by Bobby Adair
Air whistles out of the airlock and Blair’s panic turns shrill as she grasps her hands over her mask, deathly afraid it’ll pop off and leave her at the mercy of the cold vacuum.
The three of us in suits wait silently as the air drains away. Brice points his weapon at the outer door, and Hawkins does the same.
All of Blair’s animated protests turn into a horrified stare as she pushes her back to the wall. “I’m freezing!” she shouts. “Don’t do this!”
The airlock finishes. The outer door pops open.
Brice goes out first, panning right to left with his weapon.
The Rusty Turd is setting down in a cloud of dust just a dozen meters away.
Hawkins follows Brice out, weapon up.
“Clear!” calls Brice. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 46
Blue grav surges all around as the ship blasts away from the Potato.
“Still nobody around but us,” Phil tells me over the comm.
I glance at Brice. He shrugs. The absence of ships means only one thing.
None too gently, I seat Blair on the exam table in what passes for an infirmary on the Turd. We’re inside the ship’s pressurized compartments, but she’s still wearing her breathing mask, with eyes searing tungsten hate-needles at me through the glass faceplate as she gasps to the point of hyperventilating. She’s shivering. Her skin is blotchy with cold on the verge of frostbite over new bruises.
It’s obvious her short minutes exposed to the vacuum were unpleasant.
I point at a cabinet on the other side of Hawkins. “Grab me a blanket out of there.”
He cuts his eyes at me disapprovingly as he reaches into the cabinet. I don’t think he wants me to keep her alive.
“Not that one,” I tell him. “The ones on the bottom in the plastic wrap. They’ll automatically heat up when you break the seal.”
He unwraps the blanket and throws it over Blair’s shoulders.
I comm the bridge, “Phil, can you come back here?”
He instantly steps through the door. “I knew you were going to ask.”
“Everything okay up there?” I ask Penny.
“All’s good. Where are we headed?”
“Just hide out in the vacuum for now,” I answer. “We’ll have a destination in a minute.”
I unlock and raise my faceplate, and then remove Blair’s mask.
“You’re an imbecile,” she croaks. “Do you even know what the hell you’re doing?”
I nod. “Where did you send the fleet?”
She looks down at her discolored arms and rubs a hand over her skin. “You are a piece of shit.”
“I know. Where did you send the fleet?”
She glares up at me. “If you think I’m telling you that, you’re the dumbest spy who ever lived.”
I turn to Phil.
“Ceres,” he tells me.
Blair gawks at him for half a second before hitting me with a laugh. “You idiots think you can read my mind? Ha! You’re morons.”
“Yeah,” I answer. “When did they leave?”
Blair clamps up and turns away. “You’ll hang for this.”
“Just over two hours ago,” Phil answers for her.
Even I’m impressed. Turning back to Blair, I ask, “What about the—”
“Stop asking me questions!” She tries to pull herself off the examining table, but Brice puts a heavy hand on her shoulder to keep her from standing up.
“The other two bases?” I ask. “What about their ships?”
“Stop it!” Blair shouts, angry tears running out of her eyes. “Stop it, damn you!”
“All going to Ceres,” Phil tells me. “He looks down at his d-pad. Looks like the attack started thirty minutes ago.”
“Thirty minutes?” It’s my turn to shout anger at Blair. “And you were sitting behind your desk like nothing special was going on? Your whole fleet is engaged.”
“Not the whole fleet,” Phil clarifies. “She told them to engage as soon as they arrived. They’re not going in together.”
“What?” I grab Blair by the shoulder. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
She’s not intimidated. “We had to respond, and we had to do it before you and your spy compatriots gave us away.”
“My God!” I step back. “You don’t know the first damn thing about tactics.”
I turn to Phil. “Get back to the bridge.” Over the comm, I call, “Penny, get us to Ceres as fast as you can.” I turn to Brice. “Have three of your people put Blair in a suit, secure her hands, and bring her to the bridge.” I lean over to face Blair, noses nearly touching. “Now you’re gonna see what the truth is.”
Chapter 47
My soldiers are good despite their negligent training back on earth. They do their jobs efficiently.
Blair is in a seat at the back of the bridge, buckled in, wrists bound, and pissed off. She’s been dressed in one of the spare orange suits loaded along with our other supplies back on Iapetus. It doesn’t fit her well. She doesn’t have an H pack installed, so no power. She isn’t wearing a helmet, though we have one for her nearby.
Penny is in the pilot’s seat, Phil, Jablonsky, and Tarlow are all at their stations. The Gray is alone, sitting in his brightly lit room, feeling whatever passes for tension along with the rest of us.
We have two techs on the railgun that runs up our axis—a man and a woman whose names I don’t even know yet. I hope the gun will do what Spitz promised.
Hawkins is in the platoon compartment with his two crews of three—pilots, navigators, and comm officers—all preparing to use their weapons the way they probably haven’t since whatever passed for basic training up on Iapetus. They seem like good people, not one of them complains.
Brice is up front with them. He and Lenox divided our remaining troops into two fire teams. With Hawkins’s people, that gives me three units, not even half a platoon.
We strobe through a final jump, as Phil brings us to a place far enough away from Ceres that he and his Tick are able to tell me what’s going on, but not so close we’ll be noticed.
It only takes minutes to put it all together.
We need to get down there and attack the Trogs. It’s time for the pep talk.
I open a comm to the ship. “None of us planned to fight today—war happens on its own schedule.” I can’t help but cut a glare at Blair. “I can’t say what we’ll have to do. We didn’t have time to plan. We have Spitz’s wonder weapon running through the hull. We’re riding the fastest, sexiest, turd-textured beast in the whole damn universe—”
That earns me some chuckles.
“—and pretty much the whole damn Trog fleet is waiting where we’re going.” I take a moment to let that sink in. “On the bright side, these are the same odds we faced our first day up, and we took out three Trog cruisers that day.”
The platoon whoops and hollers. We have some confidence against long odds.
“Like that day, the battle is already underway. The Trog fleet just took out the Free Army headquarters up on Callisto. They caught us by surprise and destroyed most of the fleet. They killed over a hundred ships—Arizona-class and Beijing-class—while they were docked on the surface. Because the Trogs are a bunch of stupid Neanderthals and Ticks, they shot their wad trying to pound the complex to dust. The cruisers that didn’t use up all of their railguns slugs used up most of them. That might work to our advantage. We have twenty-seven assault ships either engaged or soon to be. By our count, there are more than thirty Trog cruisers down there. The rest high-tailed it out to the Trojans to resupply. Things are fucked up, but we’re grunts. This is just another day at the office for us.”
More whoops.
“Sit tight up there. We’re going to try to blow as many of these cruisers out of the sky as we can. We’ll only disembark to take a cruiser if the situation calls for it. Get ready to fight.” I close the comm and open a private link to Jablonsky.
“Once we’re down there, find Jill and open up a comm link to any surviving ships.”
“Surviving?” Jablonsky asks. He’s more of a pessimist than I am.
Chapter 48
We bubble jump one more time. We’re too close for safety. However, with our new computerized systems, I’m feeling bold.
The Rusty Turd pops out of bubble a thousand klicks up from the surface of Ceres. We’re not directly above the captured SDF base, but we’re pretty close.
Far below us, there’s almost too much happening to take in.
“Tarlow,” I order, “get me a picture up. Phil, max our defensive grav. Penny, orient us nose down. Power up the grav lens.”
“They’ll see us,” Phil warns. And he’s right, once the grav field from that lens flares, every Gray in the fleet will see us shining brightly up here like a brilliant blue gargoyle, poised to swoop down and kill their babies.
“Phil,” I tell him, “you and the Gray make sure there aren’t any Trogs out here trying to flank us.”
That’s our vulnerability. From the sides and from the rear, our defenses aren’t sufficient to stop their railgun rounds.
“Here!” Tarlow hollers, pointing at his screens.
“Thirty-three Trog vessels,” Phil announces.
My grav senses are nearly overwhelmed by the number of ships and high-velocity projectiles careening through space. I look over Tarlow’s shoulder and see an array of bright shapes moving in an intricate dance like a bait ball corralled by oceanic predators.
The Grays in those vessels have already learned the Arizona-class ships are a danger and they’ve adjusted their tactics. Their formation is roughly spherical with cruisers oriented in different directions, seeming to move randomly. They’re flying on interweaving paths in every direction, keeping their rows of railguns oriented outward. They aren’t allowing themselves to be stationary targets and they don’t want their assailants to know which direction the defensive fire will come from.
It’ll be impossible to attack one without opening my ship up to flanking fire from another.
Goddammit!
“Seventeen of the cruisers aren’t shooting,” Phil tells us.
I wouldn’t have guessed that. There are too many slugs flying out in every direction from the formation.
“Where are our ships?” I ask Tarlow.
“Seven coming in on an attack run,” Phil informs us. “Two thousand klicks out.”
Tarlow is fiddling with his machines, working on the resolution. “Here! Here!” he points.
I see the seven Arizona-class ships. No, four Arizona-class and three Beijing-class ships, flying in a loose formation down the same vector.
“Three of the Trog ships have taken hits,” Phil tells us.
I nudge Tarlow. “Find them.”
“One of the Trog cruisers has been rammed by three of the Arizona-class ships. One Cruiser has been rammed near the bridge by the other Arizona, and one cruiser has a Beijing-class grav locked to its hull.”
“Jablonsky,” I call. “I need to talk to those captains.”
“Working on it,” he answers, “but they’re busy.”
“I need a status.”
I’m doing the math. We have twenty-seven ships left in the fleet and twelve accounted for. “I need to know where those other fifteen are.”
I turn to Penny and tell her, “Pick one of those cruisers that’s still firing. Line up a course. We’re going to kill it.”
“Kill it?” she asks me. “How? We can’t just blow these things up.”
“I know.”
“I can go in shooting—do you want to aim for the bridge, the reactors, or the drive array? Each target is half a kilometer apart. We can’t just strafe and hope for the best. We need to pick a point and pound it.”
She’s right. I hadn’t thought this part through. The reactors in the heart of the ship are my first impulse, yet there are three of them, spread over a relatively wide area. They’ll be hard to knock out. My intuition tells me the drive array will be the least defended if we hit it from the flanks. The bridge, if the Grays are smart, will have the strongest defensive fields around it. They aren’t strong enough to deflect a ramming Arizona-class ship, we’ve already established that, but they might be strong enough to deflect the plasma fire from our main gun.
“Phil,” I call, “me and Tarlow will work on finding the other ships. You and Penny pick a Trog cruiser, find its gravity field weaknesses and let’s go light it up. Penny, how fast can you get us down there?”
“Max grav?” she asks rhetorically, “Ninety seconds.”
I nod to Penny. “Phil, you and the Tick have ninety seconds. Give me a target we can kill.”
Chapter 49
“Is it possible they aren’t here yet?” I ask Tarlow.
He’s leaning close to his screens, trying to coax more information out of the pixels. He points. “Here. And here. I think those are yours.”
I see a broken tube, and a scatter of fast-moving debris. “Wrecks?”
“Another.” He stabs his finger at a monitor.
Crap. Twelve unaccounted for.
“I have Jill,” Jablonsky tells me.
My degree of relief is surprising. “Connect me through.”
Jablonsky works at his console with quick fingers as he tells me, “Her ship is one of the three responsible for ramming that one cruiser. They’re going for the bridge. Here, I have her.”
“Jill?” I call.
“I only have a second,” she tells me. “We just blew the forward doors. We’re waiting for the atmosphere to dissipate, then we’re rushing in.”
“You’re taking the ship?” I ask.
“Same as last time,” she assures me. “Three full platoons. Light casualties so far.”
“Get it done and get out,” I urge.
“Same plan as before,” she laughs. “We’ll bounce this bitch through their formation and turn this—”
“Jill?”
Crackles and syllables.
“Jill?” I turn to Jablonsky.
He shakes his head. “I’m trying.”
“Don’t bother her directly,” I tell him. “Keep in contact with the bridge crew on each. I want to know if they get in trouble.”
More trouble!
“Phil, Penny?” I ask, seeing the inertial field blazing bright around us. I know we’re on our attack run and we’re accelerating. “Are we on course?”
“We’ve picked one that seems to have no shortage of ammo,” Penny tells me.
“Over ninety-percent chance we can disable it on one run,” Phil says, “if we aim at the drive array. Maybe seventy-percent we can take out a reactor, and maybe fifty-percent we can destroy the bridge. Which do you want?”
“The drive array doesn’t take them out of the fight.” I clench my teeth as I consider my options. “Penny, give us a course to come at them from the flank. I want to use the grav lens to ram right through their bridge and blast out the other side if the railgun doesn’t do its work.” I turn to Phil. “One hundred percent.”
“Ramming is a gamble,” says Phil. “It might destroy us.”
“Penny,” I pat her on the shoulder. “Max grav. Let’s see what this ship will do.”
“Those attacking ships are being shot to pieces!” Tarlow shouts. He’s freaking out a little bit.
“How many?”
“Two destroyed. One out of control.”
I look down at Tarlow’s monitors and see a ship flying high-g corkscrews out into space. “Which ones are left?” At the resolution on the monitors, I can’t tell the difference between the Beijing-class and the Arizonas.
“Arizonas,” he answers. “Both.”
I watch as they each impact a cruiser amidships, shoving it so hard into a spin that its railgun rounds pummel another nearby cruiser. Explosions follow, and the Trog ship goes dead.
“They hit in the reactors,” Tarlow
tells me.
“Jablonsky,” I call, “hail those ships and tell them to disengage and ram another ship. That one’s no longer a threat.”
Chapter 50
“Strap in!” Penny shouts.
The ship is jerking right to left, and the inertial grav is struggling to keep up.
I reluctantly strap into the captain’s chair. I don’t have the best view of what Tarlow, Penny, and Phil are doing from the seat, but I’m buckled in tight, which I’ll need once we ram the cruiser.
“Incoming!” Phil shouts.
The ship shudders.
“We’re deflecting,” he tells us. Our ship’s defensive field is doing its job, but we still have to fight the momentum of big railgun slugs pounding us from the flank.
Through the tiny forward-facing window, I see a Trog cruiser looming large ahead of us, a web of complex defensive fields wrapped around it in glowing jellyfish tentacles to keep it safe.
“Firing!” Penny pulls the trigger. It sounds like a zipper made of anvils ringing through our steel hull. It feels like a road covered in speed bumps, slowing us and throwing me forward in my seat.
A blazing, thin stream of plasma rips into the cruiser, crossing the distance in an instant, splattering off the blue fields and tearing through.
The hull erupts.
Penny sends another burst, and all I see is a chaos of gravity fields, fire, and shrapnel.
The ship jerks again with another sound, our familiar friend. We’re taking fire.
“Hit it!” shouts Phil. “We hit it.”
I strain my grav sense to see our target cruiser’s bridge. It’s disintegrating.
Penny pulls the trigger again, and another stream of plasma rounds tears into the cruiser’s bow, easily piercing the disrupted grav fields and turning the hull metal into molten explosive gas powerful enough to bump the cruiser off its course.
“Penny, max grav us the hell out of here,” I order, and our inertial bubble flashes brilliant blue as she pours twenty g’s of acceleration through our drive array and we arc across a course change to get away from a storm of railgun slugs flying across our path.
