Chapter One Hundred and Five - En Passant
They didn’t linger within the military FTL ship’s close range. Their path barely skimmed through the range where their PD guns could do something while remaining effective, then they were out again.
The couple of minutes they spent in that area were somewhat horrific, however.
Day found her worry mounting more and more as she traced the path of lasers cutting through space and slicing into Candle from multiple directions. The bigger ship was tough, of course, and Candle immediately gave up all pretences of being stealthy and deployed external heatsinks and started venting gasses in a bubble around herself to negate some of the power of those lasers, but it wasn’t enough to counter the constant barrage of fire from the FTL ship.
What did help was return fire.
Every PD gun that opened up screamed its position for the ERF to see. And if they knew where the guns were, then it was a matter of fractions of a second before the guns were added to their list of targets.
Day’s Bulwarks roared, shell casings behind ejected at a rate of a thousand rounds a minute while an equal number of heavy bullets zipped through space and rammed into the FTL ship.
She was feeling generous, so each laser array got its fair share of lead.
The arrays were designed to fight off missiles and in such close ranges as deterrents. Maybe they could take out a small fighter craft or drone as well. It took concentrated fire to do instant damage with a laser against a hardened foe. That, or prolonged, targeted fire.
The arrays were not armoured. They were little more than a few dozen moving parts in a little easily-replaceable rack. The most armour they had was a couple of milimetres of metal covering their internals.
Day’s armour-piercing rounds tore fist-sized holes through that armour, ripped apart internals, then continued on deeper into the FTL ship.
“And we’re out,” Twilight said as they slipped out of the FTL ships range. “How’s everyone doing?”
Day paused, tea by her lips as she checked her readouts. She hadn’t come out of that unscathed, but it wasn’t bad at all.
A few lasers had raked her surface, scarring the light-absorbant paint her hull was covered in. Some deeper burns had damaged some of the wires near the surface of her hull, and she’d eaten a few particle cannon rounds in the quick skirmish as well, but none had been properly targeted.
Her nose had three more holes punched into it, but that was where some of her thickest armour was, and none of the rounds had punched any deeper into her internals.
The most damaged component she had was a communications array. One of her lidar systems had taken a full second of laser fire and that had fried it pretty well.
All in all, she’d need half a day to completely fix everything until the damage was no longer noticeable. The armour would need to be replaced, but it could be patched up and the holes plugged so that they’d temporarily be even stronger than the sections around them. The lidar was an easy fix. Her printers were working on a replacement component and her repair drones could install it within the hour.
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Day had taken more damage from radiation exposure on long trips.
She wasn’t too worried about herself though. Glancing to the side, Day checked out Candle. The bigger woman brushed her hair back in a cascade of red, and then sighed. “That stung,” she said.
Day touched her arm, then gently asked for a full report.
Candle sent it, and Day read through the whole thing.
One of Candle’s main guns was out of action. Some of her manoeuvring thrusters were burnt right out, and she had taken a lot of concentrated fire from the FTL ship’s particle cannons. She had holes going through and through her hull. But only a couple of dozen, and with particle cannons being what they were, the holes were... not actually that big of a concern.
None of her important internals had been struck, though one of the loading systems for her nuclear reactor was busted and one of her repair drones had been struck inside her hull. It had damaged a few other things as it bounced around.
Otherwise, Candle was fine.
Day let out a long sigh, relieved that her friend would make it. A day or two of repairs and the damage would be entirely fixed.
Lullaby and Twilight had little damage. In fact, Twilight hadn’t been hit by anything at all, and she was exceptionally smug about it.
“Alright,” Day said as she finally took a sip of her tea. “Ninety-four percent chance that the FTL ship’s entire starboard armaments are gone, including all of its point-defence. I guess that means it’s time for a second volley.”
The first had mostly been lost. Both sides wiped out the other’s torpedoes and missiles. The missiles the Accord used flew in predictable paths, and the ERF’s torpedoes were too few to overwhelm their point-defence, even as they destroyed it.
This time, the FTL ship wouldn’t be able to stop anything.
Day, feeling magnanimous in their near-certain victory, sent a message to the FTL ship, slamming the message into their coms along with a few viruses and an end signal strong enough that the relay would likely need replacing.
“You have three minutes to evacuate,” she said.
She realised that she might have been a little annoyed that they’d hurt Candle.
Three minutes came, three minutes left, and only a couple of lifeboats ejected out of the ship.
So they fired a second volley of torpedoes, and this time they flew across the void uncontested.
Day reached for her kettle, then realized that she was all out of tea. She decided she’d start another kettle.
***