Captain Zala had had the right hunch. When the Qyrl ships revealed themselves, the DSF Volcano was close to the planet Aethel, and with the pirate outpost between it and the Qyrl, there was a reasonable chance they had not been detected. In any case, the Qyrl now had enemies on two sides.


    They had, of course, received the broadcast telling them to stand down. Zala had noticed the plurals of ?warships“. It might be a translation thing, or they had detected her ship after all. ?Only one way to find out.“, she said to herself.


    ?Battle ready!“, she gave the order via intercom to the entire crew. Her primary order was to ensure the pirates didn’t run away with their loot, whatever it was. She couldn’t contact HQ for orders in this new situation without revealing her presence. But if the Qyrl got their hands on the mystery object, it would be so much harder to turn it into space dust.  And why else would they be here, now, in clear breach of the peace treaty? She had heard the stories from the Qyrl war. Even with the Erulas battleship, in an open battle the best they could hope for was to take down two or three of the Qyrl ships. She was betting on the element of surprise.


    ?Do we still have data connection to the Aegis Prime?“, she asked Khon. The corporal nodded and then added verbally: ?Just an open connection for now because neither us nor them have new data to share. But it’s still there. If we transmit…“,


    ?We risk revealing our presence and position.“, Zala finished the sentence, ?I know. Prepare a transmission of our targets, attack vectors and deployed firepower and send it out the moment we attack. Once we open fire there’s nothing to hide anyway.“


    Khon acknowledged and prepared the transmission. The weapons officer was setting the targets, using passive sensors only. It would be twenty or thirty seconds until they could fire them in a coordinated burst. Time they didn’t have.


    Ten seconds later, they received another broadcast: ?This is the battleship Aegis Prime. Unknown vessels, identify yourself and state your intent.“


    Zala nodded. She had expected the Erulans to put up a fight, but now she was certain. Good move. ?Announce when ready, fire on my mark.“, she told her bridge crew.


    The Qyrl battleships answered by exploding. Capsules on the outside cubes of their disjointed structures explosively released trillions of tiny particles that an electromagnetic field forced into a dust cloud that moved at a few percents of light speed around the ships. Dust shields. They would simply swallow and harmlessly radiate away any energy weapon attack, blow up any missiles or other explosive projectiles well outside the actual ship armor, and even absorb the energy of kinetic weapons.


    ?Fire!“, Zala ordered, ?All weapons.“. She knew some of them were not ready yet, but every second mattered now. The Qyrl ships had not activated their dust shields all at once, some were lagging behind. And it took a few seconds for the dust clouds to stabilize and gain their full strength. It took a ton of energy to maintain a dust shield properly, so they were only ever activated when a ship expected imminent attack. Which also meant such a ship was about to use its own weapons.


    Glowing sensors and dancing lines on the displays to her left indicated that the Aegis Prime had come to the same conclusion and had fired their weapons less than two seconds after the DSF Volcano.


    The Qyrl ships disappeared in a glowing clouds of weapons hitting dust shields. Hollow nano particles, Zala remembered from the academy. They were called macrons, but dust was the more common term. Accelerated to considerable fractions of the speed of light. They were all so small that they would instantly vaporize when hit by a kinetic projectile. But they were moving so fast inside the cloud that the vaporized particle would almost instantly be replaced by another one moving into its space. Continuously. And while the dust in front of the projectile was constantly replenished, the projectile itself was eroded away by millions of tiny particles per second. Energy weapons had it even worse. Since the surface-area-to-mass ratio of the macrons was so extreme, they radiate heat away faster than receiving it. They stopped a laser or microwave beam dead in its tracks the way a pit of sand stops a runaway truck.


    The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    They were the ultimate defensive system.


    The DSF Volcano didn’t have one.


    Dust shields were another technology that humans had not yet mastered. The theory was simple enough. But that was as good as explaining an Ancient Greek philosopher the principles of a modern combustion engine - even if he understood if, he would be unable to build one for lack of the right materials, the impossibility to manufacture it with the required precise tolerances, and the fact that running it requires the existence of the entire oil industry.


    So humans had weak imitations with a fraction of the defensive strength, or stolen alien shields that they could use for a couple encounters failing at the necessary maintenance and repair. No aliens sold dust shields to humans, so unlike hyperdrive cores, all of them were pirated tech. At least as far as Zala was aware.


    The weapons of Volcano and Aegis Prime hit their targets. A quickly expanding ball of superheated plasma around two of the ships was the result of the Volcano’s macron guns. Unlike dust shields, dust guns were within human technology’s reach. They would do some damage, Zala expected, but it took almost a minute to charge them up again. A small ship like the Volcano was full of compromises.


    Two other Qyrl ships were hit by iridescent plasma beams. These left gaps in their dust shields like the gaps between the rings of Saturn.


    ?Yes!“, Khon exclaimed excitedly, ?Disruptors! I’ve heard about them. Quantum tunneling weapons. Take that, dust shield!“


    The sensors that could penetrate the dust shields showed extensive damage to the two Qyrl ships hit like that. And minor damage to the two targets the Volcano had fired upon.


    Only a few seconds had passed.


    Then, pulsating beams of plasma moving at fifteen percent light speed erupted from the Qyrl ships, streaming like pearls on a string through space, timed with controlled holes in the dust shields so that they could pass through it. The Qyrl fired back. There was no evasion at short-distance space battles. What is a quarter million klicks to a plasma burst moving at 45,000 klicks per second? Even a small ship like the Volcano couldn’t dodge a projectile in less than twenty or so seconds.


    The first burst tore through the engine section. The Volcano’s shielding absorbed the first three or four plasma beads, the next twenty or so burned a hole straight through hull, engines and the opposite side of the hull, and the following ten or so just passed straight through the space where a part of the Volcano had been a second earlier.


    The second burst hit the underside of the ship at an angle. Most of it was deflected, but the remaining plasma beads still tore a hole in the fuselage. Zala realized that she had been wrong. The Qyrl had spotted her ship and had been ready to fire on it.


    A third burst burned through a back part of the hull. A cargo or crew section. There was no time to check the details. And there wouldn’t be anyone in bed right now.


    Most of the weapons, however, had been aimed at the battleship on the other side of the Qyrl battle group. It was, Zala had to admit, the bigger threat.


    Her heart sank as she looked at the screen. The Aegis Prime was being bombarded by plasma beams of the same kind that had crippled the Volcano. Dozens of them. The electro-magnetic shielding managed to divert a few, but could only slow down straight hits. The battleship was using its macron guns as defenses, aiming them at the incoming fire to diffuse and weaken it. But they were no match for the sheer amount of incoming.


    ?Fire at will!“, Zala barked a repetition of her order, ?everything we’ve got. Focus fire on the first target left.“


    They had lost one engine, but their offensive arsenal was unchanged. While the macron guns recharged, the patrol boats secondary weapon systems opened fire, but they were easily swept away by their target’s dust shield. Zala realized she had made a tactical error.


    ?Target switch!“, she bellowed, ?Attack the ships hit by disruptor beams!“


    The gaps in the dust shields. They could exploit them to get their weapons fire into the target.


    The displays showed several hits on one of the Qyrl ships. Then in a flash, it disappeared.


    At the same time, flashing red lights on the combat display showed more incoming fire. Captain Zala hit the big blue button on the command station and the DSF Volcano was violently forced into hyperspace, with a random heading.  Same as the Qyrl ship they had damaged. Emergency warp technology was the first thing humans re-engineered 21 years ago after the Qyrl war. Essentially the opposite of dimensional shears, it forced a ship into hyperspace instead of out of it. Together with their dust shields, it was this technology that brought about humanity’s crushing defeat, because 80% or so of Qyrl ships would just jump away when faced with destruction, and at least half of them would be repaired and returned to service. Most human ships, on the other hand, were lost when defeated.


    The Volcano would stay in hyperspace only for a few minutes, time enough to get a solid distance. Then they would figure out the damage and probably send out a distress call - emergency warp had a nasty tendency to blow up the hyper core. It really was reserved for emergencies.