The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

“A turn-in-place maneuver looks sharper than a formation swing,” Geary commented.

“So a peacetime fleet got used to doing it that way? Idiots. All right, everyone, we’re going to intercept them a lot faster. Let’s see if we can knock off that bird’s other wing.”

With the Covenant ships reducing their velocity rapidly, the time to contact was shrinking very quickly as well. Desjani adjusted Dauntless’s vector to aim for the still-intact side of the Covenant formation.

“You’re giving them a lot of warning where you’re going to hit them,” Geary murmured.

She lowered her brow at him. “No, I’m giving them a lot of warning as to where I want them to think I’m going to hit them. I’ve been watching this guy Black Jack. He does that a lot.”

But he still doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. “Sorry.”

Desjani carefully designated targets for the ship’s fire control systems as the last minute before contact began running down. “Hang on,” she advised her crew, then whipped Dauntless onto a slightly different vector. The difference had been a tiny one, but given the distances involved and the relatively small size of the Covenant formation, that bob to one side meant Dauntless tore through the already whittled-down wing of the Covenant flotilla rather than hitting the opposite, untouched wing.

Geary barely caught the alerts as Covenant missiles aimed at where Dauntless had been going strove to compensate for the change in her track and failed, as Covenant particle beams and grapeshot tore through empty space.

The targets of Dauntless, though, hadn’t changed vectors, making them sitting ducks as the battle cruiser poured fire into them during the fraction of a second while they were in range before the Alliance warship was through the Covenant formation.

Desjani had ignored the corvettes this time. Most of her fire had hit one of the megacruisers, which was now rolling out of formation, all systems dead. The remaining shots from Dauntless, including the null-field generator, had hit a second megacruiser, which was still with the formation but was now riddled with damage. The hole eaten into the megacruiser by the null field made it look as if a giant had taken a large bite out of one side of its bow.

Under the push of her maneuvering thrusters, Dauntless was swinging up, to port, and around again, aiming once more for the undamaged wing of the Covenant formation. For their part, the Covenant ships had finally killed their velocity in the original direction and were now accelerating back toward the Dancers, who were engaging in a complex pattern of interweaving maneuvers among themselves as they headed back in the direction of the hypernet gate. But the Dancers had stopped accelerating, holding their velocity at a rate that would allow the Covenant ships to catch them again.

“They’re acting as bait,” Geary said in wonderment. “They’re dancing in front of the Covies, just out of reach, taunting them.” And the Covenant commander, enraged, unable to come to grips with the Alliance battle cruiser which had been his original target, was locked on trying to strike the mocking alien ships dancing just out of reach.

What had Charban complained about? He thought the Dancers were withholding something, were not admitting how well they could communicate with humans. It’s the same sort of thing, isn’t it? Dangle the objective just out of reach of whoever you’re dealing with. Is that what the Dancers are doing to us in a different way? But why? Because that’s how they do things, and they may not even realize they’re doing it when it comes to talking with us? Or are they doing it deliberately, to get us to pursue some goal they’ll keep just beyond our grasp?

“They’re just holding formation.” Lieutenant Yuon sounded baffled.

It took Geary a moment to realize that the lieutenant was talking about the Covenant ships. It was true. Even though the Covenant flotilla had lost nearly half of its ships, the remaining ships had stayed rigidly in formation, a now-lopsided bird with only one wing.