Zony couldn’t believe what she was seeing. There was simply no way these readings could be accurate. The Barker’s Asteroid station had at best, partial power. There was absolutely no way she could be getting readings indicating weapons fire from a Sentinel-class gun. She keyed her commlink.

“Dunkerque! Come in!”

“Yili here.”

“Can you confirm superheavy weapons fire bearing two six five?”

“Stand by, landing party.”

Yili switched her console to drive the cruiser’s combat scanners and turned all of the vessel’s collectors to the coordinates Zony had provided. Sure enough, there was an EM spike tracking signal going back some 300 seconds. The energy readings were right in the center of the tolerances for a Sentinel weapon.

A weapon that ostensibly hadn’t fired in more than nineteen minutes.

“Landing party, your readings are confirmed. There’s another Sentinel out there!”

Moo looked back. “Say again, engineer?”

“Zony, I’ve got weapons fire from Argent and another ship at roughly the same coordinates! Are they assaulting the interdiction formation?”

“We need to raise Argent and find out! And we’ve got company down here!”

“We’re barely functional! If we start transmitting, we’re going to attract all the wrong kinds of attention!” Moo shouted.

“Argent can’t go toe-to-toe with a battle station, even with her escorts.” Yili replied.

“I’m forced to agree, Colonel!” Zony added over the comm circuit. “We’ve got to do something to help!”

Moo sighed. “It’s not happening with Dunkerque. We don’t have the horses. Our only option here is to get our own big gun operational.”

“That may be the only chance the Captain’s got, sir,” Yili said. “We can drive that thing up there with Dunkerque’s power systems, but the throughput is going to be way too much for this ship’s power bus. We’ll have three shots, maybe four. Then we’re going to blow the relay matrix.”

“What about surface-side power?” Zony asked.

“We haven’t had a chance to survey the installation yet. They might have put power down there. They might not. To be fair, they didn’t need to if they knew they would have the matter-energy field. But that presumes this station was built by the aliens or their allies.”

“Four shots is better than none. Can we target the location of that gun?”

“Affirmative, sir!” Zony said. “It’s at the extreme port edge of our range, but we can do what we need to!”

“There’s another factor, colonel. Once we burn out the Dunkerque’s power systems we’re going to be right back where we are right now with our lack of life support energy.”

“Alright, let’s–”

A thumping sound almost caused Zony to drop her commlink. Commander DeMay stood and drew his weapon.

“What the hell was that?!” Yili exclaimed.

Zony looked back at the closed magnetic hatch between the storage bay and the rest of the complex. Another thundering crash caused the metal deck plates to vibrate and left a visible dent in the door.

“Landing party to Dunkerque. We have a problem.”