Chapter 49: Duel in the Dark
The second firing pass once again began with [Alcubierre Bubble] putting the Dragonfly right behind the alien starship, but the [Skill] turned out to be too imprecise for a perfect firing run.
Just like the first time, it took a couple of seconds to spin their ship to line up the primaries, then Derek’s ship once again bucked, unleashing the second singularity round, yet once again, the alien ship was already moving, twisting and rolling away, the round actually clipping the very edge of the inside of the massive thruster that acted as the vessel’s main propulsion and detonating, tearing a huge chunk out of it … but it was unlikely to be crippling.
“Retarget the electron beam,” Derek snapped, simultaneously highlighting the point where he wanted it aimed instead.
Instead of doing it herself or responding verbally, Ye-in passed over control over that gun, while Atticus re-aligned the Dragonfly, allowing him to plant the electron beam squarely on the site of the nearest enemy primary.
Once again, the external damage wasn’t too bad, but an interior explosion, followed by the remains of the gun spewing out of the firing port, proved quite definitively that they had, in fact, done something. Hopefully, they’d even gotten nearby thrusters and other critical systems, but Derek would be cool if all they’d reached was the gun.
Because whoever had built that ship, they’d done so under the assumption that, in space, you’d be able to see all threats coming, or, at the very least, all threats requiring a response from the primaries, and then be able to pivor the ship to bring it to bear, while anything small enough to sneak up on them would also be small enough to fall to the lighter secondaries.
And it was far from the worst idea, in a world ruled by the laws of physics … something that hadn’t been true for over a hundred years. At least not entirely.
“Jump,” Derek ordered, seeing the enemy superlasers fire once again, them being two light seconds distant this time around, giving them the space to leap away without needing to spend mana to warp space to deflect the attack.
“Can we burn off enough guns and thrusters to let us strafe around it safely?” Atticus muttered, loudly enough for everyone on the bridge to hear, though he was clearly doing those calculations himself, as evidenced both by the way he was furiously typing and what was visible on his screen at the same time.