by A. D. Bloom
"What does that mean?" Wambach said.
Tig already had visual contact with one. "Port-side! 9 o’clock low," he called out. "I see something. It’s moving. There’s survivors out there."
He zoomed in expecting to see a human figure in an exosuit floating out there in the debris, clinging to a piece of rent bulkhead like some parody of a castaway. What he saw looked like a knot of malevolent hoses slowly flying through shafts of light and shadow. Its ‘limbs’ trailed behind it from both ends as it came. It led with the single, circular visor in the alien suit, set in the center of its main body mass. He knew they didn’t have heads or necks the way we did, but there were eyes of some kind behind that visor. It was looking back at him and it was coming towards their junk for one reason and one reason only: it wanted them dead.
Burn came on the channel, "Contacts to starboard. Two more."
Wrigley said, "We’re lucky the Squidies never send SAR teams to look for their survivors."
The junk’s grizzled, swell-bellied crew chief, Phipps, who’d so far been content to ride in the reactor section, now came through the hatch like a runaway knuckledragger. Tig wasn’t sure if Posjic jumped out of his way or if she got knocked aside. "Turret up! Turret up!" the crew chief barked as Posjic bounced off the bulkhead in his wake.
The vibrations from the topside turret hummed as Phipps tried to open a panel on the forward bulkhead. It resisted, and he held on to the bulkhead straps and kicked at it with one heel until Chief Horcheese thumped it once with her artificial fist and a few hundred kilograms of force. It cracked open after that. "Positional readjustment is my specialty," she said. "No charge."
Phipps opened it all the way and revealed the loading mechanism for the turret. As he triple-checked his gunner’s load and ammo feed, he said, "Those Squidies all got propulsion built in their suits."
"Are there going to be a lot of them?" Parker wasn’t ashamed to ask.
"Don’t you worry. Probably can’t catch us if we keep moving at this speed," Phipps said, "but we’ll have to stop if we actually find anything and we want to secure it."
"Wish we’d brought the gunnery junk instead," Parker blurted out without thinking. "It’s got a lot more turrets." Audacity’s crew chief scowled a little at that. "Sorry," she said. "I mean I just wish we brought more guns, that’s all. No offense."
He flew like a dirigible to the rear bulkhead and opened the door of the junk’s armory where a dozen MA-48 rifles rested inside on their rack, waiting patiently for their chance kill something. "If it’s guns you want," he said with a grin. "MA-48 over/under. Pulse laser up top, point seven zero gauss rifle slung underneath. I bet you scored pretty high with one in basic. My daughter did." For a second, his chest puffed out farther than his belly. "She looks just like you."
11
Burn was getting her money’s worth out of that armor, Jordo thought. One hit like Audacity was taking down there would give a little F-151 Bitzer like his cause to pause.
Luxor’s ripped bulkheads, hull, and cargoes had spread out along a thin strip of the larger debris field and the junk had to plow through the wreckage of the alien ships to get close to it. She knocked fragments of Squidy hull flying off the bow plate.
He never thought you could blow a ship into so many tiny pieces until the first time he saw particle weapons and warhead dets and a cooked-off reactor turn a warship to a cloud of vapor and condensing metals, confetti and shrapnel. Audacity left a thin bow wake made of all those tiny pieces until Burn brought the junk to a stop abreast of the region where Luxor’s debris was thickest. Then, she fired the thrusters in opposition to spin the 50-meter boat.
Jordo said, "Audacity, this is 1-1, you look as if you found something you like."
"Lancer, 1-1," Burn said. "We’ve got a genuine tug on the line. More than one. The redsuits think they actually found what we need. Guess we won’t have to airlock the cherry after all."
Jordo’s flight helmet picked out the alien survivors hiding in the debris. Down through his feet, through the bottom of the canopy they darted from bulkhead to torn bulkhead making for the junk . He was surprised to see so many. Squidies never launch any lifeboats. Everyone knows they’d rather die than be captured.
"Burn," he said. "I can see Squidies in the wreckage coming for you. I’ve got eyes on a baker’s dozen closing from mostly your 8 and 2 o’clock. From where I am, I estimate they’ll be in small arms range of that junk in less than 60 seconds."
"Roger that, 1-1."
The two knuckledragger mechs broke away from Audacity’s port side together and made for the containers from the Luxor. The crews riding on top of them were armed, but they weren’t combat specialists. As the mechs flew into the debris and left the direct cover of the junk’s turret, the Squidies moved on them.
The ropey, alien knots of ribbon and hose-like limbs all around the redsuits trailed their appendages behind them as they came. All except for a single pair of them Jordo saw flying with only one of their ten, garden hose ‘arms’ extended out in front of them. "Audacity, I’ve got eyes on two armed Squidies angling on your ‘draggers from their 3 o’clock. Looks like they've got weapons."
*****
Back at Sagan, the exo-atmospheric infantry combat instructor had said (with a lunar drawl) ‘Successful infantry combat maneuvering does not allow the enemy to acquire your flank or the flank of adjoining units.' But out here, it felt like the fire teams riding on top of the two ‘draggers had nothing but flanks.
The Squidies came after them now from nearly all bearings, jetting from one bit of wreckage to another, coiling their 3.5 meter, boneless freak bodies to hide from fire behind pieces of deck and rent bulkhead that wouldn’t have hidden a human child.
"Five o’clock high," Parker said. "Mine." She grunted a little as she took the MA-48’s recoil, firing with one hand and holding on to the knuckledragger’s pommel with the other. Tig didn’t have time to look away from his assigned sector off the ‘dragger’s right shoulder, but Parker must have hit something with those rounds because he caught a flash out the corner of his eye. Then another and another. She said, "I got it."
"That’s good," Chief Horcheese said as she fired. "Do it again." Tig wasn’t sure just who the Chief was talking to after that because she spoke softly for once. "Pick your targets and aim. Slow is fast," she said. "Slow is fast. See it. See it happen. Send the round downrange."
The Squidy that Raleigh hit looked like it folded and wrapped itself around the .70 slug. The projectile’s energy swept the alien away with all its limbs chasing after.
"I’ve got a pair coming in from 3 o’clock," Tig said. "They’re flying with their arms pointed out in front of them." He kept his left hand on the ‘dragger, aimed the MA-48 from his hip and zoomed in on target with his helmet. He’d just filled his visor with an enhanced image of the Squidies now peeking at him from behind cover on a larger fragment when their tiny nubby ‘heads’ and the jagged edge they peeked over all turned to vermillion flame. They were washed away by a flooding waterfall of hellfire rain. He inhaled when he saw it and sucked the one drop of spit he had left down his windpipe. He coughed while he zoomed out to see the stream of 140mm shells coming down in a long, pissing stream from the F-151 Bitzer and its six, furious cannon. The exo-atmospheric fighter just above the debris field rotated on its maneuvering jets and looked for another target.
"Under a hundred meters," Rampone said from inside the mech’s chest. "Three standard, 2 TEU Tensies dead ahead. They’re floating pretty close together in a cloud of other crap." He puffed the ‘dragger straight up to go around a constellation of spinning, meter-long struts ripped from the hauler when she was hit.
He risked a glance ahead and saw the containers 10 meters long and painted light blue on one side, charred on the other, floating with a sea of smaller containers all lost with the Luxor. "Like I said, that hauler came apart clean." A few seconds after he said that, Tig spotted the first of the burned, human bodies floating lifeless w
ith the lost cargo and wished he hadn’t opened his mouth.
There weren’t supposed to be so many Squidies. Even after having their ships blown out from under them, some of them were still armed.
"I’ve got more targets than I can suppress," That was the last thing Posjic said that Tig could understand. After that, it was a short gurgle and then a roaring, like some kind of jet engine was trying to play his windpipe like a musical instrument. The knuckledragger sparked and arced around him from the alien microwave beam. Posjic pulled his legs up and twisted and spun off of the ‘dragger, screaming that hurricane sound until his mic burned out. His helmet filled with white flame and he briefly lit them all like a bulb.
"Fuck! Grab him!" Wambach rose up from his crouch and snagged Posjic's ankle before Horcheese pulled them both back down.
"They’re still coming..." Parker said.
"There’s too many. Why the fuck are there so many?"
"Parker, cover Posjic’s sector." Then, Horcheese put the calm back in her voice. "Aim and Fire. Slow is fast. We’re almost there." She spoke differently to Burn on Audacity. "This is Chief Horcheese, the three containers are intact, but we’ve got a real bad Squidy problem out here. It’s more than we can handle. We’re taking casualties. If we can secure these things, I don’t think we can make it back to the junk with them."
"Secure the emitters," was all Burn said on comms.
*****
Jordo and his cannon couldn’t help them. From his perspective, the ‘draggers dodging fire and debris below drove straight into a cloud of Staas Shipping containers and came to a dead stop. The Squidies came at them from all sides after that, but in this densest part of the debris field he didn’t have a clear shot.
His flight helmet showed him spotty imagery obscured by the debris. He thought he saw the figures on top of the 4-meter mechs push off and spread out around the knuckledraggers.
A brief opening revealed the mechs already spinning on their puffers and maneuvering to get what they’d come for. Rampone grabbed hold of a 10m Staas container with the mighty claw-foot in the rear and gave a burst of gas to grasp another of the belt-iron steel containers and bring it in contact with the first. The flashes from the quick welds it laid down lit up the debris like flares. Jordo made out one or two of the stringy aliens below carried away by fire from the MA-48s, but not enough of them. The aliens were already too close. The redsuits would be overrun in seconds and there was nothing he could do.
*****
The Squidies arrived all at once. They came out two and three at a time and crossed the last open space together so that even if you hit one with the MA-48 like he did, there was no time for a second shot before you were within reach of those countless limbs. It bent its ribbon-thin ‘body’ around the rifle and gripped it and twisted while its ten ‘arms’ snaked over Tig’s chest and shoulders and helmet, binding him and half-blinding him as they rolled and spun and twisted together.
Something flared up too bright and too close and between the gaps in his helmet visor not covered with the boneless alien appendages, he saw Wambach wielding a plasma cutter, swinging the clumsy, fat, meter-long cylinder like the hilt of a ridiculously out of proportion sword. When Tig and the alien twisted around again, the blade of magnetically focused plasma had sliced a Squidy into a pair of thrashing hose and ribbon tangles that shot a mix of snowy atmo and alien blood out mortal wounds.
He got yanked and spun in two directions at once. Then, he saw that nub of an alien helmet up close, pressed against his own visor. As he scrambled with his hands and clawed and tore and ripped whatever he could to escape that alien’s grasp, gloved human hands gripped either side of the Squidies ‘helmet’. Alien atmo vented out punctures where Chief Horcheese’s machine fingers pressed their way straight through the Squidy’s suit. She set her feet against the bundled knot of writhing spindle-limbs and pulled with all her strength.
The alien nub of a helmet cracked and vented more and ripped off the suit. The thing underneath, writhed only centimeters from Tig's face. Shriveling oral appendages surrounded a single orifice. It didn’t open like a jaw; it dilated like a toothy anus. Tig didn’t see the eyes before Horcheese pulverized it.
It took agonizingly long to untangle himself from those ten, dead arms until Horcheese tore away the alien limbs still wrapped around him like paper snakes.
"My rifle! I lost my rifle!"
"Forget it!" When he looked at the Chief through the pale, bluish alien blood frozen to her visor, he saw her face turn white in an instant. In the reflection he saw the first of the pieces of wreckage Audacity had knocked towards them. The terrifying storm of debris came off the junk’s bow like a wake as the 50-meter boat plunged into the densest part of the cloud, coming straight at them. The debris she knocked in the redsuits’ direction collided with other pieces on the way to create a storm of jagged metal and packing containers coming at them almost as fast as the junk itself.
*****
The metal storm headed straight for Horcheese and her redsuits, and Jordo ordered her to get the hell out of there, but Burn shouted over him. "Belay that! Hold position and secure that load!"
Burn pulled up out of the field and accelerated ahead of that deadly bow wave of debris so hard that he thought she'd rip the nacelles off their mounting. After she got out in front of it, she rotated her nacelles again and blasted the junk almost straight down into the field again. A second later, Burn fired thrust in her direction of travel and brought Audacity to a dead stop between the approaching metal storm and the redsuits. Instead of shredding them, it slammed into the junk and peppered the hull with little flashes and hot spots from the impacts. The Squidies that got hit with that wave vented clouds of snowy gas out their ruptured suits.
Audacity stayed at dead stop long enough to worry Jordo. The topside turret wasn’t firing anymore. It was like the whole boat was stunned. When he remembered how little inertial negation that bucket had, it all suddenly made sense. That would have been a stressful maneuver in a fighter with a pulse-pinch. Everyone on that junk had just taken taken at least twenty gees when she did that. They were probably out cold. "Burn." She didn’t respond. "Burn!"
"I’m fvine." She slurred the word when she said it the first time, but she came back strong. "I’m fine! I’m okay!" Every bit of pilot’s reserve left her voice and she screamed over comms, "Get that load over here NOW!"
The topside gunner came awake, and streaking shells from the cannon on the topside turret lit up the wreckage. Two minutes later, when Burn blasted Audacity clear of the debris cloud and flew towards him, the bow of that boat was so beaten and battered it looked like it belonged back in the debris field, like it was really a piece of ruined Luxor flying up at him with a fire lit under its ass.
12
The dirty, yellow atmo pulsed with micro-discharges. It was like sinking into a flashing mist. Burn lowered Audacity down slowly on her own gravity while beads of acrid looking liquid condensed on the porthole. "What is that stuff?"
Nobody answered Tig. None of the red suits on Audacity much felt like talking. Not even Parker.
Wrigley finally said, "Carbon dioxide. Nitrogen. Argon. Sulfur. Chlorine… And.. some organic crap. Atmospheric pressure and temperature not too bad, right here, low wind speed… At about 60Ks over this lava-ball’s surface, you could actually hold your breath and survive without an exosuit for like a minute."
At first, she was only a ring-shaped shadow in the mists, but then, Tipperary seemed to congeal out of the fog. The breaching ship floated bow ‘up’ with the axle shaped part of her hull and the engines pointing down at the surface. Burn parked the junk less than a kilometer off Tipperary’s port side, running parallel to her straight, axle-shaped main hull and perpendicular to her ‘wheel’.
Fifteen minutes later, Tig, Parker, Wambach and Raleigh entered the functional topside airlocks on the breaching ship. Since they’d been gone, Komora, Hongston, and Ellis had got plenty of systems up. They even cranked up t
he ship's pinch to produce extra negative gees, not only keeping the ship at its station high above the surface, but also producing a zero-gee environment immediately around the breaching ship to make the work easier and provide a workaround for the broken lifts in the ship’s main tube.
Tipperary even had a pressurized atmo now and it was good to get his helmet off once they got out of the locks, but everything smelled burnt. Wambach said what they smelled was the crew. "Anything’s better than the smell of this suit," Parker said before she took her helmet off.
Wambach was the first through the bridge hatch and he went straight to the Ops console to get the readings Burn wanted her to monitor from there. Since putting Posjic in a bag, she hadn’t said much.
Raleigh went up first. "Merry Christmas, Lt. Timms. We got you three NS191 emitters." Tig followed him with Parker close behind. "There they are." Raleigh pointed up through the bridge’s dome where Rampone and Komora in the two knuckledraggers were visible running the salvaged cargo containers to the ring section where they’d unpack them. "Three NS191s," Raleigh said. "As ordered."
"Three." Timms said it without looking up. With his helmet off and his head all bandaged up, the way he gestured over his console as he worked out the math made him look like some old-time parody of a mental patient. "We usually have five NS191 emitters. Three is two less than five."
Wambach growled it from the console without turning around. "Three is what we got."
"Three is two less than five."
Wambach’s nostrils flared as he shook his head. "And…" Parker said, pretending to casually wander between him and Timms, "That means exactly what, Lt. Timms?"
"We need to use a new protocol to push the preexisting hypermass distortions over their mass/energy thresholds to achieve a unified anomaly structure and open a viable faster-than-light passage."
