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tactical.  “I’ve got gunboats moving to interpose themselves between us and those other corvettes.”
                  “I see them, Alys,” Tariq replied, pursing his lips as he studied the displays. 
                  “But they’re coming in at us from the portside angle,” the tactical officer continued.  “They won’t be able to intercept us before we can hit the target corvette.”
                  “Good.  Maintain course,” he ordered.  He watched the displays as he saw the icon indicating the Cavalier as well as her three sister ships closing on the pirate corvette marked “P1”.  “Fire at will,” he ordered.
                  All four ships approached weapons range of the pirate corvette, which was trying to dive under the defenders’ angle of attack.  It didn’t succeed, and all four of the ships cut loose with their weapons.  Missiles streaked forth, followed seconds later by coherent energy weapons from their forward heavy lasers.  A shower of kinetic kill metallic slugs spewed forth from the ships’ railguns.  All of the weapons hammered into the pirate corvette’s dorsal shields, which flared opaque for a brief second and then collapsed.  The hits struck and tore into the top of the ship ripping it open, almost as though the hull metal was being unzipped.  The pirates hadn’t even tried to make any counterfire, which might have saved them.  Four corvettes couldn’t throw that much in the way of fire, they were more designed toward high speed slashing attacks.  By not taking down any of the incoming missiles or rail gun slugs, the pirate ship took the full brunt of the assault.
                  “Yes!” Alys crowed, pumping a fist in the air.  There were other cries of triumph from the rest of the bridge crew.
                  “Belay that!” Tariq ordered, his voice harsh.  His eyes flicked to the longer ranged sensors, showing those cruisers and support ships getting ever closer.  “We have a lot of work yet to do.  Helm, change course.  Comms, get the others on the line, we’re going to move in on the other corvettes.”
     
                  “Aploras, on me,” Korqath called, jinking his Vision hard to port to evade the incoming fire from the last remaining Sepulcre fighter.  The energy blasts narrowly missed him, but a narrow miss was still a miss.  “We’re going after those gunships; leave the egg fighters to the Twin Novas.”
                  “Copy that, Lead,” Hukriss replied, as did several others.  “Forming up.”
                  The rest of the squadron looped around, converging from numerous different vectors, evading and firing at any of the pirate starfighters that tried to get at them.  A pair of blaster shots from one of the Aploras caused the Sepulcre to break off, lumbering away from the furball as quickly as its engines could get it away from the fighting.  The pilot wasn’t finished, most likely he would be looping around and would come back into the fighting after only a few seconds. 
                  “We’ll keep the scary eggs away from you, Korqath,” the Twin Nova lead pilot called over the comms.  Korqath hissed but didn’t otherwise rise to the bait. 
                  As he angled his fighter around to face the approaching gunboats, he pressed a control to bring up the image of the enemy vessels on his HUD.  The gunboats were flat, roughly shaped like scarab beetles, with a trio of medium laser cannons in the bow as well as racks of missiles on the dorsal side.  They were slower than the fighters, even the Sepulcres , but scans indicated that they possessed shields, a level or two tougher than the output of the shield nodes on the Vision.  They would take a lot of killing.
                  “Aploras, break and attack,” he ordered.  “Force them back.  I don’t want them