by A. D. Bloom
He heard that low frequency hum it made in his bones so he knew it was on at the moment of impact. The golden sheen of the Imperium vessel's repulsion shield flashed at them as it met the field generated by their own set of alien-modified coils. In a single, blinding, golden blink, the two fields merged, and they were inside and flying smack at one of the 16-km-tall spires just above where it pierced the main hull.
"Up! UP!" Dice pitched the fifty meter junk up as fast as could, blasting away, rolling and pitching the nose back to give the warspites their best shot at the tip. Inertial gees pushed down like gorillas on each shoulder and at the bottom of the maneuver, he tasted blood that must have run out his nose. When the tip of that great spire sat square in the center of the canopy, he called it out to the torpedo bay below, "Fire! Fire! Fire!"
Once the six torpedoes lit in his face he couldn't see anything but hot blue plasma breaking over the canopy, but he felt the most amazing sense of relief. A kind of euphoria lifted him in his seat even before detonation, while he was still rolling the junk into a blind exit line and hoping he wouldn't hit anyone. There was no guarantee this would work and if it did, there was a good chance he and his crew wouldn't survive, but the relief still coursed through him. They'd launched on target with good LOS. No matter what happened now, the crew of Bangalore hadn't fucked it up.
Five torpedo junks penetrated the Imperium ship's shields and 30, strobing detonation flashes lit off at the tips of ten spires. There was no way to roll the cockpit to face away from all of them. Their helmets turned opaque to protect the pilots' eyes from the fission dets going off so close. The engines sputtered and the junk spun to one side as fast penetrating neutrons made it through the shielding and induced bit errors in the flight computer controlling thrust.
As his helmet's visor cleared, he caught sight of the Imperium ship's spires again, now blasted and fractured at the tips and still alarmingly close. He'd flown the wrong way and they were still too close - only a little over a kilometer off the main hull of the Imperium ship. The strangely mottled outer skin turned pale, spotted bright and washed out white with hits from UNS Guerrero's gargantuan railguns.
"The shield is down! It worked!" Lippmann shouted into the light.
Dice tried to hoot, but the impact to Bangalore's starboard side knocked the wind out of him and sent them spinning. As the inertial negation systems failed, the gees from the spin threw him outwards towards the console and the canopy through which he saw blasted pieces of his own boat spin away.
"What's happening?"
"We got hit!" He thumbed internal comms to the crew below. "Bai, Tory! Deng!" No answer. Strobing flashes blinded them again before a new wave of impacts hit the topside of the junk and sent them spinning in a new direction. "It's splash from the railguns!" The pieces of enemy hull hit them like a shotgun blast, tearing holes through their junk and killing vital systems. "Reactor warnings! Gammas! We're going to cook off!"
"Abandon ship! Abandon ship!"
The firestorm of ionized gases that came up the tube from the personnel section made no sound. It filled the cockpit module and enveloped Dice and Lippmann in their pilots' seats and licked at the visors of their helmets. He looked over his shoulder just once to see if Bai or the others had made for the cockpit, but when he saw nothing but rushing plasma and his burning boat, he mashed the single button that sealed the cockpit hatch and initiated the module's explosive separation from the rest of the junk.
UNS Guerrero
"The Imperium vessel's shields are disabled," his XO said. Chun glimpsed the confusion in his eyes. "But our salvo barely fazed it. We hulled the last one with a shot like that."
"This one has better armor, but it can't be invulnerable if it's trying to get away. Helm, pursue the Imperium ship at best speed. All batteries, concentrate fire on the main hull. Don't give it a chance to recover."
"All batteries," his XO said, "fire when ready." Hits from his destroyers' small railguns sparked along the length of the Imperium ship's central hull, tiny against its 3 kilometer, armored breadth.
Deep inside Guerrero, behind her glacial bow plate, sabot were still being loaded into the railguns and capacitors charged when the Imperium ship loosed its next savage burst. The plasmoid ripped past the small craft buzzing in all directions trying to get clear and hurled itself at Chun's battleship.
"Impact in ten seconds," Whipple said.
"Commander Hill of the Java wants to know if he should take the destroyer squadron to help Hardway."
It was too late to change plans now. "Tell them to close range and concentrate their fire. Throw everything at that Imperium ship."
"Fire disruption salvo," Whipple ordered
"Torpedoes away...Detonation..."
"Enemy salvo impact in three...two...one."
Chun's command chair tried to shift three meters to port under him and he thought his neck would snap as the bulkheads and consoles turned to blurs. "Report!"
"Breaches in the outer and inner hull!" Whipple called out. "Seven guns off line!"
"Fire the rest! Fire!"
SCS Hardway
Asa Biko said, "Guerrero may not be able to take another hit."
"Tell our railgun monitors to target the Imperium ship," Ram said.
"I don't think the Ekkai are going to let them!" said Dana. The fat gunboat passing to starboard underscored her words with a dazzle of beams across the base of the engineering section behind the command tower.
"Terrazzi says R1 is spiking," Biko said. "She's taking it offline."
"Damage control reports the metal in the forward bays is burning from inside," Dana told him.
"Tell them to use the explosives. Blow the hot metal off until the fire is out."
The next trio of Ekkai hunter-killers to fly past to port and gouge them took blossoming 140mm shells to the nose so they didn't see the warspites from above. Hulled, the first of them fell behind and melted down, but the others' beams filled decks with fire on Hardway and Doxy. The half-alien carrier's bridge looked intact, but they'd lost comms. Scarlet flame erupted from the Shediri carrier's cracked superstructure.
"Here come the heavies," Biko said. "He pointed out the five Ekkai battleships on his tactical display. "They're coming for a pass together."
"Keep the bow towards the enemy, please, Ms. Wei." It wouldn't matter, he thought, not with this kind of firepower about to hit them. If the beams on those battleships tore across them, it would make no difference what part of the ship they hit. "Put us between the Ekkai and Doxy if you can."
"New contacts!" said Biko. "Bearing 349 mark 25. Shediri missiles! Thousands! Thousands of them!" They blinked in and out from the tactical display as the arrays lost sight of the Shediri salvo and regained it again, but through the window of the bridge, the stealthy alien missiles blotted out the stars in a rolling wave of darkness.
"That's beautiful," he said. "How many?"
"Almost six-thousand missiles! Time to impact on the Ekkai is ten seconds!"
"I knew some of Kesik's raiders survived that assault!"
The five Ekkai battleships had plenty of heavy-hitting beams for hulling big ships, but not nearly enough point-defense guns to stop a salvo like that launched so close. Beams raked and lanced the cloud of incoming ordnance, detonating so many that all motion in those seconds stuttered and jerked with the flashes. The cloud of detonations tightened around the battleships, painting them brighter and brighter orange until the moment the missiles landed together and encased the breadth of the Ekkai hulls in a rolling, explosive aura. When the thousands of missiles had spent themselves against the thickest of the Shediri armor and the spectacle of their fiery crescendo had faded, the charred hulls drifted, unbreached, unbroken, but with their engines and turrets dark. They drifted.
"I have a swarm of 1457 Shediri raiders inbound," Biko said. "Their transponders say their Hive Kesik's."
"Took them long enough to get here," said Dana.
The last raiders in the swarm
of the Hive Regent Kesik looped through the drifting Ekkai ships in swirling, war-painted victory.
"Hardway to Colt," Ram said.
"This is Rabal."
"Target the Imperium ship! Fire, fire, fire!"
UNS Guerrero
The last of the plasmoid storms the wounded Imperium vessel hurled at them had flayed the steel from the flanks of Chun's ship, crushed her outer decks, and filled her with fire. "Seventeen seconds to enemy salvo impact." The fast-moving vortex of hyperdense plasma was already looming green and ugly and large off the port side.
"That one will finish us," Whipple said. "Unless we turn to take it on the bow plate."
Chun shook his head. "Even if we survive, we'll lose our last guns. No. We take our last shot now. Too many died for us to waste it trying to survive. Tell them to fire when ready."
The next seconds seemed like an eternity as the sabot loaded and the capacitors charged. After the deck shuddered, his XO said, "Our salvo is away. Enemy salvo impact in five...four..." Chun held contact with his XO's eyes as the man counted down for the last time. "Three...two..."
"It's veering off!" The helmsman pointed at the projection of the incoming weapon's track so hard he strained at the straps that held him in his seat. It spun off wildly to port and passed twenty Ks away from the ship's hull before hurtling off harmlessly into the vacuum.
There were no cheers, just widening eyes as the XO zoomed in on the thousands of detonations rolling up and down the enormity of the Imperium ship's hull in waves. "What the hell is hitting it?"
"Shediri missiles..." Bright popping flashes punctuated the detonations. "And Privateer railguns..."
Pieces of hull flew off the Imperium ship, glowing bright, as another wave of little Shediri detonations rolled up and down the spires.
"They can't hull it."
"But they can disrupt it!"
Guerrero's salvo landed. "Impact!" The flaring energy released when their last nine railguns landed sabot at the fractured center of the Imperium ship's hull didn't fade after impact. The core of that ship now looked like the transits before the breaching ships ripped space - the ball of hellfire didn't fade. It grew.
"We hit something vital. I've got X-ray bursts and big, unfocused gammas!" Whipple said, "Gravity distortions...whatever powers that thing is cooking off!"
The sphere of light grew in silence at the center of the Imperium ship's fractured spires and devoured them. When the flood of brilliance receded, only the tips of the Imperium ship's blasted spires remained, drifting like broken finger bones two-kilometers long.
SCS Doxy
Garlan and Singh watched for alien boarders out the porthole on the bridge hatch. He said, "If they got in the Shediri section, they might have access to our holds and then..."
"Then they'd come out on the mainsway, yeah."
The light from the engineering hatch porthole shone hundreds of meters away through the redlit dim, but close enough to see Carnaby's fat head when he blocked it. "Carnaby, you got any baddies down there in engineering?"
"I pity whatever steps out into our crossfire."
"Just don't hit us. And maybe we shouldn't use the sabot in here."
"Captain Foet!" His helmet told him the voice shouting in his ear was Lucy Elan, the Company Marine from Hardway.
He said, "We lost comms. Where are you?"
"We're literally on your starboard bow...on the hull. We can't get past the Ekkai boarders via their point of entry. The rear guard they left is too strong. We need you to secure the Shediri War Ambassador and withdraw him into your section of the ship. I'm sending Marines in through your bays, but it'll take them time to get there. I need you to go in first. Now."
"We're not combat trained."
"All you have to do is go in and get him. Go, Captain Foet. Take the chain gun and that ape of a first officer with you."
Carnaby met him at the Shediri incursion into the mainsway with Tripper who swore he knew how to shoot one of the MA-48s even though Garlan knew he'd never been in anyone's military. It took Graves longer to catch up with them.
Garlan tested the heft of the chain gun. In full Earth gees he could never carry a weapon like this without a brace or an exoskeleton, but in Doxy's low gees it was easy to hold the front end of it on target with the handle that ran perpendicular to the barrels. The ammo box said it held 500 caseless rounds and when the barrels were waist level, it came down almost to his knees.
"Be careful with that thing, Skipper," Graves said. "It's going to kick a lot in the low gees. Natural instinct is to grip real hard then with everything you've got including your trigger finger."
"We should bring more people," Carnaby said.
"Four is good," he said. "Four I can keep track of. Now, everyone look up at the camera-thing and wave at the Shediri so they'll open the door. Put on your helmets. They'll help you see."
"Least we won't have to smell 'em. Bugs stink like nuts and cheesy corn chips."
"Just stay close," he said as the alien hatch opened and he stepped in. "Follow me over the walkways. Do what I do. And don't shoot any bugs." He swept the barrels of the chain gun across the shadows outside the lock when it opened.
"What about the Ekkai," Tripper said.
"Shoot the Ekkai."
"What do they look like?"
"Like...not bugs." To the right, he remembered..go right. They crept on cat's feet through the darkness of the threshold, following him into the next chamber, a larger one with crumpled shapes below, in the dim.
"There's dead Shediri in here," Carnaby said.
"I see 'em." One good glance as he swept the chain gun that way and he wished he hadn't looked. The bodies were all halved at the very least. Their limbs were everywhere. Where they'd fallen the deck had been slashed, but whatever cut up the bugs had only half melted through the magnetite chitin.
"The dead ones are all Stripeys," Carnaby said. "There must be thirty of them in here. And the Stripeys are the tough ones."
"I know. Keep going." He kept his suit lights pointed on the walkway until it was time to descend to the tunnel he remembered.
"Skipper...what do Ekkai look like?" Graves asked this time. "The Marines called 'em 'clams in cans'."
As he pointed his light at the concave deck beneath him and jumped, he tried to tell them what he'd seen in flashes between the jagged edges of the rent hull as the Ekkai stormed out of their lifeboats. "Machine," he said. "And fast. Ugly."
He found where the squishy padded tunnel into Ix's meeting room should have been, but there was nothing but a convex bulge there now - a sealed Shediri hatch. The four of them stood in front of it and waved anywhere there might be one of the bugs' eyeball cameras, and when that didn't work, he hoisted the six barrels of the chain gun high with the front handle and used the stock to pound on the hatch.
The convex hatch cracked down the middle. It only got open half a meter before it stopped and Garlan saw what was inside that tunnel. It was machine and fast and ugly. The limbs whipped around its armored tub of a body in the cramped space. This was what he'd seen invading the Shediri section of the ship, but this one was much, much closer.
It gripped with mechanized claws and pried the halves of the convex hatch open farther as a jeweled lens angled back and forth just inside the hatch at the end of a thick, flexible appendage. "It's going to shoot!" Carnaby dropped to the curving deck before it waved a beam across the gap at him.
The peripheral discharge from the focused gamma beam in the Shediri neon atmo was nearly blinding. It scored sparking across the deck as it ripped atoms apart. It burst the Shediri bodies behind him and sent empty pieces of armor skittering. Pale green, mist hung over Carnaby, glowing with residual charge as it angled to fire again.
Garlan pointed the barrel of the chain gun into the gap between the doors and squeezed the trigger and nothing happened. He saw the barrels at the front spinning faster as the Ekkai inside began to aim the beam at him. A tongue of fiery muzzle discharge flared
out almost two meters, almost all the way to the mechanized terror trying to kill them. It pushed him back like a rocket engine. He held that trigger squeezed tight and pressed down on the front of it to fight the kick as osmium slugs burned trails on his retina.
He screamed then, mostly in absolute terror as the fire continued to spray into the enclosed space and bullets holed the mechanical thing in front of him. They knocked it back, and it sprayed fluid in jets. Garlan held that trigger down even as the force of all those bullets pushed him back across the bug juice on the floor.
The Ekkai boarder fired once more and it was only dumb luck that the beam didn't hit Garlan or anyone else. That slashing electric green nightmare tore the deck and peppered him with chitin shrapnel as the thing finally slumped on what he could now make out as five, bent mechanical legs.
He lifted his finger off the trigger when the sabot from the MA-48s shattered it. They burst the Ekkai's armor open. After it sprayed a brackish bile, what fell out of that walking can, what drained out with the fluids and fell to the floor looked more like a giant alien organ than a body. Its thick, meter-wide flaps of squidge were like nested skirts. Appendages twitched under those layers of slimy flesh.
"It's a fucking clam," Carnaby said. "It's a clam in a fucking can." The dying thing reared up on thick muscles like a trio of boneless legs and sprayed black oil all over them out some unseen orifice before they opened fire again and shredded it.
"What the fuck!" Tripper screamed at it as he fired again. "Fuck!"
At the end of the plush covered tunnel, the hatch into Ix's reception chamber cracked open and the two halves rotated back to reveal a pod of six Stripeys, their armor had been stained fully in their own greenish fluids and spattered generously with black and oily Ekkai juice.
Garlan thumbed the button on his chest and said the only word he thought he'd need - 'escape'. The quick hiss and clacking sound of the Shediri translation followed, and he looked past the six bugs in front of him to see others behind them carrying Ix. "Go now," Ix said from the speaker on the panel around his neck.