► A new series of alarms, ones that Steph was intimately familiar with, blared mercilessly through the flight deck of the shuttle. Milla looked around, disconcerted and concerned, clearly not recognizing them.

“We’ve been targeted,” Steph said stiffly. “Active range-finding gear, probably a lidar variant. They’re about to open fire.”

“Oh.” Milla’s voice was soft, barely audible as she sank a bit deeper into her seat.

“Lasers are junk in the atmosphere,” Steph said, talking to organize his own thoughts, “even ones as powerful as the Priminae’s.”

“Especially,” Milla corrected. “Overly powerful laser fire will warp the atmosphere and attenuate the energy of the weapon.”

“Okay, so what else will they use?”

Milla blinked. “Pardon?”

Steph looked over sharply. “You heard me.”

“How am I to know?” Milla asked. “They are not known to me!”

“Bullshit.” Steph’s tone was flat. “You know these people. You may not know how, but you know them.”

Milla fell silent, a mix of emotions crossing her face. Finally, she sighed. “They are using antiquated parasite frigates. Expect projectile weapons.”

“Hypervelocity missiles?”

“No. Slower, but guided,” Milla said, frowning. “If they are using the historical weapons from the records.”

“Guided?” Steph looked a little skeptical.

Guided weapons were fine when dealing with planetary distances, a few hundred kilometers—even a few thousand. However, spacecraft had to engage weapons at millions of kilometers and speeds that made most guidance systems utterly useless. If you didn’t aim them right to begin with, there was no guidance system in the universe that had the Delta-V to manage more than extremely minor corrections.

The Double A fighters had used guided missiles, but they were a knife-range platform. The frigates he was dealing with seemed like they should be solar system range at least.

If he could get into space, Steph felt he could probably get enough space between him and the enemy to negate their missiles. That really only left lasers, and at the sorts of distances you generally fought at in space, laser engagements were more of a chess game than a martial fight.

“Secure armor. Calculate cam-plate settings needed to negate their targeting frequencies,” Steph ordered.

“Aye,” Milla said. It was an easy order, one that the shuttle’s computers were designed specifically to handle. “Done. Shall I engage?”

“Not yet. Let’s hold that back for a moment. They’ve already got a pretty good lock on us, and they could use passives if they needed to anyway. Do the missiles use the same frequencies?”

“That I truly could not say. I know of historical weapons. I could not tell you how they were designed specifically.”

“Great. Alright, hold on tight. I figure this is going to get fun in a second or two,” Steph said as the alarms redoubled, signaling that more active targeting sources had locked them up. “Incoming!”