Breaking off would mean minutes of chaos till Lynsnar or Trance could pick up control. Nearly two thirds of Pham Nuwen's targets were destroyed now. The price had been high, half of Svensdot's friends. The enemy had lost much to protect those targets,
复件 (15) air max, yet much of its fleet survived. An unseen hand smashed ?lvira, driving Svensndot hard against his combat harness. The lights went out, even the glow from the windows. Then dim red light came from the floor. The Dirokimes were silhouetted by one small monitor. 'Rolle whistled softly, "We're out of the game,
复件 (6) 复件 air max, Boss, least while it counts. I didn't know you could get misses that near." Maybe it wasn't a miss. Kjet scrambled out of his harness and boosted across the room to float head-down over the tiny monitor. Maybe we're already dead. Somewhere very close by a drone had detonated,
changa shoes, the wave front reaching ?lvira before she jumped. The concussion had been the outer part of the ship's hull exploding as it absorbed the soft-xray component of the enemy ordnance. He stared at the red letters marching slowly across the damage display. Most likely, the electronics was permanently dead; chances were they had all received a fatal dose of gamma. The smell of burnt insulation floated across the room on the ventilator's breeze. "Iiya! Look at that. Five nanoseconds more and we wouldn't have been clipped at all. We actually committed the jump after the front hit!" And somehow the electronics had survived long enough to complete the jump. The gamma flux through the command deck had been 300 rem, nothing that would slow them down over the next few hours, and easily managed by a ship's surgeon. As for the surgeon and all the rest of the ?lvira's automation ... Tirolle typed several long queries at the box; there was no voice recognition left. Several seconds passed before a response marched across the screen. "Central automation suspended. Display management suspended. Drive computation suspended." Tirolle dug an elbow at his brother. "Hei, 'Frelle, it looks like 'Vira managed a clean disconnect. We can bring most of this back,
复件 (86) air max1!" Dirokimes were known for being drifty optimists, but in this case Tirolle wasn't far from the truth. Their encounter with the drone bomb had been a one-in-billion thing, the tiniest fraction of an exposure. Over the next hour and a half, the Dirokimes ran reboots off the monitor's hardened processor,
Max Interval Plyo, bringing up first one utility and then another. Some things were beyond recovery: parsing intelligence was gone from the comm automation, and the ultradrive spines on one side of the craft were partially melted. (Absurdly,
复件 (67) air max1, the burning smell had been a vagrant diagnostic, something that should have been disabled along with all the rest of ?lvira's automation.) They were far behind the Blighter fleet. ... and there was still a Blighter fleet. The knot of enemy lights was smaller than before, but on the same unwavering trajectory. The battle was long over. What was left of Commercial Security was scattered across four light-years of abandoned battlefield; they had started the battle with numerical superiority. If they'd fought properly, they might have won. Instead they'd destroyed the vessels with significant real velocities -- and knocked out only about half the others. Some of the largest enemy vessels survived. These outnumbered the corresponding Aniara survivors by more than four to one. Blight could have could have easily destroyed all that remained of Commercial Security. But that would have meant a detour from the pursuit, and that pursuit was the one constant in the enemy's behavior.