“Another raid,” Braxton said. “How soon?”
“Let’s check each spacecraft top to bottom, top off the deuterium tanks, and head out.”
During the interim, Rodney Bailey tweaked the firing algorithms based upon past performance data to optimize their kill chances. When the small fleet departed a week later, the Marauders were another 181 billion kilometers closer. Their own transit was four hours shorter, and when they emerged from nullspace and commenced sweeping their neutrino beams, they had no indication that the Marauders had any inkling of their losses or the presence of the Earth ships.
Upon their return after pooling their numbers, they determined that each Marauder fleet had only about a hundred spacecraft remaining.
Thorpe pointed out, “That’s still over five hundred hostile spacec
