of mounting this particular expedition, she supposed. Might.

They had work to do.

“Establish targets,” she ordered. “Lead them with bracketing estimates, and fire when ready.”

“Yes, Navarch. Firing.”

►►►

► The remaining fully functional vessels of Third Recon fired as one, still several light-minutes out from their targets. They had slight odds of striking their targets, of course, but lasers would hold lethal power easily enough at that range, and a lucky hit was still a hit.

Eleven groups of beams sliced space, moving at a pedestrian three hundred million meters per second, barely outpacing the ships that fired them by some measures. The ships didn’t even slow their fire as they maintained the beams and swept them across space in a pattern intended to catch their targets no matter their maneuvers.

►►►

AEV Hood

► “Lasers detected! Initiating evasive action!”

Ian’s stomach flipped a little as the Hood lifted its nose and climbed relative to the system plane, letting a terrifyingly powerful beam sweep under its position.

Detecting a laser was normally difficult in the extreme, but with the power put out by the bandit contacts, a blind man could have done it.