by A. D. Bloom
"Come about for defensive action!"
Only 2Ks behind the destroyer, the stars shimmered like someone had thrown gravel in a puddle reflecting them. The distortion hung behind UNS Duer like a killer raising a knife. Tig knew UNS Duer saw it too when the Commander in the chair thumbed comms at the same time he gave orders to his NAV. "Oh my god…. come about! Come about! One Eight Zero! All defensive batteries, contact bearing one eight zero, fire! fire! fire!"
The stealthed Squidy ship that snuck up behind Duer fired a single warhead, almost point blank. The flying bomb traveled for less than a second before it detonated up against the slender destroyer’s engines. Tig’s helmet dimmed to save his eyes and when it let him see again, Duer had been knocked forward and its shape had changed. It was bent around a volcano where its main engines should have been. The doomed ship tumbled past the port side of the junk and shuddered before her hatches blew and she jetted fire. Internal detonations rippled her hull in nauseating waves in the moments before she burst.
Audacity and Greenstone blazed from their turrets and raked the sky in vengeance, but they hit nothing. The shells streaked off across Algol until they spread thin and dim, and their fire petered out in the black.
7
"Audacity and Greenstone, this is Lancer 1-1. Do you have eyes on any survivors?"
Paladin answered for them. "Don’t look like it."
That alien played them… played him. Jordo sent all his fighters after those warheads just like it wanted him too. He had no idea if a Squidy thought anything like a human thought, but this one had outsmarted him. Now, UNS Duer was nothing but an expanding debris cloud spread out behind the junks.
"No survivors," Burn said over comms. "No lifeboats; no pods. Lancer 1-1, hold your current position and maintain guard on that breaching ship. We are coming to you."
"Audacity…Burn… What the hell was that thing?" He asked out in the open and Burn must have known plenty of people were listening.
"When Cozen had me flying at Sirius," she said. "Things got pretty haeney. Ships went down like Tipperary went down more than once. Baentz, Nimrod… Nobody ever knew why it happened. There was never any proof of any enemy ship around when it happened. Nobody ever saw nothing. Accidents," she said. "Had to call it all accidents and bad luck. But the pilots in the 71st, the Spittin’ Cobras… they got stuck on the idea that it was a stealthed Squidy doing it somehow… Some kind of prototype zapping their reactors to overload ‘em maybe…didn’t always work, they said, but the 71st attributed half the mystery reactor problems the big ships had to that thing. They said we never saw it because the stealthed Squidy warship was too smart to show himself when the enemy was superior. Smarter to stay hid. Take the soft kill and get away to do it again. Like some kinda serial killer. 71st called it The Ripper."
"It’s not afraid to show itself now," he said. "What does that mean?"
When Burn laughed then, it was just a hot breath on her mic. "I’m no alien psychologist, but I think it means Squidy isn’t convinced we’re superior."
*****
Tipperary’s dark hull drifted in open space, growing larger in Tig’s helmet as Rampone flew the knuckledragger mech closer. Tig and Parker rode gorilla-back up on top of the 4-meter machine with the Chief, Wambach and Posjic. Komora flew the other knuckledragger, ferrying Raleigh, Hongston and Ellis. The junks’ pilots had parked 2Ks off the breaching ship’s side, and as the mechs puffed their way across the vacuum to board Tipperary, Algol burned pale and cold and lit them up bright.
Under Tig’s feet, inside the knuckledragger’s chest, Rampone must have seen Komora passing them in the other ‘dragger some 200 meters off to starboard because he put on extra speed. Komora looked like he was on course to land on the ring section, the 375m-diameter, wheel-shaped bow. The other part, the spindle, the axle to the bow’s wheel, was coming up fast in the visor of Tig’s helmet.
When a knuckledragger had all four of its fists on the deck, it looked like a 4m-tall, mechanized, headless gorilla. Horcheese now perched in the center of its shoulders, where its head would be if it had one. "Alright," she said over comms, "Komora and Rampone, I want synced deceleration bursts from those ‘draggers. Rampone, don’t you go bruising my cherries. Take it in slow. Now, both of you give me a three-second burst on my bingo in...3...2...1...Bingo."
Rampone and Komora both hit the brakes. Gas puffed out in the front jets of the mech and billowed into white clouds that flew back into Tig’s visor and then trailed behind them. The mech under him slowed fast, but Tig’s body wanted to keep going forwards. Tig and Parker and the rest of the redsuits held on and tried not to do what Chief Horcheese did.
Chief Horcheese jumped. When the knuckledragger under her slowed, she launched herself at the breaching ship. Once you got used to her eyes, it was easy to forget how much augmentation the Chief had and how much of her was machine. For the first moments of her solo flight, the sight of Operations Chief Evelyn Horcheese rocketing ahead of them as she hurtled towards Tipperary’s steel flanks at 50m/sec was enough to make Tig’s knot pucker with sympathetic fear. It was reflex. If you saw someone in an exosuit coming in for a landing that hot, it didn’t matter whether or not they’d done it on purpose because they were about to get spammed against the hull.
Tig saw her give one gas burst off the slim-jim belt for attitude control. "Landing in 5," she said. Horcheese was a hundred meters ahead of the mech when she hit the hull and landed feet first. She touched down next to the closed doors of the breaching ship’s one small bay and if the force of the landing was any strain on her mechanical legs or her reinforced skeleton, she didn’t show it beyond an involuntary grunt over local comms. The impact with the hull came through her machine limbs and into her suit and shook the air around her mic so they all heard her land.
Her red exosuit clung motionless against the darkened hull for a full second after that, but by the time Rampone hit the jets again to slow the ‘dragger to under a meter per second, Horcheese had found the exterior interface panel, punched in access codes, and begun to open the bay doors on the power from her own suit.
Rampone piloted them into the tiny, pitch-black bay, flying the hulking knuckledragger between a pair of sleek longboats while the quintuple circles of the mech’s five, forward floodlights grew smaller and smaller on the interior bulkhead. Rampone lifted the knuckledragger’s arms and spread its three-fingered claws. "Brace for contact," said Rampone, just before he puffed the gas one last, little burst and set down so soft he didn’t even scratch the finish on the bulkhead.
"Tipperary has a crew of a dozen reactor weenies and three bridge officers," the Chief said. "I sent Raleigh and the other team to the bridge. Rampone, I want you to take the 'dragger and ride Posjic around to survey the exterior. Wambach, Meester, Parker, you’re going with me to reactor control."
On the other side of the disabled breaching ship’s airlocks there was no atmospheric pressure, but the darkness was thick like a fog. The beams from his suit lights seemed to dim more than they should after a just a few meters. He didn’t see any damage as he pushed off the bulkhead and followed Horcheese’s floating feet down the spartan steel corridor, but once the Chief wrestled the hatch open that led to the ship’s main passageway, all he saw was charred metal in his helmet lights. Parker panned up and down the long, 15-meter tube. The up and down lifts had been bent off-track and the surface of the metal had been flash-melted. In places, laminate coatings had bubbled up in the heat and now, it looked more like the interior of a cave than a ship. Chief Horcheese pushed off the hatch and flew down into the blackness.
"What the hell did this?" he said as he followed. "It looks like a warhead breached the inner hull and flooded the decks with plasma."
Wambach said, "The reactor vented into the ship before they ejected it."
"They had some kind of emergency shunts didn't they?"
"Yeah, well," Horcheese said. "Looks like they weren’t enough."
They passed a few hatches
, blown out and charred on both sides, but Horcheese kept going down until she reached the bottom of the shaft, almost halfway down the axle section of the hull. "This should be reactor control," she said as she paused at the blown out hatches there before entering.
Parker said, "The reactor engineers were in there?"
"Don’t worry, cherry." Wambach grinned in his helmet lights as he passed her inverted. "Bodies prolly burned up."
The inside of the pentagonal control section had been flash-melted like the tube outside. It had a command chair, raised, like on a ship’s bridge. The consoles set around it had been turned to a blackened amalgam of metal and synthetics. Where the terminals set in the walls had burned, they left niches half-filled with amorphous remains.
The hole melted through the deck where the number one reactor had vented itself was less than a meter wide. Tig shined his suit lights down there and saw through two decks of shielding. After that, what he saw must have been the inside of a fusion chamber itself because the beams from his suit almost disappeared in there.
"Take a look at this," Wambach said. Tig turned to his left and looked where Wambach’s lights shined, up the bulkhead, high up over the hatch they’d come in.
They looked like the shadows of people cast high up on the scorched steel walls.
"The hell is that?" Parker said as she shined her helmet lights on them.
"Those are the reactor tenders who were in here. That’s where their suits fused with the bulkhead in the fire. If we wanna send home what’s left of them we’re gonna have to cut away the bulkhead."
He glanced at Parker to see she’d turned green.
"Quit spooking my cherries, Wambach. Get over here. If number One blew this way, towards the bow, then there should still be four, serviceable reactors in this stack. Maybe we can run ‘em from the bridge, but I want local control from here first. Get me an interface."
Wambach looked around the pentagonal control room at the blackened and crackled consoles. "You’re kidding, right? I mean, everything in here is melted."
"Then whip out the cutzall and start hacking away the consoles. Data feeds under ‘em will still be good. I don’t care what you plug ‘em into. Just get me an interface with these fusion reactors. Parker will help you. She’s an ESys."
Tig said, "I’ve got plenty of ex-" The Chief held up her hand to stop him from talking and her eyes shifted off to the side like she was listening.
"That was Raleigh on another channel," she said. "You and me are going to the upper decks, Mr. Meester. They found a survivor. A company officer."
8
The bridge was intact. Raleigh must have patched into their batteries because he’d got power hooked up and the lights were on. With the exception of the raised command chair in the center and all the extra consoles to run the ship’s more unique systems, it looked more like an observation deck than a command deck. The diamond-pane crystal dome over his head was stronger than the belt-iron-steel hull, but the fact that it extended all the way down to the deck made being on the bridge almost like being outside again. The ring section encircled the command deck at its center like a low, unbroken ridge and the ship’s five, reverse-engineered, alien particle stream emitters jutted up off it like stumpy towers.
"He’s over there," Raleigh said, pointing his chin to the black exosuit slumped over the NAV console. "That there is Lieutenant Timms. He does the math."
"What?"
"You’ll see."
"I already told your man what happened," Timms said. His voice was quiet and flat. He had blood on the inside of his visor and when he did finally lift his head from the console and look up, his face was half covered in it.
Chief Horcheese took the man’s helmet in her hands and tried to get a good view inside. "Headwound."
"It’s not…it doesn’t matter," he said. "It’s mostly a nosebleed. Minor concussion at most. I can get treated for it when we get back." Timms’ eyes shifted and when Tig followed them he saw the black exosuit near the deck on the far side of the consoles. Someone had laid the body out respectfully, but it had drifted sideways. The visor was nothing but purple-red with dark patches inside and he looked away as soon as he saw it.
"That’s Commander Elogin," Timms said. He opened the bridge hatch after the attack was over. He went through into the tube and Liu was about to follow him when it happened. When the reactors went nuts. He was about to go down there when the plasma hit. The hatch slammed shut and blew him back up into the dome overhead so fast I didn’t see him until he was bouncing off the deck. He’s spam now."
"You’re the only survivor we’ve found so far."
Timms nodded like he’d expected that. "This ship is built for one thing and it isn’t survivability."
"What happened, Mr. Timms?"
"I don’t know. Really. I don’t know anything."
"You’re a lieutenant on this ship. You’re a bridge officer."
"I do the math."
"What?"
"For the hypermass transit calculations. I do the math. I have to pretend steer the stupid ship, too, because Staas Company only wanted three, non-union bridge officers. It's mostly auto-pilot. I’m supposed to be doing my doctorate, but they wanted Noondie Hypermass Physics specialists for this and there aren’t more than two or three dozen in the whole world…"
"The accident," Horcheese said. "Focus, Mr. Timms."
"After it happened, I called out, but the whole battlegroup, the whole convoy sailed on past like I wasn’t even here."
"Your suit radio can’t break out of the shielding on this ship."
"Raleigh told me some kind of stealthed Squidy warship got the destroyer that came with us."
"Uh-huh." Horcheese looked up and out the dome at the dirty yellow clouds of the 2nd planet, some 700,000Ks out as she called down to Wambach in the reactor control center. "Give me good news, Wambach. I want good news."
"I got good news. I got great news. Tapped into the feeds using the pd-119ac and an interface daemon fro-"
"Faster, Wams."
"You’re going to have a fully lit reactor in ten minutes. Don’t complain because it’s only one. I got you power. And if you can manage to get all the hull breaches sealed, then we can have atmo in here in fifteen."
"I take back everything I said about you, Wambach. Raleigh… what’s the current state of this bucket's engines?"
Raleigh’s ugly mug looked over from the Ops console. "Engines check out fine from these diagnostics. Give me ten minutes and we can move. Slowly, but we can move."
"Lieutenant," Chief Horcheese said, "we are going to hide your ship. And then, we are going to fix it."
Timms stared at her like she wasn’t there. "Okay. Do whatever you want." He must have been in shock.
"I’m going to need your help." His eyes began to wander to the stars out the top of the dome. "The manuals for this ship and these systems are restricted material," the Chief said. "We’ve never seen some of this stuff up close before. I need you to help me understand the damage to this ship’s systems and tell me if Tipperary can breach space."
"I told you. I just do the calculations for the transit targeting. I just figure out where to collide the streams. Math... I just plot microchanges in interstellar transit point locations. I don’t know about anything else."
*****
Jordo and Paladin ripped past Tipperary and the junks keeping station alongside her. Out through the starboard side of his cockpit, Holdout and Gusher turned to starboard and pointed their engines at him. The glare from their exhaust spoiled the deep IR readings all around them.
"Every time I tune my array down low enough that we might get some kind of emission from that Squidy, all I get is noise from Algol’s flares or our own fighters."
"Burn said we have to be right behind him to even catch a whiff of his engine heat."
"Maybe we should just go active with the radar and the LiDAR."
"That Squidy’ll just lens the ping around his hull and if there�
�s any more of ‘em hanging around, that’ll call ‘em to us. No," Jordo said.
"Aliens I can fucking see to fucking shoot. Is that too much to ask?"
The new, high-energy emissions from the far side of the Algol system were detected by their 151s and the arrays on the Lancers’ flight helmets. Projected in their visors, it was quite a light show and it was one the Lancers knew well by now. The opening hypermass transit was clear on the other side of the system, but there was no mistaking it. X-rays jetted in the first seconds of the terminus’ bloom. Then came the starburst gammas and the fiery exotic particles. And then, when the transit was open, out came the Squidies.
"Are those cruisers or big carriers?" Dirty said, "They’re so far away I can’t tell."
The Squidies were a billion Ks out on the other side of the system where Algol’s light was dimmer. Jordo couldn’t make out the gun towers very well. Illuminated mostly by the radiation from the transit, the image of the alien vessels his flight helmet could produce wasn’t detailed. The alien warships looked like long, chiseled tusks, trailing fire in thin streams as they steamed into regular space and emerged.
"Nine, ten," Holdup counted.
"You’re going to be at that a while," Paladin told her. "I got a bad feeling there’s plenty more."
"It’s a whole, alien armada," Dirty said. "They’re gunning for our battlegroup. It’s a trap for Hardway and the convoy."
"They’ll never catch up with Hardway and the rest of them."
Jordo said, "They won’t have to. The aliens will transit from here to Eta Ursae or Beta Andromedae and cut Hardway off. Yeah. They’ll go to Beta Andromedae and ambush the battlegroup and the convoy when they come out of the transit from Mizar. The enemy isn’t as thin here as everyone thinks. It’s a set up. If Hardway doesn’t get a warning they’re being herded into a trap, they’re as good as dusted."
"I guess we’re not the only ones Squidy fooled," Gusher said. Knowing that didn’t make Jordo feel much better.
