DREADNOUGHT 2165

by A. D. Bloom

  DREADNOUGHT

  2165

  A.D. Bloom

  © 2014

  Many thanks to Tom Robidoux and 'Blue Scar' D. for their extended consulting roles.

  3D models and cover images by The Whayler.

  The author would like to express his appreciation to the New England Air Museum, USS Nautilus (SSN-571), and USS Massachusetts (BB-59) as well as /r/imaginarywarships and stars.chromeexperiments.com

  Read The War of Alien Aggression

  DREADNOUGHT 2165

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  In 2164, the Squidies attacked. Since the war's bloody, first days, Humanity has teetered on the edge of defeat more than once. Today is March 3rd, 2165, and today, converted carriers of the Staas Company Privateers along with warships of the recovering UN Fleet have won their first decisive victory at Sirius. They now control the strategic Sirius-Sol FTL transit, the alien enemy's most direct route to Earth.

  The Staas Privateer warship Camden Lock chased her LiDAR contact around the limb of Sirius A's fifth gas giant. She had to avoid the great, nebular clouds of debris in orbit, wreckage of warships, Human and Squidy alike, destroyed in the six-month battle for this system. It was worth the trip. The attack carrier caught a lurking enemy cruiser off guard. After the Privateer's torpedo junks scored the kill, the victorious, 950-meter attack carrier blasted back 'round the limb of that fat, banded planet with the cheers of her pilots and crewmen still echoing on comms. But once they regained line of sight to the UN battlegroup, they discovered a massacre in progress.

  Gaunt and worn Captain Holloway nearly denied his eyes when he saw it.

  Burning UN warships drifted under the terrible beams of a single, alien vessel larger than he'd hoped to ever see with his own eyes. Steel your voice, he thought. "Battle stations, battle stations. All hands to battle stations. Redsuit damage control teams stand ready. Cease pressurization and vent for combat."

  The behemoth was 800 meters on its longest line and over 300-meters thick on the bow-edge. It was shaped like a fat, swollen wing, dark-hulled and malevolent. Its engines expelled a ribbon of rose-colored plasma like a river over half-a-K wide. It trailed a smear of blood across the stars behind it as raked the UN cruisers in passing and ripped at them with more particle streams than Holloway could easily count.

  "Holloway to all railgun batteries, load sabot and prepare to fire. All tubes load Mk3 warspites."

  The tower-mounted guns of that monstrous, alien ship stabbed and slashed at the UN battlegroup. The pale lines they drew with their streams shot so razor-straight they stung the eye. Where they cut across ships, belt-iron steel hulls split open to vomit hot metal and exosuits. The Squidies and their terror-ship hadn't spared Camden Lock's sister carrier, Vegas. The command tower had already been cut away. It spun and drifted through the slaughter sheathed in a cowl of zero-gee flames.

  "All junks, all squadrons, scramble, scramble." On four sides the fifty-meter junks rose from the carrier's bays like wasps on fiery wings. They blasted clear of the carrier on their maneuvering nacelles and peeled off to form up for assault.

  The mammoth, enemy ship that savaged the battlegroup was the only enemy vessel in sight. Its guns radiated slicing and smashing death in all directions as it steamed through the UN warships. It was all the more fearsome to apprehend because Captain Holloway's sunken, red-rimmed eyes had seen it before. All of Humanity had seen that ship before. This alien Dreadnought was the ship that had shrugged off every salvo from Earth's mightiest capital ships, Hannibal and Khan. This was the murderous battleship that had steamed past the moon and fired on the lunar domes on the first day of the war. This was the ship the Squidies sent to hang over Earth like an executioner's sword in mid-strike. The Squidies had painted a picture on the broad, impermeable expanse of its dark hull. It was representational and crude. Using whitish silver paint on the port side, hateful, boneless, palmless alien 'hands' had drawn the image of a five-hundred-meter-tall human skull...the image of a human in death.

  Every Staas Company Officer and UN Tightey-Whitesuit who stood on a bridge and gave the orders that sent men and women to die had nightmares about the aliens' Dreadnought. It invaded their dreams to haunt them because no matter what orders they gave, no matter how clever they were, how courageous, how deserving or how much they believed their god willed them victorious, it wouldn't matter. They'd never breach the Dreadnought's armor. To engage the Squidies' Dreadnought was to engage in a battle that couldn't be won. But it was too late for Camden Lock to run and get away.

  "All batteries, all guns, all tubes, fire at will."

  They called in from Geronimo and Avignon as the last UN cruisers fought back. Their voices were stuttering, static-filled cries.

  "Our railguns and torpedoes won't touch it!"

  "We can't crack its armor!"

  Camden Lock's futile railgun salvos bloomed where they impacted on the Dreadnought's armor as UNS Geronimo's reactors melted down nearby. The conflagration started at the stern and spread like a wave through her decks until fire shot out every bay door and gun port. Geronimo spun slowly and tumbled as she burned from inside.

  "Loose the QF-111 drones!"

  "There's no enemy warheads..."

  "It'll give them something else to shoot!"

  The Squidies' Dreadnought and its slashing streams of heavy nuclei severed the spine of the Staas Company carrier Vegas at midships. The orphaned torpedo and gunnery junks of Camden Lock's murdered sister ship dove together on the alien. The few not diced by the crisscrossing beams loosed their torpedoes so close to the Dreadnought's hull, its defensive batteries couldn't stop them. Over a hundred, fission-tipped, warspites detonated against it. They bathed the Squidy battleship in nuclear fire.

  In nearly the same moment, Camden Lock's salvo of warspites arrived.

  Aboard Holloway's carrier, the windows turned opaque to protect the bridge crew's eyes from the detonations. After the diamond-pane crystal cleared and the last blossoms of plasma from the torpedoes faded off the Dreadnought's hull, there were no breaches, no venting gasses or geysers of fire, only the cratered and pockmarked, cartoon skull, still grinning and mocking them.

  The Dreadnought ignored the junks and fired on Camden Lock.

  The Squidies' hyper-accelerated particle streams tore across the distance between them as if three-dozen, razor straight rays had been drawn from one hull to the other. They traveled near the speed of light and arrived to impact the carrier's forward launch bay section together, in a combined stream less than fifteen-meters-wide.

  The junks caught in the fire shredded before his eyes and when the streams hit the carrier, the impact shook the whole ship and bent her spine. It threw Holloway out of the chair and up a meter and into a bulkhead. His vision blurred. Looking down from the command tower set in the stern quarter of the carrier, he had to watch through the diamond pane windows as the Squidies' particle streams first punched through his ship's armor and hull, filling her decks with fire, and then walked up the spine of his ship, from bow to stern, ripping in deep. The wound ejected molten metal like blood spray. It hit the windows of the bridge like mud.

  The length of the burst from those alien guns seemed interminable and when they finally ceased and his eyeballs stopped shaking from the internal shock waves enough to see the horror before him, Holloway again denied his eyes. Camden Lock h
ad been gutted at midships. Both launch bay modules were destroyed along with the midships batteries. The wound jetted flame and charred exosuits into the blackness. There was no power for the bow guns.

  Holloway thumbed the squack and spoke into the helmets of any crewmen still left alive on his doomed ship. "This is Captain Holloway. All hands abandon ship. All hands abandon shi-" The shock waves from the next salvo of the Dreadnought's guns shook him so hard he couldn't speak as the Dreadnought stabbed the carrier again, this time at the base of the command tower. The golden light that came off those razor-straight rivers of hyper-accelerated nuclei lit the bridge up like the summer sun had risen out of the deck. The impacts shook him so hard all he saw was a golden blur as the five-second burst from the alien guns walked up the command tower to the windows of the bridge.

  The nuclei the aliens threw at .99 cee each had the power of tiny bullet and the first of them set off piezoelectric lightning in the meter-thick windows of the bridge. The charge floated inside the crystal, suspended and beautiful, glowing a color blue Holloway had never once seen in his life until that final moment. In the next microseconds, billions of heavy nuclei impacted the windows of the bridge, all of them moving close to light speed. A flash of that uncanny color more brilliant than he'd ever imagined a color could be was the last thing Captain Holloway and his bridge crew saw before the meter-thick, diamond pane windows shattered to a storm of silicate sand and the aliens' particle streams shredded him.

  Chapter Two

  5 weeks later, aboard the Staas Privateer carrier SCS Hardway, Sol System, out past the orbit of Saturn...

  J. 'Jordo' Colt stood in the forward observation deck of Hardway's command tower, packed in with bridge officers and looking down on the primary launch bays where burning tracers and practice rounds once again stitched the vacuum over the launch bay doors. He was used to launching out of those bays in a Bitzer 151 exo-atmospheric fighter. Today, there were no flight ops topside. Today, the launch bay doors were all closed and a mock battle raged on the ship's hull. This was the 4th engagement between Lucy Elan's platoon of Staas Company Marines and Hardway's crew. Lucy's platoon had won the last three engagements, once within a minute. It didn't seem like a fair fight.

  Hardway's crew and the Company Marines fired at each other over the meter-high ridges surrounding the individual launch bays. The bays between the combatants were a no-man's land for both sides. There was almost no cover there except for where the closed bay doors had been built recessed into the outer hull.

  Major Lucy Elan had come to the observation deck with the front of her jumpsuit unzipped halfway to her waist like she was in some bar back at Sagan Station. She swirled Cozen's expensive Scotch around her glass and knocked it back, refilling her glass without qualm or compunction. You don't have to say 'sir' and 'ma'am' aboard a Staas Privateer, but Jordo had never seen anyone so casual around Admiral Harry Cozen. Most feared him too much and maybe she feared him too, but she never showed it. Rumor was they went way back...back to the War of the Americas over twenty years ago. She said, "Harry, you know, since it's Marines vs. Crew, I'm giving odds – even better than last week's. Hurry up and take the bet. You're running out of time." Jordo imagined Lucy Elan was looking forward to more easy money. She grinned at him and slapped a wad of Amero greenbacks against the edge of her hand. That wad had gotten fatter and fatter over the last month as Hardway's crew lost again and again. The only ones on the ship who hadn't lost all their money to the marines were the Lancers. Since the pilots of the 133rd were convicts, they didn't get a paycheck. They didn't have any money to bet.

  "I'm giving 3 to 1 today..." Lucy said. Admiral Harry Cozen groaned a little hearing that. "I know, I know," she said. "I'm too generous, but Hardway is a long shot. Who wants some?"

  Almost directly below the tower, the XO, Ram Devlin, and a squad of Hardway crew came up from the shallow cover of bay 4's recessed doors and moved up while the other squads did their best to suppress Lucy's Marines. For the moment, most of the tracers down there were pointing in the direction of Ram Devlin's advance.

  "Don't underestimate Mr. Devlin," Admiral Cozen said. The gravel of his scarred voice scraped Jordo's ears, but he commanded a room when he spoke. It wasn't because he was a Staas VP and a Privateer Admiral. One look at the glint like broken glass in that old man's eye and you could see the ruthless intelligence there. It was part of why he'd risen so high at Staas Company. That, and his aptitude for conspiracy.

  "And don't underestimate my crew," Bolo added. Lieutenant Commander Asa Bolo had been with this ship for seven years before the war even began. His round face was turning flush.

  "If you think they're so hot..." Lucy Elan waved her cash at them, telling them to put their money where their mouths were.

  Don't hit on the XO's girl, Burn had told Jordo, but Lt. Dana Sellis whispered so close to his ear that her breath made him shiver. "What's the inside scoop on the air support teams?"

  "I heard that," Lucy said. "And I'll let it slide because it isn't going to matter what happens in the air. My killers will overrun Devlin's teams before air superiority is contested or established. There won't be time for close air support."

  "The pilots assigned to give air support to both sides are an even match," Jordo told Dana loud enough for all of the bridge officers to hear. "Holdout and Dirty are flying on the Crew's side. Paladin and Gush are flying for the Marines. It's a fair match-up. I had to make it fair." No matter what Lucy said, Jordo knew air support was the kind of advantage that could win a fight like this. Both flights of Bitzers would be here any second.

  Lucy Elan asked him, "Who would you bet on, Lt. Flyboy?"

  "Convicts like me and the Lancers don't have money to bet," Jordo said.

  Dana Sellis's hot hand closed around his and lifted it. She turned it palm-up and put a roll of bills in it that burned with the heat of her palm. "Okay, zoomie. Now, who would you bet on?"

  Lucy said, "Lt. Flyboy is smart enough to bet on the winners. It's no accident the Marines won the last three times we tangoed."

  "Here we go again," Bolo said. Lucy Elan never let up.

  "My men and women are all from the corps," she said. "There's a reason they win. And it's not because Ram Devlin's a button-collared bridge officer and it's not because most of those miners down there have never held a military rifle before. Even if Devlin and his team had the same degree of infantry experience, my Marines would still win for the same reason we grind regular mercs under our boots (no offense, Harry) – because it's not just experience that wins battles. Those jarheads have a 350-year-old tradition of ass-whooping excellence, honor, and duty. That's what they fight for. They'd rather die than let that tradition down."

  "Hardway's crew made their own tradition," Bolo said.

  Lucy Elan didn't argue with him; she just held out her hand for his money.

  Jordo slapped the cash Dana gave him in Lucy Elan's palm. "Hardway," he said. "I'm betting on Hardway."

  *****

  Ram Devlin tried not to shout on comms. "Covering fire!" His 5th squad popped up with their training rifles and laid down rounds across the topside of the primary landing bay module. The blocky, fifty-year-old practice rifles shook and rattled as they fired, and the yellow squares painted on to mark them as practice weapons turned to patches of blurry gold.

  "2nd squad, go, Go, GO!" While 5th squad kept the Marines' heads down with thick fire, 2nd squad advanced up the starboard side to the bay doors in the middle of the module, expertly bounding across the low-gee killing ground, trying to make it to the only cover – the low wall seventy meters ahead, almost on top of the Marines' position.

  In the first skirmish, Ram thought it would be safer to defend and let the Marines move across that no-man's-land first. It wasn't any safer. And he'd given up the initiative – he spent all his energy reacting to what the enemy did and couldn't turn the battle his way. Now, he knew he had to be aggressive and keep the pressure on Lucy Elan's Lieutenant so that Arroyo was
the one reacting to what Ram did and not the other way around.

  Besides that, the ex-asteroid-miners that made up Hardway's crew were arguably the best at operating in low-gee/no-gee environs. Not leveraging their ability to maneuver seemed like a waste.

  Ram's 5th squad spat so much fire at the Marines holding ahead of the advancing miners, that it actually forced them to keep their heads down. The hull in front of the forward bays where the Marines had taken cover sparked and flashed with the practice rounds' impacts. It was good, solid, covering fire and Lucy Elan's Marines couldn't pop up to shoot without taking hits. 2nd squad was almost to the cover of the middle bay doors when the advance began to fall apart.

  From his position on the bay 6 doors on the port side Ram saw the Marines downrange begin to rise. Half of them took hits right away and the practice rounds Hardway's crew put on target exploded in sparking showers off their suits and helmets. It took a second for them to fall to the hull and play dead – long enough for Ram to note with unease how the fire that hit them came from two, sometimes three and four of his shooters at once. Meanwhile, the other Marines rose and charged.

  Ram barked into comms for his shooters to shift their fire. They were already trying, but half the Marines were trying to suppress them now and the other half had come up running over the top with their rifles already pointed at 2nd squad. Hardway's crew got caught out in the open and so much fire tore across them, they were almost swept off the hull by the fusillade.

  That's when the Marines advanced in a firing line, shooting accurately as they came.

  "We're pinned!" Hollis shouted over comms. None of his men could poke their heads up without getting a practice round in the helmet. Ram's forward squad was in serious danger of being overrun.

  *****

  "Lt. Arroyo is already pushing up the starboard side where your XO, Devlin, over-extended." Lucy Elan knocked back her scotch like it would all be over soon. Jordo thought maybe it looked like she was right. From their vantage point in the tower, even he could see Hardway's crew was outnumbered and badly positioned. Even if they fell back now, they'd probably only be prolonging the inevitable. They were going to get overrun.