The Fleet could finally put some distance between itself and the enemy. The AI had decided to pull back it's drone swarms, but we were still under constant bombardment by hypervelocity projectiles.
Tachibana's fleet, on the other hand, had lost contact with the main fleet quite some time ago. The fate of his fleet and that of people hiding underground on Makemake was unknown.
"Luckily they are not very accurate at this distance." said Mei. "Most of the attacks miss our fleet by a good margin."
"I fear one of them will hit by sheer luck and we won't be as relaxed after that." I said.
"Why don't we do the same?" Mei asked. "They are beyond our effective range, but if we set our guided missiles for slow cruise speeds, they would have enough fuel left to make correction maneuvers and hit more distant targets accurately."
"But if our missiles travel so slowly, the enemy will just disable them before they can hit anything." I said.
"Well... Okay, I will admit I didn't think of that." said Mei.
Lodos' proximity alerts activated for a fraction of a second, the same way it has been doing for the last two hours.
"That one was a bit too close." Mei said. "It almost hit one of our cargo ships."
"How long until we arrive at Neptune?" Professor Yamamari asked from the other end of the bridge, where he was sitting and watching the enemy ships using Lodos' sensor suites to gather more data on their design.
"A week maybe." I said. "Why?"
"We will have to evade incoming shots for an entire week?" he asked.
"We have a bit better acceleration than their capital ships." I said. "They should stop shooting at us within a few hours; but for those hours, yes, we will have to take continuous evasive action."
"I can't believe their two ships can pin our dozen warships down." Mei said.
"We can't-" my sentence was cut by the professor.
"It is not the two capital ships, Admiral; it is the drone swarms we are so scared of." he said. "You should know this better than me, having fought them yourself in the past."
"What I mean is, we can break the fleet apart and send a strike team consisting of a few ships. The drones can't attack all of us at once, and while some part of us deal with those drones, the rest can launch an attack on the capital ships."
"You are mistaken." I said. "The drones can, and would, attack all ships at once. But trust me, once we get to Neptune, we will get them."
"You sound confident." Mei said. "I hope that, whatever your plan is, it won't let us down."
Lodos' proximity alarms went off once again - but this time, the sirens remained on instead of deactivating within a second.
"What is going on?"
"Armor spalling. Looks like a projectile bounced off one of our warships' armor. The ship looks fine, but it's armor has been damaged. There are alloy chunks flying everywhere, that's why the alarm is still on."
"We can't afford getting hit." I said. "There are no facilities advanced enough to repair warships - even civilian ships are in a hard situation."
"Oh no." Mei said. "Missile Cruiser Lancer is leaking something. Either propellant or water, considering the quantity."
I got on the comms console to contact the ship's commander.
"Commander, we see that your vessel has been damaged. What is your status?"
"No casualties, but we are losing water rapidly. I don't know for how long we can continue - coolant systems as well as life support will start failing unless the leak is prevented."
"What is your plan?"
"We will try to transfer remaining coolant water to clean water tanks. It will be quite unbalanced but we can configure our ship to run that way, I believe."
"Be careful not to lose the water in the clean tanks when you open the valves for transfer - space is quite a strong vacuum." I said. "And be careful not to poison your crew."
"We have no choice - without coolant water circulation we will die anyway." he said.
I thought in silence for a bit.
"Commander, if the situation is so desperate, do you wish to abandon ship and evacuate your crew?"
"Sorry, I did not acknowledge the last transmission." he said.
"Do you wish to call for help to evacuate your ship?" I repeated. "We can dock and transfer your crew to Lodos."
"No, sir, negative. We will handle it." he said.
The comms channel was closed. I went to the sensors screen to watch the damaged missile cruiser. My fingers were crossed.
"This doesn't look good." said Mei. "I can see cracks on their turbopump casing."
After a minute of nothing, an explosion was seen taking out the rear side of the warship.
"Lancer's pressurized tanks have exploded!" said Mei. "The ship lost acceleration, and is drifting away from the fleet. They will be left behind!"
"Don't stop for them." I said, walking back to the comms console to contact the ship's commander again.
"Commander, will you make it?"
"No sir. We lost all water tanks during transfer and also damaged the propulsion system with the accident. Our reactor is about to auto-shutdown due to lack of coolant."
"Commander, if you have shuttles or life boats, I insist that you order your crew to abandon ship. We will see what we can do."
"Alright." he said. "You are right. All hands, abandon ship! All hands, abandon ship!"
Four escape pods and a shuttle left Missile Cruise Lancer. Meanwhile, the ship's main power reactor shut itself down and switched to emergency battery power.
"Mei, disengage main driv- actually, no."
At the last second, I changed my mind about using Lodos to rescue the survivors. Lodos, carrying the professor and the fleet commanders, was too important. I quickly looked through the ship list of our fleet, and chose the one with the second best acceleration rate instead. In my reasoning, the one with the highest acceleration rate was also too important to risk.
"Commander, I need you to rendezvous with the life pods and take the survivors - however, should you drop too far behind, just leave them be and catch up with the fleet."
"Aye, sir; we will do our best. Turning our main drives around to decelerate."
"Godspeed."