by A. D. Bloom
"Slow breach, maybe..." Ram said.
"We'll use that dead hull as a shield, Mr. Devlin."
Ram vectored the main engine thrust and steered the ship sharply while using the bow and midships thrusters to keep her in line.
Cozen told the gun commanders to target the closest ships in firing position and then, he turned them loose to fire at will. As the salvos flew at the enemy, he said, "Mr. Biko, send in my strikers."
"All junks, this is Hardway AT. You are go, go, go. Sending you vectors now for alien cruisers on the far side of the formation. Lancers, Hellcats, and Weasels: You will escort the torpedo junks in and protect them from any remaining enemy fighters. All squadron leaders, acknowledge."
"This is Gold Coast. Orders acknowledged." That was Pardue speaking for the junks.
"Acknowledged, Hardway. Lancers are on it."
"55th acknowledges."
"The Weasels hear you, Hardway."
"The cruisers," Biko said off comms. "Look at them." Bay doors too small for fighters opened along the forward edges of the alien ships still in the fight. At least a hundred fast craft tore out and ripped hard-gee turns right out of the bay. "They're launching warheads." Over a hundred flying bombs split and flew dizzying, individual paths around the cruisers to bear down on Hardway.
"All decks, incoming warheads," Ram said.
*****
Dana swam in blackness. She tried to surface, but there was no surface in any direction. She didn't realize how much she'd loved the darkness until it was gone.
The light stabbed at her optic nerve. All stimulation was pain. Every centimeter of her skin burned to the point where she was momentarily astonished at the level of her own agony. Dana was so astonished, in fact, that if her mouth hadn't been occupied with gasping and screaming, then she'd have wanted to laugh at how truly limited her concept of pain had been prior to this moment.
She opened her eyes, and through her tears she saw the crossed red bars on the collar of the medical uniform leaning over her. She forced herself to stop screaming. She rasped, "Help me," and willed her eyes to focus. When she finally saw clearly enough to discern the cruel character of the eyes looking back into hers without a whit of compassion, she knew that doctor wasn't here to help her.
"Ms. Witt, she's awake." The white uniform withdrew from his position over her, and Dana saw Taipan's bridge. It was gilded like the rest of the ship. The glints off the gold filling the engraved clouds on the bulkhead starburst through Dana's tears and stabbed at her eyes. Matilda Witt stood only a few meters away, surrounded by projections of the ships now engaged in battle on the far side of the system.
Dana tried to bring the damn ships into focus. Every gasp was pain, but she was alive and she had to know. She had to know what had happened and if she'd succeeded, but trying to focus her eyes on the projections in the air hurt like someone was twisting her eyeballs out of their sockets.
Matilda Witt snorted at Dana and turned back to the battle. She said, "The neural stimulant my doctor gave you has amplified your sensitivity considerably. It comes from some very nasty African ants. The remaining primitives there still let the ants bite their hands as a passage to manhood. It's the greatest pain on earth, I'm told."
When Dana tried to speak, it was as if her dry throat had been packed with broken glass. "Staas... Company Officer," she managed to say.
"Yes, yes, I know very well that you're a decorated company officer, but you're guilty of sabotage and treason, Ms. Sellis. Don't expect your rank and record to afford you any protections."
Sabotage and treason. Dana's face cracked in half and she almost screamed from it, but she smiled. Through the pain, Dana could still think clearly enough to note how Witt hadn't said attempted sabotage or attempted treason. That, along with Witt's evidently vile mood told Dana she'd done it. She'd killed the Command and Control Relay Net. Matilda Witt had no control of her squadrons beyond the planes that had stayed behind to guard her carriers.
Dana tried again to focus on the projections of the ships floating around Witt where she stood. When she saw the out-of-scale projection of an attack carrier in the battle, delivering railgun salvos at close range, the name shot from her mouth. "Hardway."
"That ship has only seconds to live," Witt said and Dana didn't understand until she saw the scores and scores of repeated, firefly flashes around the carrier. Alien warheads inbound. Through her tears Dana picked out the packs of QF-111 Dingoes hunting down the incoming enemy bombs along with a screen of gunnery junks and what looked like one of Witt's fighter squadrons.
The flashes of flying bombs detonating under fire came closer and closer to the carrier until the space around the ship blossomed and lit up with the last defensive barrage of range det shells from the autocannon turrets. They threw a solid cloud front of blooming, orange, high-explosive detonations all around the ship meant to catch the last of the enemy warheads before they lit off against the hull.
Matilda Witt said, "Do brace for impact, Harry." Three of the enemy bombs struck Hardway in the launch bays, the forward Hab, and low in the command tower.
"Three direct hits," said a voice behind Dana. A second later, one of the remaining enemy cruisers still guarding their strange prize flared up in the middle of its long hull and listed off-angle from the three others.
"Hardway's gun batteries are still 87% effective," said another voice from behind.
"Takes...more...than...that..." Dana managed to rasp.
Morrisey spoke from the rear of the bridge. He said, "Half their torpedo junks are beginning an attack run." Matilda Witt turned to look for them, and he stepped into sight to point them out. "The 55th, the 99th, and the 133rd Lancers are providing solid cover against the alien fighters."
"You sound as if you're rooting for them, Mr. Morrisey." Dana could hear the frustration in Witt's voice. It was music to her tortured ears.
*****
Pardue threw Gold Coast hard to port and rolled the junk to avoid a wounded F-151 in slow meltdown. Fire jetted out its fractured canopy as it fell to starboard. "Watch the debris," she said, as much to herself as her co-pilot and the rest of the squadron. All 36 junks were now lining up for the assault on the alien cruisers.
"Gold Coast, this is Hardway AT: take it to 'em. You have the lead."
"Roger, Hardway AT. It's a pleasure."
The blasted hull fragments of innumerable interceptors littered the space behind the alien cruisers and the prototype ship they protected, but the fighters had worked them over pretty well before Hardway arrived. As the junks approached, alien gun commanders must have spotted the open tube doors on their bows and the warspite torpedoes slung under each of the junks. They must have designated them as some kind of priority targets because the Squidy gunners stopped firing at anything else. The cruisers on that whole side of the battle turned their remaining guns on Gold Coast and the approaching junks.
Scores and scores of desperate particle beams ripped up at Pardue from the hulls of the alien warships in her path. A stream of nuclei reached out for Gaucho on her wing. It connected with the tubes slung under the junk's frame and Gaucho cooked off quick.
Chan's Revenge took a hit from one of the main batteries across the midsection. The beam half-smashed her and half-sliced her into three spinning pieces.
"First wave: Fire! Fire! Fire!" Pardue hammered the button with her gloved fist and launched all four of her warspite torpedoes in rapid series. The torps shook the junk with plasma wash that cooked sparking dust off the outside of the canopy and melted the frost on the inside.
Pardue looked up for her path and as she pulled the junk out of the assault dive, through the bottom of the cockpit she saw her four torps racing their brothers to the alien hulls along with forty-four more.
The alien guns fired and waved and protested, stabbing out at the cloud of warspites as it bore down. The Squidies' particle streams caught one or two, but the junks had dived in close before they fired and with so few alien guns left, the
re wasn't time for the Squidies to stop any more torpedoes than that before the warspites found their marks.
The first flashes to light up Pardue's cockpit and make her helmet dim were from her own torps detonating against an enemy hull. She tingled under her skin hearing the word repeated over and over on comms: "Hit!"
"It's a hit!"
Pardue's gunner in the topside turret cheered on internal comms as she rolled to give him a better look. The cruiser they'd scored on took eight torpedoes to its hull. They'd vaporized the armor over most of one side and breached the hull in three places. The alien vessel vented fire and snowy wet atmo and leaned over on a collision course with another.
That one was still alive, but barely. It grew a red, 'KEEP CLEAR' warning outline in her visor, and then her copilot called out the gamma bursts from its reactors. "That one's going up!" he said. It cooked a second later.
The junks hit a third cruiser as well. It took six warspites in the same area. After the third or fourth had breached the hull, the next ones to hit that same spot filled the decks with firestorms.
The prize, the aliens' unknown prototype ship in the center of what had once been a daunting ring of gunboats, now vectored the thrust coming off its single engine and tried to abandon its dying escorts.
"Hardway AT to all craft, pursue the prototype. That ship is the primary target."
The last two alien cruisers maneuvered to put themselves between their charge and Hardway. Their dying strikes scarred the attack carrier's port side badly enough that Pardue zoomed in to see charred redsuits floating out of the wounds.
Seconds later, the railgun batteries hulled the last of the alien prototype's escorts, and it was alone. It ran, but not fast enough to get away. The alien things inside that cannonball of a hull must have seen the carrier and its fighters and junks gaining on them as clearly as Pardue could see it. The end of the chase would come in minutes. Running is no way to die, she thought.
She was surprised when the Squidies did exactly what she would have done. The prototype stopped running and turned around to fight.
Chapter Seventeen
Even from where she lay in agony on the deck of Taipan's bridge it was clear to Dana that Hardway was winning. The Squidies' six cruisers now drifted dead or combat ineffective and the few fighters the enemy had were all but gone.
And the alien prototype was done running.
Matilda Witt looked down at her, and Dana didn't understand how Witt wore a smile. "I know something Harry doesn't," Witt explained. She pointed to the projection of the ship coming about to face Hardway. "I told Harry that I don't know what that that ship does. I know its purpose. It's not very fast because it's not so much a ship as it is an ultra-heavy weapons platform meant to serve as a new blockade gun. I had a very good reason for using only small craft to attack it."
Dana watched Matilda Witt's tactical display in agony and horror as the alien prototype fired a weapon she'd never seen before and ripped off half the carrier's hull.
*****
Hardway shuddered and the diamond-pane windows of the bridge flashed with piezoelectric discharge. Through the lightning inside the windows, Ram saw the single, wide ray that fanned out in a cone from the aperture in the alien prototype's hull.
It looked like flying into the sun, but the light that engulfed Hardway had a physical force that slammed them and tore at the guns and towers and everything it hit, stripping the molecules apart, skinning the kilometer-long beast and blowing her armor behind her like sloughing skin. The alien weapon gave Hardway a tail like a disintegrating comet.
The uninterrupted piezoelectric effect in the windows built up enough charge that it pooled inside and threatened to hurl ball lightning across the bridge. "The forward launch bays! The bow guns!" Cozen said. He pointed through the flashing in the diamond windows to the forward launch bays on the starboard side. The hull was gone. It was like looking into a cutaway model. The bow guns were mostly stripped. What remained was the skeletal barrels. The only reason Hardway still had her midships batteries was because they'd been shielded in shadow. Cozen ran forward and looked down the front of the command tower. "We've lost most of our armor above a hundred meters. And probably the whole whole keel side on most of the ship, judging by the angle we got hit." Cozen said, "Don't let that thing catch us again, Mr. Devlin."
The old man had never tried evasive combat maneuvers with a thousand-meter attack carrier. There was a reason Dana Sellis had never made it look easy.
The alien prototype unleashed its ray again. The storm blasted out into the black and ripped past Hardway's starboard. Ram thought they'd missed until the weapon's fire leaned towards the carrier like water from a hose. It waved faster than Ram could move the ship out of its way.
Cozen said, "Break off our direct approach. Increase our angular momentum, Mr. Devlin. It's the only way we'll avoid that thing's fire. And be evasive!"
This was going to get them all killed. Ram hit the thrusters in opposition and turned the ship with the main engine thrust harder than the inertial negation could compensate for – hard enough he swore he saw the spine bend all down the carrier's length.
Once Hardway traveled across the aliens' aim, they were harder to hit and the terrifying weapon seemed slower. "I'm spiraling in around it," Ram said. "That way, the midships batteries can maintain fire."
"Just don't let us get hit again," Biko said. "It could snap our spine."
"Midships batteries," Cozen said, "put a salvo in that ship, a tight grouping along the craft's equator if you please. Fire at will."
The gun commander's voice came up from the midships battery more shaken than before. "Salvo away. Impact in three."
The salvo flashed brightly off the alien hull, but when the spectacle was over, there was no hull breach. The alien prototype appeared undamaged. "Look at the impact blooms on IR," Ram said.
On the projected display's thermal overlay of the alien ship, the places where the sabot had landed were hot, but the way the heat from the impacts spread out wasn't encouraging. It cooled too fast. "Its armor really is just as bloody tough as the alien Dreadnought's."
"Disengage the alien prototype, Mr. Devlin. Take us outside that weapon's effective range."
Ram kept the carrier in a high-gee turn, spiraling outwards as they increased range from target. It was the only way to disengage while maintaining angular momentum.
The alien fired again, but Hardway was too far away now and Ram flew the carrier too erratically to be easily hit. The relief he felt was tempered with the stabbing realization that they'd been driven off.
Hardway must have been outside what the Squidies considered effective range because the prototype stopped firing. Then it made speed in the opposite direction, making for the hypermass transit to Gliese.
The first test of the aliens' prototype had been a stunning success.
"We can't let it get away!"
"Agreed, Mr. Devlin. This new weapon of theirs is a gun platform. It's not fast, but it doesn't have to be. I believe we're looking at the Squidies' newest blockade gun. Smaller than what we've seen them use in the past... Place one of those at the terminal end of an interstellar transit and you could destroy almost anything that came through. You could hold an entire system with a handful of them. Unless we want to face these at the mouth of every transit in Squidy space, then it must be proved ineffective here, now, today."
"I can see why Matilda Witt wanted to board it," Biko said. "Maybe we should rearm the junks with the fizzler torpedoes she wanted to use before and try to disable it."
Cozen squinted at the projection of the alien prototype. Then, he shook his head. "It's valuable IP, no doubt, but we won't be boarding it. We're going to destroy it."
Biko kept his eyes on it as he spoke. "There's only one place to attack that thing."
Cozen said, "I can imagine what you're thinking, but we can't put a torpedo or a railgun salvo down any of the gunport apertures. They'll simply use the weapon to destroy o
ur projectile or missile before it reaches its target."
"Unless someone plugs up the barrel first," Biko said.
"With what?" Cozen asked him, and when Ram realized what Biko intended to use, he shivered. They'd promised the pilots lower casualties, not a suicide mission.
"We use the fighters," Biko said. "The junks are too wide, but we can jam up the barrel of the Squidies' new super-gun with fighters... with F-151s."
Even Harry Cozen looked appalled.
*****
The Lancers hung on the opposite side of the formation from the Hellcats. As they grouped up for the assault, his flight helmet picked Pooch out of all the hundreds of planes. He wanted to open a private channel to her, but he didn't know what he wanted to say – maybe that he was sorry – that he didn't know it would be like this. He wanted to tell her how he didn't know Hardway would give the orders they'd just given.
Witt's pilots followed Pooch and Pooch followed orders. Now that Biko had given them to her, she was already busy on comms, tightening up her squadrons for an assault conceived in madness.
Six junks with 4 warspite torpedoes apiece went in with the fighters.
"Send them to Squidy hell," Cozen said, and hundreds of Bitzers dove on the Squidies' new weapon together. They spiraled down around the massive, waving hose of its ray, teasing it. It couldn't catch them, but it kept firing as the fighters barrel-rolled around the beam like they followed Jordo's golden thread or Gusher's shining path.
Jordo jeeked the rear thrust to maximum so it pushed him back in his flight couch as he raced Paladin to the front of the pack. He pushed both sticks forward and rocketed in, screaming all his hatred for bloody war and its bottomless appetite. The ten-meter mouth of the gun threw itself at him like a hungry maw claiming its sacrifice. But Jordo wouldn't feed it today.
