COMBAT SALVAGE 2165

by A. D. Bloom

  She said, "I’m going to need some practice."

  An hour after the Chief's first, fumbling attempts to build up a capacitor charge off the reactors and fire the emitters, Burn came to Tipperary’s bridge to witness them test fire a live burst. Lightning played over Tipperary’s battered capacitor ring as the charge from the reactors built. Tig kept his face like stone waiting for it all to fail or for something unexpected to kill one of them. Then, Horcheese pulsed the emitters just five times each within an infinitesimal fraction of a second and collided five sets of three heavy nuclei streams moving close to light speed. The collisions happened right on target, within a margin of error on the subatomic level.

  "That looked good," Timms said from the NAV console.

  Burn nodded. "Is it going to be safe at full power when we breach space?"

  "That’s a joke right?" Horcheese spoke from the center of a spider’s web. "I’ve got to collide hyper-accelerated particle streams a thousand meters from a ship I can now feel has four reactors on the brink of meltdown, leaky, seeping capacitors, and particle emitters that are a hell of a lot less precise than anyone knows. I swear, firing the NS191 emitters feels like trying to snap with numb fingers. And even if I do this perfectly, according to Timms, there’s a chance I might still blow myself up before I can breach space. Is it safe? Hell, no, it’s not safe."

  Burn said, "Are you ready to do this?"

  "Of course." Horcheese’s eyes looked up out the dome at the cloud layer waving above. "There’s still an invisible Squidy out there that wants to kill us, but if we waste any more time here, it won’t matter if we make it or not because Hardway and the convoy will be gone. Time is up. Timms already laid in coordinates for the Algol-Mizar transit."

  Burn made for the hatch and almost kicked Rampone and Wambach as they came up.

  Horcheese groaned, "Does everyone have to see me like this?"

  Burn said, "Wrong direction, y'all. You’re riding in the salvage junk with me. Only ones that stay on Tipperary are Chief Horcheese and Lt. Timms."

  "We’ve got to stay," Tig told her. "To make sure the interface and the control concatenators hold together. What if something needs to be fixed?"

  "That’s right," Parker said.

  "If the cherries are staying, we’re staying," Rampone said.

  Horcheese looked like she was trying to stare him down with those milky opal eyes and it didn’t work. "Pick me an’ Wambach up and throw us off the ship if you want to be alone with the cherries. You know we ain’t gonna be that much safer on the junk anyway and at least here, we can do something."

  The Chief petitioned Burn, but Burn shook her head. "He’s right." Before she exited out the hatch, she said, "I’ll let the Lancers know it’s time to hunt a Squidy."

  16

  "Lancers, this is 1-1, invert and give those LiDAR arrays a nice view of the stars." Jordo rolled his Bitzer over to put the upper layers of the planet’s atmo behind him.

  "Is this one of that cherry’s ideas?" Holdout said. "The guy who wired the Chief into Tipperary?"

  "No, this is one of my stupid ideas." This Squidy had played him twice. It was Jordo's turn to get clever now.

  "Lancer 1-1, this is Tipperary," Horcheese said in his ear. He tried to imagine her wired up on the breaching ship’s bridge and what it feels like to have a 375m-wide ass. Shoulda’ wired her up into a Bitzer, he thought. Let her have some real fun.

  "We are at point beta and rising steady," she said. "The junks are ascending on either side. Lancer 1-1, tell me how it’s looking up there."

  "Tipperary, it’s all clear skies up here."

  *****

  The cloud layers blurred past as Tipperary ascended through the planet’s jawbreaker layers on its rise to low orbit. "Clear skies?" Wambach said. He hovered over Tig at the Ops console. "The Lancers said 'clear skies'. Is that code or something?" Nobody answered Wambach’s question. "Explain to me again how this works? I don’t get how this is going to let us see the stealthed Squidy. How is this better than looking out the porthole?"

  Parker said, "We’ve got a daemon running across all the flight computers that’s comparing input from the LiDAR arrays of all five fighters and the junks and Tipperary."

  "Yeah, but he’s stealthed. None of us can see him."

  "None of us can see him alone, but if we look together, maybe we can."

  "Give up on Wambach," Rampone said. "When he doesn't get it, he really doesn't get it."

  Parker didn’t give up that easy. "We compare the images of the background stars as seen from all the various craft. The stars are so far away and we’re so close together that there’s almost no parallax between our views. The stars should look just about the same to all of us."

  "So?"

  "So, if something much, much closer were lensing energy around itself to hide like the stealthed Squidy warship, then our individual fighters would see the lensed stars on it differently because we’re so close. There would be significant parallax between our views. That kind of difference will show up if you’re looking for it."

  "But we don’t see anything yet," Wambach said. "Clear skies."

  Rampone made imitation alien transmissions into his mic over comms.

  "Thirty seconds to exposure," Tig said.

  "Give Wambach the Ops console," Rampone said. "You watch the Chief. You got one job now." He meant making sure nothing interrupted the Chief’s control of the ship's capacitors and emitters. Nothing had crapped out yet, but Tig kept his face like stone, expecting something he never expected to fail at any moment. "Chief?"

  "Everything’s holding," she said. "Time to pick up some free charge off the atmo."

  "She’s taking the capacitors offline from the reactors," Parker confirmed.

  Chief Horcheese’s head hung back on the command chair and she stared up through the dome at the jagged rivers of raw electrons and plasma burning in the atmo as those crackling tendrils whipped at them from all directions, drawing line after line from the clouds to Tipperary’s ring-shaped bow. Each of them lasted a ten-thousandth of a second, but each one burned itself on his retina so that in only a few moments of looking up at that dazzling display, his vision was a network of slowly fading veins of blindness.

  He looked away, but Horcheese stared right up into it with her milky artificial eyes wide open. All her concentration was turned inwards, focusing on the translated feedback from the ship.

  *****

  Jordo didn’t know if it was charge flux from the pinch and all that applied artificial gravity, or maybe Tipperary was just lucky, but on the way out the top layers of the planet’s clouds, every bolt for 50Ks in either direction sought the breaching ship out with hair-thin, mycelium threads like burning capillaries, all feeding her with zap to store. It was like watching a flashing blue star rising in the clouds.

  Her ring section breached the last layers and the arcing bolts clung and crackled and stretched until she ripped free of their reach and made for low orbit. Audacity and Greenstone slipped quietly out of the atmo 50Ks on either side and let their arrays take in the stars.

  Almost instantly after that, his flight helmet’s visor painted a patch of stars fatter and brighter than they should have been. The daemon coordinating input from the fighters' and the junks' LiDAR arrays had compared all the available views of the stars from all the friendly craft in the immediate vicinity, and those views of the surrounding stars should have been identical, but they weren’t. Some of the stars weren’t where they should have been by only a tenth of a degree, but when the images from all the friendly craft were combined, the positional discrepancies were enough to make the stars appear to grow in angular diameter in one, moving location. What Jordo and the Lancers saw projected in their helmets was a tiny patch of sky where the stars looked too fat, too bright. The shape of the region was like a walrus tooth. Without any real range data, he couldn’t swear to the size, but he was willing to bet it was 120 meters.

  "1-1, this is 1-2," Paladin sa
id, "Ripper. Confirmed."

  "Roger that," Jordo said. "Play it cool, people. Nobody point your nose at it. Steady on vector. We all keep flying like there’s nothing there..."

  "1-1, this is Audacity." Burn said, "Let’s invite him in."

  *****

  Tig said, "Looks like they’re widening the patrol."

  "Cherry, goddammit, you watch the Chief. I’ll watch the tactical display," Wambach said.

  The bundles of control conduits feeding into Horcheese blocked the projection in a few places, but the bridge’s tactical display covered half the bridge. It was all shown out of scale, of course, and the Lancers’ fighters were the size of pigeons as they spread out around the breaching ship, pretending they couldn’t see the stealthed alien stalking them. On the tactical display, the Squidy was a blank, gray region, like a menacing, disembodied shadow. The half-meter-long, patch of dim over the deck of the bridge changed directions, heading for Tipperary.

  "It’s now closing range," Wambach said. "Coming in right in between Lancer 1-4 and 1-5. Cheeky Squidyman."

  "Those two Bitzers are about 2300 meters apart." Rampone said. "Looks like Squidy is confident."

  "Clear skies, people," Burn repeated over comms. "Act like you don’t see a thing. He’s coming for the breaching ship now and since he knows he’ll only get one shot, he won’t be using the warheads. Rampone, you get ready to hit that ECM script."

  Tig said, "How’s that charge feeling? Reactors still good?"

  "We’re good," Horcheese said. "Audacity, how do my reactors and engine plume look on IR?"

  "Nice and cool. Like you aren’t even breaking a sweat," Burn said.

  The perspiration clung to the Chief’s face in quivering zero-gee beads. "Parker?"

  "All capacitor links are holding."

  Horcheese said, "Mr. Meester?"

  "All the CDCS command links to the particle emitters are good. It’s all yours, Chief." He glanced at Horcheese. Her eyes were now fixed on the tactical display and the tusk-shaped patch of darkness approaching her over the bridge like a stalking specter.

  *****

  It passed right between Gusher and Dirty like it was convinced it couldn’t be seen. The alien slipped underneath Jordo, too, and headed straight for the breaching ship. It passed between his fighter and the planet’s dayside clouds. "He’ll be in range any second," Paladin said.

  "He’s already in range." In that moment, Jordo shot with fear, seeing it all going wrong. This whole gambit to let the Squidy sail right in was his idea and now, something aboard Tipperary had failed. It must have… It took all his nerve not to call out for the Lancers to attack now while there was still half a chance. Jordo had always thought he was a cool customer, but watching that shadow, that stain as it came, he wanted nothing but to give in to his fear. What stayed his hand wasn’t confidence in his plan. It was a realization so cold and chilling that he shivered inside his flight suit. It was too late to do anything now but go with the plan.

  "Greenstone," Burn said over comms, "Let ‘em fly."

  "Warspites away." Pardue confirmed over comms. The pair of warspite torpedoes flared out of Greenstone’s tubes and ripped across the black on fiery columns.

  The Squidy knew the torpedoes couldn’t see him, and as expected, the alien kept his cool. He didn’t flinch. The Squidy vessel kept coming, maneuvering for what was sure to be a kill shot across Tipperary’s ring or reactors. The Squidy now drifted in front of the breaching ship and waited for the Mk3 warspites to pass. It made sense. The torps couldn't see him. In a few seconds, those torps would be too far away to matter and then, the Squidy could expose himself and open fire.

  "Do it," Jordo whispered. "Do it." The torps had actually passed the alien’s starboard side. They were heading away from their target when Tipperary’s ring section crackled with charge. Then, her three emitters spat out wide and ghostly streams of heavy nuclei. The cone of fire had spread to nearly half a kilometer wide when it hit the Squidy. The particles Horcheese threw from the emitters were a garbage burst, a throat-clearing test burst of nuclei thrown across a wide area in an unfocused stream, barely accelerated beyond 1/10th lightspeed. Those particles were slow and carried almost no energy at all, but they were far from harmless.

  Horcheese bathed the alien with the emitters so it sparkled up and down the its hull. The projection in Jordo’s flight helmet now showed the actual location of the enemy, some 300 meters away from where they’d thought he was.

  The mk3 warspite torpedoes saw the Squidy now, too. They were only a couple thousand Ks out from the revealed enemy warship, and they cut a 96 gee turn to flip on their maneuvering thrusters and put their noses on target.

  Less than two seconds later, both torpedoes found their mark and detonated together against the aft end of the Squidy’s hull. Like UNS Duer, the Squidy was blown forward. Jordo imagined the vaporization fireball breaching the aliens’ armor, reaching the inner decks and filling them with firestorms. The dying alien’s camouflage failed as it spun towards Tipperary’s ring, threatening to take the breaching ship to Squidy-hell with it.

  *****

  The rent and burning alien hull spun down on top of their heads and Tig wanted more than anything else to run, but there was nowhere to go.

  "Evasive! NAV! Give me that ECM script!"

  "No engine power for thirty seconds! Can’t maneuver!"

  It spun at them, and as Tig watched the dying alien ship falling on them like a terrible illustration of inevitability, the fear left him like a rat jumping ship. There was a clarity that came after the panic, a flash of insight that happened more quickly and landed more solidly than any thought he’d ever had. He glanced at Parker at the same time she looked to him. Her face was still full of fear and a smile was all he could manage then before her face washed out in the glare from the alien reactor’s detonation.

  It took whole seconds for that light to fade, and when it did, there was nothing falling on top of the bridge’s dome anymore. There was nothing in front of the breaching ship but a cloud of rapidly expanding gas and small debris. The Chief's head slumped forward.

  17

  Tipperary steamed for the Algol-Mizar transit at her best speed with the two junks and five Lancers flying just ahead of them. All Tig could see of the fighters with his naked eyes was the pinpoints of their exhaust flares. They looked like a constellation gone squirly as they rolled around each other and switched up their formation up every few seconds.

  He didn’t notice the Chief had woken up until she spoke. "The hell you do to me, Meester..."

  "Welcome back," Parker said.

  "The Chief is back!" Rampone left his console and flew over the web of control leads and concatenators.

  Wambach almost pulled out the leads from her shoulder socket yanking on them to get to the Chief faster. "You alright, Chief?"

  "Do I look alright?"

  "You had an overload," Tig said. "Like a seizure."

  "What about the Squidy task force gunning for Hardway…. is it still in place or have they already hit the transit."

  "They already left to lay their trap ahead of Hardway and the battlegroup."

  "They’re gone, then?" Horcheese sounded as if she doubted it. "They know what a breaching ship is. They know we could warn Hardway. I’m surprised they didn’t send more ships than the one we killed."

  "Oh, they didn’t forget us," Rampone said, "They dispatched a trio of destroyers to come after us, but we’ll beat them to the Mizar transit by almost four minutes."

  "And Hardway will be there?" Timms said from the NAV console. "If we open the transit and jump to the Mizar system, then Hardway and the convoy and the battlegroup will all be there?"

  "That was the plan..." She looked at the bundles of control conduits like jungle vines where her limbs should have been. "When we get there, you’re all transferring off Tipperary. Even you, Timms. You already did the math for us. I know where to collide the streams to open the transit."

  "Thank
s," Timms said.

  The Chief said, "Meester, you know there’s a real chance that even if you rigged all this up right and it works, we could still die. You and Parker should ride in the junk. All of you."

  "No, no, no. He can’t go," Raleigh said. "You said Cozen said he was lucky. So he’s got to stay."

  "If he stays then I get to stay, too." Parker said.

  "If the cherries get to stay... Hell," Rampone said. "Me an Wambach. We rebuilt this ship as much as anyone."

  "Send Parker back," Tig said.

  "Screw you, too, Tig!"

  Horcheese actually chuckled. "You saying ESys Specialist Parker isn’t up to her job?"

  "No."

  "She stays, too," Rampone said. "I’ve seen you lookin’ all moon-eyed at Parker. I bet you’ll be luckier if she stays."

  *****

  Burn insisted on charging the capacitors in flight. While an already crackling Tipperary settled in position just 2Ks from the point in the vacuum where she would breach space, Jordo zoomed in with his flight helmet and interrogated the closing alien warships one more time. He’d seen their images painted in millimeter radar returns, grainy and monochrome. He thought maybe it was the angle they flew at that hid the gun towers, but now, they’d come closer and changed their angle of approach and he still thought they looked under-gunned. "Lancer 1-2, zoom in with your flight helmet and tell me how many gun towers you see on those incoming alien destroyers."

  "Not enough," Paladin said. "One, maybe. Small-bore. Near the top."

  "They're too fat. Those are pocket carriers," Dirty said. "Three of ‘em."

  "Twelve red bandits flyin’ off each one. More than I’d like to tango with."