[h2]Sharlin Vande Tanne[/h2]

Sharlin's reply was terse. "Wilco," she said, the single word cool and firm. 

The Phantom slid through the vacuum, coasting on tiny puffs of cold reaction mass from its attitude thrusters. It was a wasteful way of consuming delta-vee, but lighting up thrusters meant lighting up your opponent's screens. Instead, Sharlin was running silent, accepting inefficiency in exchange for stealth. The game that she played was all about patience - working the angles, the positions, the probabilities. Everything was calculated, but all too much had to be left to chance. 

This time, the odds broke in Sharlin's favour. She'd placed the Phantom between the enemy frigate and the [i]Indomitus[/i], deployed a scattering of remotes - small drones, little more than sensor packs with station-keeping thrusters, but enough to extend her sensor coverage and provide targeting solutions. 

The little strike craft burned towards the [i]Indomitus[/i]. There was no subtlety about their approach - throttles opened full, blazing straight towards their target, trusting to speed and numbers to get through. Given what they probably had to work with, it wasn't the worst strategy. It gave the least possible time to put up defences. Most ship captains, faced with such an aggressive attack, would turn and burn to open up the range and give themselves more time to shoot down the strike - delaying their pursuit. 

But that reckoned without factors like the Phantom. 

Now the scarlet Core unmasked, gauss carbine spitting iridium slugs as quickly as it could cycle. Sharlin had spent a few precious seconds setting up her shots in a planned firing pattern. Now the Phantom worked through that pattern quickly, methodically. It spun on its axis, the muzzle of the carbine describing a complex arc that sparked each time a projectile left it, every one directed at a pirate strike craft. 

The beam gun was normally a better weapon at long range - its near-lightspeed pulse of charged particles meant less flight time to consider. But its capacitors took time to charge, making for a longer firing cycle. The carbine was less accurate against a maneouvering opponent, but it had a higher rate of fire. 

Against targets that were flying straight and level though....

It took a half-dozen heartbeats before the first blossom of fire flared against the dark. By that time, Sharlin had already sent the command for her remotes to self-destruct, which they dutifully did. Their last act of service was to burn out spectacularly, acting as flares that hid the Phantom's signature as it returned to silent running. 

Another strike craft exploded, and another. Sharlin allowed the expert systems to keep track, her attention on more urgent matters. If she'd missed any, they'd alert her. In the meantime, amidst everything else, she composed a message to Lucia aboard the [i]Indomitus[/i]. 

She hadn't actually specified earlier just which order she was complying with, after all. 

Another thread of light, an encoded and compressed burst transmission. "Indomitus, this is Phantom. Comms intercept follows."