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Chapter 22 - The Wind at my Back, Stars at my feet[]
In Space...
As the Nightlord class battleship crested the horizon, two things were immediately clear:
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A force of Dropships have been rendered into a debris field, along with their escorting fighters The cutter was gone.
There were beacons from ejected pilots, here and there in the expanding debris field, and there was a lot of wreckage in a more complete state than the entirety of the Absolute Truth had left when she had been hit.
Sensor gains were increased to try to seek out the trail of the 'Coast Guard' vessel, and additional fighters were launched to try to sweep through the orbiting debris field.
There's a thing with active probes. They're active probes. You can imagine it like the effect of lighting a powerful white-beam flashlight in darkness. It can reveal things it's pointed at, but...
...something lurking outside the beam will see it before you're likely to see them.
It was among the host of tricks that derived from the war against the Blakists. Little stratagems to cope with someone's technological superiority. Modified half-kiloton Alamo munitions picked up on those active probes, and lit their chemical rockets, guiding in on the emitters when signal strength reached a specific intensity.
It's not that there was no warning, there was-as soon as the solid-fuel pellets ignited there was warning.
It's that it was too late, the Warship's fighters were out of position to intercept.
Thus, a second Star Adder battleship was destroyed in the Colleen system.
The whole battle had taken a matter of minutes from start to finish.