Free Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) by Evan Currie

our last mix-up here in Hayden, and that blew damned near every armor panel we had clear off the hull.”
    “Flying her through an enemy ship will do that to you,” Nadine countered dryly. “We were lucky they were able to ship replacement panels out this far. It would have been a long way home without them.”
    Roberts nodded soberly, knowing that was more than the truth. Despite the fact that the ship had still been space-worthy after their accidental trip through an enemy starship, there was a difference between space-worthy and jump-worthy. Without the ceramic panels, the ship would never have been able to maintain high, relativistic velocities, which would have limited their jump speed to only a few points over light-speed.
    Since Hayden was more than fifty light-years out, well, it would have been an epic voyage.
    “Any word on how complete a refit, ma’am?” he asked curiously.
    “No.” She shook her head. “Just orders to report for refit.”
    “Well, it’ll be good to have a slip and some engineers who can check our fittings,” he admitted. “Not that I don’t trust our men, but those slabs are tricky to install by hand.”
    Nadine snorted softly, smiling. “Tricky is an interesting euphemism, Captain. I believe I would have said
impossible
until I watched them do it.”
    “I wouldn’t have gone quite that far,” Roberts said with a shrug. “The book says it can be done, it’s just that no one ever thought a crew would have to do it for practically every plate at the same time.”
    “Well at least we made the history books, I suppose.”
    “Being the first ship to ever flying
through
another starship should have been enough to secure that particular honor,” Roberts chuckled dryly.
    “True.” Nadine felt her cheeks flush just a bit, and she hoped it wasn’t visible. While tactical maneuvering was the auspices of the captain and his ship handlers, she was well aware that it was her strategic decisions that had placed them in that particular situation and there had been no way to redirect the sheer mass of the ship once the enemy had turned directly into their path.
    Her finest hour it wasn’t, not in her opinion at least. Her crew, on the other hand, took it as a bizarre badge of honor and considered surviving the blatant inanity of the situation to be an accomplishment.
    She was just glad they’d survived the incident in order to brag about it later.
    Better lucky than good, I suppose.
    “When do we break orbit for home then, Admiral?”
    “Few days, Captain,” she said, considering. “We need to top off our tankage, that’ll take at least three days.”
    “Four,” he corrected, nodding. “They’ve got the facilities here, but they’re not up to tanking a full squadron in a hurry yet.”
    “I understand that will be changing soon,” Nadine said. “I saw a note in the dispatches about a second tether being shipped out as soon as it cleared the slips back home. Looks like Hayden is going to become our first major resupply point.”
    “No shock there, we’ve been working out of Hayden for over a year now,” Roberts answered.
    “Yeah,” Nadine mused. “Hayden is probably going to be the most important port we have next to Earth itself.”
    “I don’t know, Ares is making a play for their own yards.”
    “Granted,” she conceded, “but they’re a lot closer to Earth, out nearer the rim. Hayden has a lot more stars within jump range, and it’s closer to the main body of the galaxy. I wouldn’t put a slip yard here, but a major military installation is a given.”
    “I can see that. It’ll take a lot of ships and stations to cover this system properly, though.”
    “Hayden sits at a choke point with the alien territory, as best we can tell.” Nadine shrugged. “Better to stop them here than try where the star density is higher.”
    Roberts just nodded; there was nothing to say about that really. Over the past year they’d tracked down half a dozen star systems with