Steph twisted the shuttle around, hard over, and away from the closest parasite frigate, winding up with the nose pointed right at the second bogey just as Milla threw full military power to the CM generator. The shuttle lanced forward, cutting through the storm around them and leaving contrails in its wake. The lights dimmed, however, and Steph felt his controls get a little sluggish as the energy-hungry counter-mass systems swallowed up everything the reactors could put out and a fair chunk of what was coming from the stored batteries.

He rolled the shuttle over, showing the heat shields of the craft’s belly to the enemy ship, and hit the rockets generally used for precision maneuvers in space. Normally, those weren’t remotely powerful enough to throw the big transport shuttle around, but with CM maxed out, the boost threw the duo to one side with shocking force, and hopefully with as little predictability as possible.

“Back down to full power,” Steph ordered, flipping them back over and pointing the nose to the skies again.

“Full power, aye.”

“Can we track their tractor beam?” he demanded.

Milla looked over at him, her expression incredulous. “What is this . . . tractor, Stephan? I do not know this word.”

Steph sighed. “Later. The lock. Can we detect it?”

She scowled at him, then glared at her instruments. “None of these systems will do it, Stephan. A quantum lock molds space-time . . .”

“Like counter-mass?” he asked.

“No, different aspect of space-time,” Milla answered. “Counter-mass affects mass and, thus, gravity. A quantum lock is magnetic.”

“We have magnetic sensors on board . . . ,” Steph said as he twisted the bird away from the second frigate. Eagle One was now climbing rapidly, hell-bent on flying deeper into space with both frigates turning into pursuit.

“Yes, but your electromagnetic sweep equipment is very crude for this sort of work,” Milla rushed to explain, honestly shocked at how easily he was handling the flight systems while talking seriously about the situation with her. “It is designed primarily to scan large items. The lock will be very small, below the atomic scale.”

“So you can’t do anything?”

Milla grimaced. “I may be able to detect when they are trying to establish a lock. However, I certainly could not pinpoint where the lock will be focused.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” Steph said through clenched teeth as he sent the shuttle through another spiral, trying to gain ground while the two frigates below him were still attempting not to cross one another’s bows. “Get to it.”

Milla stared at her instruments helplessly for a moment, then pulled up the radio intercept software, cycling through into the core settings and looking over the range she had to work with. A quantum lock was fundamentally a very focused diamagnetic point, one that could be tuned with the appropriate hardware to move through space.