The Second Ambush

Angelus had already turned Heaven's Gate, Abadon, and Apolion for the quiet vigil, distance opening between his picket and the mercenary fleet he'd just traded blows with. It would have been a reasonable place to let the day end. Akora would not allow him so much as a moment of equanimity. She planted her feet on Akul's Teeth's deck, took a breath, and gave Scintilla the order to microjump. "We'll find the way through or make one."

Angelus felt the jump before the sensors confirmed it. "One ship is masking their vectors. Target locks aren't holding clean." "Then we don't need clean locks. We need them not to matter." He refused the retreat vector outright. "Running from a jammed lock is how you die to a shot you never saw coming. We hold, we spread the target, and we make the DSC spend everything they brought to prove this was worth it." Abadon and Apolion broke picket to close on Heaven's Gate's flanks, turning three separated hulls into one hardened formation before Scintilla's opening volley ever landed.

What followed was the same seam, struck again and again before it could close. Angelus committed his escorts to Resolve specifically, refusing to spread the damage thin. "Same facet, same angle. Don't give the DSC crew time to patch what we just opened." Akora answered by doing the one thing Angelus hadn't accounted for: her three ships stopped fighting separately and started fighting as one, Akul's Teeth and Halo converging their batteries on Abadon while Resolve held the center, shields matched and re-matched to whatever frequency Angelus's gunners found next. "Steady as we go."

Twice, Akora's fleet tried to carve the exit out from under him entirely, once with a gravity well spun up directly in his charted retreat vector. Angelus caught it before the readout confirmed it. "That's not point defense. That's a well. They are carving up our exit before we've even called for one." Abadon broke the lock with a hard burn and cleared it with margin to spare. Neither side let the other settle into a rhythm; Akora's coordinated volleys landed two degrees apart each time, deliberately spreading the wound rather than reopening the same scar, and Angelus's answer was to stop parceling out fire in careful increments and put everything Heaven's Gate had behind Resolve at once. "She's not fighting like someone testing us anymore. She's fighting like someone closing something out."

It was Resolve that gave first. The heavy cruiser's shields, matched and re-matched all night to whatever Angelus threw at them, finally ran out of frequencies to try, and her integrity gave way under the accumulated weight of every convergent strike that had come before. Halo broke off to recover her crew as Resolve foundered. On the open channel, Akora did not concede so much as close the account with the honor she'd fought it for. "Greetings given from Commander Meraki of Scintilla Fleet. Well met in honor."