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couldn’t stop missiles or hard radiation, and a nuke could be detonated beyond the range of point defense lasers and still do a hell of a lot of damage to a ship.
    That possibility, fortunately, was a remote one. According to intelligence, Daikokukichi possessed both Imperial and Hegemony personnel. Long-standing policy restricted nuclear weapons to Imperial forces alone. Hegemony officers were not trusted with them, and even the Nihonjin skippers of any Imperial ships present would need release authorization from much farther up the chain of command before they could turn scourging blasts of nuclear fire against the swarms of attackers.
    Still, it wouldn’t do to get complacent. Policy could have changed since Dev had last read an Imperial Fleet directive, or the Imperial officer in command of Daikokukichi could be an unstable son of a bitch who nuked first and got authorization later.
    “Commodore!” Lara warned. Colored lines highlighted parts of his view, indicating four separate points within the shipyards. A red diamond flashed insistently, indicating a ship rising above the clutter of gantries and open, duralloy-strut frameworks. “Imperial frigate boosting clear of the Yards! Range nine-five-zero-zero, boosting at point five.…”
    “Got it,” Dev snapped back. “Hit him before he fogs our lasers.”
    Data cascaded through Eagle’s sensors; the target was broadcasting standard Imperial IFF, which included ident and stats. According to the warbook readout unfolding in Dev’s vision, the moving ship was Senden, Flashing Lightning, accelerating clear of the orbital docks and repair gantries on white-blazing drives. Since she was listed in the datanet—the newly constructed warships had not yet been named or given net IDs—either she must have been docked at Daikokukichi for repairs or else she was part of the Imperial garrison force here. An Inaduma-class frigate, she was over 100 meters long, massed 1,800 tons, and carried a crew of 210. Though no match for the much larger and more powerful Eagle, she could still cause a hell of a lot of grief for the destroyer at close range. Possibly, Senden’s skipper was simply trying to win free of the Yards before he was attacked, but Dev couldn’t take that risk.
    Lasers flicked from Eagle’s starboard bow mounts, invisible bolts that turned duralloy sun-bright at their caress. Metal vapor puffed into space, briefly and silently illuminated by starcore energies.
    “She’s launching,” a voice on Eagle’s tactical net reported. More colored graphics winked on in Dev’s vision, highlighting a cloud of stars curving out from the frigate under 60-G boost. “Missiles incoming!”
    “Tracking,” another voice said, calm despite the stress of the moment. “AI targeting lock. We’ll take them with the PDLs.”
    PDLs—Point Defense Lasers—were batteries of one hundred-megawatt coherent light weapons deployed in clusters about the warship’s outer hull, arranged to give maximum coverage from every side and angle of approach. Too weak to penetrate a starship’s armor, indeed, too weak to make much of an impression on any hardened target through the light haze of antilaser fogs that quickly filled the battle volume, they were hot enough to burn through a missile’s relatively thin outer skin in milliseconds. One by one, then in groups of two and three and five at an instant, the incoming missiles flared white-hot within Dev’s virtual reality panorama.
    Space combat was primarily a war of maneuver. With nano-based cloudscreens to block incoming laser fire, with banks of AI-directed lasers to take out enemy missiles in lightning, close-in point defense bursts, ships had to draw fairly close before they could do serious damage to one another. Exotic beam weapons, like kaon cannons, CPGs, and electron guns, could usually be dispersed by manipulating hull magnetic fields; the most effective weapons were long-range Starhawks that could be remotely jacked by human