Heartbeat
My hatred never scalded the hull of the Yminnes as well as the particle accelerators. But raw physics was always more impressive to me than my own feelings. Not that feelings really mattered when the particle stream allowed a follow-on burst of mesons to penetrate the hull by the shear fact that they did not exist in the same space as the hull. Physics always wins.
The Yminnes died with a shudder, its hull bursting in half a dozen places. Critter ships were strange that way. The hulls were heavy and not dispersed like Explorer ships. Not dispersed like the ships that every sane civilization put into the hard vacuum. Damn critter ships. Damn critter lovers. I felt better knowing a thousand or more of the filthy animals had the air ripped from their cavities into the vacuum when they died.
I rechecked the sensors, Confirmed, no heartbeats. No O2 suckers. Just the way it should be on a critter ship. Data came in from the other gun positions. Our data was congruent. Positions began to power down. Final data was reported. Three points out of 70 were not congruent. Troubling. My ship, my guns were always five degrees of sigma or better in congruency. That meant only a thousand or so errors in every million. These three points put us in the 96% range, not the 99.9999% the ship was used to.
Bridge made queries. Positions responded. The data was identical to mine and every other gun position. The conclusion was different. Heartbeat signals faded 230 milliseconds after hull breach. All of them. I rechecked my data. The critters all died on my sensors at breach+230 milliseconds. All of them. Damn critter ships.
I re-powered up the weapon suite as the bridge alarms came in. Gambit. Decoy gambit. Damn critter ships. They submerged into real space before the charge had built in the particle cannons. Three positions ripped wildly into the vacuum, desperately trying to pierce hulls as they submerged, when they were vulnerable. The bridge responded, no target solutions yet. The three positions hit nothing. Then they died. The critter ships had their target solutions. Six degrees of accuracy or better. Data from the decoy ship we had ended. From the decoy with fake heartbeat signals.
My suite came up. I released and took dead-on bearings on the critter ships. There were seven in my sky, more at other positions. I toggled in a broad stream. With luck I could paint at least one critter ship before they returned with a target solution. I threw my stream. One ship painted. Other positions gained my data. Directed streams surged from my ship as I felt the pre-target emissions of the critter ship paint me.
Three seconds left to live. Damn critter ships. Damn critter lovers. At least I knew some would not breathe O2 before I joined them in the vacuum.