by A. D. Bloom
"More movement," his XO, Whipple said. "The other four Ekkai battleships escorting the Imperium vessel are coming our to meet us now. They'll be in ra-" Guerrero's bridge shook once and then once again as two of them demonstrated they were already in range. "Now," Whipple said as the other Ekkai battleships announced themselves, too.
"Bridge to gun commander," his XO said. "Any reports of damage?"
"None, sir."
From the ops console, one of the warrant officers - Jarvis said, "Our destroyer squadron is scoring hits. They claim to have disabled one of the six battleships. We've lost UNS Johannesburg."
Whipple said, "Our whisker array can see a total of six gunboats moving for Hardway now."
"Steady as she goes."
The next hit to Guerrero shocked the inertial negation system for a moment and made Chun glad he'd strapped in. "All guns still reporting they're ready to fire," his XO pleaded. "Captain?"
Chun said, "Open the ports." Surrounding the scarred shield of her bow plate, the sixteen monumental gunports withdrew to expose barrels big enough to fly a junk down and a sets of magnetic acceleration rings so powerful that if they weren't shielded, they'd rip the iron from the crew's blood and twist the ship inside out. "Coordinated fire, please, Mr. Whipple. I want to make an example out of that leading Ekkai vessel."
In a few seconds, thunder rumbled through the deck. "Salvo out," Whipple said. "Impact in five..."
Guerrero shuddered again under fire.
"Impact. Three solid hits on the leading Ekkai battleship!" Whipple calmed his voice as he narrated what Chun could see from the images projected over the tactical console. "It's jetting plasma out two hull breaches. Engines and guns have gone dark. It's out of action - at least for now."
"Target the next ship when ready," said Chun.
"The last of the hunter-killers and gunboats are now all on course to intercept the carriers," said Lt. Pied from Ops.
"This is the XO. All Banjo flight elements will prepare for separation on my mark."
"Not yet!" Chun said. "Not until the gunboats actually engage Hardway..."
"Captain, Hardway and Doxy are going to get creamed. Those five monitors they've got can't protect them. They could take on a few hunter-killers and one or two gunboats, but they won't be able to hold out against this many ships."
Chun said, "Stop worrying about the pirates and let those Ekkai have another salvo before the Imperium ship opens up on us."
Whipple pointed at the remaining battleships over his console as the formation began to turn. "They're breaking away. They're making for the carriers."
"And?" said Chun. He knew what was coming; the Ekkai were making way for something bigger.
"The Imperium ship is now moving in our direction. It's projecting a magnetic loop at us."
"Can you confirm it has a targeting lock?" said Chun.
"Confirmed!" said Evans at Ops. "Our outer hull is getting charged with an electron stream...It just locked on us."
They all remembered the swirling, kilometers-wide plasmoid weapon that could snap a ship's spine and flay its outer and inner hull in a single blast of fast-moving, high-density plasma. "Show me our enemy, Mr. Whipple."
His XO enlarged the projection of the 16km-tall Imperium ship. The great spires that stabbed through its heart in fourteen directions flared and flashed at their tips on the side facing the UN battleship. The high density plasma that erupted from its towers' peaks was only a short-lived streak on the projection. "It fired. Incoming salvo...now...75 seconds to impact." Even this early he could see the arms beginning to form as the ball of plasma spun around the magnetic line projected by the Imperium ship. It hurtled at Guerrero and burned a blue-shifted, verdant hue across five Ks of space.
"All tubes, prepare to fire disruption salvos," Whipple said.
"Enemy is continuing to close," said Pied.
Chun gripped the arms of the command chair. "Helm, set an intercept course and continually correct for maximally decreasing range and bearing to the Imperium ship, please."
His XO said, "Recalculating as we accelerate... enemy plasmoid now 63 seconds to impact."
SCS Doxy
In front of Garlan's command chair and slightly to port, Singh leaned to one side of the NAV console, unconsciously mimicking the motion of the Doxy as he vectored her thrust to starboard, trying to break the uncomfortable line of sight they had with the squadrons of Ekkai hunter-killers and the gunboats close behind. "Keep going, Singh...more..." Garlan said. "I'm still looking right down their barrels. They're going to open with the big beams on their noses any second."
"Have you looked at our ship lately?" Singh said. "You can throw all the bloody inertial negation you want at the Doxy and it won't change the fact that we're more than three times our original mass. She doesn't move like she used to, Skipper."
Past Hardway in front of them and not nearly far enough away, the space between the Privateer ships and the Ekkai flashed with small detonations as the alien gunners occupied themselves with clearing the sky of the hundreds of missiles the Shediri had launched to greet them. Soon the enemy gunners on those ships would turn their beams to the carriers.
The sense of relief they all felt when Singh finally managed to put Hardway's bulk between them and the Ekkai again was palpable. "That's looking better, Singh." said Garlan. The carrier now eclipsed the detonation flashes. They made it look like a stuttering sun was rising behind her. The carrier opened up with her bow guns and her smaller midships batteries at the same time the squadron of five monitors behind them fired. Colt and her sister ships sent shining, streaking blurs of osmium and tungsten five times more powerful than Hardway's salvo. After the peppering flashes of the carrier's turreted guns on the Ekkai hulls, the impact of the monitors' big-bore sabot lit up the vacuum ten times brighter and turned the carrier to a silhouette.
Garlan was able to see it with his own eyes as a pair of hunter-killers fell out of formation and tumbled upwards into view over the carrier with plumes of firestorm erupting from the breaches where they'd been holed. Pieces of their broken fins drifted with them, spraying hot metal and sparking with discharge.
A thousand little beams savaged the Shediri swarm and the Sky Jacks with a thick dazzle of fast-waving rays, but the hunter-killer squadrons' main guns all targeted Hardway. She shot plumes of eye-searing bright spray where they raked her and through it Garlan saw a whole squadron coming for her in echelon formation with all their batteries firing. The bow plate spewed melted armor and chitin they'd repaired with shattered and blew off her in all directions. Hardway didn't slow and neither did Doxy, but material the aliens blasted off Devlin's ship impacted on the bow faces of Garlan's command section and the main hull behind it. The deck shook under his feet.
Graves enlarged what the arrays could see. At Doxy's two o' clock low, thousands of Ekkai beams from all the small turrets on the Ekkai's gunboats stitched space nearly solid with radiating gamma beams. Once they'd hunted down the Shediri's missiles and burned the clouds of them away, every one of those beams stabbed out at a raider. The bugs' light chitin armor flared and burned purple before their small hulls cracked.
"Here they come!"
"It's our turn now," Garlan said.
The Ekkai turrets looked different when they were pointed right at you. They sparkled and winked and as the rays fired, they flashed wide across his field of view. Internal shock waves rocked Doxy hard as the first of the beams scored the flat bow of their ship's hull next to the command module and clawed a molten trench into the Shediri superstructure above. Doxy trembled in her bones.
"Our engines are offline," Singh said.
"Carnaby!" he shouted over comms.
"The engines! I know; I know!"
"How long?"
"I don't know! Fuck off!" Doxy shook again, and Carnaby came back on the line. "Five minutes and I can give you maneuvering thrusters. Maybe!"
Beams raked up the outer hull of the command section spraying orange ac
ross the bridge windows. Melted hull spattered and cooled on them like mud. "I've lost comms and data-link with Hardway..." said Graves.
"Along with radar and LiDAR," Annie said. "The connection to our arrays is down. Switching over to secondaries..."
The beams of an incoming hunter-killer slashed at the flight decks, and Garlan saw pieces of them blown out into the black, but while his ship shuddered, the bridge windows filled with streaking trails of blue plasma ripping across the Doxy's bow from below to meet the enemy ships head-on.
The junk that launched them veered away as the warspite torpedoes corkscrewed around the Ekkai's beams and detonated against their hulls. When the bridge windows cleared and their helmets let them see the result of the fission detonations to port, the closest Ekkai ship had been turned to a fast-moving nebula of expanding gas, hull, and fin fragments.
A hunter-killer ripped around behind them making for the squadron of monitors, but it turned hard to avoid fire and ran smack into another torpedo. After the flash, it tumbled nearly parallel to the Doxy. For a second or two, flame shot from the hole where the bow of it should have been. Some kind of artificial gravity must have still been working since the clouds of opaque gasses that billowed out into the vacuum wrapped around the wreck in a shroud that obscured much of it from sight.
"That thing is going to drift into us in a couple of minutes," Graves said.
"The Ekkai will dust us in less time than that," Annie grumbled. "Without engines, we're an easy target."
"We're not getting dusted," Garlan said. He was glad when Hardway gave him a real reason to say that. "Devlin's ship is slowing down to match our drift..." She did more than that. Hardway put herself between them and the enemy guns again. "This is where we'll make our stand," Garlan said as another enemy beam salvo sent showers of molten spray arcing off the carrier.
Annie shouted and pointed at the drifting Ekkai debris next to them, "Look! Lifeboats!" The pods rocketed out from the forward section of the Ekkai wreck firing some kind of maneuvering jets out all sides to point themselves at the Doxy like they wanted to ram her.
A single streak from the rear and a bright flash told them one of the monitors had finished off the Ekkai ship that launched the boats, but whatever they launched got away clean and whipped across the bridge windows in a bullet-shaped blur that turned hard into the bow. Impact shudder came up through the deck and told him they'd been hit again.
Garlan unstrapped himself from the command chair and rushed to the starboard windows where he could see the beam-torn hull on that side. The back halves of the Ekkai boats protruded like knives from a wounded man's chest. They'd wedged themselves into a gouge the alien gunners had already cut into the Shediri superstructure directly over the bow. Inside the burned and split chitin hull, he saw movement - what looked like machines of some kind exiting the Ekkai boat.
"Those are boarding craft," Garlan said. "We're being boarded. Get those rifles ready."
SCS Bangalore
When viewed through the topside windows of the cockpit, the Imperium Ship's salvo seemed to descend upon them from above. At first, it rose from the limb of the battleship's shield like an ugly spinning nebula, and as it curved outwards on its path to strike the battleship from the side, the plasmoid climbed and grew until it looked like it was coming down on their heads. Plasma in discharge arced between the ten spinning arms of the fast-rotating and focused cloud. There was enough electromagnetic and kinetic energy in that hyper-density plasma to turn belt-iron armor to gas and sweep a ship away like a sandcastle in a storm.
"This is the XO," the voice from the battleship beneath them said. "We estimate forty seconds to impact. All Banjo flight elements are ordered to detach. You've got a clear shot at the Imperium ship now. Make it count."
Dice felt Lippmann's eyes on him for a moment then and remembered he was designated flight leader and he should say something while the raiders cleared off first. As the ascending raiders made a cloud so thick it seemed impossible for them not to hit each other, he thumbed the comms to every human ear. "Banjo, Banjo. This is Dice on Bangalore. Lotta' people worked hard to put us here. Let's not fuck it up. I want a LIFO departure from the outside in. If you're one of the lucky ones carrying a new penetrator remember not to flip the switch until we're too close for the Imperium ship to stop us. Otherwise, that big bastard is going to know just which of us to pop on the way in. Everyone else out there, don't worry about sending in the warspites once you see us hit our targets because a salvo from Guerrero will already be on the way. Right. The bugs gave us a little space. Punch it, Banjo. Go, go, go!"
As he released the landing clamps and withdrew the gear, Lippmann said. "Thirty seconds to enemy salvo impact." The glow from the incoming weapon came through the blanket of raiders above them in verdant, emerald shafts. As he eased into the thrust and blasted Bangalore off the starboard side of the battleship's hull with the other junks and interceptors, they passed through one of those shafts. The color made his eyes water.
"Twenty-five seconds to impact..."
The outer rings cleared first. The Sky Jacks from Kodiak Squadron tried to melt the junks behind them with their exhaust as they blasted out hard and fast, curving around the bottom of the departing Shediri swarm.
"Fifteen seconds." Dice rotated his junk's four maneuvering nacelles to thrust in-line with her nose. Once the torpedo junks Portland, Hajume, and Squidy Chow in front of them had fired their mains, he finally had a clear flight line.
Dice gave the main thrusters more juice than the inertial negation could compensate for and in the half-second his head was pinned against the back of his helmet, the 5-km-wide Imperium weapon looked like the sky falling on Guerrero. "Ten seconds to impact," Lippmann said as they and the last of the junks cleared the battleship at high speed. Dice pulled up and to port, following the corkscrewing path of the Shediri swarm with the others. He rolled Bangalore to port on her maneuvering thrusters to make sure they'd all got clear.
The plasmoid fell like a charged green hurricane, lashing out at the battleship's mountainous steel flank with bullwhip tendrils of crackling zap that connected and wandered over the hull, trailing red clouds of belt-iron steel turned to a burning gas. In the heartbeat before the worst of it hit, the battleship glowed as if the armor had somehow taken the charge inside it and was on fire from within. The full force of the weapon slammed the battleship, smashing her side. Molten armor splashed in all directions.
Seconds later, Guerrero fired a salvo with all her guns. "That's not going to make it through the energy shield," said Lippmann.
"I think they just did that to make sure it keeps shooting at them and not us."
"Enemy is still closing," his co-pilot said. "Thirty-six seconds to their shields."
He rolled Bangalore back over to keep the enemy in sight. A hundred-thousand Ks out, even a 16km-tall ship is an invisible speck, but it flared up bright when it launched another salvo. The lurid green stain swung out to the side and followed the magnetic targeting line projected by the Imperium ship. "Banjo, Banjo. This is Bangalore. Stay with the Shediri swarm until I give the go."
The interceptors and junks hugged one side of the Shediri's looping snake of small ships now flying as unpredictable a line as Dice had ever seen in an attempt to fake out whatever was inside the Imperium ship that was now guiding that 5km-wide plasmoid weapon right at them. "20,000 Ks..."
"Alright! Break, break, break!" The junks and fighters all veered away from the river of war painted Shediri ships and hit thrusters as hard as they could to put distance between them. He hoped like hell the gunners aboard the Imperium ship would aim their salvo for the thick of the alien swarm instead of chasing the Staas Company junks and the fighters, but the electric cloud of high-density plasma veered towards the Privateers.
"It's after the torpedo junks! Scatter! Scatter!" he shouted into comms as the edge of the cloud swept through the tail end of the swarm and shattered three-dozen raiders. Their chitin fried a bright wh
itish purple and vaporized before being swatted and swept away by the plasma that flooded through and rushed at the junks on Bangalore's port side. Portland, Shanker, and 8-bit Charlie's comms gear shrieked on the line at the moment of impact. The armor and hull on one side of them evaporated and the kinetic energy smashed what was left, pulverizing them.
"Banjo, Banjo," he said. "They're going to get one more shot on the way in. Be ready for it. Scatter wide. Penetrators, I'll see you on the inside."
"That a joke?"
"Glad someone got it," Dice said.
He'd expected another five-k-wide nebula of hyper-dense plasma, but what leaped from the spires of the Imperium ship spread as it spun until it was a thin front, a thousand Ks wide, barely visible save where that plasma got excited to discharge along the magnetic loop directing it at them. "We can't fly around this one," Lippmann said. It was unavoidable.
"Brace for impact!"
It zapped the hull with charge that sparked at the edges of the canopy, but the thin cloud that hit the port side of the junk hit with reduced force, slamming them with mostly kinetic energy. The cockpit module rolled up and to starboard as the wave flipped Bangalore. They spun over, and Dice glimpsed the fighters and junks and Shediri raiders of the swarm. A tumbling, swatted, semi-conscious cloud of small craft filled the sky. A good number of the Sky Jacks looked disabled, but as he vectored thrust to bring Bangalore out of the spin, he saw the engine flares of at least two-dozen rugged junks stabilizing and coming back on line for attack.
Lippmann said, "Distance to target is increasing. It's running for it! It's running!"
"Not fast enough, it's not." There was barely two tenths of a second between the moment Dice's naked eyes apprehended the towering cathedral spires of the Imperium ship and the moment when it grew so large in the canopy of the Bangalore that he could see nothing else. "Now, Bai! Hit the penetrator!"
