by A. D. Bloom
"They must have figured out our game. They don’t want us transiting out of here and warning Hardway about the ambush."
"Audacity, this is Lancer 1-1. We’re going to have company sooner than we thought."
"I see ‘em now, 1-1. They’re going to launch those fighters any second."
"And those bandits will accelerate. Haven’t run it through the OMNI NAV, but I figure we’ve got less than three minutes until they get in firing range."
Burn called out, "Tipperary, Chief, you there?"
As he flew across the breaching ship’s bow, through the dome he thought he glimpsed Chief Horcheese’s head and torso strapped in the command chair with a thousand cables trailing out of her, like a spider that had become its web. He lost sight of her when the meter-thick radiation shield meant to protect the breaching ship’s bridge closed over the dome and made him feel like a peeping tom.
*****
As the capacitors packing Tipperary’s ring came to full charge, the radiation shield closed over the dome like a slow, half-meter-thick eyelid. After that, he couldn’t see the ring and the lightning storms ripping up and down the hull and he was thankful for it. The arcing bolts had gone from discomforting to downright frightening after the Chief filled the capacitors past 80%. The charge that seeped out flayed overhead in whips that skated over the surface of the dome, leaving pools of charge trapped in the crystal.
Horcheese sweat now from her temples and brow. It ran down her neck and chest. She grit her teeth so hard she could barely get her words out. "Balancing the reactor input with the capacitor seepage."
"What’s wrong?"
"Reactor feedback you wrote goddamn hurts! It burns! It’s burning my feet!"
"The reactors must be close to overload."
"Well, I’m not going to shut ‘em down! Kill the sensory feedback!" She screamed once and writhed. He had his hand on the control conduit and he wanted to pull it, but he couldn’t. "Kill it!"
"I can’t without losing the system! I’m sorry!"
Then, she let out the kind of pre-verbal cry he’d only ever heard from animals and women in childbirth and he thought she’d have a seizure, but after a few more seconds, her squinting eyes opened. She said, "I’m taking Tipperary over the top." Once she topped off and overcharged the capacitor system, she’d get an extra 11% more power, but it couldn’t stay in there for long. "I’m all in," she said. "It’s now or never."
A tiny, arcing, charge came off the command chair and wormed and noodled its way into the back of Tig’s hand, making him let go. Then, he grabbed the back of the chair again because there was nothing else to hold on to.
"All ship, all ships, this is Tipperary." Rampone said, "Discharge is imminent," Rampone said. "Discharge is imminent."
"No countdown," Horcheese told him.
"Whatever you say, Chief. It’s your show."
She closed her eyes then, concentrating on the streams of imaginary sand running through her fingers and brought them to a point, making the particles into a stream of single nuclei at the same moment she released the power in the capacitors to drive them. There was no change in her face when it was time, other than she opened her eyes and stared up into the armored dome above her as if she could see through the shield to the point in the vacuum where she would collide the streams.
"Now."
Outside the breaching ship, the capacitors in the ring released their energy under Horcheese’s regulation. When all that energy flooded into the three NS191 particle stream emitters, every hair on Tig’s body stood up. It felt like the ship’s tremendous charge was bleeding into the atmo on the bridge just before all the charge from the capacitors went into powering the magnetic vectoring rings on the particle emitters and ejecting bright streams of heavy nuclei.
Timms said, "Good contact!"
Outside, up through the dome and the blast shield, three perfectly synchronized streams from Tipperary’s NS191s collided over the transit point. Out there, the pinprick star they made was growing. That burning fireball, the spherical inferno, that ball of hell at the end of their noses was getting bigger.
"100 meters," Tig shouted out the fireball diameter as it read on the console. "150." He stopped shouting out the size of the growing fireball when he could suddenly see it in flashes coming through the belt-iron steel radiation shield above. It was as if, for blinking moments, the blast shield and the dome weren’t there at all.
"Exotic particles!" Parker shouted. In those terrifying moments when he could see though the ship and his own flesh like it was made of nothing at all, the sphere of roiling hellfire filled the sky. It lunged at them as it grew.
"Hull temp! 3500, 4000, 5000!"
"We're way too close!"
Horcheese let out that pre-verbal cry again, and this time, when the next wave of Parker's exotics bathed the bridge, he saw right through the Chief as she screamed. All at once, he understood the wordless expression in her cry was defiance.
The monster outside the bridge swelled wider and loomed until the plasma that licked in furious waves over its surface slapped at the breaching ship, vaporizing hull plate and buffeting Tipperary so Tig thought she would rip apart. A second later, as the Chief's cry fell from the air, the discharge ceased.
"Chief!"
"Hull temperature dropping!"
"Open the shield," Rampone said.
The Chief must have managed to keep the streams on target because out in front of the breaching ship, the center of the hellish monster they’d created had gone dark. It was as if all that energy they'd poured in had fallen through a crack and gone somewhere else. When the waves of plasma dancing on the opening transit faded, he looked through a swarm of animated particles skating on the dimensional membrane and saw stars...different stars...the stars as seen from the Mizar system.
"It’s open!" Rampone shouted it over comms as if the whole system couldn’t see it.
"This is Burn," she said. "All ships into the transit! Go, Go, GO!"
18
The warped and twisting stars sped past Jordo’s canopy on either side in a way that made him think they were flying underwater. The region of ‘other dimensional’ space that manifested between star systems as a hypermass transit was always narrow. The one they’d opened was narrower than usual. The passage the Lancers and the breaching ship and the junks had to traverse was less than 650 meters wide and constantly changing shape. With the junks and Tipperary and all the Lancers hurtling faster than light towards the Mizar system, it almost seemed for a moment as if they’d made it, as if they’d got away clean, but Jordo had been flying his fighter backwards for at least ten seconds now, staring at the transit’s opening onto the Algol system as it receded. It was still open.
"How long is it going to take that thing to close?" Paladin said.
"Too long."
All the Lancers had spun on their thrusters then to fly backwards, and Dirty was the first to spot them. "Squidyman, Squidyman, comin’ down the pipe. I count three, six…. Hell, it's an even dozen."
There were more. As they entered the transit, the plasma caught and trailed off the spikes on their three-dozen red hulls.
There was no room for evasion in there. "What’s our ETA to the terminus? Will they catch up before we make it?"
"I don’t know. But if they follow us out of here, they will."
"Lancers, listen up," Burn said. "I am ordering you ahead. You are to accelerate as hard as you can for the terminus and leave us here. Your priority is to warn Hardway."
"What?"
"You’re faster than Tipperary and the junks. If anyone can make it out and transmit a warning it’s you and the Bitzers."
"But we don’t all have to go."
"Yes, you do. There’s thirty-six red bandits back there just licking their alien chops. You really think you can stop them? I’m ordering you to fly ahead and warn Hardway. The battlegroup and the convoy are the priority here. That’s the end of it."
"Burn…."
&nbs
p; "Don’t get mushy on me, Lancer 1-1. Do I sound like a woman who’s about to die?"
"What are you going to do?"
"Just make sure you let me know the second you’re clear of the transit."
*****
The terminus grew over Tig’s head like the end of a tunnel. The pinprick flares from the Lancers’ engines centered themselves briefly in it. He saw them against the foreign stars before they veered to port in formation and were suddenly lost from view. Their pale blue constellation flew across the terminus again and held station there, waiting for the breaching ship and the junks. "Lancers are clear of the transit," Jordo said. His voice didn’t change pitch or tone at all when he said, "We have Hardway and the battlegroup in sight. They're 471 million Ks out and still crossing the system."
"Roger that," Burn said from Audacity. "We’ll see you soon."
*****
The cockpit of a junk is a surprisingly spacious place if there’s only the pilot and co-pilot in the module. Once Burn added Phipps, the Crew Chief, the reactor specialist, Nysciz, Wrigley, and the gunner, Bubba, the cockpit module of Audacity felt more like a crowded lifeboat.
"You load the NAV script and give it priority downstairs?"
Wrigley nodded. "She’ll fly just fine without us. Until we say so."
The reactor specialist told her what he told her before. "You know that’s not the kind of det that’s going to take out 36 enemy fighters. When the reactor cooks off, it won’t even be the yield of one warspite torpedo."
She nodded. "I’m not gunning for the fighters," she said. "Not directly."
"What then?"
Burn turned to Ernie and said, "Blow the cockpit."
"Seal green," the co-pilot said. "Circuit good. Bingo on your mark."
"Bingo."
When they blasted the cockpit off the junk without any inertial negation, Burn thought the rockets might just turn them to spam. The acceleration gees flattened the junk’s crew against the rear bulkhead. Burn and her co-pilot couldn’t do much under those gees, but except for one remaining task, their job was done.
Burn got confirmation in her flight helmet a few seconds later that headless Audacity had obeyed her autopilot script and come to a stop behind them. The junk drifted close to the twisting stars and the waving wall of the transit.
The cockpit module tumbled slowly next to Greenstone and Tipperary on her way to the terminus. 63 seconds later, the cockpit module ripped out the hellmouth and entered regular space in the Mizar system along with the breaching ship and the junk.
*****
"Squidy will exit the transit in… thirty-three seconds," Jordo said.
"Negative, Lancer 1-1." Burn voice came over comms cold and even. "Nothing is coming out of that transit."
He could see deep down in where the Squidies now approached the drifting junk. They were wary of a detonation. They tried to fly past without opening fire as the junk’s reactor cooked off like a low-yield bomb.
Whatever dimensional membrane made up the walls of the transit echoed with the detonation, rippling with waves so violent, the walls of that great vein seemed to reverberate against each other before they tore. The membrane ripped and came apart in a hundred places at once and receded from all points simultaneously. The walls of the interstellar transit tore away everywhere, seemingly rushing at the still open terminus of the transit in a fiery wave. The three squadrons of alien aces vanished from sight, presumably lost somewhere in interstellar space or incinerated when some sizable portion of the energy that went into the transit's opening hurled itself out into the Mizar system in a fountain of high energy particles, microwaves, and infrared.
"I’ve got incoming LiDAR beams. Multiple sets. Radar too. We’re being painted." Dirty said, "Multiple contacts."
"IFF?"
"They’re friendly!" Forward recon patrols from SCS Araby’s 19th fighter squadron ripped past the Lancers.
"Lancer 1-1, this is Cuckoo 3-1. Is that SCS Tipperary with you? What the hell you people doing out here?"
Burn answered that one. "Cuckoo, 3-1. This is Lt. Commander Burn Steinmetz," she said. "Patch me through to Hardway on your Q-linked comms. I’ve got an urgent message for Harry Cozen."
Epilogue
The tremors and the spasms started the moment she got her limbs back. Doc Ibora spent the better part of a two days checking out every thread of the Chief's nervous system for damage. He said the Chief, herself was alright, but the neural interfaces where she’d been hooked up to Tipperary were damaged. They were never made to do what they did, he said. Some of them had fused.
Her artificial limbs would still work and the palsic shakes that came on would go away once she adjusted to them, but she wouldn't have the same fine control as before, not until the damaged interfaces were replaced back at Sagan. Who knew when that would be. Until then, she was out of the action.
The redsuits she passed in the spine were happy to see their Ops Chief up and around. She was glad to see them, too, but she was more glad she held it together and didn’t get any tremors in front of them.
Horcheese stepped off the lift and on to Hardway’s bridge. You could see half the ship from up there and as she passed between the guards, she took in the primary bays and midships batteries nearly 200 meters below. You could see the secondary bays and the bow guns from up there, all the way to the two-meter sculpture Cozen had her weld on the bowplate like a figurehead. Ram Devi looked up once from the Ops console. Asa Bolo winked at her from behind a squadron of fighters projected over the AT controller’s station. None of them saw her hands shake because she held them together behind her back. Her legs felt alright so far.
Harry Cozen didn’t turn in the command chair. He stayed facing forward, facing the tactical projection of the enemy task force that had meant to ambush Hardway coming out a transit. The combined Privateer and UNS battlegroup had caught up with them. "We’ve got the Squidies pickled now," Cozen said. The 25 enemy ships she saw projected hiding behind a local gas giant were clearly inferior to the battlegroups closing in on them from two sides. "Since we made a detour and entered the system behind the enemy, Admiral Ming’s raiders have entered the system from the other side. Now, the Squidies can’t get away without facing one of us and they only had enough ships in that force for an ambush. They know they can’t win a straight-up fight. I thought you might like to see the Squidies’ moment of reckoning come. Since you’re not busy."
"I’d like to be put back on duty, Mr. Cozen. My redsuits need their Ops Chief. Doesn’t matter if my hands are a little shaky."
"It does when you’re strong enough to rip off an airlock hatch if you twitch wrong. I’m sorry, Chief. You can’t go back to work until your burned out neural interface is sorted and the specialists who can sort it are all back at Sagan." He turned now in that command chair and faced her. "Unless, of course, you know somebody who might be able to find an improvised, and entirely unauthorized workaround of some kind to get you back in action before that. Provided you trust them to do the job right, that is..."
*****
Once Hardway’s battlegroup and convoy had finally rendezvoused with Admiral Ming’s combined fleet over the debris field that had been an alien task force only hours ago, the Air Group Commander called the Lancers to Bay 23 in full flight gear. Jordo was the last to get there and when he did, Paladin, Dirty, Holdout and Gush stood in front of the window next to the airlock, shaking their heads. "The hell is going on?" Dirty said. "Where they taking our fighters?"
"Answer me you red-ass POS!" Paladin said into his helmet. "Damn redsuits out there are portaging the last of our Bitzers out of the bay and ignoring me," he growled.
Out in the bay, a knuckledragger was gently moving Gusher’s F-151 right out the door, puffing out into the black with the scarred fighter in its claws. "I’m gonna fry the hell out of that red next time I land."
"Where are they taking our fighters?"
"Let's follow ‘em," he said. It took a good fifteen seconds to run
the airlock through on emergency cycle, and once they finally got out there into the empty launch bay, they had to get to the door before they saw where the reds were taking their birds.
SCS Arbitrage hung 300 meters out, holding station alongside Hardway with the ships of the combined fleet massed behind her. That ship belonged to Harry Cozen. It was where they’d first learned to fly the Bitzer as a test squadron recruited from prison.
It had once been a salvage ship and now, it was a light carrier. Arbitrage and its single, gaping launch bay was just like Jordo and the rest of the Lancers remembered. Except inside the bay, where some unknown, new 12-meter craft had been lined up next to the Lancers’ confiscated 151s. The new planes weren’t QF-111 Dingoes or F-151 Bitzer variants. They didn’t look like anything Jordo had seen before.
"Look at the stub-wings," Dirty said. "And the hull. You could fly in the atmo and maneuver with that thing."
"But the maneuvering thrusters," Paladin pointed out. "twin sets on opposing sides. That was made for exo-atmo maneuvers."
"And that hull coating sucks up the light," Gush said. "I can’t make it all out."
"It’s a predator for sure," Jordo said. "look there... on the starboard side next to the cannon." Zoomed in on the open bay with their helmets they could see that the bulge in the smooth hull offset to the starboard side was a housing for a ship-killer of some kind, probably a warspite torpedo.
Shadow and fire streaked across their gawking eyes and hid Arbitrage’s bay from sight as Burn came straight down from above them, firing maneuvering thrusters in opposition and spinning one of the new fighters on three axises at once as she brought it to a dead stop in space in front of the launch bay. She gave the Lancers a view right down the cannon barrels. He could see her in the cockpit after he knew where to look. The cockpit was centered high on the armored hull.
She cleared her throat over local comms. "Staas Company Privateers’ 133rd Fighter Test Squadron," she said, "Lancers, allow me to introduce the Sky Jack 223." She spun slowly so they could see the engines on the back. "More thrust than a junk," she said. "Armor like a bloody destroyer and it can hack high-gee maneuvers better than a Bitzer. Designed from the ground up for a human pilot, but we kept the flight AI just like the one you have so we won’t have to spend more money training you. Welcome to the next generation, Lancers. You’ll be the first to fly them in combat and if you can tear your eyes away from this sexy hull for three seconds, then you can see the redsuits portaging your Sky Jacks over from SCS Arbitrage right now. I think they might be even more excited than you."