"Point defense fire plan Horatius!" he snapped, and what was left of his Tactical Department started throwing canisters of counter-missiles out of the bow tubes. The canisters were seldom used, especially by a ship as small as a light cruiser, but this was exactly the situation for which they were designed. Defiant had lost over half her counter-missile tubes. The canisters used standard missile tubes to put additional clusters of defensive birds into space, and despite her vicious damage, the ship still had three-quarters of her counter-missile uplinks, which gave her control channels to spare.

At least two-thirds of the incoming salvos lost track, twisting off into the depths of space after the decoy drones. More of them disappeared as the light cruiser's counter-missiles' impeller wedges swept a cone in front of her. Defiant's defensive fire bored a tunnel through the middle of the dense swarm of attacking missiles, and she roared down it, her surviving laser clusters in desperate continuous fire against the laser heads on her flanks. Bomb-pumped lasers lashed at her, but they wasted themselves on her impenetrable impeller wedge, for her hairpin turn had taken their onboard computers by surprise, and the surviving laser heads had no time to maneuver into firing positions.

And well they should have been surprised, a fragment of his brain thought grimly. His bleeding ship was headed directly into the teeth of the overwhelming enemy task force, now, not away, and the heavy spinal grasers of her forward chase armament locked onto a Mars -class heavy cruiser.

They opened fire. The range was long for any energy weapon, even the massive chasers, but the Peep had strayed ahead of her consorts and the more massive battlecruisers as she raced eagerly for the kill, and Defiant's gunnery had always been good.