"Can you target where they're sending out those gravimetric waves?” I asked.

  "Looks like it's coming from a hardened location deep inside their drive section which is heavily shielded and armored, so probably not,” Smith said.

  "I was afraid you were going to say something like that," I said, frowning as I looked at the readout of the Volnask cruiser in front of us.

  "We could try to take out their communication array," Rachel said from behind me. “They’re probably using that to jam us, and it’s not as hardened as their drive section.”

  "We could," I said, "But something tells me they have redundant jamming units that are going to keep us from being able to get anything out even if we take that out.”

  I turned to Smith, then I nodded over to the holoblock behind me.

  "What do you say? Do you think you're going to be able to hit them?"

  "Yeah, I think I can," she said. "But XO is right, they have multiple comm redundancies are built into that type of ship."

  I turned back to the holoblock. I saw a bunch of missiles going after the foldspace comm torpedoes. All it would take was one of those to get away and then…

  Well, we wouldn't exactly be in the free and clear. The livisk could still have their way with us, and the picket ship wasn't going to be able to outrun them or outgun them.

  Basically, we were fucked. The point to get something off the ship to warn the fleet in time to save us was back when Olsen first realized there was a communications disruption.

  "Keep working on it," I said.

  Missiles flew away from the ship after the heavier torpedoes finished launching. If one of our armed matter/antimatter torpedoes got through then the payload would be big enough to potentially take out the smaller and more mobile missiles if any of them were launched too close.

  Early Warning 72 gave a good accounting of herself, even if it was ultimately a futile gesture.

  The ship rocked and the shielding went down precipitously every time one of the livisk beam weapons slammed into us.

  Usually ship to ship combat dealt with distances where it was possible to avoid the speed of light from a certain point of view, one of the reasons why the Vornask was taken out of service was because they were loaded with laser weapons that were rendered obsolete when they ran up against a bunch of hairless monkeys who figured out how to use foldspace to bend relativity over a barrel and scan space in realtime, but we weren't nearly far enough away from the livisk in this fight for that to be an option.

  "Do we have any other options available to us?" I asked.

  "Working on it," Rachel said from behind me.

  I turned to her. She had her own screen up in front of her and her fingers were dancing so quickly she looked like the great Spiner himself.

  “Olsen!” I snapped

  "Sir," he said, jumping out of whatever stupor he'd been in. He was staring at the holoblock like he saw his impending doom waiting for him in there.

  "Is there a way to use some of our comms gear to burn through their jamming?”

  He turned to look at his station. His fingers hovered over the thing, and then I saw them instinctively start to go through the motions he used when he was working on his day trading. Not that it was strictly day trading since he was doing it at all hours depending on the difference between ship time and earth time, but whatever.

  "Damn it, Olsen," I said. "Don't you actually know how to use any of your equipment?".

  "I know how to send and receive messages," he said. "Why would I know how to do anything else?".

  "Because it’s your job to know how to use everything at your disposal!” I said, not believing that I had to explain it to him.

  "But this wasn't supposed to happen," he said, his voice plaintive.

  I turned to Rachel. "Okay, it would seem Lieutenant Olsen has gone bye-bye. Can you get to work on that?"

  "Yeah, I can," Rachel said.

  "That's not going to be interrupting whatever important thing you were working on?”

  "To be honest, trying to burn through their jamming with our comms equipment is a better plan than anything I was working on," she said with a grin.

  "Got it," I said. "Let's get a move on, then."

  Then I did what I was supposed to do in this situation, which was deeply frustrating. I monitored the holoblock and I stayed out of everyone's way.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  There was nothing else I could do for the moment. It's not like I needed to tell John to evade their fire. It always struck me as ridiculous in movies when the captain started barking maneuvers at the helmsman when presumably the helmsman was a trained officer who knew how to do their job.

  I couldn't do anything with the comms situation either, or at least I couldn't add anything to it. So I was left sitting there watching Smith doing her thing firing weapons, and watching as the shields ticked down.

  It wouldn't be very long before those weapons started slamming into our armor, though it looked like they were going for shots around the engines mostly. No doubt trying to take out our power center.

  That was a dangerous game. They could take out everything was powering our engines and weapons, yes, but they also risked taking out the reactor and causing it to go critical.

  If that happened, then poof. There would be no more Early Warning 72 gracing the galaxy.

  I only had the small satisfaction of knowing the livisk would probably go insane shortly after. It was a very small satisfaction since it would involve my death.

  I hated this part of the job, but at the same time, it's not like there was a damn thing I could do about it. So I watched the holoblock. I watched as bolts went back and forth between our ship and their ship. I watched as they evaded several of our torpedoes and…

  Suddenly there was a massive bloom on the livisk ship near the back. Big enough that it took out a chunk near the back, but apparently not close enough that it hit their reactor, damn it.

  A cheer went up from the crew in the CIC. I heard Rachel clapping from behind me.

  "Good shooting!” Rachel said.

  “That takes care of one point on their gravimetric wave generator,” Smith muttered.

  I stared at the livisk ship. Smith managed to hit hard enough that it punched through their shields and their armor. That had to be one of the torpedoes.

  "One of our foldspace comm torpedoes just got away," Rachel said. "It should come out of foldspace close to Neptune orbit, and then it’ll start pinging."

  "Excellent," I said, clenching my hand into a fist and pumping it in the air a couple of times.

  The mood seemed to be infectious between everybody on the bridge crew. We'd managed to get one of those torpedoes off. Things suddenly seemed a little less bleak, for all that our situation still wasn’t great.

  "What was that you hit?" I asked, turning my attention to Smith.

  She smiled and cocked her head to the side, but only for a moment, and then she was going back to looking at the holoblock as her fingers danced across her weapons controls.

  “I figured if we wanted to get something away, then we needed to get rid of those gravimetric pulses,” she said. “I couldn’t take out the stuff near their engines, but you have to have a multi-point…”

  She trailed off and grinned as she fired again.

  “Y’know what. Too technical. I guided a torpedo in on a spot that wasn’t as heavily armored to interrupt their foldspace jamming with a big bada boom,” she said.

  I felt hope blooming inside me. Hope that I probably didn't deserve in that moment. Hope was dangerous, but hope was also something my crew needed.

  "Does that mean…”

  "Afraid we still can't bring the whole ship into foldspace, Captain,” John said.

  He grimaced. There was a set to his jaw that said things might’ve gotten a little better, but we were far from out of the woods.

  I did some quick mental calculations in my head. Thought about how long it would take a torpedo to drop out of foldspace and start pinging. How long it would take one of the relays closer in to pick it up. How long it would take for the people working that relay to realize it wasn't a joke and there seriously was a distress call going out.

  That was a big if right there. It was the same problem we had on Early Warning 72. There were a lot of people in the Sol system who'd grown complacent over the years because it’d been nearly half a century since the livisk paid us a visit. We were running against the tendency for humans to think everything everything was going to be just fine forever because that’s how it’d been recently.

  There were a couple of world wars that had started that way with military people assuming it wasn't ever going to get bad again because the peace had been kept for so long. So they lost a little bit of their edge and boom, that was right when the enemy who'd been waiting for a moment to strike, sometimes waiting decades, moved in.

  And we had the livisk moving in on us.

  "We still can't rely on somebody coming out here to get our ass out of the sling," I said, looking at everybody in turn.

  That made the mood in the CIC a whole hell of a lot more serious pretty damn quick. Like they realized the kind of trouble we were still in and they were going to do their best to make sure we got out of that trouble.

  If it was at all possible. That was a pretty fucking big if right about now.

  "Should I target more of their foldspace jammers or go after their communication jammers, sir? Or I could try to target their engines, but they're pretty heavily shielded. A Vornask was designed to take a beating, even if they do seem to be running a hull type I haven't seen in active combat."

  “How much active combat have you seen, Smith?" I said, turning and grinning at her.

  She surprised me by hitting me with a grim look.

  "More than I'd care to and less than I hoped," she said, grinning for a moment and then going back to her deadly business.

  I turned back to the holoblock. I thought about the options we had in front of us, and none of them were very good. I took a deep breath and sighed.

  "Try to hit their foldspace jamming capability, if you can," I finally said. “What we really need is to disable enough of them that we can get the ship out of here."

  "Got it, Captain," Smith said, a look of intense concentration on her face as she went back to the holoblock and hitting the ship with everything she could. “No guarantees, but I'm going to try my best."

  "Your best is a whole hell of a lot better than what a lot of officers at tactical can pull off,” I said, turning and hitting her with another grin and a thumbs up. "So keep at it."

  I turned back to the holoblock. I wondered if we could distract the livisk long enough for the fleet to get out of here. I wondered if the livisk realized she was going to be in serious trouble very shortly thanks to that torpedo getting away.

  If it was me sitting in their CIC or their bridge or their fucking throne room, I didn't know what they called it but that seemed like the kind of thing the livisk would call their bridge, then my asshole would be puckering something fierce right about now at the prospect of the Terran Navy and the entire CCF coming down on me like a ton of proverbial bricks.

  Just as that happy thought ran through my head there was a massive shudder that ran through the entire ship. Followed by the telltale sign of something jetting out of the back of the ship near the engine compartment on the holoblock. A telltale sign that said there'd been a containment breach of some sort.

  Not to the point that the entire ship had blown, otherwise I wouldn't be here to see that telltale sign, but it was also only a matter of time.

  "Shatner's girdle," I spat, earning me sharp looks from everybody on the CIC for using that kind of spicy language.