On the main screen's split communications display, Bartfield abruptly lost the casual smile that usually curved his lips. His sharp eyes widened, and his Adam's apple bobbed with difficulty. He saw the suicidal resolve hidden behind that order at once, but just as he opened his mouth to rebuke her, the other end decisively cut the connection.
This was nothing less than sacrificing a pawn as bait. Faced with the tightening noose of the Jachin Due Fortress Guard Fleet's encirclement, it was the battered Dominion's last possible tactical contribution.
The devastating secondary explosions along its starboard side had already cost the warship nearly half its attitude-control thrusters. Smoke and plasma sparks spewed from fractures in its armor, freezing into wretched crystalline debris in the black vacuum.
The retreat Mu had proposed a short while earlier was simply impossible. With the black Legged Ship's current engine output, even turning around would only let ZAFT's agile GINN and Gates units latch onto its stern and tear it apart.
Remaining here in an attrition formation would merely mean waiting to be slowly dismembered by concentrated beams and antiship missiles, dragging down the two allied warships beside it that still had the ability to break through.
As a soldier, Natarle Badgiruel would never allow her warship to become nothing but a burden.
If the countdown to destruction could not be reversed, she would personally make this ship's sacrifice as costly as possible. She would turn the entire warship into a fuse, igniting a path out of certain death for the two ships behind her. Within the Dominion's nearly paralyzed hull, one last shot from its Positron Destruction Cannon remained-enough to tear the void apart.
**"I don't have time for your spineless nonsense! All Dominion personnel, First Combat Configuration! Push the engines to maximum combat