but

limit imposed by their particle shielding. That meant they couldn’t run away from Yanakov in normal space, yet they were already up to something like .46 C, much too high for a survivable Alpha translation, and if they kept this nonsense up much longer, they’d put themselves in a position where he would overrun them in short order if they tried to decelerate to a safe translation speed. Which meant, of course, that for all their frantic attempts to avoid action, they were painting themselves into a corner where they had no choice but to fight.
“Captain, I’m getting something a little witchy on my active systems,” Ensign Jackson said.
“What do you mean ‘witchy’?”
“I can’t really say, Sir.” The ensign made careful adjustments. “It’s like snow or something along the asteroid belt ahead of us.”
“Put it on my display,” Alvarez decided.
Jackson did better than that and dropped the same data onto Courvosier’s plot, and the admiral frowned. He wasn’t familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the Yeltsin System, but the two clumps of cluttered radar returns certainly looked odd. They were fairly far apart and neither was all that big, yet the returns were so dense Madrigal couldn’t see into them, and his frown deepened. Micrometeor clusters? It seemed unlikely. He saw no sign of energy signatures or anything else unnatural out there, and they were too far off the task force’s vector to pose a threat with Masadan weaponry, but their illogic prodded at his brain, and he keyed his private link to Yanakov.
“Bernie?”
“Yes, Raoul?”
“Our active systems are picking up something str—"
“Missile trace!” Lieutenant Yountz snapped suddenly, and Courvosier’s eyes jerked towards her. Missiles? They were millions of kilometers outside the Masadan’s effective missile envelope! Not even a panicked commander would waste ammo at this range!
“Multiple missile traces at zero-four-two zero-one-niner.” Yountz’s voice dropped into a tactical officer’s flat, half-chant.