by A. D. Bloom
"Loading..." repeated Pasty, "...loading."
"Fire when ready."
"Ready! Sabot away!"
"Close the gun ports!" he shouted.
Whip said, "All hands,brace for impact."
SCS Hardway
Chun's salvo landed a close grouping along the rear quarter of the one closest to his battleship and hulled it. It vented a firestorm and its broken fins fell away as Guerrero continued on towards the last enemy vessel, rotating herself to keep that glacial bowplate pointed at the enemy.
"I covet that firepower," Margo said. "And that armor."
Ram decide the Ekkai on that ship must have known they were doomed because instead of firing all their batteries at UNS Guerrero, now falling on them like a steel mountain, they pointed their beams at Hardway.
He said, "Evasive!" as he saw the flashes from the Ekkai hull grow. There was no time for Wei at NAV to react before the longshots came in from the dying Ekkai. The manifestaions of their last, collective wills screamed across the vacuum as focused gamma rays and stabbed at the two carriers with all the fury of the doomed Clams.
Wei had been steering Hardway on a random zig zag, but it wasn't unpredictable enough. In their dying moments, the aliens took a wild guess where the carrier would be and got lucky.
Two hits from the Ekkai's big guns drilled almost straight down onto the top of what had been the forward launch bays and now housed the only protection they might have from an Imperium ship. Ram unconsciously strained against the command chair's straps as the rays waved across the hull and threw up curtains of molten metal. Clouds of discharging plasma bled from the fires as the beams hit. Secondary decay from the focused gammas widened the wounds to his ship before his eyes.
"Meester! Report!" Before the beams that found them ceased, they'd cut through outer and inner hull. A second later the shock wave came down the tensegrity spine and up the command tower to the bridge to shake them.
"It's alright!" Tig shouted back over comms from inside the forward bays with his magnetic pinch. "I think we're okay!"
"Chun is bloody ramming them," Margo said in his ear.
UNS Guerrero and the Ekkai battleship collided with a flash that seemed to consume the edges of Guerrero's great hull. Half a heartbeat later, jets of debris and plasma radiated outwards from Guerrero's bow. The three major hull fragments of the Ekkai ship rolled off the battleship's burning armor as Chun maneuvered his beast back towards the carriers. UNS Guerrero's bow plate still glowed from the impact, but her ports opened again to reveal her guns undamaged.
"The UN and Staas will be coming here with three ships like that," said Margo. "The Ekkai don't stand a chance."
"That's why they're going to surrender to us," Ram said. "Our target is close."
Biko nodded. "We will intercept the Ekkai vessel designated EK.57 in.... just over nine mi-"
"What's wrong, Mr. Biko." Ram's XO looked suddenly pale. He was busy poking at his console, but with only an upward nod of his chin he pointed to the display projected over it. The menacing cloud of Ekkai ships like a swarm of flies all around the task force was gone. "We can't see the Ekkai!"
Biko said, "I know! The data feed from Dana's surveillance network is down! We're blind again! We can't see through their stealth anymore!"
Ram said, "Get Dana on comms. Get the datastream back up! The Ekkai could be shifting positions to attack us right now. We could be steaming right in front of that dreadnought's guns and we'd never even know it until they opened fire."
8
Surface of Alcyone-3
Halfway up the landslide ridge, the slope flattened to a ledge. Here, the beam from orbit had turned the rocky dirt to glass. It reflected the stars above, and as Dana ran across it, her boots sent cracks radiating outwards to shatter the night sky.
They passed a set of jutting rocks five meters tall that had been melted smooth, and she waved her team to a stop. "We'll take cover here. This position overlooks the whole landslide basin. We're almost right in the middle of the bowl."
While Click and Clack and the rest took concealed positions, Dana counted the hostile Shediri soldier bugs she could see springing up the landslide basin behind them. The Stripeys advanced in pairs that loosely covered each other. "At least eight this time," she counted out loud.
"I count ten," Dice said. "But you know what they say..."
She thought the rest without being able to stop herself. If you see one, there's a hundred more. If they were actual words she'd spoken and Clack had heard, she could have taken them back, but the ugliness of the thought echoed in her mind until she was sure she felt Click and Clack both glaring at the back of her helmet.
The multicolored targeting burst from orbit lit up the valley. She didn't have to look to know where the beam had been aimed this time. The ray came down from almost directly above, piercing the atmo to stab at the burned out forest down the ridge and across the hillocks where they'd left SCS Aragami to continue relaying the datastream from the surveillance network as long as possible.
"They found her," Lippmann said.
"RIP, Aragami," said Dice as the color of the beam shifted with the rising frequency.
Whatever craft was in orbit decided then that from this angle, under these specific atmospheric conditions, the crimson color had penetrated with the least loss of any frequency of light attempted during the rainbow burst and fired its main salvo accordingly.
Alizarin blush filled the valley as the beam drilled down. The ray didn't wander or walk across the landscape as it had before. This time, it knew exactly where to strike. For a few heartbeats, the beam melted the surface and blew burning pieces of it outwards into the night, but then, after the outer hull and inner hull and the bulkheads of the reactor room had been breached along with the containment vessels, for an infinitesimal moment the beam from orbit shone down into the open and active fusion chamber like a blood moon. The energy of the beam actually contained the reaction for a few picoseconds and fusion occurred naked and uncovered under the alien sky. The crimson beam wasn't enough to contain it for any longer than that and when the last smidge of secondary burn fuel that had been injected went critical without anything to hold it in, the energy produced radiated outwards and upwards and engulfed the junk.
SCS Aragami cooked off in a blinding, cold white flash. When her helmet let her see again, the atmospheric shock wave had already expanded outwards almost two kilometers. It was coming fast.
All the Stripeys chasing them up the basin below took cover except one that was mid-jump in its ascent of the ridge and got caught in the air when the blast hit. That Stripey got thrown into the side of the hill. It didn't even twitch as it slid down into the boulders where the others had taken cover.
The beam ceased, leaving nothing but a glowing crater a hundred meters wide where SCS Aragami had been. The light cast shadows in front of the remaining bugs as they began up the hill again.
"Our network of surveillance proxies is now offline," Dana said. "Hardway is no longer receiving any transmissions and doesn't know the locations of the enemy ships."
"We've still got the primary decoder relay," Dice said. "The QC-212, I mean."
"We're going back online real soon," she said. Dana withdrew the handheld unit from her thigh pocket. "I'm going to decode the network's output and relay to Hardway directly."
Duds said, "They'll triangulate your position fast and burn you out just like they did the relays and the junks."
"They'll have to find me first. And catch me."' She could see their eyes dodge hers in the light from the fires below. None of them looked like they actually believed she'd have a chance. "I'll switch to intermittent, burst transmissions at random intervals," she said. "If I keep moving, it'll make the job of triangulating my position that much harder."
"Not that much harder," Dice said. "No offense, Captain Sellis, but you're kinda slow...at least compared to that beam."
The voice from Hardway burst into all their helmets then so
unded like the new young warrant officer handling comms. Biggs sounded scared. "This is Longshot, this is Longshot. Come in Ronin. Data stream is down. Stream is down. We're blind up here. Reestablish link immediately. Ronin, this is Longshot."
"You going to answer them?" said Lippmann.
"What's the point? There's only one answer they want to hear and it's not me yakin' on comms."
Clack swayed slower now and the six compound eyes she could see through its helmet visor shone like hex-celled jewels. The light glinting off them followed her as it swayed. It twitched forward a step and the gnashing jaws hissed and clacked in its helmet. "Give me QC-212 primary decoder comms relay," the translator voice said flatly. The other one made a noise like a broken reed instrument, but Clack ignored it. "Human slow. Shediri fast." If alien eyes could beg, that's what she saw.
"No. This is my job."
"No fear," it said. The calm of the translator's machine voice and the way the bug swayed mesmerized her for a split-second. "Action is truth," it said. This time, those words meant 'trust me'.
"Even if they can't pinpoint you, you know they're going to take shots at you with that beam right?"
"Ein Kai Kesik tough bug."
"Who?" asked Dice.
"Me." Clack beat its chest like a Stripey.
She looked down at the primary decoder relay in her hands and made sure it was set to one-switch operation. "Run first. 300 meters. Then turn it on. One switch." She showed it.
Clack snatched the device from her.
"Hsk~eeiin~Clk." its friend said. The language matrix had no translation for the words or what Clack said back.
"Safety," the bug said as it pointed down across the basin and over a low hill where the wide river narrowed and the water ran black and still and deep. When she looked back at Clack, the bug had already sprung. Clack's underside and back was all she could see of him as he hit the arc of his first, hopping jump.
The discharges erupted from the soldier bugs chasing them, now in range. The lightning cracked and whipped out of the fire-stained blackness to chase Clack in flight. "Give him cover!" she shouted.
They rolled around the heat-smoothed boulders and fired down at the Shediri that were trying to stop Clack from escaping. Dana fired with the under-barrel laser now, lining up the targeting reticule projected in her helmet with the targets below. The beam stabbed out silently and burned a visible beam of ionized gas around the focused x-rays. She lanced one, and its chitin-armored exosuit flared up pale violet and burned bright enough to reveal the two next to it in the shadows in the very moment they lost limbs to MA-48 sabot.
Either Clack had been hit and was dead or the arc of his jump had somehow taken away their line of sight because the bugs below stopped trying to shoot Clack and fired at them as others set off to give chase. "Don't let them go! Grenades!" The little bombs went out in slow lobbing throws, and before they'd even landed, she shouted, "Jump, jump, go!"
The grenades blossomed in double flashes across the transverse ridges of the basin as she leaped up and out and took to air in the .37 gees with the MA-48 nimble in her hands. By the time the grenades had all blown and the bugs below had poked their heads out again, she was ready.
In the space of a few seconds, Dana tagged one war-painted bug and then another with needles of focused x-rays that burned the air with bloody light. Those bugs dropped like a pin had been put through their brains. Beams of the same color flashed left and right from above.
Humans can jump well in low-gees. Dana was lucky to come down on a part of the downhill basin that was steeply sloped so the shock of landing didn't injure her. It was easy to make the next, smaller, more directed jump and ride the arc of her flight down into the thickest mass of Shediri she could see below.
Lightning crackled down from her right and drew a line up one of the Stripeys trying to bring a rod to bear on her. The whipping bolt burst it up the side and sprayed steaming bug juice all over her as she batted with her rifle, beating back Shediri arms and flashing blades. The silver streak of a spearhead drew a line past her visor as she cranked the fire select to discharge as much energy as the MA-48 would allow on continuously sustained fire.
The beam waved like a blade, gutting the two Shediri to her right. Her finger had the trigger locked down when the manufactured crystal inside the rifle finally melted. By that time, it was fused in a state of discharge and the unfocused x-rays blew out the front end of the transducer like it was a fouled gun-barrel. Fragments pecked at her armor and chipped her visor. What came out her mouth then wasn't any kind of a word; it was a banshee scream. It was a war cry. She charged the last three Shediri she saw meaning to beat them to death with her ruined weapon, but Dice and Lippmann put sabot through them before she could get there.
"Kill the ones chasing Clack!" she shouted as she ran to pick up speed for a jump in that direction. At the top of her jump arc, she saw them and flashes of Clack as he took lower, fast jumps over rougher terrain. She wondered if he'd activated the decoder relay and begun to send the position of the Ekkai ships to Hardway, but all question about that went out of her mind when the next targeting burst from orbit began.
The four Stripeys chasing Clack now abandoned pursuit and veered away, bounding in the direction of the burned out forest at high speed without any regard for cover. When Dana landed, Dice and Lippmann landed next to her. They had a clear shot, but none of them were stupid enough to take it. Now was the time for running.
"Get to the deep part of the river!" she shouted as she took off, skipping twenty meters at a time down the bottom of the ridge.
"What about Clack?" she heard Duds ask as the color of the wide test beam went from blue to violet to invisible.
"Now, we'll see how fast he really is."
The beam fired a candy-apple red that made her salivate. The next time her feet came down, the ground under them shifted sideways with the shock waves in the ridge. The lurid ray sent molten rock flying like splashing water as it gouged the crest of the ridge.
"Clack!"
"He's still alive," she said.
"How do you know?"
"Because they're sill firing! Make for the river! Run, run!"
They bounded across the hillocks, lit by the lurid beam. With every jump they rose into its rouge and then fell into deep, disorienting shadows. In the moments when they all realized those shadows were disappearing, there was no time to shout why. There was no need to. The rumbling under their feet rolled the ground like it was a thick carpet and the beam got brighter and brighter.
Dana risked a glance to her left where the landscape under the ruby beam flared and burned so bright she couldn't make anything out. The beam rushed at her, burning and exploding the landscape as it came. Silhouettes in exosuits both Human and Shediri raced between her and the light. The next time her foot tried to set to take another jump, the ground wasn't there. Dana felt herself falling as the beam hit the water just upriver and sent out a billowing cloud of steam that engulfed them.
Her legs kicked in the air one more time, and she hit the surface and plunged down deep into waters that shook with the rumbling and then, as she struggled to stay under, the beam passed overhead.
It passed in only seconds, but the water itself seemed to catch fire and turn ruby red as meters of it boiled off above her. She swam deeper and deeper against the buoyancy of her suit atmo, trying to escape the light until the bubbles from all the boiling around her displaced so much water she felt like she was falling again.
A few seconds after the beam ceased, Dana floated to the surface and found it much closer than expected. Half the river had been boiled away and the water was now rushing in from upstream, making clouds of steam where it met the banks. The landscape and the fused crust around them glowed orange. The dirt and the rock had been turned to a glass that steamed and smoked everywhere beyond the river's waters.
She didn't try to swim to shore. Dana floated downstream between the melted banks and looked for bobbing helmets in
the water where the arrows projected in her visor told her to look.
Less than five seconds later, the beam from orbit fired again and landed over a kilometer away. She smiled as she heard Clack's pidgin translator speak in her ear over local comms. "Ekkai slow. Shediri fast."
9
SCS Hardway, bridge
"Positional data on the enemy fleet is coming back! Dana got the link up! We can see the Ekkai fleet again," Biko said. Relief flushed the face of Ram's XO as the enemy contacts repopulated the airspace above his console. But in the reflection off Biko's helmet Ram saw something else, too. He turned to look through the windows of the bridge where their target, the Ekkai's Dreadnought, had just turned off its stealth and manifested itself out of the starry blackness.
"The Ekkai Dreadnought is right on top of us!" Biko shouted as he looked through the projection in front of him and out the bridge windows.
"It's about to fire," Ram said. "NAV! Turn! Turn into it! To port!"
The stars to port seemed to melt and run off the edges of the bridge windows, and a second later the passing hull and domed turrets of the mightiest man o' war in the Ekkai fleet filled them. The enemy Dreadnought loomed so close you could go out the locks and hit it with a wrench. The menace and towering malice of an alien battleship had better stealth than the others and it had used it to steam right through the air patrols and right into the heart of the task force. There were just enough milliseconds for the shock and horror to flush through him before the alien battleship opened fire in all directions, from all its batteries, stabbing and slashing at will.
The beam salvos that didn't score the thick armor of the carrier's bow plate stabbed at Hardway's command tower and primary bays with focused gammas. After the shock of the first hit, the tower rumbled under them with the secondary decay as the atomic structure of the hull ripped apart and produced more gammas that ripped apart more hull. It took whole seconds for the reaction to burn out. The blasted hull plating from the bays fell past the windows of the bridge as the beams fired again.