by A. D. Bloom
As Meester's redsuit piloted the knuckledragger down into one of the melted launch bays of the forward section, the mechsuit's lights stabbed into the blackness and found a ten-meter hole in the lumpy, curving bulkhead where the Ekkai's beams had punched through bulkheads and passageways, deep inside to the section's core. They puffed down that grim tunnel until they exited into the remains of the cavernous maintenance bay at the center of the ruined module.
The Shediri-fabricated, chitin structure that protruded on either side of the ship ran through the forward bays like a 20m-diameter bone through the ship's nose. The cold lights of the Human exosuits near the center of the chamber shone like little stars around it in the dim, red illumination the engineer bugs had set up.
That alien light seemed to bleed its color into shape more than illuminate them. It lit a trio of the engineer bugs jetting themselves from the keel side of the device to the top where the chitin plates had been removed. "We found a more efficient placement for the explosives used in the compression phase of firing," said Tig. "The bugs are resetting them."
"Are you going to need more tests?"
"No. The new Cynium coils are quite predictably super-conductive," Meester said, but he grimaced slightly.
"But..."
"But nothing," Meester said. I just wish I could say the Shediri name for the stuff. I don't have the parts to hiss and click it out right and the conceptual language matrix only recognizes the word Cynium thanks to Anton Cyning."
Ram said, "Chief Terrazzi actually expressed confidence in this project. Have you been sucking up to your superiors Meester? They usually hate your ideas."
"My ideas are usually untested. This isn't. This is the EM field pinch at its most fundamental - generating magnetic field by running charge through nested coils and compressing it to increase field density and power. But our ability to focus the field we project will last only as long as the hammerhead does. The magnetite-layered chitin in that horn is all that's shielding us from the full power of the burst."
"How many hits can we deflect from an Imperium ship?" That's the real question...the only question, Ram thought.
"I don't know," said Meester.
"That's not the answer I want to hear."
"It's the proton leak, Mr. Devlin. There's going to be leaks. This field pulse won't deflect energy outside a finite boundary like an Imperium shield does. It pushes back on the energy of the incoming salvo. Electrons won't get through, but protons will. They've got some mass. Kinetic energy that hits us could damage the shell of the hammerhead and spoil the focus of the magnetic field we generate."
"And then?"
"And then, the Imperium's salvos blast us, electrify us, and blow our disintegrated hull away in the wind like we were made of sand."
"Even if we can force the Ekkai home fleet to surrender to us, the Imperium is likely to have forces in-system or nearby. We're in for a big fight no matter how this goes."
"No support from home, no repair...limited stores of warspite torpedoes... I hear my redsuits talking, Mr. Devlin. Some of them are saying maybe we should just let the new Staas and UN fleet put an end to the Ekkai once and for all. They're saying it isn't up to us to pull this stunt to save them." Devlin couldn't help but glare at him. "They'll do their jobs no matter what," Meester said. "They're proud of that. It's just.... I'm not sure they all understand why we have to do this. They're calling this one 'Devlin's War' like it's you going and taking on the entire Ekkai fleet yourself..."
"It's not my war. This war belongs to all of us."
"If you say so, Mr. Devlin."
"If we let Cyning, the Board of Directors, and the UN secretary General's office have their way, Humanity won't just be the ape-descended rock-throwers that overreacted to a hostile first contact with the Squidies and murdered another species in panic. No. We'll be confirmed as a bipedal plague that in the space of only three years wiped out two out of the first three species we met. Action is truth, Tig. The saying is Shediri, but the logic isn't alien. I can't let us to be murderers again. Once was enough."
"We couldn't stop it last time," said Tig.
"This time we can. We owe it to the dead to make sure we do."
"Our dead?"
"And theirs," hes said. "Both." Meester blinked at him, and Ram explained. "Two species met, Tig, and for reasons beyond our control, only one could survive. We're alive because our enemy died...because of all the Squidies we killed. Just like we're alive because of every Privateer and UN swabbie that died fighting. We owe it to our own dead to continue on as a species worth dying for."
"I get that part, bu-"
"...and we owe it to the Squidies we killed to make sure Humanity doesn't wantonly murder another species again. This isn't my war. This war belongs to all of us."
2
SCS Aragami
5 Ks out from the Beta Taurus - Alcyone Interstellar Transit
On the doorstep of the enemy's home system, Dana Sellis was still fiddling to compensate for the energy drain from the Shediri n-space shunt panels mounted on the junk's port and starboard forequarters. The system was 90% powered down, but despite that state, the alien stealth still messed with the sensors. Even the optical arrays had a bit of their energy spirited away and sent to a sub-dimension, a layer between layers.
After she identified the exact pattern of drain, her new algorithm allowed her to read the data from Aragami's arrays clearly, and she peered into the electronic warfare console to search the sky for contacts once more. If stealthed Ekkai ships lurked in the Beta Taurus system to witness Aragami's incursion, she imagined she'd have seen at least a magnetic anomaly by now or detected a reflected bounce off that dim but noisy star's constant song.
Lt. Dudley floated in the null gees to her left and above her, hanging on to a handhold set next to the electronic warfare console. He was a skinny kid that worked trauma in Doc Ibora's medbay. She imagined all that blood and all the burned and broken bodies he'd seen would have hardened his face more, but it was boyish and always ruddy at the cheeks like he'd just been slapped around. He said, "Is it safe?"
"I can't see any contacts. That doesn't mean it's safe."
"It is if they don't see us," he said. "I thought that was the plan."
She turned to the rear of the compartment where the two Shediri engineer bugs they'd brought along clung inverted in the null-gees, holding on to the straps on the ceiling with four claw feet as they gestured in front of the alien control console set in the nest of fuel cells being used as power conditioners for the stealth panels.
The bugs both had three names, but like everyone else, Dana called them Click and Clack. Clack did all the talking - enough for both of them. As it opened its vertical and jagged-edged jaws to hiss and snap, it swayed its upper body, and the emotionless voice came from the translator on the Shediri's exosuit. "N-space shunt operational. Power sufficient. [Conditional] If 80% emission stealth, then success duration six hours."
Dana said, "[Interrogative] Shediri stealth operation certain?" and after consulting the conceptual language matrix, her translator generated the words in pidgin Shediri. She knew they understood because the two bugs made a kind of keening that she took for mockery, but she cursed the translator for probably making her sound as idiotic to them as they did to her.
Duds said, "You tested the hell out of their stealth rig before we left the Shedir system. It works. What are you worried about?"
"Do you want to pop out in the middle of the enemy's home system, find out this thing is glitchy, and get eyeballed by every canned clam in the Ekkai home fleet? It's okay if you've got a deathwish, but if we're not alive to uncloak the Ekkai ships with our network and provide the intel, then Hardway and the Task Force will enter the system and be unable to see through the Ekkai's stealth until it's too late. I know you're happy to get out of Doc Ibora's medbay, Duds, but a nice kid like you should worry more."
Junks never had enough power to run artificial gravity for the crew. She got a c
lean launch up the tube to the cockpit module, maintained attitude on her flight, and as she shot out the top of the tube, she tucked her right shoulder and made the half turn and twist that let her look 'up', sight the cockpit, and push off the bulkhead in a single, fluid motion.
"I might keep this flight helmet on for the rest of the trip," Dice said from the left chair. "That cheese smell they've got creeps me out."
Dana caught the hand hold set into the top bulkhead, above and between the cockpit's two pilots' seats. "They don't like the way you smell either, Dice."
"What's not to like?" Inside his helmet, he sniffed at the neck of his exosuit.
"I don't like the way Dice smells either," Lippmann said. "Maybe that means me and the bugs will get along."
Beyond the two pilots' consoles and out past the diamond-pane canopy, the starry black evidenced no visible sign that their junk held station only five Ks from the transit, the spot where it was easiest to breach regular space and open a faster-than-light passage to the Ekkai's home system.
Dana felt the vibration of the junk's opening torpedo bay doors come up through the frame of the boat and into the cockpit to tickle her fingers on the handhold. "Sellis to Clack," she said over local comms. "Fire the popper. Breach space."
The translator daemon voice spoke in her ear a few seconds later. "Countdown zero. Launch now."
At launch, the crude engines the bugs had given the disposable breaching device flared up in their faces and bathed the cockpit in plasma, blinding them. The chitin-shelled hourglass-shaped bomb flew towards the transit jetting out small thrusters fore and aft to maneuver before decelerating and shifting into place over the precise point where the alien device would energize its coil set with a detonation.
The Shediri had been eager to share the tech, but she couldn't fully understand it yet. Hypermass transit physics was simple enough. It was just a matter of adding to an already persistent other-dimensional distortion caused by (and a cause of) very large masses in regular space. Professor Banyan Noondie, Earth's only real expert, had told her to imagine the surface of two ponds only inches away from each other while hypermass distortions caused the surface of each to jump and stretch and distort as if bombarded by a rainstorm.
The first species she'd seen breach space was the Squidies'. Their technique had been to find the right spot in regular space where the hypermass distortions caused by adjoining stars would almost 'intersect' and add lots of 'mass' to the spot in the form of raw energy resulting from particle streams aimed to collide over the very spot. Staas Company breaching ships did the very same thing far more clumsily, but a Shediri spatial breaching device operated with an elegance the other methods lacked.
The popper detonated with a cold and greenish burst of visible light when the alien explosives juiced the coils they'd built. This was no crude bomb meant to spam the transit point with energy. This device didn't rely on a side-effect of uncontrolled release. It sent its energy directly into the dimension in which the hypermass transits of the two adjoining stars almost touched and bridged them.
In seconds, the pale and verdant flash withdrew to an uncanny, finite bounded sphere almost 2 Ks in diameter. The brilliant ball of green light collapsed in on itself. All surface points withdrew from all others as quickly as they possibly could, and the hellfire fringed maw of the Beta Taurus - Alcyone Transit opened and painted the bow of their ship blood red.
Dana said. "Anytime you're ready, Dice. Don't wait for it to close."
He rotated Aragami's maneuvering nacelles, vectored thrust to the rear, and took the boat in. The meniscus of the transit remained invisible until the bow of the junk crossed the threshold and splashed exotic particles back into the system they'd left. Aragami lurched forwards with spatial distortion as if caught in a current and then shot between the undulating walls of the transit, hurtling towards the terminus, the opening they could see like a patch of stars at the top of a burning well. It was six light years and only minutes away.
"I don't understand where I am," Lippmann said.
"You're in a tunnel of forced real-space going through n-space. It's an in between dimension."
"That's the part I don't get," he said.
"Got a house with two floors, right? Upstairs and downstairs? Those are both dimensions like normal space, like ours. If we're on the 3rd floor, then N-space is what's in between the ceiling and the floorboards of the 4th floor. That's what's outside this tunnel of regular space. When the bugs shunt energy off our stealth rig, that's where it goes."
"Nine minutes to enemy space," said Dice. "Hope you're feelin' lucky."
Dana returned to monitor the electronic warfare console in the belly of the junk before Aragami burst out the transit and into the Alcyone system too brightly to be missed. The shower of sparking particles that came off the flat bow of the junk made a spectacular display above the ecliptic of the rocky second planet. Had the Ekkai in the outer system been looking that way when the 50-meter craft appeared, they'd have see the plasma trailing off her, too. For the first few seconds, the boat was lit up like a torch.
For just having entered an enemy held system full of stealthed warships, Dice had as cool and calm a voice as any pilot. "We are currently 190 million Ks from our destination. I can't see anything out there, but the Ekkai home fleet is probably close - maybe even all around us."
"We should assume they're heading our way," said Dana into comms.
"I'm deploying the decoys," said Lippmann. She didn't even feel a shudder as the noisemakers launched from the torpedo deck and veered away on new vectors.
"Dice, give us a hard acceleration burn and then we'll go dark. After that, make a few turns using cold gas thrust only."
"Got it, Captain Sellis. We know the dance."
She piped the map of the system as they knew it to the projectors over the EWC and called to the bugs in the torpedo bay. "Clack. Begin surveillance proxy network deployment."
"Acknowledging," the Shediri said in her ear. "Deployment begins."
"What can you see?" said Dudley. He hovered close. "Is the Ekkai home fleet out there?"
Only a second later, the first of the tiny, fist-sized surveillance proxies deployed from the torpedo bay began to feed passive LiDAR and radar data to her console giving her its view of the system and everything in it. Less than a minute later, the second of seventy such devices in their surveillance proxy network was released and as it spread out from its brother, its observations of the system were added to those of the first.
The anomalies and first enemy contacts began to come clear as they deployed the third surveillance proxy. On the map projected in the air above the console, the stealthed Ekkai ships now appeared interspersed between the planets as fuzzy areas of shadow. The popped up like little storm clouds in a blue sky, breaking out all across the system. "Are those all enemy ships?"
"Yup. That's all the places where the background stars don't appear the same for all our different proxies. The Ekkai use a kind of artificial gravitational lensing to bend radiation around them. But it's not perfect. If we've got multiple views with good parallax to compare like we do now," she said, "Then we can spot them."
As more surveillance proxies were deployed and came on line, the more detailed and well-resolved the presented anomalies became until they formed the familiar shape of Ekkai warships. The details of the anvil shaped hulls had yet to emerge, but the long, vertical fins that extended topside and keel were easy to discern. Whole battlegroups steamed in high orbit around the fifth planet, the homeworld.
"What's that there?" Dudley's gloved finger pointed to an uncomfortably large patch of shadow that seemed to be a glitch of some kind because it suddenly took up one whole edge of the display map and overlapped to appear on the other side. "That an error or something?"
In the next moments, the data from another surveillance proxy came on line. This one was far enough from the others that it was able to make sense of the observations that had confused its brothers and
sisters and caused what appeared to be a glitch. As its observations threw theirs into clear focus, the shapes of the cutters in the Ekkai Hunter-Killer squadron grew in the air above her console, enormous in the display with warnings blinking that the enemy vessels now spotted were only a scant few Ks out, right on top of them.
Duds said. "They're getting closer."
"Clack," she said over comms, "pause deployment. Dice, don't do anything. Just let the Ekkai pass. They can't see us. I know they can't."
"How do you know?" said Dice.
"We're still alive."
Dudley said from the starboard porthole, he said. "They look like moving blurs. They're... they're going to pass high over the bow."
"No sudden moves..." she said, glancing out the porthole. The tall fins topside and keel and all the fast-tracking, domed turrets on the sleek hulls passed close enough to hit with a rifle. Dana's heart thumped under the chestplate of her suit, but five minutes later, Aragami remained unseen.
"The HKs are moving off for now, but a lot more ships are going to be looking for us," Dice warned from the cockpit.
Dana said, "Clack, resume deployment of the surveillance proxies."
"Acknowledging," it said.
"Dice, when those canned clams are at least 50,000 Ks out, put us on course for the third planet. It's time to set up shop."
"Captain Dana Sellis," Clack said. The engineer bug repeated her earlier question back to her. "[Interrogative] Shediri stealth operation certain?"
"Action is truth," Dana replied, and the bug made that keening alien laugh over comms that shivered her spine.
Five hours and thirty-one minutes later, Dana hovered between the pilots as Dice and Lippmann used gas thrusters to maintain geosynchronous orbit over the largest of the equatorial continents and bring SCS Aragami down slow using only the anti-gravity from the junk's pinch. "These things just aren't built for endo-atmospheric flight," Dice said. "You know I'm not going to be able to do much maneuvering right? We'll be a sitting duck."