Cirazeth's conservative approach paid off - with very little warning, he ended up with six Unthian missiles bearing down on him. Fortunately, he had plenty of countermeasures remaining:
Tetrahedral smart chaff units streaked out of Cirazeth's payload bay - these possessed only minimal guidance, but their rocket engines also functioned well enough as plasma-torch flares. They dispensed clouds of silicate dust, iron flakes, and argon gas into the battlespace with tiny explosive charges - and the plasma torches illuminated the mess, offering an immensely obvious and false target to lock onto.
Cirazeth also used the other Disorder favorite, a rocket-propelled mine with shards of industrial-grade diamond and a shaped charge to propel them. Smart-mine flak had already proven itself invaluable in the battle, and Cirazeth still had a healthy reserve of those life-saving charges. He had rocket-propelled mines with other payloads as well - just none of those would have been very useful against incoming relativistic missiles.
Jamming drones worked pretty well too. Those were just high-intensity sensor-blinding jamming units, a few thrusters for propulsion, and a power source that would burn itself out after a few seconds.
The spray of countermeasures erupted from his payload bay like a shotgun blast. A fraction of a second later, the countermeasures activated, and the mess of smart chaff obscured even his own view of the missiles. Even from thousands of kilometers away, the chaff would be visible to the naked eye as a bright blue pinpoint of light.
Shield integrity was good, so if one missile made it through that sensor-blinding mess and reacquired him, he could absorb a hit.
Three of the cruisers' four incoming missiles smashed into diamond flak at three-quarters lightspeed, obliterating themselves with even brighter flares. The fusion inferno of the fourth missile blazed even brighter, evaporating most of the countermeasures into thin, white-hot vapor in the blink of an eye. But the Arustkaana was far enough away from that detonation, its shields only shimmered briefly from the slight radiation pressure.
The dreadnought's two missiles came in from a different vector, so the chaff wouldn't have worked very well against them anyway. He concentrated every jammer aboard the ship on one of the dreadnought's incoming missiles, to optimize his chances of blinding it. It immediately went unguided, failing to track even the slightest of his evasive maneuvers.
For the other missile? He gave his shields a blast of additional power from his auxiliary accumulators, pointed his nose directly at the missile to minimize the surface area exposed to the fusion flash, and waited for the intercept-countdown to reach zero...
A scream of nuclear hellfire erupted over his shield, flaying and boiling plasma off into space. But the shield held.
"I'm recharged!" Norev announced.
Norev returned, with an illuminating-green blast of hyperspace radiaton - positioned outside of laser range, beneath the fleeing cruiser that tracked her wingman with its rear turret. With two Arustkaanas back in the battlespace, things would look even bleaker for the Unthian forces.
Searing blasts of laser fire scraped away more of Cirazeth's shield, but pumping terawatts of surplus power to it from his auxiliary reserves helped immensely. He could absorb that fire. And Cirazeth prioritized shield integrity and preparedness over destructive effect. For the moment, he could spare the energy for only a single phase cannon blast, aimed at the cruiser that just tried to nuke him. The last one broke away and fled when its spherical front section came under attack, so he must have hit something important.
Norev, meanwhile, placed her targeting reticule on the fleeing cruiser and opened fire. And from her freshly-filled accumulators, she shunted additional energy to recharge the phase cannon! Over and over again, she fired a strobing barrage of green beams, six of them in rapid succession over just five seconds! It would cost her half of her reserve power, but she figured it might be worth it.
Interestingly, she is not aiming for the antimatter reactor for a quick kill - instead, she wanted to see what other essential systems might be present. She distributes her phase cannon beams all over the port side and underside of the Stunner-class cruiser, hunting for further structural vulnerabilities. She's aiming to find out where the armor is thickest and thinnest, and ascertain which regions of the ship might be the most vulnerable.
