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pilots all the way to the target.
    At point-blank range, then, the ship that could outmaneuver an opponent—ducking in and out around drifting cloudscreens, loosing clouds of missiles from precisely calculated points, pulling the unexpected maneuver, finding blind spots on an opponent’s hull—was the ship that would score the kill.
    Four Starhawks left Eagle’s forward missile bays with a jarring thump that rang through the destroyer’s hull. Guided by jackers aboard the Confederation ship, they twisted past Eagle’s dissipating cloudscreen, locked onto the accelerating frigate, and went to full throttle up. Lasers winked from Senden’s port side. Two of the Starhawks vanished in white-hot balls of plasma, followed an instant later by a third.
    The fourth, already locked onto a collision course, was detonated by its jacker before the frigate’s PDLs could find it.

    Lloyd was directing the base’s defenses, calling laser batteries on line and ordering all ships to launch, a headlong scramble to get clear of the vulnerable Yard docks before the attackers could get a solid target lock on them and melt them down into slag. Senden was clear, accelerating toward the hostiles now at 5 Gs. Her sisters, Shiden and Raimei, were nearly ready to launch; power cables and umbilicals were being freed now. A fourth Imperial ship, the Yari-class destroyer Asagiri, was bringing its fusion plant on-line and would be ready in minutes.
    With stunned horror, Lloyd realized that this was not, could not be a drill. The attackers had fired their lasers, scoring several solid hits to the Senden’s hull while she was still working clear of the docks. Senden had replied with a missile barrage, and the volley had been returned. The base’s radar and AI analysis painted the detonation of that last Starhawk warhead as a blue-white spray of tiny sparks, fireworks against the night.
    The Starhawk’s warhead was canister, a modern twist on an ancient artillery weapon. After boosting a full ten seconds at 50 Gs, the thousand or so depleted uranium ball bearings packed inside the warhead were whipping along at nearly five kilometers per second, a deadly spray of ultradense shrapnel following the same path that the Starhawk had been taking at the moment of detonation.
    The warhead was twenty-five kilometers from Senden when it exploded, spraying the load of ball bearings toward the target in a diffuse, slowly expanding cloud. Point Defense Lasers flicked and snapped, directed by the frigate’s sophisticated, AI-linked radar tracking system, but there were simply too many targets, and too little time. In five seconds, Senden was able to decelerate enough that perhaps half the incoming slugs missed, flashing silently past her bow, while her laser defenses took out perhaps four hundred of those that were left.
    Approximately one hundred depleted uranium bearings slammed into Senden’s armored hull in a shattering demonstration of F=ma. Laser turrets were swept away in the storm; sensors were smashed; the port-side drive venturi crumpled like paper; whole sections of duralloy armor peeled up like shingles beneath a hurricane. At the same instant, hits rang through Daikokukichi’s main control center, an insane hail of shot that had missed the smaller target. Red warning flags flashed up in Lloyd’s mind as an AI voice intoned the damage: pressure loss in sections eighty-one through eighty-eight; damage to secondary base IR sensor suite; minor damage to laser batteries seven, nine, and eleven…
    He was beginning to respond when, with a chilling abruptness, the scene of battle surrounding him was wiped away. There was a burst of static… and then he was lying in his slot on the control deck, blinking up at a gray ceiling covered by painted-over cables and power conduits.
    “What the goking hell…”
    At first he thought the base link network had gone down… a serious failure and one that should never have happened, so many redundancies were built