The Liberty Fleet Trilogy (War of Alien Aggression, box set two)

by A. D. Bloom

  CWO Kurtz was the last out from that section of the command tower. Kurtz made sure Garlan and all his crewmen had all escaped before he'd leave. Garlan didn't argue. He got a good launch off the edge of the hatchway and flew inverted up the burned and broken passage and out over midships.

  As he cleared the cleft command tower, deck after cut-open deck displayed itself. The whole aft-end, starboard side corner of the command tower had been sliced clean off to reveal a cross-section of the tower's flash-burned decks. Ash and loose gear floated free from hab compartments along with rag-doll bodies in blackened blue and red exosuits.

  Garlan hit the gas on his belt and got some distance and a moment later, he felt sick when he turned and saw the full extent of the damage. Whatever had cut off the aft end of the command tower hadn't stopped there. The monitor had been sliced deep. The steel of the outer and inner hulls still burned at the edges of the wound. The light of the system's orange giant streamed up through the gash in a wide, unbroken shaft. The ship had been cut nearly in half.

  He finally spotted Kurtz jetting clear along with a few others from the Choctaw's crew. Seconds after that, something at the stern blew, and the broken ship began bending and twisting. The bow end swatted the Chief and sent his red exosuit spinning like a rag doll.

  Garlan leaned on the slim jim and accelerated. When he craned his neck up, he saw the positions of his crewmen projected for him against foreign stars and counted their eleven transponders with relief.

  Annie had stopped about 3 Ks out from the wreck and the others stopped with her. Behind them, UN destroyers turned hard, coming about in front of battleship Guerrero. Steaks of hot metal burned in her gargantuan sides where she'd been hit, but against her armored bulk, those wounds looked like scratches.

  Immediately in front of Choctaw, the 500-meter hauler, Mare Lux, had been hit with the same alien weapon as the monitor and the battleship, but from a raking angle. Her spine hadn't been cut through, but the weapon tore her down the topside of her hull and ripped her open. Fires burned inside and jetted out the wounds, and ordnance she'd been carrying began to cook off.

  It was easy to recognize the section of curving, toroid hull that drifted under the freighter. More pieces of the breaching ship Midwicket came into view as he watched. "What the hell happened?" To the rear, the five other monitors in the squadron looked to be intact. They were now breaking the single-file line in which they'd entered the system and forming up together to engage something with coordinated fire, but Garlan still had no idea what.

  SCS Colt, sister ship of Choctaw.

  The UN conducted their own search and rescue and Staas Company did the same. While the destroyers' skiffs pulled in lifeboats and crewmen from the black, longboats from monitors SCS Bloc 5 and SCS Colt plucked the Choctaw's survivors from the vacuum. Broken bones and concussed spacers went on to Hardway where they had a doctor and a medbay.

  Garlan thought his crew probably had some hard knocks that needed attention, but they were shaken up and none of them wanted to leave the others, the only familiar thing they had left. So they limped and shuffled on their bruises and sprains out into the Colt's small bay and through the locks. "Atmo is still up," the XO of the Colt told them. "Enjoy it while you can."

  The second they stepped into that ship and popped their helmets off, they all got chills. The six ships in the monitor squadron were all the same class of converted hauler and Colt looked exactly like Choctaw. Walking down those passageways felt like being back aboard the same ship they'd just had shot from under them only now they knew exactly how well those ships held up under enemy fire.

  The crew of the Colt leaned out hatches to cast wary stares at them as the Colt's chief led them aft, probably to their mess. Garlan was glad he got called to the bridge with Dana Sellis and the Choctaw's surviving XO, Lohengrin.

  When the doors of the lift opened, he heard Captain Rabal before he saw him hidden behind a console in the ship's command chair. "I'm sorry about Choctaw, Bernie. I'm sorry about your crewmen."

  "And Captain Lewis," Lohengrin said.

  Colt's bridge was as spartan as the rest of her. It looked largely unchanged in the conversion, but a tactical console had been added. It took up more than its share of space, cramping movement and blocking their path. Garlan, Dana, and Lohengrin had to walk around it to get in front of the raised command chair where Captain Rabal sat.

  "Could have just as easily been us that got hit instead of Choctaw," Rabal said. "We're all a little skittish now." Rabal's standard, blue, Staas Co. exosuit showed a lot of wear on the thighs where Garlan saw him nervously gripping them. "They came out of nowhere - no warning - no nothing. Some kind of stealth."

  Garlan couldn't help but look out the bridge windows then. All he saw was search and rescue operations wrapping up between them and Guerrero's flank while the remaining destroyers stayed close. "Eight destroyers and a battleship entered the system before us and didn't see a thing..." said Rabal's XO.

  Rabal snorted out his nose and sneered a little and shook his head.

  Dana said, "We knew they'd be coming, just not so soon. What does the rest of the system look like now? Is there any sign of Hardway?"

  Rabal nodded to his XO at the tactical console, and after the flip of a switch, its projectors displayed the whole system at false scale. Shedir burned like an orange ball of solid flame at the center. The innermost planets were barely the size of peas. The half-molten rocks and sulfuric-acid shrouded hells that orbited close to Shedir were devoid of activity. The fourth planet, the Shediri homeworld, hung over the console as big as Garlan's fist, but not a single, war-painted Shediri raider was in sight that wasn't hulled and broken in jagged pieces of chitin. "That looks like thousands of small ships. All dead."

  "There were more than 6500 Shediri raiders stationed on that planet and the orbital stations around it."

  The orbital stations burned and swarm he'd heard of wasn't anywhere in sight. All Garlan could see around Shedir was a task force centered around a single, leviathan of a vessel. Its spires pierced the main hull to stab outwards in fourteen directions. The notation next to it indicated that ship was sixteen kilometers from tip to tip. He said, "At the center...that's an Imperium vessel?"

  "Big, isn't it?" said Rabal.

  "Not so big it doesn't need escorts," Dana said. "Look at the ships around it. They're distributed in defensive rings like destroyers and cruisers around a battleship or a carrier. Those ships are Ekkai, the Shediri's neighbors. They're the Imperium's new colonial fleet."

  "A full mission briefing would have been nice," Rabal said.

  Dana Sellis nodded. "I sympathize. But I don't set the operational security policies."

  "The Ekkai hulls look like the anvils in the Deimos yards," Garlan said. "The ones they set on top of the knuckledraggers."

  "Siggy said that exact same thing." Rabal nodded to the NAV console where bald Siggs sat. The scar that circled his skull looked to go all the way around.

  "Don't know what the fins are for," Siggs said. They extended topside and keelside for hundreds of meters, relatively thin and parallel to the ship's line of travel. "Maybe it's the stealth. But the big ones have 'em as well. And they don't disappear like the little ones can."

  "What exactly are those Ekkai battleships doing around the planet?"

  "Shore bombardment. Our arrays aren't very good, but from the IR hotspots, we can see it isn't pretty. Whatever they call cities or hives are being burned off the surface. Isn't that where you said your ship is, Captain Sellis?" She nodded. Rabal worked the interface set in the arm of the command chair and brought up a projection of three ships. "This is what hit us. They hid themselves and walloped us when we came out of the transit."

  Lohengrin visibly shuddered. He didn't want to see them again. "Ekkai hunter-killers," Dana said. "Fast, highly effective against small targets. They carry lots of fast-tracking batteries and one larger gun. Their focused gamma beams cause a kind of nuclear decay chain reaction in
our belt-iron steel."

  "Where the hell are the bugs?" Lohengrin said. "Are they all dead? No help from them?"

  "I've got some LiDAR returns from 25-meter craft," Rabal's XO said. "They're out around the sixth planet and the archipelago of moons there." The XO poked the projection of it with his finger. The banded gas giant was lurid purple in places and muddy yellow in others. A hexagonal vortex gaped over the north magnetic pole. The moons orbited close and oversized and between them were Shediri ships, half the size of a junk, all of them painted in black and white patterns like angular war paint or dazzle camo.

  "Shediri raiders," said Dana.

  Siggs said, "You know what they say about bugs; if you can see a few..."

  "That's where we'll find Hardway," Dana said. "Get me comms with the battleship."

  The crew of the Doxy found a forward-facing window two decks under the bridge in the command tower. They all wanted to see their ship too badly to wait like cargo in a hold.

  Sleek F-223 Sky Jack interceptors from Hardway's air group met their convoy halfway and escorted them in. Once they were inside the orbit of the banded gas giant's fourth moon, young Bix was the first to spot the Doxy against the crackled ice of its sister. "I see her," Bix said, pointing at something, a speck Garlan could barely differentiate from the high albedo surface. "There, next to Hardway. Off to her starboard about 5 Ks. No. Wait. That's not... What?"

  He didn't understand what tripped the kid up like that, but it scared him. They could all see the fires burning in Hardway's side and the damage to her tower and the strange foreign plates on her outer hull where the armor looked to have been replaced with something new, something alien that wasn't from the Staas Company yards. But none of them asked about that. They only had eyes for the Doxy and something was clearly out of place with her.

  Carnaby got his helmet on before Garlan. Once his XO gestured in for a zoomed view, Garlan saw the man's face screw up inside his helmet with a mix of what looked to be confusion and anger. "What the hell have they done?"

  "No...oh, god," Annie said.

  "What did they...?" Graves said, "what is it?"

  Moments later, Garlan raised his glove in front of his helmet and spread his pinched fingers wide to zoom in on the Doxy. He could easily discern her blue-painted command module jutting forwards from her main hull like the head of a turtle. The rest of her, though... Her 600-meter length looked to be intact. That is to say, he could make out the bow and the stern of the hauler and that implied the middle was still there. In fact, he had no idea if what was between bow and stern was still present at all. He couldn't see it under the alien-made structure that reminded him of wasps' nests and tumors and looked to have grown or bubbled up to massive proportions around the hull of his ship.

  The alien additions to Doxy hugged her at her sides in bulbous, intersecting spheroids of varying size and the solid mass of them grew over two-hundred meters high, top and keelside both. Around the towering alien growths were impossibly thin, curving open decks, shaped like sails blowing downwards, with their corners pointed up like the corners on pagodas. All of it had been painted in black and white Shediri war-paint and here, it actually broke up the form and made it harder to pick out the details.

  "They mutilated our ship."

  "What the hell is all that stuff on her?"

  "Who the fuck cares; get it off!"

  "It'll come off once we accelerate or turn; I guarantee it."

  "What did they think they were making? Some kind of orbital station?"

  "No. I can see Doxy's engines," he said. "She's spitting blue plasma out into the black. That's no orbital station."

  The swarm of Shediri raiders that launched off the fringing decks made it easy to guess what the Shediri had intended to make out of Doxy when they covered her with alien construction. "Those are flight decks. It's a carrier. It's a converted carrier. For the Shediri - the bugs."

  "More of a 'tender' than a carrier," Graves said.

  "It'll rip right off," Singh repeated.

  Carnaby said, "Not if they've got our inertial negation cranked the hell up and properly synced to NAV."

  "She's got the coils for it," Annie said. "They wouldn't melt out like the new ones."

  That's why Devlin needed Doxy, he thought. But what the hell does Ram Devlin need us for?

  3

  SCS Hardway, bridge

  Commodore Ram Devlin hoped his redsuits were right and the damage just looked worse from the bridge than it really was. The Ekkai guns had scored the topside of the primary bays and the command tower, ripping the armor and leaving ragged-edged wounds in the bay doors. Bay six wouldn't open, but the redsuits were on it. The fires were out in bays Eight and Nine. He still hadn't seen it yet himself, but Meester claimed the hits they took from the Ekkai had punched clean through one side of the carrier and out the other. He said in MBay 2 the shock wave had rolled the thick steel under their feet like a stone thrown into pond water. The Shediri chitin plates used to repair the damage done during the last engagement with the Imperium had held up better than the ship's original armor.

  Ram said, "Any communication from the Shediri about where that swarm is going?"

  "No, Commodore," came the response from the warrant officer behind his command chair. "But Captain Chun Ye Men on Guerrero is setting up a handshake for encrypted messaging. "He says, 'Action is truth.'"

  "UN hears talk like that, they're going to think Captain Chun's gone native," Asa Biko said from the tactical console.

  "He likes the Shediri. Any movement from the rebel hive around the gas giant's fourth moon?"

  "They're staying in the shadows, avoiding any line of sight to us and the enemy battlegroup. Maybe they're hoping the Ekkai hunter-killers roaming out here won't attack something that big."

  Ram said, "If the Imperium only attacks Shedir-4, the rebel hive could come out on top in this system."

  "The six Ekkai battleships are continuing their bombardment unchallenged," Biko reported.

  They'd been lucky to disengage after it was clear Hardway and the Shediri alone couldn't fend off the surprise attack. "I know the Hive Regent couldn't have lost all 6500 raiders. The ones that got away will come out of hiding once we counter-attack."

  On the projection over the deck of the bridge, the thermal blooms that spread from the ruins of the Shediri cities each represented the deaths of millions. He leaned forward in the command chair to see if the capital hive-city was burning. Of course it was. The surface was probably fused to glass. "Ix spoke of much larger structures underground than we'd seen," he said. He just hoped Margo and the boy and Taipan's repair crew had gotten enough warning to abandon ship and take refuge with the Hive Regent below.

  UNS Guerrero was the first ship visible to the naked eye out the windows of Hardway's bridge. At Deimos Yards they'd fused more belt-iron to her where it had been vaped away and now, her enormous shield had become a particolor mix of old and new armor. It had been fused and ground down, but the misalignment of the newly formed crystals made the light hit the two patches differently so through the polarizing diamond pane windows, the repairs were as visible as a great birthmark across the battleship's face.

  Her destroyers proceeded her. Inside their ring, the two remaining freighters, five of the six railgun monitors, a yacht, and a single breaching ship kept close to Guerrero.

  "That's Cyning's yacht."

  "He's brave coming back to this system," Biko said. "And in his own ship. He's daring someone to kill him."

  From the AT Controller's console, young and swarthy Eileen Hassan spoke with soft voice and the lunar drawl. "The forward destroyers in the convoy are just over 5000 Ks out now. The junks say it's clear out there. No Ekkai lurking as far as they can tell. I'm adding the escort fighters back to the combat air patrol." She reached out into the projection of the incoming ships over the AT controller's console, plucked the flights of Sky Jacks and junks from the convoy, and placed them among the projections of fighters and junks
flying the CAP over what was now a much larger task force.

  Ram said, "Lt. Hassan, send a longboat out to whichever ship is carrying Dana Sellis and the crew of the Doxy and bring them to Bay One immediately."

  Hardway, Bay One

  Ram Devlin wore a close-combat exosuit and carried the helmet under his arm as he rode the lift down from the bridge to the hollow tensegrity spine. It was under 700 meters from there to the bow, but the walls and the struts that crisscrossed the 20-meter-wide spine seemed to recede to infinity.

  He nodded to the redsuit damage control teams squatting with their backs against the bulkheads. Nobody has to salute or say sir on a Privateer ship, but they didn't want to look like they were loafing. They started to rise and he waved them down. It had been thirty-six hours on alert for those crews. Squatting against the bulkhead in low gees conserved almost as much energy as racking out.

  The crewmen he passed on the seventy-meter walk to the Primary Bays nodded to him and he could see the fatigue in their shoulders and the heavy lids encircling their bloodshot eyes. Over half of them hadn't ever seen action before they got to Hardway. They'd trained before they came, but nothing can prepare you. If you're not doing more than you think you're capable of, you're probably not doing enough.

  Up the lift and down the passage into the topdeck of the primaries, he nodded to the redsuits and pilots, turret gunners and torpedomen he saw. A squad of Lucy's Company Marines in front of the airlock into Bay One blocked the hatch. They stared at some imaginary point far beyond him only they could see. "I didn't order up a protective detail, Hugo."

  "That was me," Lucy Elan said from behind him. From the MA-48 across her chest and the extra ammo and D6 grenades bouncing like plums off her belts, it looked like she was planning on coming, too.

  "You do know the Shediri are our friends, right?"

  "Today, they're our friends."

  "No room on the longboat," Ram said. He put his helmet on, secured it, and said it again through his suit speakers. "No room. We've got a dozen and myself already."