by A. D. Bloom
"Mr. Devlin!" Hollis pulled him down just before Henkel and Thiebaud next to him flared up under maser fire. Flames danced inside their helmets as they fell. Hollis shouted, "We've got to fall back!"
"We can't pull back until Lucy can! Hold!" No other command would save them. Ram picked up Henkel's rifle and pumped out sabot after sabot at the horde of charging Squidies. They were thick out there – coming from everywhere on boneless legs, now pressed low to the hull. The aliens reached the lip of Ram's crater and raised the masers they held at the end of their knots of absurd, garden hose arms. The stubby, neckless heads inside those cycloptic helmets in the middle of their bodies looked down at Ram and Hollis at the bottom of that crater. Ram fired, but the MA-48 didn't buck. It was out of energy. All Ram could do was open his mouth and scream his rage and all his hate into the ten, ugly, alien eyes he saw inside that 'helmet'.
The Squidies above him twitched their wormy, oral appendages just before their freakish bodies burst apart and sprayed copper blue mist and snow in all directions.
140mm canon rounds rained down from directly above like hail and everywhere they fell knots of garden hose limbs and sack-torsos blew apart in the red-orange explosions. Lightning and fireballs flashed twelve times a second until every square meter of the hull in front of Ram and the rest of the boarding teams was filled with blossoming detonations. It was an inescapable hell and it fell on the nubby heads of all the Squidies charging the Ticks.
"It's the Lancers!" Hollis' arm shot out as he shouted and pointed to the blurred streaks overhead. Five F-151 Bitzer exo-atmospheric fighters dove down at the alien Dreadnought's hull, flying insane rolls around the particle beams that swept back and forth in all directions at once as the battleship's guns big and small stabbed and waved and tried to cut them from the sky.
The pair of fighters that had obliterated the Squidies in front of Ram's position spiraled around a single, frustrated particle beam and then another like they were teasing them. The streams reached out and slashed at the fighters all the way in, but the Lancers' paths changed direction too quickly. They had too much angular momentum and the turrets were too slow to keep up. Everywhere guns reached for the Lancers and everywhere they missed.
Bizarre, almost pre-verbal screams cut the jamming and filled the local suit comms channel whenever the Lancers dived low over the Dreadnought's hull. Ram hoped it was just the sound pilots make when they're hitting inertial gees that crush them with thirty times their own body weight.
They skimmed right over the tops of the low gun towers too fast to be caught and hosed the hull down with sabot and HE shells, strafing the Squidies and raining hate everywhere. The Ticks on the far side of the formation and the men and women in exosuits Ram could see defending them were now silhouetted by a walls of fire from the Lancers' high-explosive shells.
The aliens scattered and squidged fast across the hull, retreating for the edge, for the other side or the cover of a gun tower or a hatch – anything to avoid the explosions that chased them without mercy and blew thin knots of limbs and boneless bodies apart. Then, almost as quickly as they'd begun, the firestorms thinned and waned. The red-orange blossoms of hell only bloomed in clusters, then in bunches. Then, finally Ram realized only two of the Lancers were still firing. "Out of ammo!" he heard more than one of them shout on local comms as they streaked overhead with all the Dreadnought's beams chasing them like searchlights. In a few more seconds, the rest of the Lancers were out of ammo and all he heard on their comms was more atavistic screaming and curses and rage.
Ram knew what was happening. He tried to tell them to get the hell out of there. He tried, but even as he gave the order, they dove at the hull. It looked like they were going to ram senselessly into the Dreadnought, but they pulled up at the last moment and skimmed only a couple of meters off the surface – below the height of the gun towers. They shifted left and right on their maneuvering jets, hunting down any Squidies they saw with the hulls of their fighters, trying to impale them on the barrels of their cannon.
Lancer 2-1 sent a line of a dozen Squidies spinning into the black, broken and twisted wrong, even for those boneless things. "What the hell are they doing?"
"They're crazy!"
"They're gonna wreck!"
"Ram Devlin to Lancer Squadron: Break away! You're out of ammo! Break away! Get your pilots the hell off the hull!" The only response on comms was unintelligible.
"What the shite is wrong with them?"
Ram knew. "Lancers, break away! Break away! RTB! You can't do any more good here!"
In the very second when the Dreadnought spun the battle from day into night, an F-151 Bitzer running down Squidies close to the far side of the Ticks' formation clipped the burned out hull of Tick #5. The fighter spun low overhead, narrowly missing two more of the armored boarding craft. On its way down, it ripped over Ram's crater and Lucy's squad and Pardue's knuckledragger. It crashed a little over 100 meters out from Lucy Elan and slid into a tower.
The Lancers didn't listen to Ram's orders. They shot across the hull ramming the Squidies that came anywhere near their downed pilot. Over comms Lucy Elan reported, "I can see the wreck. The cockpit detached cleanly from the rest of it. It's intact about 150 meters away." She said, "Cover us if you can. We're going to go and get your stupid pilot."
*****
Lucy Elan and five of her Marines ran hard across the open hull in two small teams. While one team laid down cover, the other advanced.
The Lancers' strafing and their suicidal runs only meters over the surface had scattered the Squidies. Only two unarmored aliens made it to the downed pilot's cockpit. They took cover behind it and fired over it keep the Marines from crossing the last meters.
Lucy and her corpsman, Smedley, pressed their backs to the side of a gun tower. "We go next chance," she said. He nodded. Lucy peeked, then spun out from cover with the corpsman right behind her.
The Squidies had laid down fire on the other Marines and when they saw Lucy in the open, one turned to point the wide barrel of a maser at her. The inside of it lit up so bright her helmet dimmed and she felt heat everywhere down one side of her body, like she was naked and facing the burning sun, but she felt the burning even inside, inches under her skin. Lucy would have burned alive if the lid of the pilot's ejected cockpit hadn't opened up like a coffin and knocked the aliens' weapons off target.
They stumbled back on their clusters of vine-like limbs and tried to fire again, but they weren't fast enough. Lucy fired over the lid. She meant to keep the two Squidies pinned there while the others came in from the flanks and ended it, but the insane pilot came out of the open cockpit like an orange-suited jack-in-the-box. He sprung up and out like a crazed ape and threw himself at the closest Squidy.
He wrapped his legs around its waving, garden hose 'arms' and hugged the middle and banged his visor against its nubby helmet. It clawed at the pilot with its perversely tiny, all-finger 'hands' at the ends of its 'arms' as the other Squidy scuttled back and tried to get an angle to burn the human off.
The crazed pilot's hands were suddenly everywhere on the Squidy's suit helmet. He actually managed to tear something free, and pressurized gas jetted out the top of the Squidies suit. The top-heavy pair fell to the hull and rolled.
Lucy and her corpsman came 'round the left side of the cockpit and put a pair of holes through the still standing Squidy while the pilot wrestled with the slow-dying alien, entangled in its ropey limbs.
"Get off it!" she shouted. "We can't get a shot!"
He wouldn't let go – just kept tearing at the Squidy's helmet, trying to get it all the way off. It kept moving for another ten seconds after the outgassing stopped. When it was still, the pilot looked up at Lucy. Through the visor of his flight helmet, she saw J. 'Jordo' Colt's wild eyes flash madness at her just before he lunged.
A rifle butt to the ribs didn't seem to slow Jordo down much, but it was enough for her Marines to get control of his limbs.
He thrashed
and screamed. That boy was not himself today. She said, "Corpsman give him the gas."
Smedley had the canister out of his kit and in his hand in less than five seconds. Once they got the port cover off the rebreather system on Lt. Flyboy's suit, the medic fit the nozzle to the port and rammed it down hard. J 'Jordo' Colt kept thrashing for a few more seconds until the misty, twilight fog filled his helmet and his face went slack.
*****
Ram said, "Bring him inside."
They carried him in the Tick's hatch and set him down on one of the crash couches. After that, Lucy cocked her head and just stared at Ram for a half-second. "You been jacking up your pilots, Ram?"
"What?"
"Have you been jacking up your pilots? Maybe using some kind of experimental enhancements on them?"
Ram said, "Why would you ask that?"
"Lt. Flyboy here didn't even recognize me. When he got done killing a Squidy without no weapons but his gloved hands, he turned on me. He would have killed anyone, I think. My corpsman had to pump anesthetic gas through his rebreather plate while we held him down. He went berserk, Ram. What the hell did you give him?"
"It wasn't me," Ram said.
The Tick lurched to the side hard enough to throw them all off their feet. Once Ram got his balance back, he made for the hatch – the one facing the Dreadnought's stern and the 600-meter-long line of engine exhaust vents set on its trailing edge. Even before he got the hatch open enough to see the plume, he saw the color of the aliens' plasma exhaust tinting the Dreadnought's hull. The rose hue poured into the Tick and filled the compartment. "They've got one of their engines started," he said. "One of six. It's slow, but it can move now."
"So where is it going?" Lucy said it as if there was nowhere it could go that made a difference.
The ship turned and the stars began to set into the aft end of the alien hull. The jet of vectored plasma torrenting out the single, functioning engine bent at a shallow angle, and they turned harder. The ringed planet rose over the dreadnought's bow. Ram said, "It's turning towards the planet."
"Is it making for Hardway?"
"Maybe. Maybe he just wants to burn us off in the atmo."
Lucy said, "You're the sailor, Ram, correct me if I'm wrong, but he can't go that close on one engine. He'll get sucked down the gravity well."
"On just one engine he can probably pass this ship through the outer atmo and then skip it like a stone on a pond. He'll shoot back out into space and we'll be nothing but ash."
Lucy sighed. "It's never the straight up fight I want it to be, is it? Fine. How long?"
"It only has one working engine. Three hours maybe. Maybe less." She nodded grimly as if she already knew it wasn't going to be enough. Ram turned and looked over his shoulder at Tse and his two-man crew working the plasma drill. "Depth report, Mr. Tse."
"2.15 meters. That's it. I could have cut you a kilometer-long tunnel through a solid iron block by now. It's... it's like whatever this stuff is, it gets tougher and denser the deeper we drill and we don't even know how deep we have to go."
Tse looked over at J. 'Jordo' Colt. He lay on the deck after getting rolled off the crash couch when the Dreadnought lurched. "So... How long's it going to be before the gas you gave him wears off?"
*****
Two hours later, the Dreadnought hadn't changed course. The planet grew to fill half the sky and the rings reached out for them like a curving blade. It wouldn't be long now. Soon, it would try to burn them off in the atmo.
The Squidies didn't throw the same numbers at them as before. Since they'd got one engine working, it seemed like they were content to contain the boarders. They hadn't tried to overrun the Ticks again. They must have been confident the intruders would burn up soon enough.
Out in the crater closest to Tick #1, Hollis was the one who saw her first. "Hardway."
Ram took another look up at the planet above and its knife-edged rings. He saw the cold flare of the carrier's engines coming 'round the limb of the planet, making the outer atmo glow with pale, bluish light. They weren't the only ones who saw it. Local comms erupted with cheers until they all zoomed in with their helmets and got a better look.
Hardway's forward bays had been cut with the aliens' particle beams and he could see inside her like it was a cross-sectioned diagram. She'd taken warhead detonations there too and the metal itself was burning. A glow made him think her starboard side was on fire, too. The tower had a hole in it below the bridge. The armored engineering module near the engines and the stern had taken hits. Hardway ran on half her engines. The damage was severe. At least she's alive, he thought, but when the limb of the planet and the thin outer layers of atmo glowed pink in spots, he knew whatever battle had beaten and battered the massive carrier wasn't over yet.
She turned hard and when the seven alien ships chasing her came over the horizon and got line of sight on her again, Hardway was the first to fire. Her railgun rounds hit the first heavy cruiser and it lurched towards the planet, momentarily without power. Ram zoomed in even closer and saw the engines of the torpedo junks diving on it. They loosed four warheads apiece so close that even if the cruiser hadn't been stunned, it couldn't have got all of them before the nuclear detonations flashed up and down the 400-meter hull. It leaned and fell into the path of the heavy cruiser behind it.
Chapter Eleven
Jordo couldn't move. He'd been bound. He came awake to a splitting pain in his skull like forks were being pushed through his helmet and into his temples slowly and deliberately. He wasn't sure where he was. It was inside, so it had to be one of Ram Devlin's boarding craft. He tried to look around, but they had him strapped down to a crash couch. All he could see was the top of a plasma drill derrick and the melted hatch where the topside turret must have got burned out. He couldn't see the XO, but he recognized his voice in the conversation on local suit comms. "We're not going to make it through the hull of this ship in time to board it or plant charges." Jordo's suit told him Devlin was only scant meters away.
"We could blast off in the Ticks," Lucy Elan said, "call it a day."
"If this alien battleship engages Hardway, then it's all over. You've seen her out there. She's barely hanging on as it is. No. We can't go. We've got one last shot at this bitch and we're going to take it. We'll detonate the charges we have along with the reactors inside the Ticks."
Tse said, "But we haven't cut all the way through the armor yet."
"The vape craters in the hull from the nuclear warspites – the ditches we've been using for cover – some are over a meter deep. We should get a meter's worth of vaporization from a Tick's reactor and a fusion mining charge. We're already at... What are we at, Tse?"
"2.38 meters."
"If it's only a meter or two more through the hull from the point we've drilled to, then there's a good chance the reactors and the charges together will punch through. If even a tenth of the force of the detonation gets inside, we'll blast a firestorm up and down every deck of this ship."
Lucy said, "What about the heat and the radiation?"
"We'll have to make it to the other side of the hull where the ship itself can shield us."
Jordo couldn't lay there and listen to officers concoct another suicidal plan. He said, "Hey! Let me up. Where are my pilots?"
"Flyboy is awake..."
Ram Devlin looked down at him from above. He was uglier upside down. He said, "Your pilots finally followed my orders and returned to Hardway to re-arm after Lucy rescued you."
"You can untie me now," Jordo said. Every word hurt.
"Lt. Flyboy," Lucy Elan said as she appeared on the other side of the crash couch and peered down at him through his helmet. "You look like shite."
"Why'd you tie me up?"
"Because you tried to kill the Marines that came to get you, that's why. You remember that part?"
He remembered. He remembered all of it. "I feel fine now. You can untie me." He could tell they weren't convinced.
Lucy Elan
said, "You get your hands on some of Harry Cozen's stash, Lt. Flyboy?" and the XO's mouth actually fell open.
"You knew about this?"
"Just a lucky guess," Lucy said. Devlin didn't seem to want to take that for an answer. "I've seen something like it before."
"Where?"
"Back. Way back. Back in the War of the Americas. Battle of the Amazon Crater. The magic minute. There are ten million stories from that day, but they don't talk about 'magic minute' and the fight for the BNC uplink facility. The only winner in that battle was death."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean," Jordo said, but he knew. He did.
She said, "The Staas Contractors who made the final push through the trenches dosed some kind of experimental cognitive enhancement as they dropped in. I heard it was some kind of synthetic hormone. That's just hearsay, but once, I talked to a guy who was there. He was in it. Called it 'the magic minute'. He said he could see the whole battle happening at once – said he could see it all happening in dilated time... every bullet and bomb. I asked him how they closed the distance to the trenches after landing with all those HK drones and fast fifties perched on tripods the whole way in, and he said they just ran between the bullets. He said it like that's what anyone would have done."
Jordo said, "What happened next?"
"After that... Once they took the lynchpin position for the Turko-Brazilian defense...they couldn't stop fighting. Got some kind of Berserker rage going. The guy I met was one of three survivors from that unit. The rest all killed each other. Harry Cozen was just a Colonel, but those were his boys and girls. 'Magic minute' was his compound. I guess he's been working on it and improving it because this time," Lucy said, "it took over an hour for the madness to set in."
Ram Devlin towered over him, grim-faced. "I ordered you to find the compound and destroy it." He just looked up at the XO and blinked. There was nothing to say. "And that stunt-flying over the hull... ramming the Squidies... God almighty, Colt are you trying to get the rest of them killed? What the hell did you think you were doing?"
