by A. D. Bloom
He made more and more of those clouds, firing and screaming until both his cannons had overheated. When he saw more Staas Guards exploding under fire, but not from his weapons or Hojo's, he knew they weren't out there alone anymore. The sight of friendly assault suits outlined in green almost made him choke with relief.
3rd Squad jetted past overhead and in moments, the Legionnaires' massed particle bursts ripped up the docks past Jurcik and Hojo and hit the Staas security forces in front of them like an artillery barrage, quieting the pulse and sabot fire for another hundred meters down the docks with a blanket of devastation. Thin-walled break-houses out-gassed with two-meter wide holes in them and abandoned knuckledraggers exploded with secondaries from hits to their cells. The carpet of burning destruction the 158th laid rolled fast down the spoke of the docks.
He scanned the spoke to the right for any sign of a threat, but all he saw were a pair of patrol boats taking hull hits from the gunners on the boarding craft. Further out, two Legion craft burned. "They got our ride, Hojo." The moment he heard the crack and the wheezing on comms, he began to turn.. By that time, Hojo's suit had already dropped its guns to its side and shifted into the shoulder-width ready position it only assumed when there was no neural input from the driver.
Hojo's head lolled to the side inside his dome and the edge of the hole the burrowing sabot had drilled in his side still gassed out the partial seal the suit had effected as a repair. If the sabot made it in, Jurcik didn't need to see Hojo's eyes to know.
"Keep moving!" the voice shouted. "Oh, it's the heroes!" His suit said the speaker was behind him. Master Sergeant Rolande thumped down on the top of his dome with his armored hand and grinned at him from inside his own armor. "Goddamn glorious initiative was what I call that, son. You were the anvil to our hammer! With you to push against, we jetted in and ran right over them. We've almost got this section of docks. The sailor boys are starting to land and board the destroyers. All we've got to do is hold 'em now. You and CPL Hojowitz will get the Legion Cross for this."
"Sarge, I didn't...we didn't...mean to..."
"Keep moving! Keep moving!"
21
Bofor's Station
Ram Devlin ran down the .3 gees of artificial gravity on the docks in long, leaping bounds while sporadic fire from Staas Guards on other spans zipped soundlessly past the line of almost three hundred making for the 12 destroyers lined up in their berths. "We've got the span," shouted Chun to the crews of UNS and Privateer veterans behind them. "Go! Head for you ships!"
Over a hundred small craft filled the starry sky above, darting so quickly in so many different lines of travel that a collision seemed assured. In his mind he saw them collide overhead and wipe the docks clear, snuffing out their mission's hope for success in a few heartbeats, as quickly and finally as the pulsed particle salvos from the Legion's heavy infantry had swept the Guard from the docks surrounding the destroyers. The bodies that had been blown out of the artificial gravity hung between the ships or glomed onto their' gravity. Their bodies and parts lay on the warships' hulls as if they'd fallen there.
As Ram and the first fifty of the crewmen approached the steel cliffs of the Uncas, the first flashes of red and black war-painted exosuits appeared above. At least fifteen of the hive's warrior monks flew overhead, but only three of them landed on the hull, immediately making for the empty bow gun mounts where they planned to set up.
When he came down from his last leap, he stared up at her armored port side and her command tower in a kind of disbelief that it was all happening. Ram glanced down the docks where he saw crewmen now reaching the Shantok and the Fidelia. They ran across the gangplanks to the open hatches and flew in open bay doors on gasbelts.
"Shantok reporting, Captain on board," reported Shaw over comms.
"This is the Fidelia. Captain on board."
The calls continued to come in from captains boarding their assigned ships as Ram Devlin ran across the gangplank with three crewmen and the ship's new first officer, Girot, a veteran who's served on the last class of UNS destroyers. The second they set foot in the hatch she called out on comms, this is the Uncas. Captain on board." She said, "This way, sir."
"You don't have to call me sir."
"If you say so, sir. This way. He and Girot jogged the outer rings of the C-deck to get to the lift, and when the doors opened, four, blue-suited dock workers nearly knocked them down as they bolted from the lift and disappeared around the curve of the passageway. "This is Devlin, we've still got shipyard personnel on board. Make sure you don't fire on them; just let them go."
"This is the Chief in the reactor room. I've got two here that want to come with us, Mr. Devlin. They're redsuits."
"Take them," she said. "They're recent on these systems. Nobody else is."
His navigator and Ops officers caught up before the lift doors closed. "There's more coming, Siske said. "Only half of us made it to the designated boats for the ride up. I show 14 on board now. It takes 24 to crew her properly."
"We can move with 14," Girot said as she shifted the lever up towards the command decks.
"Give them another five minutes."
The doors opened onto Uncas' small bridge. Patrol boats and Legion boarding craft traded fire as they streaked across the crystal-pane windows. Gaspar stepped to the NAV and Siske took OPS as Girot swiped at the air over the tactical display. The projection from the console blinked in front of her and then went dark. "It's got power," she said. "That's a good sign, but it's all locked down."
"It's supposed to be. Let's see if Dana's core overwrites did their job." He stabbed at the keypad on the right arm of the command chair, inputting the sixteen-digit command code she'd given him that would let the ship know its new captain had arrived. The tactical display lit up the air over Girot's console as well as NAV and internal OPS at the same time Ram's command menus were displayed from his chair. "Good. Siske, get me an update from our reactor room." He thumbed the squack and spoke into the helmet of every crewman aboard. "this is Ram Devlin. I show Uncas with 17 of 24 aboard. We are t-minus 3 minutes to departure." Siske pointed to seven blue dots huddled under the bow gun mounts. Ram added, "I'm also showing 7 Staas exosuits hiding near the keel-side bow. This is your last chance to leave otherwise, you're coming with us."
"Getting reports from Chief Wills....," said Siske over local comms. "Reactor balance is crap, but he can give us almost 70% power to the main engines."
Ram went to the front windows and looked down on the three Shediri monks out on the empty bow railgun mount as they bolted the tripod mounting to the platform and hoisted the surplus ion cannon on top, securing the power feeds on either side. "We won't have any coordinated targeting information for the bugs out there," said Girot. "They'll be firing blind."
"Don't worry about them," Ram said.
"Two minutes."
Yates arrived last, took his station at comms, and reported. "We have eleven ships currently reporting a go launch status. We're only waiting on one and the rest of the personnel she needs to run are on the docks now, about 200 meters away."
"Uncas will launch first, then down the line," Ram said.
It had been twenty years since Ram Devlin had the bridge of any Human-built warship. For so long, they'd had to make do with pieced together bitzer hulls. The ships Devlin's Privateers had built out of scavenged and stolen parts were built to fight a particular kind of battle, winking in and out of view while using their stealth shunts to hide and strike at the enemy from where they were least expected. One or two hits on any of those ships and they'd be done for. Over the years, he'd kept himself from saying out loud more than once how he'd give his right arm to have a real warship at his command again, something with hardened armor and a double hull that could go into battle without hiding and take some punishment before becoming ineffective.
Now that he had again what he'd wanted for so long, it felt different. Not because he remembered captaining a carrier almost seven times the l
ength of the destroyer in which he sat, but because he'd never wanted to avoid a fight more than he did at that moment.
"I have clean interface with the docking clamp system," said Sikes.
"Release in five seconds on my mark," Girot said, "Three...two...one...mark."
"Releasing docking clamps...good sep, good sep."
"NAV, use maneuvering thrusters until we clear 300 meters, then go to main engines, half power. Make for the far side of our second moon."
Girot pointed to the tactical projections showing the third planet, its satellites both natural and artificial, and the LiDAR contacts in immediate orbital space. "We have six incoming contacts. It's more patrol boats." She zoomed in on the combined LiDAR and radar image to show the dark spots like painted eyes on the bow. "Open tubes. Each carries two low-yield torps. They're ready to fire. I don't need to remind you we have no gun batteries whatsoever."
"What's the status of our boarding craft?"
"The Legion are busy handling the remaining patrol craft on the other side. We're on our own. Besides those torps, the patrol boats are armed with a 140mm scatterguns, but they won't do much to us. Six are on an intercept course. They could launch now if they wanted. I don't know why they're waiting."
Ram said, "Because warships are expensive. They'd prefer to get them back without holes vaped through the shiny new armor. And they think we don't have any guns. They'll try to get behind us and use the scatterguns on our engines. It's the only part of us that pea-shooter can damage besides our antennas. They might succeed if we take them on piecemeal."
"Tabotem and Yantic are launching now."
After a glance at the tactical display in front of Girot he said. "This is Uncas... Tabotem and Yantic, maintain course. We've got six bandits rolling in. We'll take them together. All other ships, group up in threes to combine firepower. They'll be going for the engines with small guns. We won't let them."
"Yantic confirms," said Dana.
Chun spoke next, "Wilco, Uncas."
"New vectors, Mr. Devlin?"
"NAV, swing us wide off course, away from the Patrol boats and when I tell you, swing us back onto our original line along with Tabotem and Yantic so that we engage from slightly different directions."
"Should I tell the Shediri on the bow we're about to engage?"
"Looks like they already know." Out on the topside bow gun-mount the three of them swiveled the cannon to point at the incoming boats. One and then the other two turned on their suit lights.
Girot said, "What are they doing with their suit lights? Do you know?"
"I'm not sure even they know."
The patrol boats burned their engines hard and came silhouetted by their glowing exhaust. They caught up with the first three stolen UNS destroyers as the warships descended from high orbit over a sea storm flashing lightning on the clouded night-side of Otherworld. Uncas came in on a line twenty degrees off the parallel courses set by Chun and Dana aboard Yantic and the Tabotem. Ten seconds later, Ram gave the order to turn the bows of their ships straight at the six Staas patrol boats still in close echelon.
"They're still coming right at us," said Girot.
"They think they can spin for a shot and score engine hits after they flyby. It's the easiest way in one of those."
The nine ships closed on each other, and Uncas' NAV projection showed a series of multicolored lines over the console marking where their paths would cross.
Girot said, "Well, if six get by us on this head-on pass, I don't think they can miss."
"We get to shoot first."
In the final seconds, he tried to imagine how it was possible for the Hs'tok warrior monks to do this. The shot was, by all rights, impossible. The second the Staas boats realized the destroyers had any kind of guns at all, they'd veer off and give up their perfect shot to save their skins. That meant the Shediri riding the bow would have to wait until the enemy was close, but the enemy was traveling at them so quickly they'd be past in the blink of an eye.
Shediri eyes don't blink, he thought as the first salvo of bright, rose-colored plasma hurtled out from the cannon. The field of high-density plasma expanded to a ball over three meters across and crackled with charge as it lit the bow and put color in the faces of his nervous bridge crew. Rounds from the Hs'tok gunning off the bows of Dana's and Chun's ships screamed past on the starboard side as the Shediri on the bow of Uncas fired two smaller bursts of more concentrated fire. One more salvo was all the rest of them got out before the first impacts.
The dark hulls that had been silhouetted lit bright on their bows as the rosy plasma struck the first, second, and third patrol boats. The hits slammed their hulls out of line while the charge crackled over their ship. The first and the second passed over the top of Uncas spinning out of control, engines dark. As the next three crossed the wake of their disabled sister ships, the last dispersed plasma round fired by their Shediri gunners landed on them with the fire from the other two Hs'tok crews. There was no time to see if the last three patrol boats been disabled until Uncas, Yantic, and the Taobotem had steamed past, but even before a nervously cursing Girot checked the feed from the arrays to see what had happened, the bugs on the bow began to celebrate and drum some chant, dancing out in the vacuum on the bow of his ship.
"How the hell did they do that, sir?" said Girot. "That's a big gun they've got, but they didn't have array and tracking support. Nobody's reflexes are that fast, not even a bug's. There was no time to aim."
"They don't aim. They hit targets. That's all I can tell you. NAV, don't slow down. Those dispersed rounds disabled them without killing them, but I doubt they'll think about all the trouble we went to arrange that if there's a chance they can launch one of those torps they're carrying. Comms, tell the rest of our destroyer squadron to divert over the pole to avoid them and make for the second moon."
"Still no sign of Company Cutters in orbit."
"Every single one of them went to engage Hank after they hulled the first of them. There's a war going on out there." He was afraid to look at the long-range LiDAR and what it showed out past the orbit of the fifth planet. Too many lives had already been lost. They'd be coming in force now to kill them all, just like Martin Samhain had said. Hank had given them the excuse they needed.
Girot said, "I can't read much from here and we're crossing the planet's limb soon so I'll lose LOS, but I can tell you the battle is still going on out there in the middle-system. You can see the detonations and LiDAR flares from here. They're hunting stealthed ships."
22
Absolom
Alcyone system, past the orbit of the fifth planet.
The eleven stealthed corsairs, junks, and Shediri corvettes of Devlin's Privateers were as invisible to Hank Devlin aboard Absolom as they were to the nine Staas Company Cutters hunting them. He knew the rest of his ships were close. Just like him, the captains of those vessels would try to stay at range to strike the cutters when the best opportunity presented itself.
The armored company cutters spat plasma from their tails. It was easy to see them coming even through the gauzy veil the stealth put over the arrays. Their bows flashed with salvos of flares while dowser mines launched and veered down to to hunt where Hank thought Biko and Split Aces must be lurking along with Porker's Pride. The little fusion dets on the dowsers cooked off and vaped their thick casings into waves of expanding plasma like silent balloons inflating forever, never bursting, only going dark after a last, spiteful discharge of lightning across its dimming front.
"I saw Split Aces on LiDAR that time," said Millet. "Along with Porker and the Ketok." He pointed them out on the projection, deep inside the enemy snare like Absolom. "I think Gondola Six might be over there, too. When those dowser mines went off close, the det flash was more energy than they could shunt away. We're right at the edge of our envelope. Any closer and those cutters will spot us for sure."
The incoming flares fired by the cutters now turned together towards Absolom and the other stea
lthed ships nearby. When the string of thirty detonated in brilliant blooms across the bow, the bright flash felt like a fire running up and down his own nerves.
"31% over our threshold...They must have seen us that time," said Millet. "They'd have to be blind not to."
"NAV evasive for fifteen seconds, then come back on parallel vector with the enemy."
The gun captains aboard the cutters hunting them guessed right again with their next flare salvos and revealed the Zo'tok's 190-meter magentite-doped chitin hull cruising closer than Hank thought it had been. "That was Zo'tok, Borneo, and Debtor's Due at four o'clock. They're deploying in a cone around us," said Millet. "This is out last chance to disengage." Over the tactical console to Hank's right, the ten-centimeter, floating representations of the armored warships hunting his squadron made a shape like a hand closing around them.
"Incoming burst comms from Split Aces. Captain Biko says to come about with him and make for the Grinder."
"No. We can't waste this opportunity." Hank raised the volume and projection of his voice for the benefit of his bridge crew. "We cannot disengage. If we do, then these company ships will be in orbit around Otherworld in hours, hunting our new destroyer squadron while it's still being armed behind the second moon. We must fight them here and we must fight them now or resign ourselves to lose everything."
Zi'vt at NAV swayed his chitin torso nervously over the console as the translator did its best with Hank's words. The bug chatter-clacked and hissed approval. "No longer crossing roads place," said the translator he wore.
