Good god, Marx thought. Other than a few thousand flockers and hunter drones, the battlecruiser's drone complement had been committed almost entirely to defensive weaponry. The Rix captain had prioritized the receiver array above everything else.
He shook his head. The Lynx had never had a chance.
Looking at the ranks of fearsome monitors, Marx envied their firepower. If he could just take over a few of the blackbody drones and turn their weapons back on the receiver. . .
Then the master pilot realized what he had to do.
It was simplicity itself.
He watched the trajectories of his four drones as they converged, growing nearer to each other as they drifted toward the Rix battle-cruiser. The decoy was in front. The little drone was designed to burst a wide range of EM every few minutes, drawing fire away from more vital targets. When it wasn't screaming, it was stealthy, with passive sensors and line-of-sight transmission. Marx had kept the decoy silent so far, but now he saw what to do with it.
The stealth drones were the only thing he could move without detection. They were equipped with coldjets, slow but radiation-silent. He eased one alongside the decoy drone, bringing the two into soft contact. His view might be blurry and vague, but at under ten meters per second, Marx could have rammed a hummingbird.
The master pilot shoved the decoy with the stealth drone, pushed it on a new vector toward the sandcaster. He cursed, pushing the plodding coldjets to their maximums. In another twenty seconds his little formation would be hurtling uselessly past the battlecruiser.
Marx waited until the decoy was a bare kilometer from the sand-caster, then fired its reaction drive. It barreled in toward the sand-caster drone in decoy mode, screaming bloody murder.
Suddenly, Marx could see.
The decoy was flooding the area with EM, painting everything within light-seconds across the whole spectrum. To the Rix, it must have seemed as if a fleet of drones had popped up from nowhere.
The blackbody monitors wasted no time responding. Ripples of 61 their slugs arced beautifully across space, lit like tracer bullets by the decoy's sensory howl. The rain of slugs swept across the stealth pene-trator first, then found the decoy, and things were dark for a moment. But seconds later Marx saw the blast of the sandcaster being hit, pulped, shredded by the depleted uranium slugs. "Per/ecf/'he whispered as a sequence of explosions flared in synes-thesia.The blinded sandcaster was still loaded with reaction mass! The drone blazed with the dirty fuel of its self-propelling canisters.
It popped again and again like a sackful of fragmentation grenades.
The Rix had done Marx's work for him.
The sand cloud expanded into a huge, misshapen ball, a time-lapse amoeba festooned with reaching pseudopods. It was almost 4,000 kilometers across when it struck the receiver array, at a relative velocity of 3,000 klicks per second. The hail of slugs had also imparted lateral velocity to the cloud, and it swept across the array like a sirocco.
Marx switched on his scout's active sensors, letting the Lynx's computers record the damage in maximum detail. He leaned back to savor the light show, the vast receiver array flickering from end to end, a mica desert struck by the morning sun.
The huge object began to fold, a giant piece of fabric twisting in the wind.
Then fire from the blackbody drones found the pulsing scout, and Marx's view snapped to dead-channel blue.
He brought up Hobbes's line.
"Master Pilot reporting mission accomplished," he said. "The Rix receiver array has been destroyed."
Data Analyst
Tyre prioritized Marx's signal, recording at maximum resolution.
Finally, a good look at the enemy battlecruiser.
It only lasted a few seconds. The projectile fire from a dozen black-bodies raked across Marx's forward drones, tearing them to pieces. The sand canister exploded. Tyre watched with her mouth agape as the sand tore across the Rix receiver array.
"He got it!" she cried.
Then the arc of fire moved inexorably toward the scout drone itself. In the seconds before the signal was extinguished, the tearing mega-structure caught the light of the Legis sun, and an awesome sight was revealed. Ensign Tyre's ragged breath halted as she took it in.
She had assumed that Marx's drones had hit a concentration of blackbodies, a random clumping of firepower. Even the largest Rix ships only traveled with a few dozens of the blackbody monitors; the heavy-metal ammunition they carried was bulky, they were difficult to maintain, and were primarily a defensive weapon.
But revealed against the bright background of the crumpling array was a host of monitors. They stretched across its shining expanse in a vast, hexagonal pattern.
Hundreds of them.
Then synesthesia went dark; Marx's drone had finally died.
Ensign Tyre heard a gurgle from Data Master Kax at her feet, but she ignored the grim sound. Tyre rewound the scout's viewpoint stream a few seconds, and froze it on a frame in which the Legis sun had revealed the monitor drones.
Ensign Tyre blinked as she looked at them.
They were short-range weapons, primarily for defense. They had no drives and little intelligence, just lots and lots of projectile fire 63 power. If a small warship like the Lynx were to stumble amongst hundreds of them, it would be torn to pieces by their collective kinetic attack.
And the Lynx was headed straight for the battlecruiser and into the intervening field of blackbodies, unaware of their deadly, silent presence.
She had to alert the captain.
Tyre opened a line to Hobbes. The executive officer did not immediately respond; there were probably a dozen crew of superior rank clamoring for her attention.
Tyre waited, the seconds ticking away, the Lynx hurtling toward the deadly blackbody drones, three thousand kilometers closer every second.
"Priority, priority."
The priority icon appeared before her in second sight. The icon was for "extreme emergencies" only, a term that held awesome power here in Data Analysis. Kax had never used it. Tyre had certainly never thought to invoke it herself; it was the data master's prerogative. And if she were wrong about what the vast array of drones meant, misuse of the priority icon in battle would be a terrible mark against her forever.
Tyre stared at the frozen image again. Hundreds of them, she reminded herself. The data were unambiguous.
She switched to the diagnostic channel again. There were casualties all across the ship, hull and equipment damage, even fatalities. It could be minutes before Hobbes responded to a lowly ensign.