by A. D. Bloom
"The fuck is 'Kr'izit'k'?"
"Look it up," said Pill.
She did. He called up the projected manual interface for the conceptual language matrix and searched for the word every way it allowed. "Not there," she said. "That word isn't in our matrix yet - not the Human-searchable part of it." As she bent her wrist to backhand the projected display and close the interface, her eyes caught the update as it happened. One second it hadn't been there, and now, the blinking icon indicated the translation daemon had located a definition for her earlier query. "What the hell, now it's here. Someone must have just input the word to the database's Human dictionary in the last few seconds."
"So what does it mean?"
"Kr'izit'k," she read, "awkward Human English phoneticization of the Shediri word meaning the faith required for trust. The hell is that bug talking about?
"That's a fascinating word," said Pill. "Teach that new bug word to Rabal when he gets here. Do it right before you tell him how you don't have his money but you will."
"Good," Devlin barked out as he saw a last gaggle of torpedo junk pilots come in. "I think you're the last to arrive. You're the last I'm waiting for before we start, in any case."
Rabal slipped in before the hatch closed, and the captains of the railgun monitors followed him. "Sorry. Our longboats were conducting Search and Rescue." Devlin just nodded. "We'll have four barrels firing for sure," Rabal said. "Bloc 5's gun might be beyond repair in the time we've got." After he stopped talking, Rabal's eyes found her in the crowd of pilots so fast it was like he was homing in on her suit transponder.
She grinned at him like she had the money.
"Where's Tig Meester?" Commodore Devlin scanned the crowd then. His eyes settled on bunch of redsuits off to the side. They didn't usually come to the briefings. "Tig Meester. Up front." The Chief stepped out of the redsuits to stand awkwardly next to the UN Captain. By and large officers know how to look perfectly natural doing nothing, but a redsuit like Meester had trouble looking comfortable unless he was busy. He shifted his weight left and then right like he'd forgotten how to simply stand in one spot. His hands opened and closed without explanation.
"Boy-genius Meester looks like he's going to piss his suit," said Pill. "I don't get it."
"The hammerhead magnetic pulse thing going through the forward bays got damaged in the fight with the Ekkai Dreadnought."
Pill asked "Will it work?" but she didn't have an answer for that.
"Our battleplan is simple," The Commodore said loudly enough that there was no doubt the mission briefing had begun. "The ships of this task force will attack the approaching Imperium warships together and in close formation around Hardway. The focused magnetic pulse device should protect us from a few hits. We're betting that along with disruption bursts from warspites and reconfigured Shediri missiles, we'll have a good chance of surviving the enemy plasmoid salvos until we can close range and get inside their shields." She tried not to shake her head as she heard those words. If those disruption salvos were reliable and if Shediri missiles could stop an Imperium plasmoid, then the task force would already been using those countermeasures. The truth was, if Meester's device failed they'd be defenseless.
Devlin said, "We had a plan worked out for facing a single Imperium vessel. We've had to make a few changes. Tig Meester and Captain Chun of Guerrero will outline them for you since they involve the battleship and the shield penetrator coil for her built for us by the Shediri as well as the new device, the hammerhead."
Strike glazed over and almost fell asleep during the technical presentation. When Devlin finally got to the part where he told them all just what she and her fellow pilots would have to do to make this new plan work, she was sure she'd never sleep again.
12
SCS Hardway, Bridge
The task force held station close around Hardway while she played dead, allowing herself to drift slightly off line as if she'd suddenly lost power to even her positioning thrusters. The ships around them tilted in unison as Dana looked around the bridge for where she planned to strap herself in. She knew Margo was going to seat herself at comms with Biggs. There was one extra seat at that console.
Right now, Devlin's 'wife' stood on the other side of Ram's command chair staring back at Dana with a grin like a territorial chimp. Dana said, "If I can get that third seat at the communications console, then I can help coordinate with the helmsmen aboard the other ships and free Wei up to concentrate on maneuvers. This is going to be tricky bit of work at the NAV."
"Wei is going to do that, Ram said. "I want you at the NAV console."
Dana caught the lieutenant glancing her way. "It's her watch," Ram. "I don't want to take it from her."
Wei spoke up loudly. "I appreciate that, Captain Sellis. I do. But this isn't a rec-league match. We're playing for keeps and if you're the best we've got, I want you at the station." She laughed unexpectedly and explained, "I want to be able to tell my kids about this. So you're driving."
The NAV console had been replaced since the last time Dana Sellis seated herself at that station. The chair was technically a different chair, but it was the same model. It felt the same. It felt exactly the same as if she'd never left it. Despite her ventures in the command chair, this was where she'd always remember herself on this ship. "How the hell did I end up driving your ship again, Ram? I want my own again."
"You'll have it," he said.
"Promises..."
He said, "Comms, signal the task force it's time and tell them to stay close to us," said Ram. "NAV. straighten out with the task force and set a collision course with the closest of the approaching enemy ships. We'll accelerate until the end. Then, we'll all have to turn and burn to decelerate. When we close with the enemy ships, we can't be going too fast to maneuver or we're lost."
Dana shrugged. "Still sounds easier than making this thing fly evasive maneuvers," she said.
The three Imperium ships came in close formation, only a few K's apart. On each, seven spires pierced a central hull like elegant spikes driven through a heart. What powered them and how they flew was still unknown, but how they killed was burned into the collective memory of Task Force Liberty. When Biko said the hull was being bombarded with a thin stream of electron leak, Dana didn't have to ask what it meant - nobody did. "We're being targeted by the Imperium ships with a magnetic loop."
"Which ships," Ram asked.
"All of them. It's one magnetic guidance loop powered by three ships."
"That means they'll be sending two plasmoid salvos or one big one," said Ram.
Margo said, "Can Meester's hammerhead handle this?"
"Meester," Ram said. "We've been targeted. Prepare to fire a pulse on my command."
"We're ready," Meester said from the ruined forward bays, at the hammerhead's controls with his team. His voice sounded confident enough.
The way Biko gave the projections of the Imperium ships over his console the stink-eye almost made Dana laugh. He shook his head and said, "It's like they've given up on attempting to maneuver to any kind of tactical advantage."
"That piss you off, Biko?" She said. "It pisses me off, too." Despite the fact that the enemy had every tactical advantage, the way the three Imperium ships steamed at the task force without deploying themselves better smacked of arrogance and it was more than a tad insulting.
"They're launching the first salvo," Biko said. The tips of the spires on the Imperium ships sparked bright on Biko's display and out through the windows of the bridge, Ram thought he saw a new star being born as the plasmoid salvo launched. The ionized particles seemed to materialize or coalesce from some place unseen and rocket forward in jets to come together into a dense ball that spun around the magnetic targeting line they'd projected as they launched it in a single burst. It arced outwards in a wide loop, following the magnetic line. As it spun and evolved in shape, forming spiral arms that rotated around its center, the color of it changed from a pale green to a white so cold and deathly it c
hilled her. It was 10 Ks wide and following them along with the magnetic loop; there was no hope to evade it.
"All my birds report they're tucked away," said Pardue. "I hope this works."
The salvo of electrified, high-density plasma continued towards the task force. Its spinning had produced at least a dozen arms now. It loomed like a growing galaxy out the port windows of the bridge.
"Impact in thirty seconds," Biko said.
"NAV, steady on, dead ahead," said Ram. "Chief Meester, prepare to fire the hammerhead."
SCS Hardway, Forward Bays
Tig Meester stood at the control console with his team and the three engineer-bugs looking up at the 70 by 330 meter, cracked chitin shell of the hammerhead device piercing through the blasted and burned out forward flight bays and the central maintenance bay like a bone through Hardway's nose. It would still work. The device was almost too simple to fail, but the cracks he could see worried him. The bugs and his team had scrambled to repair them but even Tig knew the integrity of the magnetite shield had been ruptured along with the hammerhead's shell. Sure, they repaired it, but those cracks were going to affect containment of the mag field they projected when the device fired.
The light from the approaching salvo streamed in through the holes in the forward bays and the beams supporting the hammerhead, finding its way inside, to the central maintenance bay where it invaded the dim red light and cast unsettling shadows.
"You feeling lucky, Chief?" said Bucca. "Because now is a good time to be lucky."
"Chief Meester," said the Commodore over comms. The voice startled him and shot a tingle of fear down his spine. "Fire the hammerhead!"
"Firing!" Tig Meester's gloved fist mashed the button. Less than one millisecond later, the juice stored up in the whining Shediri capacitors flooded the sets of nested field coils inside the hammerhead and generated a magnetic field of immense strength. Inside the horn section, the outer, magnetite-lined chitin shell of the device, the magnetic pulse got hammered by lensed explosives that forced field lines over on top of each other and magnified the field strength before the pulse could blast out the horn on either side of the carrier, producing a focused magnetic pulse of gargantuan power.
As it fired, he knew field containment had failed because the patch-welded deck below them bent upwards towards the hammerhead's cracked shell and the compartment seemed to shrink around them.
55th and 99th Squadrons, flying close over the battleship's hull
Even with all the multispectral imaging she had on her flight helmet, she still couldn't see the focused magnetic pulse from Meester's device. But she saw what it did. The hulking plasma salvo that had spun towards her and the task force like a snow-white hurricane hit the magnetic pulse and visibly bent it, lighting up in wild discharge. The whole plasma front erupted with a flash as the magnetic field seemed to snap, but what continued on towards the task force was a thin mist that expanded like a hot local nebula to port as the cheers went up on squadron comms.
The Sky Jacks all flew dangerously close to Guerrero and Hardway both and she could actually see most of her pilots in their cockpits as they whooped it up on comms. After that, she zoomed in on the enemy far ahead and watched the spire ships launch another shot at them. "That was the first Imperium salvo anyone ever got hit with where nobody died," she said to Pill on a closed channel.
"Don't be so sure, Strike. Get a gander at Hardway. She don't look right."
The burned out and ruined forward bays behind the bow plate where Meester had mounted that gigantic coil set were a different shape now. The whole frame of the module had been bent. In the open bays where doors had already been blown out, the bulkheads looked hot on IR - hot enough to go soft and crumple. The forward bays already looked thinner as if they'd been stepped on. She could see in through the holes in the side and none of the struts or repair welds looked square anymore. "Magnetic containment failure," she said.
"I thought they said this shit worked."
"You know it got damaged in the Ekkai attack," said Strike. "And it did work. The question is: will it work again..."
"Yeah, well, we got our own problems to worry about."
"When you're right, you're right, Pill. I'm switching over to squadron comms." After the double beep told her she had the line, she looked through the frost on the inside of her cockpit out at the 47 remaining Sky Jack fighters of the Hardway Air Group. They held a tight formation for once. They might have even been mistaken for real pilots. She told herself it wouldn't be be a suicide mission. And then she told her pilots, but with more effort to be convincing than she'd wasted on herself.
"This is Hellcat 1-1. Cats and Kodiaks, listen up. Just in case you slept through the briefing like Pill here did, we will stay close to the battleship when she penetrates the shield of the Imperium ship. We will not stray more than 300 meters from this battleship's hull at any time. That includes the turn and burn coming up. The second stop is ours. I'll remind you when to get off. After that, we do some fancy flying and raise Cain."
Helmets nodded at her as she looked around the formation. She swiveled her head, taking the sight in like some reassurance that they were ready, soaking it in as much as she could before the light of the approaching, second Imperium plasma salvo began to stab at her eyes to port.
SCS Colt
Siggs maneuvered SCS Colt down to within 350 meters of the battleship's hull and held her there, ready to jitter on the positioning thrusters in response to any deviation from any of the ships around them. The railgun squadron hovered close around them. Their helmsmen were good enough for this stunt; it was the zoomies he was worried about. What with the fighters and junks all clustered close with the Shediri, a collision was bound to occur and he didn't want it to be his ship that got hit.
"Thirty seconds to enemy salvo impact," said Julian. Rabal's XO gripped the console and leaned forward with his face nearly inside the projection of the approaching plasma weapon like he was searching it for a weakness. Out the bridge windows Rabal could see the Imperium weapon coming, spinning down the targeting line, coming at them from the port side like that last one.
"If we survive this, they'll have time to throw one more at us I think," said Rabal. "If they could fire at us faster, they'd be doing it."
"I've been a little busy trying not to crush the Sky Jacks against Guerrero," said Siggy from the NAV, "but that was my guess, too."
"Let's hope that kid's gizmo holds together. looks like it already lost some containment around those coils," said Rabal.
"The forward bays of that carrier look mangled."
"That thing better fire again or it's over - end of the line."
Out the starboard windows, he could see Flight One from Hellcat Squadron holding station almost on the steel of Guerrero's hull. His helmet picked out Strike's 223 for him so he patched himself through to her comms on a private channel. "This is Rabal. That sexy Sky Jack of yours looks ridiculous with an oversized, Shediri bomb attached to your belly."
"It's a modified missile, not a bomb," she said. "And it's big enough to take the tip off an Imperium ship's spires so I don't much mind how it ruins my figure."
"Can't say I do either. Come back safe, Strike." The silence then didn't feel right so he said, "I want my money," and immediately wished he hadn't. That moment, Tig Meester triggered the hammerhead again, and the magnetic pulse killed comms before he could say anything else.
The whole of the forward bays shuddered and twisted again and this time, Rabal was sure he saw the aft compartments of the 950-meter carrier all rise up in an arc, bending the tensegrity spine of the ship as all its belt-iron steel fell under the influence of a pulse even less shielded than the last. The chitin shell of the device protruding from Hardway's bow cracked clean open where he could see it and some of the coils inside blew out the end of the horn on the starboard side like it was spitting its guts out into space. The uncoiled cables whipped in the focused field as if they were alive. A handful of torpedo junk
s riding too close to the cracked hammerhead pitched and yawed as it tried to align their hulls with its mag lines.
The plasmoid impacted against the weakened magnetic pulse with a flash and after pushing against the force of it and snapping its lines in a furious release of energy to port, this time, it penetrated. Its form had been ruined and nearly all of its charge lost, but the plasmoid's heavy particles penetrated. Nearly ten percent of it made it through at reduced velocity, but it was still enough to slam all their hulls from the side.
"Siggy!"
"I got it!" Siggs shouted back as he checked the force of the hit on the hull with the positioning thrusters. The few smaller craft that hadn't been shielded enough by any of the larger ships got slammed and sent spinning. He couldn't see if they recovered or not.
SCS Hardway, the hammerhead
Inside the wrecked forward bays, Tig Meester pawed ineffectually at the fractured projection over the top of the hammerhead's control console as it spat sparks out a rent in its casing. The chitin shell was now only scant meters over the top of his head and the cracks in the shielding around the coil sets themselves had spread as the unwinding nests expanded. Gangles of them still whipped from one side to the next, caught in shifting, residual current.
"This console has had it," he said. He looked to his right, to Rye, the cherry on his team and saw for the first time just how warped the steel bulkheads of the maintenance bay had become. They all bent inwards, towards the hammerhead. Splinters and fragments of fractured Chitin plate repairs floated everywhere in the vacuum here.
"Meester!" the Commodore boomed in his ear. "What is that thing doing to my ship?!'
"It's the containment! We fixed the cracks in the hammerhead, but there must have been fractures in the magnetite shielding we couldn't detect."
"Fix it!"
"We can't fix this thing," Rye said, but only Meester could hear him. Once glace around them at the shrinking compartment was all it took to see that the next time they fired the hammerhead, the leaking mag pulse would pull the bulkheads in around it again, this time with more force, crushing the device and anyone still in the control chamber.
