by A. D. Bloom
*****
It would take seven interstellar transits to get there. That's what the redsuits told him. Hardway would have to breach space seven times and cross as many systems to reach the unnamed target. Looking at charts on a terminal that accessed Hardway's OMNI flight computer, Jordo and Snooze and Dirty tried to guess where they'd be going. Everyone knew humanity could barely hold their own system against alien aggression. If the carrier was making seven transits, then wherever Hardway was going had to be far behind enemy lines.
When the carrier steamed out past Saturn and approached the location where they'd breach space, Jordo made sure he was near a bow-facing porthole. Holdout and Snooze and Dirty were just meters down the passageway at the next one. The Lancers' orange suits crowded the decks between the bow railgun batteries where they'd been told they'd get the best view. The nuggets had all heard that when they opened a transit it was spectacular sight, but Hardway's crew didn't seem to care. They'd probably seen it a hundred times.
Buoys marked the precise location of the Sol-Procyon Transit like a five-K-wide, spherical shell of lighthouses in space. A dozen, fixed-station railguns twice the size of Hardway's made a second shell. Jordo guessed they were never meant to move from their position guarding this obviously strategic location. The sun glinted off small craft hanging in a cloud over the sphere of buoys. He squinted, but without his flight helmet's imaging capabilities, he couldn't make them out. He was about to put it on so he could see better until a low, but feminine voice next to him caressed his ear with unlikely words. "Torpedo mines," she said.
She stood close so Jordo smelled the warmth rising off her, coming out the neck of her exosuit. She was slender with dark hair and fine features and a very odd angle to her nose. It had been broken. "Lt. Commander Dana Sellis," she said. He could see she was a Lt. Commander. He reminded himself that in the privateers a Lt. Commander was only one step above a Senior Lieutenant.
"You're a..."
"Bridge officer," she said.
This was the first time he'd ever said it and it felt good. "I'm a fighter pilot."
"I know. You ever breach space before?" Jordo raised his eyebrows and made a brief show of looking down at his orange, prison-issue suit and then back at her. He had to point to the patch that said Property of Bailey Prison before she seemed to understand what he was getting at. "Right," she said. "Got it. You were too busy."
"You never seen a convict suit before?"
"Nope. But I'd love a closer look at that flight helmet," she said. Jordo handed it over. "What's with the six... um..."
"Bug eyes? On the sides? Lensed arrays."
She said, "Are they part of a multispectral imaging system?" He nodded, and she pointed to the port where Jordo plugged into the Bitzer.
"Umbilical," he said. "Secure data feed." He pointed out the porthole at a strange pair of ships, half obscured by the other carriers. One was coming closer. They looked like old-style, wonder-wheel space stations from the time before artificial gravity when they had to spin people around and around to hold them on the deck. They were spindle thin in places. One good shot is all it looked like it would take to blow them into pieces.
"Those are breaching ships," she said. "They open the hypermass transit. Almost any enemy warship can do it, but we still need a special, dedicated vessel to manage it."
The two breaching ships didn't appear to have guns. Most of the ring section was just naked tensegrity frame. Almost all of the mass was in the center of the wheel and in the spoke. It looked like a stack of symmetric reactors and engines. Conduits fanned out and extended down the length of the 200-meter spokes where they terminated in what looked like low towers of some kind. Jordo couldn't guess what they were. It was all reverse-engineered from stolen alien technology, just like the inertial negation pinch in his plane.
As Hardway closed on the 5K-wide sphere of buoys and the defenses, the closer of the two breaching ships turned towards them. "We're taking one with us," Dana said. The other one adjusted its position slightly to square off with the sphere of buoys. "The other should be warming up now." In seconds, lightning began to arc over the hull and the wonder-wheel frame of the breaching ship. The charge danced up and down the skeleton spokes between the axle and the wheel. The crackling intensified and spread and lit the whole ship up like it was sheathed in zero-gee flame.
From the edges of the wheel, where Jordo had seen the stubby towers, five streams of ghostly and razor-straight nuclei lanced out into space. "Looks a lot like Squidy particle beams," he said. She nodded. Five beams, thin and absolute in their bearing, stabbed across the black on a colliding path to intersect inside the sphere of buoys.
At first, the energy from their collision produced a stable, rolling and sustained explosion, but then, it began to swell, growing brighter and blossoming bigger, expanding like a burning bubble. The carrier hurtled towards it as the ball of hellish light and fire licked outwards like it was trying to consume the buoys around it. The inferno looked to be almost a kilometer wide when the core of it suddenly went dark.
In a moment so brief it made Jordo doubt his sense of time, the fire and fury disappeared. It was all gone save for thin, flicking tongues of plasma dancing across a spherical surface so thin you could almost only see it at the edges. Inside, where it had burned like the interior of a star only moments ago Jordo saw what looked like a tunnel with shifting walls made of hellfire. At the end of it were the warped and waving stars as seen from Procyon, 12 light years away.
There was no sensation of crossing from normal space into the transit, no discernible threshold other than thin plasma that trailed off the hull after entry. One second, Hardway was in her home system, and the next, she steamed through places Jordo's notions of physics could not describe, flying faster than light with the twisted stars streaking by through the sides of the fiery tunnel. The breaching ship that had followed the carrier in flew to the rear, sixty degrees to the side.
"How long?" he asked her.
"What...you mean how long do we stay inside the transit? A few minutes."
"Hey," Jordo said, "If you're a bridge officer, then why aren't you up on the bridge?"
"Not my watch," she said. "I'm not on for another hour." She paused then like he was supposed to say something. Then, she asked, "They assign you quarters yet?" He shook his head. The stars streaked by so damn fast. "So..." she said, "I see plenty of female Lancers. Were they all locked up in the same place as you?"
He said, "Uh-huh." They were going to breach space seven times? "Does every solar system have a place you can do this?"
"Do what? Open a Noondie hypermass transit and travel faster than light? Yeah. More than one place. Any two stellar masses will create a hypermass distortion between them. You've just gotta tickle the right spots the right way to trigger an opening." She grinned after she said that. "So when you were in prison," she said, "did you get to... um... fraternize?"
"Yeah. Sure." Why the hell would she ask him that? He could see her face in the porthole's reflection. Why was she smiling at him like that?
Jordo figured out why about sixty seconds after she said goodbye and went down the tube to the ship's spine. He told Snooze and Holdout and Dirty he was going to go and find out where the mess hall was, but instead, he did his best to find Lt. Commander Dana Sellis before she changed her mind.
Chapter Ten
Shafter and Burn's 151s were already gone when he went to bay 33 before the last transit. So were Topper's and Dig's. It didn't make any sense. Where could the hell had the Lancer's aces gone? The squadron's pilots already had their orders, but going into battle for the first time without their only veterans left Jordo and all the rest feeling abandoned and more than a little uneasy – Jordo in particular because with them MIA, he and his 2nd Lieutenant’s bars were in charge.
The Lancers waited in the cockpits of their Bitzers in four different launch bays, dead-quiet on comms. On the other side of the launch bay doors the breaching ship opened the
last transit. It would stay one system back while Hardway made the trip to 211-Lovis and attacked the Squidies far behind the current battle-lines of the Sirius front. Today's target was 36 light years from Earth.
Cozen's voice came across all comms channels and the ship-wide squack: "Hardway will engage enemy cruisers on the near side of the gas giant's planetary system while a force group designated Hobo inserts to the fourth moon, currently on the planet's far side. Hardway took the long way 'round to get here and we are deep, deep in Indian country – so far back behind the lines that the Squidies will probably be surprised to see us. But don't expect them to be rear echelon pushovers. Data from a spybird in orbit confirms a full squadron of twenty-four red bandit fighters stationed on the fourth moon. Keeping them occupied while our people insert and extract will be critical to the success of this operation. The 4th moon is Squidy's moon. He guards it heavy and if there's fighters all over it, then we can't land a junk. Good luck and good hunting. That is all."
The bay doors parted and the Lovis system's red light flooded the bay. 211-Lovis was a dim star in the visible spectrum, but Jordo's flight helmet translated its infrared brilliance into a spectacle his eyes could apprehend. That star's rays extended in shafts through thin dust spread across the inner system and seemed to keep going forever.
Hardway closed on the fifth planet out, a gas giant, fat and swollen. The top layers were cool and dark, but where the clouds broke, hellish heat seeped out from the layers underneath in radiant beams that shifted with that planet's hurricane winds.
Jordo's helmet drew false-scale wireframes over enemy defense satellites it saw against the banded clouds just before Hardway's railgun batteries opened up on them. Hypervelocity impacts turned the satellites to brilliant crimson and green plasma blooms. "Now, that is some real scenic shit," Gusher said.
When the flashes around and across the face of the giant planet were over and every alien satellite Hardway saw on active radar and LiDAR had been removed from the sky, Jordo heard the coded call go out on general comms, "Night train, night train."
"All railgun batteries, hold your fire."
Now that the enemy couldn't see the far side of the planet with their satellites anymore, Hardway launched its junks. Asa Biko's voice came over comms. "This is Hardway AT. Junk flights 1 through 15, launch. Scramble. Scramble." They blasted out bays above and below and on either side of the Lancers, vectoring plasma out their four, outboard nacelles and their primary thrusters. The gunnery junks went out in six flights of 3 to take up defensive positions around the carrier with their 140mm autocannon turrets. The torpedo junks formed up to Hardway's starboard rear. They were fitted out like assault bombers and carried four, enormous warspite torpedoes each instead of the gunnery module.
"Hardway AT to all Hobo elements, you look good on our scans. Standby... 133rd...Lancers, prepare to scramble and deploy as planned. Lancer 2-1, you and your wingman will lead the Dingo QF-111s in for initial contact. All Lancers scramble and engage war mode. Scramble, scramble. All 111 launch bay crews, standby to loose the Dingoes on Lancer 2-1's mark. Repeat, Lancer 2-1 has the leash."
The calls came in a dozen at a time over Lancer squadron comms. "What the hell is 'war mode'?"
"War mode?"
"Jordo, what's he mean?"
"He means the big red button! Mash it!" Jordo slammed it with his fist. The vibrations from the F-151's inertial negation system shook him so fast that his whole body buzzed. He felt like he was rising and falling a micrometer ever microsecond.
"Feels like this thing's givin' the de-luxe massage," Snooze said.
F-151s tore out of the bays above and to the left and right as Jordo blasted out into the radiant beams. While most of the Lancers took a defensive position over Hardway, waiting for their signal, Jordo rolled and pulled his nose down and around the forward launch bay module until he was flying parallel with the underside of the carrier. Snooze followed him through the split-s and rotated and stopped with him under the closed, belt-iron doors. On a private channel, Jordo told his wingman, "After we pick up the Dingoes, we're going straight down from here. Follow me through an easy turn onto vector. Stay on my wing and match my maneuvers. Don't pull any fancy moves and go taking a nap." Silence on Flight Two comms. A couple of seconds after his wingman still hadn't responded, Jordo said, "Snooze?"
Snooze said, "Wilco, 2-1. Will comply."
Jordo thumbed through channels until he was talking to Hardway. "This is Lancer 2-1. Open those doors and loose the Dingoes." Jordo flew in a circle under the ship as six bays opened on the bottom side. 50 of Hardway's 111 drones poured out along with another 72 that had come with them from Arbitrage. Jordo half expected them all to to ignore him and fly around looking for Squidy warheads to kill. "Here we go." Jordo put his 151 in a dive away from the carrier. "Snooze, spin on your jets for me and make sure those Dingoes are following us."
A second later, Snooze said, "Yeah. They're all right behind us. Looks like all of them, anyways. Bays are empty. Doors closing."
"Alright spin back around. I'm about to maneuver." Jordo flew to his 12 o'clock high – towards the set of three Squidy cruisers now breaking the limb of the planet like a set of enormous dogs' teeth biting through it. This was the first time he'd ever seen an enemy warship this close. They looked like gigantic, armored fangs with gun towers. They left a ruddy trail behind them in the vacuum. "There's the enemy. They're coming."
"I wish that were all of them," Snooze said. "Those junks down below us are going real low, almost hitting the planet's atmo. Look. 3 o'clock low, way low."
The junks had flown down towards the gas giant. They'd bring those torpedoes to the Squidies around the blind side of the planet and launch them from where the aliens could now only guess since their satellites had been dusted. Shafter had said that would force the Squidies to send their fighters out, but before they arrived, while the convoy of 27 junks was down low and out of the Squidies' sight, three of them broke away.
Three junks near the rear of the convoy rolled and blasted away from the rest and away from the engagement with the Squidies. Those junks were going somewhere else...towards whatever we came for on the 4th moon.
Jordo zoomed in on them just in time to see the little charges blow. The fronts of the first two junks' ore carrier modules blew off with sparking puffs. The metal plates tumbled down towards the planet's clouds, falling in and out of the beams like scraps of paper. A second later, the two boats decelerated using forward-vectored thrust, and a pair of Staas F-151s that had been hidden in each junk's containers shot out from where they'd been concealed under the bow.
The two junks that had delivered the 4 fighters veered away without pause as Lancer Flight One formed up and rocketed towards the objective escorting a third, well-armed junk. The redsuits said it was filled with United Nations and DIA spooky types and Staas Company geologists.
"Thirty seconds to our way-point," Jordo said.
The junks launched torps early and cleared out. 96 warspite torpedoes flared as they came up at the Squidies' cruisers from under the planet's curve. The cloud of them left thin IR trails across the black. It was a salvo bigger than any capital ship could throw and already, the junks that launched them would be returning for more ordnance. A few torps in the front of the salvo flared and cooked off. The Squidies were already stabbing them at long range with defensive batteries.
Far out ahead of Jordo and Snooze and all the Dingoes, through the gas giant's hellish rays, the Squidies' third ship finally showed itself to be not a cruiser, but a carrier when it opened its launch bays. Alien fighters poured out in a crimson blur. "Red bandits," Snooze said. "Looks like...twenty-four of 'em."
"Hardway AT to all flights. Enemy fighters have been sighted with the cruisers. Lancer 2-1, be advised of bandits' decreasing range and bearing to your position. They're on an intercept course with you and the Dingoes. ETA is less than 2 minutes. Your orders are to ensure the Dingoes engage and then bug out. Acknowledge."
>
"Lancer 2-1 to Hardway AT. Wilco, Hardway. Will comply." The pack of Dingoes was about to get chewed to hell and Jordo actually felt bad for them like he was serving them up for the Squidies, but at least if the bandits were occupied with the drones, they wouldn't be killing his Lancers.
Jordo and Snooze led the Dingoes in and peeled away as the autonomous drones hurled themselves at the alien fighters. "Hardway AT to Lancer 2-1, form up with your squadron."
"Roger that. Changing vector now." Jordo turned to port, half-rolled and half-looped so he turned 180 degrees. Snooze followed and they laid on the thrust to make sure they got away clean and none of the Squidies overshot the Dingoes for a crack at them. Seconds later, after they were going fast enough to feel safe, Jordo was compelled to rotate his Bitzer on its jets and fly backwards to see the engagement with his own eyes. Snooze was already spinning.
There were more than five times as many Dingoes as red bandits. Jordo had heard of Squidy pilots taking on enormous numbers of autonomous drones and the red bandits gave him and Snooze a demonstration of just how they did it.
The Dingoes hit the closest bandits with all their numbers. The drones in front threw themselves at the lead Squidies and the rest of the pack went in with them. Jordo couldn't tell whether it was Dingo following Dingo or whether it was every single drone making its own path for the same target, but that pattern of attack was what the alien pilots exploited.
The drones flew at the red bandits in a fire-spitting horde, chasing the leading, alien three-plane element as it flew past them, rolling and dodging their fire while it dove and then looped away. The Dingoes in position to fire on the alien fighters that had just taunted them only spat shells briefly because that's when the second element of the red bandits formation opened up with their particle streams from their position behind the first flight. Their shafts came down across the front edge of the Dingoes' pack from above and the aliens drew swaths of bright flashing impacts across a dozen Dingo hulls, gutting them or running them through so the 111s drifted for absent half-seconds before their reactors cooked off in fast flashes.
