by A. D. Bloom
Matilda Witt had obviously read Hardway's logs and action reports because she'd ordered 56 of the fusion warheads turned into fast neutron fizzlers. The warheads were being intentionally imbalanced so they didn't go off properly and instead traded their fission punch for a reaction producing only copious fast neutron emissions....the kind that penetrate radiation shielding and armor to wreck hell with a ship's systems.
Ram worked his way around the edge of the bay where puddles of condensate had formed. He kept his eyes on Lucy Elan just so that Horcheese's redsuits didn't think he'd come down here to supervise them. Since he'd become the XO, Ram had figured out that sometimes his job was to be everywhere, directing everything and sometimes his job was to not to get in the way of his people by giving orders and micromanaging when they were handling things just fine. Doing that was probably management's #1 failure. Ram had seen plenty of execs screw things up like that. It was usually because they were afraid that if things went well without their direct supervision, then it might imply to people without an understanding of leadership that their management hadn't been necessary.
Just over halfway across the hundred-meter bay, Ram heard Hollis' voice ringing off the deck and bulkheads as he addressed a huddle of company marines and crewmen. "Plenty of you have fought Squidy McJangles here up close and personal." Hollis pointed up at a projection of an alien, a see-through Squidy and its anatomy, 3.5-m-tall in front of them. Even on a diagram, he still had trouble counting all those limbs above and below the main body mass. "If you ever shot a Squidy, you know this diagram here is shite." The image projected above the deck from a matchbox computer was from Staas Company Consulting and it was labeled 'ONE SHOT KILL-POINTS ON THE ALIEN ENEMY'. The illustration highlighted several 'organs' that could be found inside, through the Squidies' tough exosuits and under their leathery 'skin'. These organs had all been labeled with the word 'KILL'.
"There are no one-shot kills on the alien enemy," Hollis said. "Not unless you blow half of it off. And if you think piercing their exosuits so that they lose atmo and decompress is gonna kill 'em fast, then you might get a real nasty surprise. On Moriah, I saw one get holed-through with an x-ray laser right here." He pointed to the middle of its elongated ribbon of a torso, to just above the swollen section with the orifice and ocular elements. "It took a wide-bore discharge from a Honma & Voss hand cannon right here... The beam left a 10cm hole in Squidy and punched through the bulkhead behind it. Two more holes like it, and that Squidy still had fight in it. Didn't go down. Not right off. First, it discharged every cap on its hand-maser and turned the woman who shot it into cinders. Lit her up in her suit."
He's talking about Mickey, Ram thought. Just looking at the ghostly projection of that 3.5-meter-tall, alien monstrosity made Ram sick thinking about it.
"No such thing as a one-shot-kill," Hollis said. "You shoot it and you keep shooting it until it's down and then you fucking shoot it again."
The two Staas Guards that came in through the aft hatches were right on schedule. It was time to let the Lancers and the Hellcats out. Ram didn't enjoy having to confine them, but at least he had the Staas Guards to do it so the Lancers wouldn't hate the Hardway crewmen that got assigned the duty.
He'd gone to a lot of trouble to make sure the Lancers and the Hellcats mixed. He knew they'd just end up in the cooler, but he thought when he put them face to face that they'd team up and rampage together. He'd put the Staas Guards on alert for a small riot and expected lots of bone fractures for Doc Ibora and the Medicals to fuse out because he'd assumed the Lancers and the Hellcats would be fighting as allies and terrorizing the crew, not bashing in each others' skulls.
Ram was the XO and the XO was in charge of discipline, but where the F-151 pilots were concerned, he'd all but given up on bothering. They might not mind going back to prison now that they'd had a taste of war. The only threat he held over them was to put them up against a bulkhead and shoot them, but he needed them alive and in their cockpits and they all knew that.
He understood all too well just what the war had asked of those pilots. He knew about the brain damage from the new pulse-pinch. So did they. They were fast-trained killers flying AI-assisted planes sent to swarm the Squidy aces with numbers. They'd become the grunts of this war, but their life-expectancy was shorter than any rifleman in history. The casualties those fighter pilots had seen in their squadrons made Ram feel like it wasn't them, but rather the people who ran this war who should be put behind bars.
Chapter Five
Fifteen minutes before zero-hour, as Biko spotted the inbound contact, the voice came over comms. "Hardway AT, Hardway AT, this is Taipan longboat requesting you open a bay for us on your topside primary. Our ETA is now."
In the false-scale projection coming from the AT controller console where Biko stood, the incoming longboat flew across the bridge towards Hardway like a slow-moving bullet. Eight of Witt's F-151s flew with it as escorts. Incoming traffic from Taipan just before they were about to execute Matilda Witt's plan could only mean one thing.
"I know who's on that boat," Ram said.
"Hardway AT, acknowledge."
Biko looked up from the AT control console to Harry Cozen in the command chair. "What are you looking at me for?" Cozen said, "She's a Staas VP and a bloody two-star admiral. Let her in."
The muscles in Asa Biko's jaw clenched. He thumbed the comms and replied. "Hardway AT to Taipan longboat: Bay One doors open, topside primary bays, port side, right in front of the command tower. Welcome aboard."
"Mr. Devlin," Cozen said, "have the redsuits completed all weapons modifications requested by Matilda Witt?"
"They finished up an hour ago. They had to run three shifts at once, but they managed it."
Cozen grunted acknowledgment. "Tell her it was easy."
"When?"
"Now," Cozen said, "when you go to Bay One and receive her, of course."
She stood in the very center of the airlock doors so they parted to reveal her like stage curtains. She'd brought an aide with her. "Mr. Devlin," she said, "this is Mr. Morrisey." Morrisey wore a single dueling scar like a fat, 20cm keloid caterpillar crawling down his left cheek. His pinched face had grown in around it.
Witt stepped across the airlock's threshold and into the passageway, and Morrisey followed her. Like Matilda Witt, he wore a business suit with a knee-length coat. It hung off his thin frame like he was a wire hangar. "Mr. Morrisey assists with command and control," she said. Morrisey's eyes briefly focused, but Ram could see from his oversized display glasses and how his hands ceaselessly gestured that he was engaged in monitoring or manipulating data at this very moment. He said, "Ma'am, all four carriers report green lights across the board and the breaching ship Malibu says they are 'go' to commence operations at any time."
"Thank you, Mr. Morrisey."
"This way," Ram said, "I'll show you to the bridge."
Damage control teams waited in groups at their duty stations up and down the carrier's 950-meter spine. Every six-man team in their exosuits eyeballed Witt and her aide as the visitors passed. They stared at her in a way Ram thought she'd probably have considered insubordinate if she'd actually deigned to notice them. He asked her if she'd ever been aboard any other Staas Company attack carriers.
"Once," Witt said. "SCS Araby. Despite the distinguished name, that ship smelled like stale suit-liners and sweat. Like this one."
"I noticed you and your aide aren't wearing any kind of exosuits. Quite often, we'll vent our atmo before combat to prevent shock wave propagation in the event Hardway takes a direct hit. I'll have a pair of suits sent u-" Witt pointed the flat of her open palm at Ram's mouth like she planned to stuff the words back in if he said any more.
"Thank you for your concern, Mr. Devlin, but that won't be necessary because we're not going to let the Squidies strike Hardway's hull today. Today, the torpedo junks and the interceptors will do the fighting. Hardway will remain prudently out of range of the alien guns and bombs as she s
hould have been all along."
When the lift arrived at the bridge and the doors opened, there was no standing at attention, but Hardway's Staas Guards stiffened a little. Matilda Witt strode past them without any acknowledgment. "Were you expecting me, Harry?"
He didn't turn around. "Of course I was," he said from the command chair.
"Don't get up." The suit draped her gracefully, but as she stepped to the side of the command chair, Ram still thought she moved like a bulldog. She didn't look at Cozen. Her eyes went to the tactical display hovering over the bridge, projected from the AT controller's console and the NAV.
While Morrisey stepped to the side and lurked by a terminal near the starboard bulkhead, Matilda Witt raised her voice a few decibels and looked at each one of them as she spoke. "I'll be commanding from the deck of Hardway today. I'm here to make sure this engagement goes the way it's supposed to. I won every battle I fought behind the Sirius Line and I never had to put in to port for repairs. I couldn't, of course. So I baselined a methodology for assaulting small to medium-sized alien warships using squadrons of Staas Company F-151 fighters as the sole means of delivering destruction to the enemy. This has the obvious advantage of sparing larger ships like Hardway damage that has proven costly in lives, downtime, materials and man-hours required for repair."
Those are the costs of battle, Ram thought. She can't make them go away. She just transferred them from the largest ships to the smallest ones.
"And while destruction of enemy materiel no doubt contributes to the war-effort," she said, "the real gains that will propel humanity to victory are to be made in the acquisition of alien technologies. That is why we are here. Today, we will board and seize another alien vessel."
Witt glanced over her shoulder to her aide, and he nodded. She punched at the buttons on the arm of the command chair where Cozen sat. "Excuse me, Harry." He moved his arm but still didn't get up. When she'd given herself a voice on the battlegroup's general comms, she thumbed the button and said, "All vessels, this is Matilda Witt. Begin the operation, please."
Taipan's carriers, Witt's command ship, Hardway, and the two breaching ships steamed together to the point on the far side of the Groomsbridge system where Dr. Noondie's calculations and stolen alien charts said they could breach space and open a transit to Pollux.
From the windows of Hardway's bridge, Ram had a fine view of the breaching ship Malibu where she'd moved to hold station 2Ks out over the starboard bow. Lightning danced up and down the spokes of her fragile, wonder-wheel frame as her capacitors came to charge. "This is Malibu. Discharge is imminent. All ships, standby." Fifteen seconds later, using technology stolen from the enemy, she fired crude, converging particle streams from five emitters. They crossed precisely over the charted location of the transit, and the continual release of energy from the colliding nuclei moving near lightspeed tore an already weakened spatial fabric. Over the next seconds, Malibu ripped a kilometer-wide hole in regular space and opened the interstellar passage.
Hardway sailed into the burning breach first. Then, the box carriers. Then, Taipan and the breaching ships followed the others through the plasma-covered membrane and into the transit for the roughly seven-minute, faster-than-light trip from Groomsbridge 1618 to Pollux.
*****
Hardway entered the Pollux system trailing fire – plasma and exotics picked up off the mouth of the breach. Matilda Witt watched the last of it lick at the diamond-pane windows of Hardway's bridge and then stepped forward to squint out into enemy space as if she could find the Squidies with her naked eyes.
She'd already found an appropriate target to try her new methodology on – armed, but not to the teeth – armored, but not a dreadnought – and, most importantly, alone. It could be attacked and boarded before its calls for help were heard.
Matilda Witt leaned into the comms button on the arm of Cozen's command chair. "Commander Dahl," she said, "you have your orders. Execute them."
As Hardway continued forward, Ram glanced out the rear windows of the bridge. Beyond the pale blue plasma flare of Hardway's engines he saw Matilda Witt's ships began to turn to starboard and come about together until they'd maneuvered into a diamond-shaped formation with Taipan at the center. They held station just a few hundred Ks from the Transit point where only sporadically appearing infrared and X-ray irregularities remained to evidence the now closed FTL passage.
The F-151s swarmed out the bays of the four box carriers. Hundreds of them scrambled at once. They spread out to attain broad air superiority across the system so nothing could get close to Matilda Witt's carriers and her command ship.
Hardway continued towards the inner system.
Ram said, "NAV confirms everything in the Pollux system is exactly as reported by recon elements, but comms is a nightmare here, too. There's a lot of adaptive noise spread across our frequencies. We're being jammed. We won't be able to communicate over a few thousand Ks without using IR lasers and line of sight."
Matilda Witt said, "Most of the sectors this far behind the lines are positively rife with alien jamming craft dropped at one point or another. There's bloody clouds of them in places. Self-repairing. Some follow our ships; some lurk in Lagrange points and foul the spectrum from there. It would take weeks to shoot them all out of the sky. Instead, my fighters deploy a comms relay network as they advance. We use disposable microsats as coded q-comms relays. Can't send or receive much over our network, of course, but besides positional location data and tactical imaging, traffic is mostly one-way. There's no delay and it's secure. Don't you worry about command and control, Mr. Devlin. We've got that covered."
Dana showed them an out of scale projection of the system and the solar storms ripping across it. "Terrible weather. There's 16, super-X-class coronal mass-ejections underway. The system's innermost planet is currently getting charred by one." Raging Pollux had thrown pieces of itself out into space and a 100-million-kilometer trail of glowing, high-energy particles bent around the lines of the planet's distorted magnetic field, blowing towards the outer system. Viewed in the right part of the spectrum, it looked like a stone in a burning river.
"It happens often here," Witt said. "Every few days. The enemy has a mining operation on one of that planet's moons and when the weather gets bad like it is now, a vessel evacuates them. They usually ride out the storms by holding station in the magnetic shadow of that planet. They're mostly blind in there." Matilda Witt turned to Ram, now standing on the other side of the command chair where Harry Cozen was still seated. She literally spoke over Cozen's head. "No problems with the modifications to the warspites, Mr. Devlin?"
Ram lied, "Our engineers have done that modification to more torpedoes in less time before." He glanced at Cozen then. From the little tick in his cheek, Ram could see Cozen felt Witt's breath moving the silver hairs on the top of his head when she exhaled out her nose. It annoyed the hell out him, but he wasn't about to get up out of that command chair and let Witt have it.
"And the junks carrying the boarding parties?" she asked.
"Two gunnery junks configured for boarding," Ram said. "Each one will have a knuckledragger mech with them and squads commanded by officers and senior NCOs who've already been inside a Squidy ship."
Witt said, "You must mean Chiefs Hollis and Tse," she said. "From the incident on Moriah."
"And don't forget Mr. Devlin," Cozen added, "Our Mr. Devlin will be leading the boarding parties himself."
*****
"133rd Lancers and 55th Hellcats, Hardway AT has you cleared to launch."
"Lancers copy, Hardway."
"Hellcats copy that."
"Vector 152 flat to assembly and proceed. Good hunting."
The 133rd blasted out of the bay together and accelerated so hard that if they hadn't enabled the inertial negation early, then the g-forces would have killed them. It wasn't standard operating procedure, but how else were they going to beat the Hellcats to the rally point?
The 7-meter fighters ripped
out of the bays while Hardway's junks flew out slow on their four, vectored nacelles before they hit their rear engines to get up to speed.
Jordo and the Lancers looked down through the bottoms of their canopies to see if they could spot the Hellcats rocketing out of their launch bays on the starboard side. He caught a top view of Pooch's 151 a couple hundred meters below. She flew point on one of three, 8-plane elements. It gave him hot flashes of anger to realize that despite the fact that the Lancers were at full-open throttle and accelerating as hard as they could, the Hellcats were passing them.
"Bleeding hell," said Paladin. "Do you see that?"
"They've got faster planes..." Dirty said it with the bitterness they all felt.
"Same planes," Jordo said. "It's probably their pulse-pinch. They've got better inertial negation than we do. It's probably a 2nd gen system made with the rare elements from 211-Lovis." Might mess up the pilots' heads faster, too, but he didn't mention that.
Gusher said, "We bled to take that system! Why the hell didn't we get that gear?"
"We lost thirty-two pilots on that mission," Holdout said. It had been the Lancers' baptism in blood.
"The Hellcats can counter more gees," Gush muttered into comms. "Not only can they accelerate harder, they can turn tighter than we can."
"Don't mean shite," Dirty said. "Alien bandits fly superior craft and we still hold our own." Dirty was right, but it didn't change how smug Hellcat 1-1 sounded on comms.
"Lancer 1-1, this is Hellcat 1-1. Interrogative: Are y'all flying vintage planes? You want us to slow down so you can keep up?"
*****
Ram flew in Biko's junk, Gold Coast. Seconds after the 151s blasted away, all Ram could see of the interceptors from the cockpit was their bright pinpricks of burning exhaust. 1000 Ks out, it almost looked as if the Lancers were chasing the Hellcats and trying to maneuver into an attack position of some kind.
