COMBAT SALVAGE 2165

by A. D. Bloom

  Three minutes later, Tig, Parker, and two whole service crews watched the QF-111 Dingo hover and rotate on its jets as it tested its newly repaired maneuvering thruster assemblies. Raleigh started shouting from the other side of the bay when he came back and saw the 111 in the air. "What the hell is that thing doing?"

  "I put in the longboat ACB like I said, and it works great." The 111 rolled, pitched, and yawed, turning in place. It almost looked happy. "We’ve got to talk, Raleigh." Behind Raleigh, Parker waved her hands to stop him. He ignored her. "I can do more than swap parts on a QF-111, but you won't give me a chance."

  At first, he thought all the red he saw in Raleigh’s face was reflection off his exosuit, but then he realized the color he saw was Raleigh’s blood rising. "It’s the wrong part," Raleigh growled at Tig with his helmet centimeters away. "Take it out."

  "What? Why? You’ve got loads of these and they work better," Tig said. Behind Raleigh and the veins now throbbing with fury at the senior redsuit's temples, Parker mimed shooting herself in the head and then walked away.

  "Now hear this, now hear this." The XO’s voice boomed in his helmet. "Tipperary is at T-minus ten minutes to discharge and breach. Hardway will transit to the Procyon system in ten. That is all."

  Chief Horcheese's voice came on next. "This is the Ops Chief. All cherries to the bow decks if you want your eyeful. Tipperary is going to breach space and open the hypermass transit to Procyon. Since you’ve never seen it happen, this, people, this is your one chance to gawk."

  A few hundred meters up the ship’s spine to the bow gunnery decks was where the saltier reds said to go for the best view. By the time he and Parker and the others made it there, the show had almost started.

  The twenty-five ships of the battlegroup had already come to a stop out past Saturn's orbit, where a pair of 2000m Paul Bunyan class blockade guns stood guard in the starry blackness. A herd of torpedo mines surrounded the same, empty region of space at which the absurdly large railguns had been aimed. The breaching ship Tipperary flashed them all as she came to full-charge.

  She held station 5Ks ahead of the battlegroup like a burning wheel, sheathed in zero-gee plasma and crackling with lightning. It danced over the 375m diameter, ring-shaped bow section that housed her capacitors. The seeping discharges arced from the ring out to the five spokes and down her axle-shaped main hull. The lightning jumped and crackled out from the ring to arc and skate along its surface and pool up and down its length.

  And then, in an instant, all that zap, all that seeping charge disappeared, leaving Tipperary darker than every other hull in the battlegroup before she suddenly released all the energy she’d been storing up and used it to hyper-accelerate five streams of heavy nuclei on a collision course.

  Five, luminous shafts ripped out of the emitters near where the spokes met the ring and lanced out so razor thin, that in the first moments they fired, Tig wasn’t entirely convinced he saw them at all. But he saw where they collided.

  Tipperary’s five particle streams smashed into each other at close to lightspeed, hurling high-energy spray in all directions. It was so bright that it took Tig a whole second to note how, where the streams collided, a ball of white-hot fire had formed out of burning plasma so dense and brilliant as to defy his eyeballs' scrutiny. It appeared as a featureless white opposite of the dim vacuum of space. It was energy; it was mass. As the streams continued to collide, the nascent inferno grew. The ball of hell swelled outwards, feeding off the energy released by the streams as they crashed into each other from five directions without pause.

  What had begun as a burning point in the black had become a kilometer-wide sphere of swirling destruction until all at once, it was as if the insides of it drained out… like they somehow fell inward and imploded. All that energy…all that mass...it was gone now, leaving only a ghostly, hollow sphere, a thin curtain of fire over a spatial membrane so thin, they said it actually only had one side. The membrane ruptured. It withdrew suddenly from all sides like the skin of a torn balloon to reveal a hell-mouth passage between star systems.

  Tipperary had breached space.

  He pressed his fingertips to the porthole. The fire-ringed, unknown constellations Tig saw through the transit, at the other end, were the stars as seen from Procyon, twelve light years away.

  As Hardway boldly led the ships of the battlegroup and the convoy through the threshold and into the transit, her hull pierced a secondary spatial membrane over the threshold where something that looked like fireflies skated, trapped by unseen forces. The exotic particles splashed onto the carrier’s bow and ran down the barrels of the railguns and flowed towards the stern of the carrier like a sparking liquid.

  The warped and blurred stars shone faintly visible through the waving walls of the hypermass transit as Hardway raged down the narrow passage. That’s when Harry Cozen chose to speak. His voice came over the squack channel, booming out every speaker and filling every helmet.

  "This is Harry Cozen. As you all know, the battle along the Sirius Front has raged since the first months of the war. What you do not know, is that the third UN battlegroup, charged with holding the Sirius end of the Sirius-Sol Transit, has been routed. The Squidies control that end of the transit now. Task Force 223, the combined Privateer/UNS battlegroup on operations in that sector is now cut off from all reinforcement and logistical support."

  Parker’s eyes widened in her helmet. The significance of what Cozen had said wasn’t lost on Tig either. They had a lot of ships at Sirius.

  "Without support or a path to retreat," Cozen said, "their position is untenable. The enemy forces now flooding Sirius are superior in number and 223 cannot retake the system. Intel indicates that in order to win the battle at Sirius, Squidy rushed most of his fleet there and left the backfield open, hoping we wouldn’t notice. Knowing he had only a limited time to exploit this weakness before enemy forces could maneuver to counter him, UN Admiral Ming plunged his task force deep into Squidy-occupied space. Task force 223 is currently fighting its way through Regulus, making for the Squidies home system. Admiral Ming's force isn’t large enough or well-supplied enough to drive all the way there. That’s why we're going to rendezvous with the task force and drive to the enemy's home together, like a single dagger into Squidy’s heart." Cozen let that image sink in. "You’re going to hear scuttlebutt saying that without Sirius, Earth can’t last more than six months. It's true. But we’re going to drive hard to Gamma Draconis, hit the Squidies' on their homeworld moon, and end this war in three."

  As they crossed the Algol system, J. ‘Jordo’ Colt and the Lancers of the 133rd Fighter Test Squadron, flew long range recon ahead of Hardway’s battlegroup, the convoy, and the precious breaching ships.

  The dull, yellow clouds of the second planet rushed past through the bottom of his vertical cockpit. Flying this low turned the atmo into nothing but a blur under his feet. It was so thick and opaque that it looked like it could have been made of windswept rock and sand. That’s how it would feel if they hit it at speed. "Get ready to turn and burn, Paladin," he said. "We’re going after Dirty’s radar contacts next time they show."

  "Need live bait on a hook?" Paladin said. "Send in the bloody Lancers. See if the Squidies jump out and shoot."

  "You had your chance to quit this outfit, Lancer 1-2."

  "Yeah, Paladin." The way Gusher said it, he leaned on the hero name to the point of mockery. "Everyone knows you like the name too much to quit." Holdout and Gusher heeled their seven-meter interceptors over on their maneuvering jets and dropped into their cover slot supporting their forward flight element.

  High above their formation, Lancer 1-5, aka Dirty hung a high guard position, burst-firing her thrusters and drifting to make herself harder to see. She said, "When you fly a modded POS Dingo drone and it takes less time and money for the Privateers to train your dumb ass than it costs to train a rifleman, you’re only gonna get sent on the choicest missions."

  She was right. Cheap to produc
e planes and fast-trained, AI-assisted pilots got used as cannon fodder no matter who was in command. "Stifle it, Dirty. Don’t encourage my wingman’s bitchin’. Like I said, he had his chance to quit."

  A few million Ks behind the Lancers’ exo-atmospheric interceptors, over 100 fighters and junks flew the combat air patrol around the battlegroup’s big guns and the humungous haulers, the broad side of a barn, each one of them. But the Squidies wouldn’t go for those fat targets. The Squidies would attack the fragile breaching ships. After six battles in seven systems, the battlegroup only had two breaching ships left. Without them, nobody was going anywhere and the whole offensive would grind to a halt.

  So far, Algol was all quiet, but that wouldn’t last. Algol would be like Kruger 60 and Lalande. Squidy wasn’t about to let them pass without a fight and the spot they’d pick for an ambush was right under the hull of his fighter. The rocky core of that planet below was shrouded in layers of clouds whose weight drove the surface temperature to 700 degrees, but the upper layers of the atmo were low-pressure, billowing, dull yellow fog, plenty cool enough to hide a Squidy ship in if they came down slow using just artificial gravity. With the planet’s hot surface behind them and the murky atmo around them, they could partially hide from IR scans. The clouds made LiDAR almost useless. As long as the aliens didn’t use active emissions, it was a perfect place to hide in ambush.

  "I’ve got intermittent contacts again," Dirty said. "Something maybe in the upper cloud layers. Want me to paint ‘em with narrow beam? They’ll definitely notice."

  "Hardway wants visual."

  Lightning flashed in the yellow murk below like a detonating salvo. Discharges off aliens hulls? Dirty said, "My OMNI NAV thinks those radar contacts had a 35% probability match for Squidy warships."

  "35%? Hell," Paladin reasoned, "that’s a 65% probability of it being my johnson."

  Jordo thought they were light effects in the clouds, but within a second those shapes turned more menacing. The lightning went off again like a storm around them as a trio of Squidy warships rose fast out of the murk like 600-meter tusks, like flying stone teeth, spiked with gun towers and glowing on one side from all the atmospheric friction.

  "Contact, Contact! Squidy warships!" The particle streams from the aliens' gun towers stabbed then waved, chasing the 7-meter fighters, slashing in long, two-second bursts, drawing burning lines in the outermost atmo as four more trios of Squidy gunboats rose out of the soupy atmo and revealed themselves.

  Most of them were out of effective range, but they fired on the Lancers anyway, forcing them to fly defensive while the aliens blasted themselves out of orbit unopposed. "Hardway, Hardway!" he called out as the Lancers flew between the slashing beams. "This is Lancer 1-1. Be advised you have fifteen, repeat: one five Squidy warships inbound from the 2nd planet."

  The Squidies waiting to ambush Hardway accelerated faster than the Lancers had ever seen a large alien hull propel itself. "When the hell did they get so fast? Estimated time to intercept is now less than two minutes."

  "They're going to beat us back to the convoy."

  "It’s going to start before we effing get some."

  "Like hell it is." That’s what Jordo said through grit teeth, but his flight helmet projected the unfolding battle for him in his visor and it looked like Dirty was right. The Lancers had dodged some alien fire in and around Algol’s atmo, but ‘first blood’ bragging rights would not belong to the Lancers today. SCS Araby’s fighters and junks along with other elements of the Hardway air group would be the first to kill Squidies at Algol.

  The aliens attacked the convoy and led with their biggest ships. The three heavy cruisers took the lead, flying close abeam, narrowing the gaps between their hulls as they came until the tallest of their gun towers nearly came together like cactus spines. They launched warheads together. Over a hundred of the aliens’ flying bombs flew unpredictable, twisting paths, making for the UN and Privateer ships, but without fighters to disrupt the screen protecting the battlegroup, their warheads never made it past.

  The alien bombs blossomed green and lurid as they cooked off under streams of 140mm cannon fire from over 120 fighters and junks. Then, before the hot gasses from the detonations had even faded, the Squidy warships opened up all at once with their guns, stabbing across the vacuum at the fighters and junks, slashing their particle streams in vengeful, extended bursts.

  The aliens’ small bore streams sliced fast across formations of approaching Bitzer fighters and junks. The lumbering 50-meter junks couldn’t get out of the way as fast as the fighters could. Araby’s torpedo junks took more than a few fatal hits, but not before they’d loosed their warspites. A swarm of Mk3 Warspite torpedoes ripped across the blackness, riding blue fire as they hurled themselves at the Squidies.

  The smaller alien warships, their destroyers, slim frigates and other, less identifiable craft tucked in behind the cruisers as their guns sliced the sky with a hundred different rivers of hyper-accelerated nuclei. Smashed and sliced torpedoes cooked off under fire, blooming bright with mortally wounded fighters and junks, lighting up the Squidies with their dying flashes as the enemy closed.

  The fighters spiraled down the Squidies’ defensive streams, firing on the enemy gun batteries to give the torpedoes their best chance. The F-151 Bitzers of Hardway’s own 99th Wild Weasels pulled away a fraction of a second before the first detonations against the alien hulls.

  When the new constellation of stars that had risen faded enough to see again, it was clear all three of the Squidies' gunboats had been mortally wounded. They burned from the inside. Fire jetted out the vaped holes up and down their hulls.

  The three biggest ships were done for. They were dying even before UNS Tamerlane and all the big guns on all the UNS ships and attack carriers opened up with their railgun salvos, but those dead, half-molten hulls sailed on without stopping, protecting the smaller warships behind them.

  Jordo could see what was about to happen, but from 50,000Ks back, there wasn't anything he could do.

  In front of the Privateer carriers, the UN gunboats formed a range of steel mountains in the enemy’s path with the dreadnought Tamerlane standing as its highest, most impassible peak. The faces of that armored range sparkled as the guns that clung as densely as alpine forests all fired their alpha strike together.

  Magnetic acceleration drove the osmium and tungsten sabot to speed and produced inertial gees in excess of 80,000 Earth gravities. The already hyperdense missiles compressed further during their .0004 second trip down the barrel. They superheated into a new state of matter.

  The railguns of the UNS and Privateer ships coordinated their fire and Jordo couldn’t count the number of hits the hurtling, burned-out alien cruisers took. The impacting sabot sprayed molten metal and hull like a hundred volcanoes, and all three ships bled wet atmo and fire and melting ship out exit wounds.

  The three, dying alien cruisers finally cooked off seconds after that, their overloading power plants leaving nothing behind but hot gas and fast debris. The remaining, smaller alien warships that had been hiding behind them kept their tight formation. The alien destroyers now took the brunt of the railgun fire from the ships of the battlegroup while one, singular and smaller ship now used them for cover. It had the outline of small launch bays on its fat, vertical hull.

  "Pocket carrier..." Paladin said through his teeth. He saw it, too.

  "Al-most there…"

  As the line of alien warships plowed through the fighters and junks, 140mm cannon nipped at the aliens’ light cruisers and destroyers, but those little shells couldn’t stop them fast enough. The alien line ran straight into another salvo from the combined railguns of the entire battlegroup. Burning Squidy hulls tumbled and fell out of formation like broken teeth. The last of them closed ranks, protecting the single ship in the rear.

  As the next salvo hit, the last, doomed alien destroyers broke up into parts less than 10Ks out from the battlegroup. Before the railguns could fire agai
n, the debris cloud continued on the collision course the aliens had set. Some of it impacted against the armored hulls of the UN cruisers and bounced off Tamerlane’s steel slopes. Some of it sailed between the steel peaks along with the last, single, remaining alien warship.

  The Squidy ship had flown into the middle of the convoy and now, none of the gun batteries could fire on it easily. Before the fighters could swarm it and the junks could put torpedoes into its hull point blank, it streaked right between Hardway and Araby, loosing a single warhead at each of them.

  The automated defense systems on the carriers fired over fifty turrets at once, filling the space between the alien warheads and the Privateer hulls with a fiery storm of range-det shells, all blooming like a string of flowers in the black. Araby’s system got lucky in the .3 seconds it had. It caught the warhead early and only got buffeted with dissipated plasma. Hardway wasn’t so lucky. The hailstorm of range det shells didn’t catch the warhead until it was less than a hundred meters out from the carrier’s sides, and when the alien bomb felt its hull casing peppered with shells and knew this was as close as it would get to the carrier, it detonated itself.

  The exotic metals and alien composites that made up the Squidies’ flying bomb all converted to high-density plasma and the force of the detonation accelerated it right into the forward, port-side launch bays. One bay took most of the blast. After the flash, the inside of it glowed like a hellish, 70-meter kiln.

  The alien warship blew past the carriers and opened up on the cargo haulers with its particle streams. Fat, SCS Luxor took six hits at once and it was like she’d been raked by claws in three directions. She vented and drifted until secondary detonations blew out her sides, and she spilled her cargoes. The rear third of the 800-meter ship spun away with the severed engines and reactors. After it spewed x-rays and gammas, it wasn’t more than a second later that it blew.