by A. D. Bloom
Her rounds couldn't pierce the armor of the alien warship, but she walked the stream of fire across the hull, leading it where she wanted it to go like a dance partner. The bright flashes and impacts of her hellfire rain waltzed across the first of the Ekkai gun turrets in the same moment she saw the peppering impacts of over fifty more streams of cannon fire just like hers.
The deluge of 140mm HE and AP shells fell together and shattered the domed Ekkai gun batteries. Up and down the length of the first Ekkai Hunter-Killer, the beams burned out in bright blue flashes and went dark, leaving only hot, glowing concavities behind.
"It's defenseless," she said. "Flight One only, torpedoes away." Strike released the Mk 3 Warspite from the belly of the 223 and squinted into the glare of its plasma. It launched on a good line, and half a heartbeat after she pulled away between the hunting beams to strafe across the other ships, the flashing glare of the fission dets behind her told her she'd scored.
SCS Colt
The railgun monitor, Colt, and its four sister ships, Bloc 5, Da Jin, Montauk, and Rose waited for the order to fire with coils and capacitors so overcharged that the zap began to leak through their hulls to crackle down the plates of the topdecks.
In the narrow bridge of the lead monitor, Captain Rabal edged forward in the command chair and took in what his XO's tactical console could show him of the damage Strike and her pilots had managed to inflict to the enemy ships. The projection of the outermost Hunter-Killer in the formation showed it was done for. The IR layer showed it radiating sunbursts out the holes the warspites had put in its hull. It was melting down from the inside.
"That counts as one kill for sure," Julian said. "Strike and her zoomies strafed the shit out of a second HK before the bugs hit it with their covering salvo. No penetration though they're coming around for another pass."
"One." said Rabal. "They got one."
"So far," said Julian.
Siggs looked up from the NAV. "Screw those puny hull-peckers; railguns rule the day."
"Can't argue with that," said Rabal.
His XO smiled. "Go rock throwers."
The voice from Hardway spoke in Rabal's helmet and said, "Captain Rabal, our air group will be clear in seconds. Prepare to open fire."
"Right. NAV is hands off on your call," Siggy said from NAV.
Rabal thumbed comms to the other ships in his squadron. "All monitors, Colt is honcho for CFC," said Rabal.
"All monitors confirming CFC..." Pasternak said as he leaned over the Coordinated Fire Control targeting console with the visor of his helmet almost in the projections. Rabal could see the reflection of an Ekkai ship curving over the bridge of his nose right between his eyes.
"Pasty, are you ready to maneuver five ships, track my target, and unleash the combined fury of this squadron upon the enemy with righteous and vengeful aim?"
"How many alien silhouettes in crosshairs on the back of my helmet?" In the field of ships he'd painted on there, one ship represented each kill and the formation of them stretched round the front of his helmet by now. "I've got a beautiful bead on a can of clams, Captain Rabal. It's chowder time."
"This is Asa Biko," Hardway's XO said in their ears. "All monitors, open fire."
"Acknowledged, Hardway," said Julian.
"Make me some money, Pasty."
Pasty squinted at the targeting and NAV projections in front of him as he used the bow and aft maneuvering thrusters to point the gaping barrel of the ship's single railgun into the enemy's path, leading his target. He locked in and without enough power for inertial negation, the bridge and the command chair lurched under him and pushed upwards and twisted as the stutter-jets fired to maintain angle for the shot.
Around SCS Colt, above and topside and keel, port and starboard, in the quarter-second firing cycle, the stutter jets flashed on her sister ships as they mimicked her motion for as long as it took to discharge their stored energy into their magnetic coils and hyper accelerate their osmium-tungsten sabot. Inertial launch gees compressed the dense alloy, heating it in milliseconds to a super-dense, ionized mass. That's what seemed to leap out of the barrels like streaking arrows that traveled together across the vacuum to seek out the enemy ship.
The flashes budded, flowered and faded. "Impacts!" said Julian. "Increased IR in...three places. Two hits...bow and midships." The projection of the Ekkai ship over his XO's console radiated to one side. "We hit something good," he said. "Reload in nine seconds."
"They're almost in range to fire on us."
"Target a different clam," said Rabal.
"Already on it," Pasty said as he set up the shot with the thrusters and got ready to lock it.
"First target is falling out of line." It flared up like a brief star. "It cooked off. Nice aim, Pasty."
"Reload in three...two...one..." Rabal braced for the stutter jets as what looked like grouped bolts of razor straight lightning launched out into the black across their bow. "UNS Guerrero has fired."
A second after the detonation impacts from that ship's gargantuan guns flashed in front of them, the projections from his XO's tactical display flared up so bright it cast shadows around the bridge. "Three targets down." The cloud of hull fragments remaining where the three, Ekkai ships had been expanded as it followed the course the dead ships had set.
I'm getting a lock on the last one," Pasty said, but only moments later, mighty battleship Guerrero fired her other barrels. The streaks flew like grouped spears before receding to a point almost directly in front of the bridge. The flash lit off outside and then over his XO's console as well. "And that's the last one," said Julian.
"Final score: Zoomies 1, Monitors 1, Guerrero 4."
"Kill hogs," Pasty said with disgust as he leaned back from the CFC console. The light glinted off the sweat on his face.
The very second Hellcat 1-1 started speaking, he patched the comms through to his whole bridge. "This is Strike. Looks like we won, Colt."
"What?! You got dain bamage from the gees maybe?"
"We scored more hits than you. Killed one ship, damaged another. You took one HK. One. You didn't hit anything else."
He said, "Cans of Clams don't come in fractions, kid. It was one kill apiece."
"That isn't fair, Rabal, and you know it."
He said, "Double or nothing?"
SCS Hardway
The detonations out the port-side windows of Hardway's bridge raised cheers on comms. Ram Devlin nodded in his helmet. "Send my compliments to the air group, the monitors and Guerrero," he said over his shoulder to Biggs.
"That's how it's done," Margo said as she unstrapped and rose to stand by the command chair. "If you can keep it up like that, dear husband, then I think we might just arrive on target intact."
"It's beautiful when it goes right," Pardue said.
"That was just a warm up," Biko said. "If we're getting good track data from Dana's network of surveillance proxies, then from what I see with the ships closing in around us, we're not going to be able to avoid some of the Ekkai battleships. This trio here, closest to us, turned away to join up with the Dreadnought before engaging us, but the others will be here soon and when they arrive, they'll have numerical superiority and then some. They won't hesitate to attack. We won't be able to run over them so easily and I don't have to tell you what those big beams do to our hulls."
"Mr. Biko, you worry like only an XO can."
"I recommend we plot a course to intercept those three battleships before they join up with the Dreadnought."
Ram nodded in his helmet. "As long as we can make it look like a random course change and still stay more or less on our intercept with our target."
"The enemy flagship will be close," Biko said, "but not close enough to help them."
"Let's take them now rather than later." Ram said, "NAV, plot a course and push it to all task force ships. Let's go hunting."
6
Alcyone-3
On the surface of the third planet, the view from th
e cockpit of Aragami was apocalyptic. The thick forest canopy had burned out and the trunks of the charred trees now pointed skyward, sharp and vengeful. Small fires smoldered on nearly every centimeter of the forest floor, burning off some kind of chemical energy stored up in the soil. Through the ashy haze Dana could see all the way out to the edge of the forest and the bald and blackened hills.
The full spectrum of colors seen by the human eye flashed in the haze. "They're blasting the ridge to the South," she said.
"How far?" asked Dice.
"It's 5.7 kilometers to the relay we placed over there."
The atmo flashed viridian green as the beam stabbed down and walked across the ridge. In the wake of the hundred-meter-wide ray, the molten rock erupted and sprayed in all directions. The ash lifted from the floor of the burned out forest around them then as if gravity had been suspended. The shockwave hit and Dana couldn't see much else but the ash in the air and the glow from new fire in that direction as the junk shifted under her.
The console beeped out the tune she'd scripted to announce the death of another of their relays. "We're down to two," she said. "After they find those, they'll find us."
Dudley shouted up the tube to the cockpit. "I've got hot food." He said it again as he poked his head in. A minute later, she followed him down into the personnel compartment where Duds had batch-heated a set of meals and set them on top of the suit-hold in front of the armory hatch at the bow end.
She looked at Dudley suspiciously because he was snickering. "I didn't have anything to do with this, I swear." He nodded his chin upwards at the meals he'd zapped, put his hands up, palms out and said, "I think it's a Shediri experiment."
Some side dishes had been unwrapped. Clack now swayed over a pair of double-potion mashed potatoes in trays. One portion steamed up at her unmolested with the weird, extruded ridges on it unbroken. The other had been quickly and crudely sculpted, formed by four, eager Shediri claws into a pair of rounded, symmetric mounds, both of which had been punctuated at their peaks with the caricature of a human nipple. She squinted her eyes shut and pressed her lips together. She managed to only allow a wincing whimper of a giggle to escape. Dana shook her head.
The Shediri bent its body down and lifted the two trays of mashed potatoes and held them uncomfortably close to her face. "[Interrogative] Which funny?"
Dana forced her face straight. "Ask Dice. Show Dice. Shediri experiment."
"Shediri experiment," Clack repeated as it scuttled up the tube to the cockpit carrying the trays of potatoes. The other one swayed back and forth and squeezed paste into its jaws. It offered her some and she shook her head.
Dana ate as much of the shepherd's pie as she could and packed burger-filled buns on top. At the rate the relays were getting triangulated and destroyed by the Ekkai, chances were they'd soon be too busy eluding the clams for a proper meal. Clack's friend Click must have thought the same thing. It went to town on its paste, smacking and snapping its jaws. It didn't stop swaying and watching her with all those eyes as it ate. It and Clack went through three of those tubes of paste and kilos of some kind of dried red meat that looked uncomfortably mammalian.
Not more than an hour later, she was back up in the cockpit with Dice and Lippmann when the enemy in orbit found the second to last relay. "Get ready to move out," she told them.
Dudley came up then. The color was all gone from his face and he was sweating more than he should have been. He looked behind him at the top of the tube before he pounded the button set in the bulkhead and closed the hatch. "I gotta' talk to you. Sign off local comms. Shut down all the mics."
"No time; we've got to get moving," she said. "We're down to one relay. Once that one is gone, they'll find the junk. So get your helmet on. And round up Click and Clack. Tell them to do whatever they have to do and be ready to go in five."
"That's the problem," he said.
"What's the problem?"
"Microphones off." The resolute and stubborn way he insisted and just stood there staring at them refusing to move or speak until they did what he said actually scared her a little. Duds was a lot of things, but not an alarmist. "Shut down all comms, local and otherwise."
After they did, she said. "This better be good."
"I got some images and constructed better models of the contact in orbit that's raining down hell on us," he said.
"How?"
"With the optical array. That ship isn't stealthed when it fires."
"And..."
"It looks wrong. It's all wrong." Before she could even ask what he meant, Dudley's right hand shot out in front of him. With a single fluid three-part gesture in front of his suitcomp, he called up the image and piped it to the console between the pilots' seats like a dealt playing card. The image of the Ekkai patrol craft floated a third of a meter long between Dice and Lippmann.
"Looks right to me. Looks Ekkai," she said. "The hull shape is consistent. Never looked like an anvil to me, but that's what they call it. It's got the expected vertical elements...the parts for lensing stealth."
"That part looks right," he said, "but the spectral signature and the albedo is all wrong. It reflects Alcyone's light too dimly and the way it radiates heat...it's like something made of chitin..."
"Easy on the paranoia, Dudley. Bugsy is on our side," Lippmann said.
"The ship in orbit isn't transmitting," said Duds. "We've been monitoring. It hasn't sent any calls for help or backup... why not?"
"Maybe he's pretty sure he's got us nailed," Dana said. "Maybe he's got comms we don't know about."
"Okay... try this one. If the Ekkai know we're here why haven't we lost the surveillance proxies themselves. The whole reason Devlin didn't just string proxies behind the task force is because they'd be found immediately. And fast, too. We haven't lost one, not one. If the Ekkai knew we were here, they'd look harder for those proxies we dropped along our course and find at least one or two just out of dumb, ass-backwards luck. But we haven't lost any. Why? Because the Ekkai don't know we're on this planet."
"So who's up there shooting at us?" said Dice.
Dana nodded grimly and did her best to not telegraph the flush of alarm that ran through her then. "Do the Shediri want us to fail so Hardway fails? Why?" If Hardway fails, the Ekkai would be wiped out. It made no sense to her at first, but just because she didn't understand it didn't mean she could ignore it. "What are those two bugs doing down in the personnel compartment?"
"I could see their displays before I came up here. It looked like they were fast-sequencing bio-samples from the planet and cataloging more gene-code like me."
"No more jokes? No more food sculpting?" she said.
Dice moaned. "We're they just fucking with us that whole time? Goddammit, I was just starting to like Clack."
"We don't know anything for sure," Dana said. "Hell, that could just be an anomalous set of spectral data Dudley got off a messed up Ekkai ship with a shite paint job. If they'd wanted to, then Click and Clack could have sent out transmissions to pinpoint our location to friends in orbit at any time in the last hours of bombardment. But they didn't."
"So?"
"So, we go on the move and we take them with us. And we take precautions," she said. "Dice, you know how to use an MA-48 well?"
"Sure. I'm a surgeon with a forty-eight. Better than Lippmann here."
"Whatever formation we end up in, then you're the tail. You bring up the rear. Now. Listen carefully - all three of you. I'm only ever going to say this word once I hope and if you ever hear me say it again, I want you to act without thinking. If you hear me say it again, I want you to step away from the bugs in our party while counting to ten in your head. When you hit ten, I don't care where we are or what we're doing or who we're with. Once you get to ten, I want you to open fire on the aliens in our party and keep firing until they're all dead. Do you understand me?"
The three of them nodded at her. Their eyes were wide. "Chesterfield," she said. "That's the stupid word. Did you
all hear me?" They nodded. "I hope I never have to say it again. Now open that hatch, Dudley. Get your helmet on. It's time for that nature walk you wanted."
Dudley's hands shook as he spun the wheel, popped the hatch, and went down the tube.
Five minutes later, the airlock opened on the wasteland, and the ashy winds sucked them out. She was glad to have the helmet so she didn't have to breathe the smoke and the imaging it provided was invaluable. The IR picked out for her the jetting superheated gasses erupting from the forest floor that would have been invisible to her naked eye.
"What's causing that?" said Duds.
"Remember when we were coming down and the forest floor looked too hot? I think it was a lot of decomposition under the surface raising the temp like that. Probably been happening for a long time. Whatever accumulated from that process burns well. Stay clear of those jets."
At the edge of the forest, where the blackened tree trunks and burning ground ended, they stepped onto barren, rolling hillocks where the clumped grasses had been. "We'll head for the North ridge," she said. "Lippmann, you and Dudley take point. I'll bring up the rear with Dice.
Clack said, "Shediri faster. Shediri scout. Go first."
"No. Stay with us," she said. Where I can keep an eye on you.
As they set off across the bald and charred hills the dust and ash they kicked up blew ahead of them. Dana didn't see the shadows from above until the creatures were right overhead, like vultures, but with featherless wings like bats. "What the hell are those?" They circled fifty meters up and rode higher on thermals rising from the scorched landscape.
"Leatherwings," Clack's translator said. "They feed." The winged predators dove in series then, picking up speed as they shot through the haze hanging overhead and glided fast and silent and deadly leaving only a minimal wake behind them as they flew. One by one, as talons touched down and kicked up plumes of dust and ash, the leatherwings flapped and lifted clear with prey in their grasp. She saw one of the headless monsters clearly then as it ate on the wing. Its round and toothy maw opened to receive the creature it had snatched from the open, and before its leatherwings had beat twice more, the rows of teeth sank in and tore flesh. Color spurted and caught the sunlight, and the three-meter wings spattered and beat it into a mist.