2166 - FORCE LIBERTY

by A. D. Bloom

  The Imperium ship bent its looping magnetic field lines in great curving arcs that swept around the planet and suddenly intersected with Hardway again. They followed her with kilometer-high walls of burning, ghostly ions.

  Pardue saw it was coming for them and launched the torpedoes. "Hardway CAP, Hardway CAP, fire the disruption salvo."

  "This is Gramercy. Warspites away. Intercept in five."

  "NAV, evasive action in five," Biko said. His voice was surprisingly calm. "Wait for the dets, it's still tracking us until then."

  When the ninety-six warspites the torpedo junks put on the artificial magnetic line detonated, Ram swore he saw the plasmoid coming at them begin to waver off the wide curve that lead right to them, but the targeting line never snapped, and after the flashes were gone, the luminous, sparking, spiraling cloud of plasma was only disrupted. It rippled with shockwaves and it had dissipated into a front ten kilometers wide, but the cloud of charged particles and ions was still on a collision course like a guided solar storm.

  Biko said, "Starboard tubes, set to det 2Ks out. Fire on my mark....Fire." The only hope now was to break up the weapon with another blanket of nukes. No matter what they did, some of it was about to hit.

  The plasma weapon splashed through the planet's thin, vertical rings in a spectacular display, frying everything it came near. Just before impact, field lines around his ship flared with charged particles and vaporizing hull plate and armor. The tendril lines twisted and wrapped around her in the infinitesimal moment before impact.

  The last salvo of warpsites from the carrier's own tubes bloomed in a protective wall of hell all along her length, 600 meters high.

  "Good disruption!" Biko shouted. It looked to Ram as if the plasma cloud swept it all along on its way. "Brace for impact!"

  The disrupted plasma storm slammed the entire carrier at once, knocking it on a new course. He saw Hardway's spine bend along her forward length and then bend back. Between the lightning arcing up and down the ship as it twisted in space, jets of flame rocketed out the bays and the ship shuddered with secondary detonations as conventional munitions cooked off under the charge and energy of impact, blowing molten metal out the forward launch bays into the blackness. Internal shock waves rolled up the launch bay modules toward the command tower. When they hit, Ram's chair tried to throw him like a bucking bronco. The straps tried to sever his limbs as his brain rattled in his helmet.

  "Exterior and interior hull breaches in all sections." There was smoke in the vacuum on the bridge.

  Pardue pointed to the tactical projection and her birds being chased down by an alien hell-storm that had gotten by their nukes. "They're getting low on torps now. Not enough left to protect themselves." The alien weapon found Flight Element A and wiped a three junks out of the sky. "Where the hell is Guerrero?"

  "The Imperium ship isn't close enough to the planet yet for them to show themselves," Ram said. "NAV, take us for a bounce off the atmo. Force it to go lower too if it wants to chase us for another shot. Hurry, it'll break the limb of the planet for another shot any second."

  "We can't take another shot from that thing," Biko said. "Not even one like that...and I don't think using more nukes is going to help disperse it more if it gets by."

  "Pardue, pull all the surviving craft in Flight Element Alpha off their station and place them...there." Ram pointed to the projection of the gas giant and a spot near the South polar region. "There. 35,000 Ks off the point where the Imperium ship should catch up with us again. If they go there, then there's only one reasonable path the Imperium ship can take to hit both of us at once. He'll have to haul-ass and cut close to the gas giant to do it... That will be Guerrero's chance."

  UNS Guerrero

  Over the South polar region of the gas giant

  Captain Chun hid UNS Guerrero and her 800-meter, armored hull 5Ks down in the eye of the gas planet's south polar vortex, burning her reactors near maximum output to remain where the Imperium ship didn't think she could go. She couldn't stay there much longer. "Another two minutes maybe," his reactor chief told him.

  At battlestations on this ship, all personnel were stationed at least a hundred meters into the hull. Unlike the Privateers' carriers, the battleship's bridge had been built deep inside her armor and placed behind her glacial bowplate. Belt-iron steel mined from the Jupiter Trojans rode her bow in a disk 400-meters-wide and 25-meters thick.

  The bridge of UNS Guerrero was closely packed and buzzing with activity. Chun gripped the arms of the captain's chair too tightly, cramping his fingers inside the white gloves of his exosuit. His executive officer ranged between the Ops console and their tactical console. The projection over it showed the battle unfolding above, and as Hardway and its decoy element came on new vectors in their flight from the Imperium ship, he saw the opportunity.

  His XO tapped furiously at the tactical console until a broad green line curved around the projection of the gas giant, illustrating the path of the alien. "That's it's current course, Captain Chun. It's coming in low and fast. It took the bait," he said. He was smiling inside his helmet.

  "NAV, prepare to blast us out of this hole. XO, make ready the railguns. Chief Meester," Captain Chun said. "Is the alien modified device still functioning within expected parameters?" He had to turn over his shoulder to see the Privateer redsuit at the console they'd given him to monitor the alien device now placed next to his ship's pinch.

  Meester said, "It's a field coil device with a stable field. Nothing has changed since the last time you asked, Captain. sir. It'll only get better the more juice you can throw at it. Sir. Captain Chun."

  It seemed like the redsuit from Hardway was more worried about when to say sir on a Navy ship than anything else. At least he seemed confident in the device. If a Privateer showed that kind of confidence when he was aboard and they were about to bet their lives on it, Chun truly believed the device would work.

  "Open the gunports." All around the edges of the bowplate, the sixteen gunports opened, each of them 26 meters. You could have flown fighters and junks down those magnetic acceleration barrels and never scraped the outboard nacelles. Each of those guns would fire an osmium-tungsten sabot close to 73% the speed of light and pack more punch than the alpha strike from a fat gunboat cruiser. And Guerrero had sixteen of those guns.

  Let the Privateers have their carriers, Chun thought. As he watched the Imperium ship commit on the course that would doom it, he allowed himself a glance around the bridge of his proud ship and look upon the men and women there. He could only see his ship now from deep inside its heart, but never had it looked more beautiful. All things are most beautiful when they're doing what they were made to do. This ship was made to fire a salvo of unimaginable power to destroy Humanity's enemies. It was on its way to do that this very minute.

  "The Imperium ship has committed," his XO said. "It will have another magnetic targeting lock on the Privateer carrier in ten seconds.

  "Plot the intercept course and hold," Chun said. "We can't appear until it locks on the carrier or the fighters. If it shoots at us on the way in, there won't be time to do anything and we'll fail."

  "It's got a lock on the carrier at close range...they're sitting ducks now."

  "NAV. All ahead full towards the alien. Collision course. Keep us low. All railgun batteries prepare to fire on my mark."

  On the tactical display, the spires of the alien ship reached out with a pair of looping magnetic lines, one through the formation of fighters and junks and one through the carrier. The electricity lit up the clouds as the Imperium vessel fired two bursts that swept out on long curving arcs. The fission warheads from the torpedo junks and the carrier flashed and strobed in a cloud in front of the incoming plasmoid as it swept over the gas giant. The fighters got lucky and when the line targeting them snapped, the plasma weapon veered off harmlessly like an unguided solar flare. Hardway wasn't so lucky.

  "The carrier will take impact in 12 seconds."

  There w
as no window to look out, just the out-of-scale tactical projections over the bridge showing the positions of the ships and a see-through planet. UNS Guerrero was tearing around the gas giant at over 5000 K/s. On the display, it was only a few centimeters between them when they came over the local horizon and had a direct line of sight to the enemy.

  SCS Hardway

  "Plasmoid impact in ten seconds," Biko said. "This one should finish us."

  "NAV, hit the maneuvering thrusters and turn us into it." There wasn't time for that, but thankfully the lieutenant didn't waste her last seconds pointing that out.

  The weapon had retained most of its shape through the last torpedo salvos and now, it had spun through its toroid shape into a disk. The curving arms extended from it like the arms of a galaxy. It flew at them like an angry, dense plasma hurricane growing larger too fast for Ram's eye to take in.

  "Five seconds..."

  "It's Guerrero!" Pardue shouted and pointed to her tactical display showing the UNS battleship approaching fast, ripping a wake in the clouds under it from the fire rocketing out its truncated tadpole tail. Her gunports were open and gaping as she cut the clouds. There was time to see only that much before Guerrero crossed the vacuum between her and the enemy.

  There was no chance for the Imperium ship to fire and it never tried to run. Up until the last moment it must have truly believed that the armored cannonball of a ship approaching it so fast would impact on their shield like all those impotent torpedoes and sabot.

  That alien cathedral floating over the whirling clouds dwarfed Guerrero's 800-meter girth. In the moment the projected fields of the two ships touched, the weak shield around the battleship lit up and flashed bright with the energy of the Imperium shield. In the next millisecond after that, when he saw the UN battleship was still there, Ram knew it was inside the shield.

  UNS Guerrero was between the Imperium ship's tallest spires when it fired. When the battleship's sixteen guns let loose from inside her hull, there was an unexpected discharge that made the whole ring around her bowplate flash.

  Magnetic rings in the barrels accelerated the simple osmium-tungsten sabot the battleship fired to 73% the speed of light and they did it so quickly that the inertial gees alone were enough to compress them and convert them into a new state of matter. The burning sabot moved too fast to see, but Ram swore he saw them streak from the ring around the battleship's bowplate and all impact simultaneously on the central mass of the Imperium ship's hull. The kinetic force of the impact vaporized much of it and the flash of the explosion could be seen erupting from between the shattered pieces of what remained.

  Guerrero never had any hopes of slowing down. She rammed what was left of the Imperium ship. She steamed straight into the wreckage and the expanding fireball she'd created only an infinitesimal moment before and was lost in it.

  The last storm of plasma the enemy had hurled still lunged towards Hardway and then, as if it had been tied to the end of some snapped elastic band, it veered off, away from the carrier, vaporizing a path as it veered into the banded atmo, discharging lightning around it as it disappeared down a deep tunnel in the clouds.

  Cheers erupted over comms as broken alien towers tumbled in the vacuum, burning from inside. When the fireball of energy and burning gas at the center of them cooled enough to see through it, Guerrero remained, defiant over the clouds, her great hull now a white-hot teardrop. Her topside and keel towers were gone along with the outer layers of her armor everywhere but her bowplate. Her 25-meter-thick belt-iron steel dome glowed so bright in IR it bathed the clouds below it in radiant heat. She shone like a molten moon, but Guerrero was intact.

  "Guerrero, come in. Come in Guerrero." The comms officer didn't need to be told to keep trying.

  "Hardway, this is Tig Meester aboard UNS Guerrero. The next time I tell you something will work, can everyone just take my word for it?"

  "Commodore," Anton Cyning said from his Diplomatic Console, "We've received a message from Hive Hrt'ee from her station around the fourth moon. It translates roughly to 'Congratulations'."

  "She sortieing her fleet," Biko said. "I have roughly 3700 contacts launching from the pads surrounding her orbital station. Her swarm is setting course for the fourth planet, the homeworld. She's starting her attack."

  "Prepare to join her, Devlin," Cyning said. "It's time for the second phase of this plan."

  Hive Hrt'ee's 3700 small craft were only seconds off their docks on the fourth planet's orbital station and still tightly packed when the detonations hit the lead warships and took them all by surprise.

  "Stealthed Shediri missiles!" Biko said. In the flashes you could see now how many had sneaked up on them and how many more were incoming. "Thousands and thousands!" They bloomed over the forward ships along the breadth of Hive Hrt'ee's fleet. Her forces had been taken completely by surprise.

  During the battle, the Hive Regent's Kesik's ships must have slipped into the archipelago unnoticed and laid in wait for the rebel forces to sortie en masse. Her forces now rose over the gas giant's fifth moon where they'd hidden themselves.

  "No..." Cyning said when he saw it, "No! No! Devlin, stop them! Pardue! Launch your squadrons! Do something!" Even if Ram had wanted to help her, it was too late for Hive Hrt'ee now. The Regent's forces had known just when to strike.

  He could barely see the missiles, but the detonations flared up all across the Hrt'ee fleet. The confused swarm couldn't get out of its own way. As the missiles poured into them, the losses were horrific.

  Cyning stiffened in his seat then. "A second transmission arriving. What?! It's from Hive Regent Kesik of the fourth planet?!" Cyning whipped around and stared wide-eyed at Ram then. The company man must have read the message already.

  "What does it say?" He did his best to appear nonchalant. Cyning turned back to his console and didn't answer. "Mr. Cyning, what does it say?"

  "You know what it says." Cyning's voice was almost a Shediri hiss now and the perfectly smooth skin of his face distorted and cracked with rage.

  Biko left his station to read the message, and Cyning slid out down the console, getting out of his way. The company man's shoulders slumped and as Biko read, Ram thought Cyning might collapse. "Hive Regent Kesik and Human alliance. Accepted. Taipan return now. Action is truth." Biko turned and smiled. "That's from Regent Kesik... But how?"

  Ram nodded. "I opened private negotiations. Apparently, she liked my honesty. And we proved we could defeat the Imperium ships. Now, we'll get Taipan back."

  Anton Cyning had now found his rage. Veins throbbed at his temples where none had been visible before. "You went behind my back and you communicated with the Hive Regent when I was stuck in that lift, didn't you...when I was cut off...Imbecile! Now Staas Company will never get the same kind of deal from Regent Kesik we would have gotten from Hive Hrt'ee. Why? Devlin, why?" Cyning had probably lost a speculative fortune. "They'll end you for this. The Board of Directors won't stand by while you sabotage the company for your ethical vanity."

  "I didn't sabotage the company. I saved Staas Company and Earth from what would have become a much more expensive situation indeed when, after observing our behavior here with the Shediri, the day came that nobody in our section of the galaxy could trust us. The Board of Directors will see the logic of it. They'll see how your short-term thinking could have doomed our whole expansion by rightly engendering the distrust of our neighbors. After all, it could be their governments we change next after we're done with the Shediri. Our actions and our choices decide who we are, Mr. Cyning. And not just for us. Our choices define what the other intelligent species think of all humanity. Your choices made us into devils you wouldn't want coming to your star system. That's not what these Privateers and UN sailors fought and died for us to be. And I won't let us become that. Not ever."

  Anton Cyning shook his head and grimaced at the taste in his mouth. "You're not whom I thought you to be, Devlin."

  "I'm proud to exceed your expectations."


  12

  EPILOGUE

  SCS Hardway

  Geosynchronous orbit over the Grand Palace of Hive Regent Kesik

  24 hours later...

  Observation Deck

  It wasn't hard to get Captain Chun of UNS Guerrero away from his battered vessel for an hour. Navy ships are dry, but not Privateers. On the observation deck below the bridge, Dana poured another finger of scotch into the Captain’s glass as Ram filled him in on what he missed.

  "So it's right after the battle and Hive Regent Kesik says she's going to return Taipan to us. Now that we proved we can protect them and we can be trusted, she'll side with us. No alien civil war, Earth has a new ally...mission accomplished."

  "I know that part," Chun said. "But what about Captain Sellis and Taipan?"

  "Call me Dana, please," she said.

  "I'm getting to that part. Everything looks great. But suddenly, Hive Kesik keeps calling on the diplomatic console every three minutes repeating "Kesik Devlin alliance! Devlin help! Taipan help!" and I don't know what the hell that means. My XO doesn't know how to work the diplomatic console yet and can't answer her anyway."

  Biko shakes his head. "I can't transmit on the effing thing and Anton Cyning won't help me. He's sulking at the back of the bridge about all the money he just lost."

  That made Chun laugh.

  "Tig Meester had showed me how to work it earlier," Ram said. "But I can't do it now and Mister Meester's still on Guerrero." Dana filled Captain Chun's glass again as Ram continued. "So Hive Kesik keeps calling from the planet and saying, "Help! Taipan! Surrender no!" and "Alliance help!" and we think we know what's going on. There's no comms with Taipan still because the bugs are jamming locally and I can't figure out how to tell them to stop in Shediri. So no comms with Taipan. We finally get to the planet, launch junks, come down through those shit-ugly pink clouds, descend into the palace complex, and land in a plaza of some kind almost 60 meters away from their landing zone. It was too tight in there right up close to Taipan. So we've got to approach on foot. It's paved sort of, like cement, but not stone...like something that came out a bug's ass and dried hard. We can see the ship between the weird towers and the Shediri have all these ground vehicles parked in the street with frontal armor plates like giant beetles and they've got barricades set up. The Shediri have put barricades up all the way around the landing zone where the streets run in. And they're all hiding behind them in their stripey dazzle armor, twitching all those arms and hissing like they're mad. Pretty soon, we can hear the MA-48s whumping and we're thinking oh, no, here we go again, but the bugs just stayed down and clattered those limbs because they had orders. When we get to the barricade, they move out of our way so we can peek over. I guess Dana must have seen us land because I looked over this barricade and running across this red leafy lawn in front of Taipan screaming "Die, bug, die!" out the speakers in her suit is none other than Captain Dana Sellis. Her crew is charging behind her with rifles and they're all screaming mad murder, too. Including Margo and my young son - all of them - screaming like they're trying to scare the Shediri out of their way. I notice something weird about Dana's MA-48. It's too long and it's lit up on front. When I lock on her, zoom, and look, I see it's because she's got a plasma blade fixed on the end of it like a tiny, 15cm plasma bayonet."