Chapter One Hundred and Eleven - Results

They had two priorities with firing.

The first was targets that they knew they could hit. That meant Accord ships that were moving in a predictable manner and whose future location was almost certainly known. Those were coming up relatively often, especially as the Accord seemed to hyper-focus on the threat of the mines they were still crossing paths with and on the damage they’d sustained fighting each other.

The second priority were military vessels.

That was an easy choice to make. Not only were the few combat ships the biggest threat, they were also the ones being harmed the least from the mines.

Better point defence, more point defence, and a much tighter grip on their communications meant that the small group of military craft were faring the best out of all the ships in the fleet. It helped them that the patrol was at the rear of the fleet, in an optimal position to intercept Day and her sisters. They were the last to get hit by any of the mines, and that gave them the time they needed to notice and intercept the incoming trap.

“This is going pretty well,” Candle said. She smoothly rotated her main guns and fired out another volley in a wide-dispersal pattern, designed to catch on of the enemy ships no matter how it dodged.

“It’s going well so far, but this won’t be enough,” Day said.

The damage left from the mines was extensive, but it wasn’t enough to destroy the entire fleet. Day watched with keen interest as one of the destroyer-sized civilian ships started to tumble through space. It was still heading in the same direction and at roughly the same speed as the rest of the fleet, but from the way it was spinning, Day gave it even odds that the crew were dead.

One more to the tally.

So far, they’d eliminated three corvettes, two destroyers, and one of the heavy industrial frigates had enough holes in its hull that it might as well have been eliminated. The rest of the fleet wasn’t unscathed either.

Burns had been sliced across the hulls of nearly every ship, most from allied point-defence fire. In fact, other than the few ships outright destroyed by direct contact with a mine or from coming within close proximity to one of the offensive mines, more than half of the damage the fleet had sustained came from itself.

“Dawn is going to be insufferable,” Twilight said.

“Why do you say that?” Day asked.

“She told me about this part of her plan. The whole ‘let them shoot themselves’ bit, and I told her it was unlikely to work. It’s my fault, I assumed that they’d be a lot more competent.”

Dawn had been the MVP in this fight, Day admitted. Even now she was getting communications from mines and even from some of the ships in the fleet telling other ships where to aim, what to fire at, and the location of incoming mines.

The information was almost entirely wrong, but to disorganised civilians, it probably sounded legitimate.

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Order was returning. Dawn’s false communications were being ignored, and the Accord were quickly figuring out the scheme, but the damage had been done. Better yet, Day suspected that moving forward, the Accord would doubt their own legitimate communications as well.

She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to talk to her sisters and not know if it was really them on the other end. It would be distressing, she imagined.

“Opportunity in two minutes,” Candle said, which broke Day out of her ruminations. She was mostly firing automatically, based on her current set of priorities. Now she paid more attention.

Candle had plotted out the location of the Accord destroyer, specifically, and its current trajectory. It was about to cross paths with one of the last mines in the field.

Not that the field ended so easily. Dawn had left dozens of additional mines out in the fleet’s path so that they’d run across a new one every few hours from here on out. Most, if not all, of those would be wasted, but the psychological toll would compound itself.

The destroyer was going to have to dodge. Even if they destroyed the mine, its debris would be in the ship’s path, and it would move. And Candle had been studying how the ship moved in previous instances.

It was predictable, but every so slightly varied, in a way that suggested that there was some organic piloting at work.

“Got it,” Day said.

“Yeah, I guess,” Lullaby said. “I’m ready for another shot.”

Twilight sent her own approval over the line, and all four of them prepared to fire at a specific time so that their rounds would all cross specific points at a specific time.

The time came, Candle called mark, and then, three long minutes later, the destroyer which was racing to the side to avoid Lullaby’s MAC cannon shot took three shots mid-deck. Something critical was hit. Day checked the shot telemetry, compared it to the blueprints of previous Accord destroyers they’d attacked, and then she chuckled to herself. “That was its missile stowage,” she said.

“Nice,” Candle replied. “Scratch one bandit.”

“Well done,” Day congratulated. That was one of six military ships out for the count. “Is this a good time to start demanding their surrender?”

“Why bother?” Twilight asked.

“Because it would mean less work for us?” Lullaby replied.

Day kept her laughter to herself, but a big part of her was relieved that things were going this well.

Then she noticed the two military corvettes of the fleet peeling off to one side. They were both sweeping ahead of themselves, scanning for something.

Something in the exact direction Dawn was in.

“Are those two going after Dawn?” she asked. The trajectory was more or less correct. It didn’t look like Dawn was aware of them yet, not that she had to move for a little while if she wanted to get out of their way. The time was closing, however.

“Dawn can handle herself,” Twilight said.

“Or she’s so busy being clever that she didn’t notice,” Lullaby said.

***