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claws in three directions. She vented and drifted until secondary detonations blew out her sides, and she spilled her cargoes. The rear third of the 800-meter ship spun away with the severed engines and reactors. After it spewed x-rays and gammas, it wasn’t more than a second later that it blew.
    With all the speed they'd built up, the Lancers ripped past the fighter and junk squadrons still coming around to chase the last Squidy warship. Jordo coaxed more acceleration out of his Bitzer as he pulled ahead of Paladin and the rest of his squadron. He couldn’t lift his chest to breathe at all now, but it didn’t matter. He'd get there before he passed out.
    He shot past the capital ships and carriers and veered around the dense debris clouds from the haulers. Then, he was so close to that last Squidy ship that when its bay doors opened and a squadron of red bandits launched out of it, he almost rammed them. Jordo and Paladin jinked wildly and dove through the enemy fighter formation, trying to take as many targets as they could before the alien aces could recover. The 140mm cannon shook his cockpit hard enough that the three alien aces he scrapped on that pass blurred in front of him.
    The battlegroup's combined railguns finally found the Squidies' pocket carrier, and Jordo ripped past the burning wreck with Paladin and rest of the Lancers close behind. They rolled in on the trio of alien aces already lining up to draw their razor-thin, small-bore particle streams across Fat Anne. They planned to slice the breaching ship’s ring or cut her reactor stack in two.  
    The Squidies were fixed on their targets and never saw it coming. Jordo’s shells stitched a line across the aliens' three-plane formation along with Paladin’s, flashing up and down the alien hulls where their shells impacted, blasting and melting armor, destroying the thing inside, that disgusting knot of hose-like limbs and ribbon-thin body the aliens called a pilot. The two they hit veered off course for a fraction of a second before they spun and their shell-torn power plants cooked off.
    Nine red bandits remained, but by the time the alien aces recovered and spun on their thrusters to put the breaching ship back in their sights again, the 99th Weasels and the 55th Hellcats and nearly every fighter in three carriers’ air groups were on them. There was nowhere for the aliens to fly that wasn’t stitched tight with hellfire. Even the gunnery junks got some, and when all the blossoms from all the HE range-det shells and all the alien reactor dets had faded, the Squidies’ fighters were gone, and it was over.  
    The convoy steamed on. The aliens had massed everything they could at Algol and thrown it at them. They’d targeted the breaching ship Fat Anne and given their best shot, but she was unscathed. Her fragile, wonder wheel hull was intact and there wasn’t anything between the battlegroup now and the transit to the next system but clear skies on radar, LiDAR and IR. They’d won Algol.  
    The cheers went up on most of the comms channels, and the pilots from three air groups were still cheering when, on the far side of the battlegroup, the other breaching ship, SCS Tipperary , rocketed jets of blue fire out the emergency vents on her axle-shaped main hull. A moment later, she jettisoned a reactor core. It streaked across 5Ks of vacuum, riding a column of fire before it cooked off like a low-yield fission warhead.  
    The breaching ship, Tipperary fell dark as she began to turn off angle and tumble in her line of travel. There were more no enemies in sight...not on radar or IR or LiDAR. Everyone asked what happened and none of them knew. Now, all the voices that had called out on victory on comms had the same mix of defeat and astonishment when they said the only thing they knew for sure: " Tipperary is down. The breaching ship is down."  

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    Tig’s crew used explosives to put out the fire in bay 39. Or Raleigh did, anyway. As usual, Tig