Dr. McCloud was growing somewhat frustrated. Every single one of the ten thousand humanoid shells they'd arrived at Charlie with had either been filled or modified to serve as the basis for some other machine; and now she was being tasked with being essentially a factory foreman; overseeing the production of stacks of new machines; humanoid shells here on the 13, which were being loaded with new crew personalities as soon as the body was finished, and Squids to add to the continuing expansion of construction outside.

She'd taken pleasure in helping sift through minds for those that could handle it best, adjusting their initial experience to help break them into reality and their overlay; now it was simply pulling the requested datafile out, plugging it in, and starting to build the next one before the first was even out the door.

For most of the journey, once the 13 had been crewed and prepped, she'd been able to just fast-forward, letting the long, boring parts continue on; but now, she had to deal with an overabundance of those long, boring parts.

She hadn't planned on this; she'd expected not to do mass production until it was time to make organic bodies for whatever new home they'd assembled. But no. Humanity needed navigators, gunners, and engineers for the fleet so they could make the region safe; before building that home.

She went over the checklist for the latest body. Minor fault in the left arm actuator. Pull. Replace. All green. Activate. And as the confused person trapped in their new mechanical body rose up, she was already moving on to the next one. "Good morning, welcome to your new robot body, please step out into the hall, check your Icon for your assignment."

Ugh. At least she wasn't the only one working on this.

***

Commodore Peterson leaned back in his chair, smoothing back his still nonexistant hair as he looked at his command screen; images of the now seven captains under his command; four of them freshly awakened; looking back at him. "I've been studying the new simulation Amari's XO put together and distributed, and it looks to be exactly what we need. We'll continue tweaking it as we gather more info, but it seems clear that, so long as we have hypercannons, the only real threats will be these 'Defender' class enemies. Everything else we can take our time with."

He tapped his keys, bringing up an image. System Beta, where the Alecto had first detected the Defender-class ships, came up on-screen; and the vague ring of Defenders in the star's orbit; seventeen of them. Roughly cigar-shaped blobs, running at higher energy than any of the 'civilian' craft; and unlike the civilians, not giving off any tell-tale radio signals.

"To say the Mags are slower than our ships is a drastic understatement. Keeping out of range will be trivial; but this plasma lance these things have looks to be lethal at up to several light-seconds in range.. even if it's lightspeed rather than instant, it still means that every moment in hypercannon range is a risk. We should also assume they have just as good, or even better, point defenses than the civvies. Still. We now have five destroyers to bring to battle; and if one of these things can handle two hundred and fifty warheads in a single wave... we've got problems."

"The Tisiphone will, of course, take point. The Minotaur, Hydra, Griffin, and Cyclops will accompany her. The 13 and Alecto will remain here in the unlikely event something threatens our construction operation. Captain Amari has built us a pair of Hyperspace relays; basically just a hyperdrive hooked onto a comms sattelite; which we can let remain outside the system and send signals back and forth."

He turned to Amari. "Focus on some of these mimics. You're in charge of building the best imitator you can, and fitting it with hypercannons... just the single-shot variety, of course."

"We'll have it tested before you get back. If you take long enough, we'll even pull it up beside one of these deep-space contacts to see if it reacts."

The commodore nodded. "We'll keep you updated. If we can clear out the Defenders easily enough, we'll completely clean the system before we go. If not, we'll be back to re-arm... and head back out with a larger fleet for round two."

***

During the extended trip to the Beta system, the five ships drilled extensively; knowing the enemy weapon would melt through armor like butter, the vessels had been equipped with a deeper, 3-layered system of shields. The ultimate idea being that they could, hopefully, reform layers faster than the enemy destoyed them; though it was only conjecture that the shields would stop the plasma lance.

They determined that, at first, the five ships would work together, firing a full volley of missiles at each enemy; just to see how well the Defender point defenses worked. They could move around the system, picking off each ship in isolation; and then move on to cleaning up the system.

This plan, of course, didn't even last through the transit into realspace just outside the beta system.

***

"Relay deployed, Commodore. Sweeping the system for the Defenders. And... Well. Found them. All of them."

Peterson sat up abruptly. Some of those ships should be on the opposite side of the sun; and certainly far enough away to take time to pick out. Had they somehow received a warning? "Show me. Keep shields and point defenses ready, just in case."

The central holographic screen lit up once more; showing a loose formation of seventeen Defender-class Mag ships clustered around the region the probe had been launched from in the outer system, clearly investigating the area. This left the Defenders quite distant from the various civilian ships; and only a few light-minutes from the flotilla's equally cautious emergence point. Still; a few light-minutes was vastly outside the range of any sort of direct-fire weapon. But... easily within missile range.

"Shit. Alright. They'll be smotting our emergence in just a few minutes." He taps a button on his icon. The other four captains conferenced into his communications. "I'm designating enemy targets one through seventeen. We have to assume that being up close and personal will let them help support each other's defenses. So lets keep our distance. We've got enough between us for twenty volleys of missiles. Scale up in launch speed for each volley so that they all arrive at the same time, and we'll target just one enemy with each volley. Save the last three for later. Execute when the clock hits seventeen."

Still lingering from back home on earth, where the UN navy operated on GMT even while working on planets with days that lasted weeks; that gave everyone just over a minute to prep their firing pattern; and let them launch just before the enemy saw their arrival.

Over the next thirty seconds, each of the Destroyers spat out a long stream of missiles; carefully timed so that they formed a wave of death, steadily building in speed towards the Defenders; who saw the Destroyers seconds after they launched, and began moving in closer to each other; and accelerating towards the Destroyers.

The Defenders... were substantially faster than any of the civilian ships. Accelerating hard, at least 10Gs, a speed which should've been enough to kill the Mags on board; though a tiny increment compared to the terran drives.

All of the missiles were the bomb-pumped laser variety, designed to detonate as far from the enemy as possible and still inflict damage; and the Defenders didn't seem to be firing a hail of projectiles the way the other ships had. Instead... they simply fired the plasma lance they'd used against the probe. Rather than a single heavy burst, the vivid green wave of superheated gas swept across the incoming missiles as if it were drawing a line in the sky; each of the Defenders detonating dozens of them with each shot, and the deadly spray actually intersecting the path of the Destroyers; forcing abrupt manuevers to avoid intersecting with the beams.

The Minotaur didn't manuever quite fast enough; the shields failing within seconds, the plasma melting a path through her and setting off the missiles she had yet to launch; but the sturdy ship yet survived, channeling the explosions outward as damage control teams rushed to seal the gaps and make what repairs they could.

The missiles were destroyed by the dozen, the hundred, the thousand... only a few dozen managing to pass through the beautiful arc of death weaved by the seventeen plasma lances scoring a pattern through the void. The lasers detonated, high-intensity lasers skewering the vessels at the points where, if they matched up with the Carrier that had been boarded, the 'heart' and crew quarters would be located.

Vivid fountains of bright green, glowing fluid sprayed out of the vessels, matching those lethal plasma beams in color. Three of the Defenders were badly damaged, and seemed to stop moving at all; while two others received only glancing blows, leaking atmosphere but continuing to charge headlong at the Destroyers.

They stopped firing when the last of the missiles were vaporized; but only for seventy-two seconds. Seeming to detect Minotaur's difficulty in manuevering, several of them fired a second extreme-range volley; and the Minotaur ruptured in dozens of locations, the already stricken ship at first simply critically damaged, then flashing a vivid white... as a self-destruct device, a nuclear fusion munition intended to ensure the enemy couldn't retrieve a functional hyperdrive, obliterated the engineering section, reducing the entire vessel into slag.

"Shit! Scatter. Fire remaining missiles and manuver as much as possible to avoid incoming fire. No waves this time... scatter the missiles to come in from as many arcs as you can. Force them to shoot as many times as possible to take them out. Target the damaged ones from the first volley."

The four surviving ships came to an abrupt halt, accelerating at what would have been an unbelieveable rate before they'd adapted Enemy engine technology; and began to turn back; working to open up the distance before re-entering hyperspace.

While the terran ships retreating, firing missiles off in a variety of random directions only to loop back in, some of them dropping down to as little as a thirtieth of light speed in order to come in at the enemies from behind, all four survivors emptied their magazines, delivering six hundred more missiles into the void.

The Defenders fired one more extreme-range burst; all fourteen that were still in the fight working with precision, firing in arcs to make it more likely to nail one of the manuevering terran vessels; and the Griffin lost her outermost two shield layers to a glancing blow, the beam that struck her deflected just enough by the loose spheres of gaseous matter to only slightly melt a few hull plates, and fuse one of her crew to the wall as the some of the component metals abruptly reached melting point.

After that second burst, they redirected their attention to the second wave of missiles; the alternate firing pattern, however, made their defense much less effective; fully a third of the missiles managing to bypass their massed defensive fire, hundreds of detonations sending holes burning through the five damaged craft; as the Destroyers re-entered hyperspace, they bore witness to the final, dramatic detonations of the Defenders, vivid explosions of green energy and black hull scattering into the void.

The amount of energy the beams used should have been impossible. Nothing should be able to fire a beam light-minutes away and draw it around such a wide area to strike a target.

Still; clearly, they existed. As he gathered the ships to return to Charlie, Peterson reviewed the video of the battle. He had been far more confident the enemy were too primitive to mimic a hyperdrive without a sample a few minutes ago. Now... he thought it was a miracle they didn't already have one.