by A. D. Bloom
He saw the beam that killed the engines. One of the Dreadnought's main batteries lanced and hulled the command tower's edge and hit the engineering section behind it. After the impact and the shock waves, Wei called out "Engines offline!"
"Terrazzi! Terrazzi" he shouted into comms, but she didn't answer and neither did anyone else from the reactor section. Five meters of armor, he told himself. The engineering section was hardened. They couldn't hit a reactor with just one shot.
"Pardue! Send the Air Group in now!"
"This is the AGC. All craft, Geronimo, say again, Geronimo. All go, all go."
"Guerrero is moving to shield Doxy." The battleship looked like she'd lost more than one railgun to the last enemy salvo. Guerrero's face and flanks had been scored and the wounds bled molten metal behind her as she came between the enemy and Doxy. A whole piece of the converted carrier's upper tier flight deck was missing. Burning raiders tumbled around the wound down her sides where the raking beams had ripped her.
"The bugs are away," said Biggs from behind Ram. "The Shediri bomb is closing fast."
"Tell them to hurry!" Biko said as the bugs' strange device emerged from behind UNS Guerrero. Only luck had put it on the opposite side of the Doxy's flight decks when the Ekkai pounced, Ram thought. He hoped it still had that luck now.
"Bow to the enemy!"
The beams from the endless turrets on the Ekkai Dreadnought savaged them even as the rain of Shediri missiles came down. The Ekkai flagship plucked only half of the raiders' salvo from the black before impact. The strobing and stabbing rays ceased for only the briefest pause.
They raked up Hardway's bow plate and sent a splashing spray of metal over the topside of the forward sections before they hit the forward bays, penetrating the improvised armor over Meester's hammerhead device. "Here they come," Biko said. The reservation in his voice evidenced the lack of confidence he had in the bugs' plan.
Some six-hundred raiders and Hardway's fighter wing fell on the Enemy dreadnought from all directions, pouring small Shediri fission missiles and cannon fire and torpedoes into a hull they had little hope of penetrating. "So far so good," Margo said as her arm rose to finger the Shediri pulse bomb now passing them just behind the rest of the small craft, all of them hell bent on the enemy hull, diving on it in a mad game of chicken while they pecked at the 700-meter battleship's armor. The beams were everywhere, taking missiles and raiders and Sky Jacks from the black, but the strangely wide, 45-meter Shediri pulse mine hadn't yet been hit. "With any luck, they won't see it," he said, "not with several hundred small fission dets going off all around them."
The cloud of human and alien fighters got thicker and thicker as they all closed range on the Ekkai dreadnought with the bomb. Its four, extended claws at the corners and domed topside made it look like a tick.
Biko said. "When are the fighters going to pull away?" Five more flared, pierced by the stabbing beams in the time it took to say those words.
"Not yet..." Ram said as the big guns of the Dreadnought loosed a salvo at Hardway and blinded them with spraying metal. The burning rain cleared in time to see the swarm close the last Ks to target. "Now..." They loosed missiles from all sides and pulled away with the Sky Jacks as the Dreadnought's batteries flashed and crisscrossed the vacuum solid trying to catch them. Before the slashing rays could catch them all, the surviving Shediri missiles cooked off in a cloud around the main hull of the the enemy battleship. So many little fission warheads detonated in such close proximity to one another so close to the enemy that they blinded the enemy.
"There!" Margot said as she pointed.
The bugs' pulse bomb ripped across the last Ks as a blurred streak before the deceleration burn lit up the belly of the craft with fast-burn chem thrusters. The Shediri device didn't look as if it decelerated much over that last kilometer. It impacted with enough force to bend the enemy hull, but stuck in place. When Ram zoomed in and looked, he saw its dome topside intact. The four claws had somehow melted through the armor to secure it.
"Come on..." Margo said. "Faster, please, faster..."
"It's drilling and sending in the conductives now..." said Ram.
The dreadnought fired again. Beams lit the space between the ships of the battle group once more, but only for a moment. The Shediri craft stuck to its hull glowed with a quick and queer flash that showed him the structure under its chitin skin. There was no time to wonder what happened before the meters-thick outer armor of the enemy hull around the impacted Shediri craft stretched and warped like skin, tearing and discharging electricity in flashes as it contracted and drew towards the Shediri craft on the hull until the domed shell on the bugs' weapon burned out with a lurid, blue glow. What remained afterward looked melted.
The Ekkai Dreadnought's guns went dark. Its engines stopped and it drifted between the burning ships of the task force like a lifeless derelict. "What the hell was that weapon?" Wei said.
"That was a Shediri pulse bomb. It directs the EM blast into the ship and can overload even shielded electronics and bio-electrical systems. Nasty what it does to a brain," Margo said. "That's no way to go."
"Before, you said it only affected mechanical systems."
"My dear husband, half of the alien technology floating around out here has a biological component. If it didn't kill that too then it wouldn't be very useful."
"Good god, is there anyone left to negotiate with now?"
"The 'primary vessel' as they call it should have been shielded enough to survive that. It's their version of a bridge."
Biko said, "Other enemy ships nearby ships are turning away now. They're waiting for more firepower. That should buy us some time."
"How much time?" said Ram.
"That Dreadnought's sister ship will be here will a dozen battleships and escorts in...less than 37 minutes."
He unstrapped and stood. "Mr. Biko, you have the bridge."
SCS Leadbelly, 2000 meters from the enemy dreadnought
Ram launched cleanly out the junk's airlocks and crossed the gap to the disabled Ekkai flagship without having to use the gas belt to correct his course. Between his feet, the detonated pulse mine had welded itself into the enemy ship during the energy burst. The armor plates around the spent bomb were fractured in places, torn and rippled like cloth in others. Through the gaps, he could see struts and a shock-space. No icy clouds jetted out from within. The inner hull had been breached, but like the Privateers and the UN, the enemy fought without internal atmo. The shock waves were even more dangerous in a fluid environment like theirs.
The visor of Ram's helmet pointed an arrow to Lucy Elan on his right as she passed him. A dozen Marines would be enough, she'd said. The raider bringing the Shediri Ambassador to War from the Doxy and his Stripeys was just settling in close to the enemy hull. By the time Lucy called for the deceleration burst and Ram and her Marines all hit their gas belts together, Ix and a dozen bugs in black and white war painted armor had deployed from the belly of the little chitin ship.
The slim-jim landed him slow, at only a few centimeters per second. "We're lucky their artificial gees are down with the rest of the ship's systems. They like it heavy if you know what I mean. Too heavy for us," said Lucy.
As the Stripeys came down with Ix, a pair of them dedicated themselves to carrying the VIP bug even in null gees. Its 58 tiny lower legs bristled and waved as they carried it. "They sure weren't built for speed," Lucy said on a private comms channel.
"VIP bugs are like that so they can't get away."
"What do you mean 'get away'?"
"The Shediri do plenty of tinkering with their various forms. The VIP bugs are smart, but they were gimped long ago so they can't defect to another hive," Ram said. "Kind of like foot-binding, but genetic. That's what Ix said anyway."
The Stripeys cut in through the bottom of the detonated bomb, using a device like a derrick-mounted plasma drill, but wider and shielded so he couldn't see the actual melt-point. They switched it on and bored the
ir hole so fast they cut through the meters in only seconds. As they removed the device from the bored-out hole, still hot-edged and smoking, he realized with a sick twist of his gut that this was the same weapon the Shediri had used in their brief fight with Humanity to drill through the hull and into the bridge of SCS Taipan. After that thing got in, it filled the command deck with a plasma firestorm that turned Dana's bridge crew to ashes.
The Stripeys flew in the two-meter hole first with rods like tailless bullwhips pointed out in front of them. You could see the electric charge built up in them arcing back onto the armored 'glove' of the bugs holding them. The Marines went in next until only Ram, Ix and the Ambassador's two personal Stripeys remained on the hull. "Devlin go first," Ix said.
The smoothness of the plasma cut walls in the bored-out tunnel was uncanny. they reflected a twisted and dizzying image of the Marines and the bugs ahead of him and gave him a weird kind of vertigo.
It must have been over fifteen meters until the point where the tunnel narrowed with the focused cone of plasma and the boarders flew out into some kind of hold. Before Ram could examine the cargo there, the bugs cut through to a secondary passage and then something he wasn't sure was a compartment or passageway. It was cavernously wide, but the pipes and conduits ran down the very center of the open space, branching off in places.
The space extended towards the bow and aft towards the stern like the mainsway on a freighter or the spine on Hardway. The light was dim in there to a Human eye. His suit told him it was vacuum pressure and a haze of combustion byproducts hung in the air. Twenty meters down in the dim, the first Ekkai he saw floated up above the deck. It was the size of a 1200 liter water drum, the kind they put on small buildings for water tanks.
He would have taken the gangle of metal appendages for ruptured conduits if he hadn't already known what they looked like. Lucy shined her suit lights up at it. The arms and or legs drifted placid in the null gees. "Can't see the clam inside that can," she said. "But it isn't moving. Save the ammo; move on."
"You didn't say the bomb would kill them," Ram said, turning to face Ix. "You said it would just disable their systems."
"Not all dead. Not primary vessel," Ix said.
"Forward," Lucy ordered. "Two-by-two. Ramone and Elias on point.
"The bow," the translator voice said in Ram's ear. "Go." It wasn't Ix. It was the Stripey on point that had said it. Ram only knew because his helmet marked the speaker with an arrow as it and the other bugs pushed off and flew towards the bow, down the long shaft where more of the stunned or dead clams in cans drifted, shuttered up and slack-limbed in the haze.
Near the forward-most bulkhead, the canned clams floated thick, all drifting, all dead. "When they lost inertial negation, they all went flying up the passage and hit the forward bulkhead," said Lucy. Ram shone his suit lights inside what he took to be some kind of narrow porthole in the closest of what had to be over fifty of them. The beams lost half their strength going through the thick crystal. They refracted and bent off-angle in the murk beyond and the only way his eye could discern the fluid of the environment inside that Ekkai exosuit from a gas was the way the particles flowed together on the currents of some twitching motion inside. At the very end of the beam, where the photons scattered and were absorbed to the degree they ceased to penetrate the murk, his eye caught movement. The flutter of some underwater membranous wing scattered light like wet, pebbled leather.
"It moved," he said. "This one might not be dead."
"Yeah, well...at least its suit is dead," said Lucy. "Martins, Jiro, Danelle. Let's push these cans behind us while the bugs cut their way into the clams' version of the bridge."
He said. "Do they have a fluid environment in there?"
"Bugs said its vacuum mostly. Except for the fish tank, the 'primary vessel'."
The Shediri floated and puffed themselves around the circumference of the two-meter-wide, five-centimeter-deep, circle-shaped trench they'd carved out of the metal of the curving Ekkai bulkhead. The bugs packed it with something that looked like an expanding wax extruded from a tube. After they'd made sure they'd filled the circle out completely, the Stripeys waved four arms each and pushed in the Marines' direction as if moving them back. "Danger now," said Ix behind them. "Safe distance here."
With the IR transducers in his helmet, Ram could see the compound the Shediri laid heating up long before it began to melt its way through. Just before the Ekkai bulkhead began to burn and spit, plasma balls danced in the trench they'd cut and popped off to drift like miniature ball lightning. They snuffed on the armor of the Shediri while the bulkhead melted away. When the last of the hot, popping gasses from the metals shifted the two-meter disc they'd cut from the bulkhead, it drifted free.
"To the sides," Lucy said, "Above and below." Her dozen marines deployed to engage anything coming out. The bugs looked poised to breach.
"Shediri go first," Ix said. "Rock-throwers, caution."
"That's sweet," said Lucy.
"I think he means don't hit them with friendly fire."
"My pleasure."
The Stripeys set themselves around the edges of the disc they'd melted out of the bulkhead and stood placed like numbers on a clock as they set their four, lower legs braced to the unbroken metal and gripped at the hot edges with the tips of their bottom two upper arms. The disc of cut-away bulkhead floated forward and out. Watching them coax its astoundingly thick mass from the hole they'd cut reminded him of watching bank vault doors open. The cone of metal they released to float freely down the central passageway of the alien dreadnought had to be at least two meters thick. It impacted the disabled cans and sent them spinning as it disappeared into the dim.
"No grenades," said Lucy as the bugs unexpectedly gripped the lip of the tunnel they'd cut and then flipped themselves over and into it. The flash of the discharges from the Shediri's rods stuttered out the hole like a lightning storm had erupted in there. "Go, go, go!" she said as she pushed off and used her slim-jim to fly in fast.
"Left, left!" was all Ram heard before the whumping of the railguns shook their mics. Ram got through the end of the tunnel in time to see the pair of stunned clams jerking their appendages about as the railgun rounds knocked them back into the bulkhead. A few rounds penetrated right away and jets of fluid under high pressure erupted from the holes, but it was the bolts of whip-cracking Shediri lightning that seemed to burst the Ekkai armored suits open best.
When the flash was done and the deluge of whitewater froth and uncontrolled fluid decompression was over, the armored cans floated motionless and empty, the skins of the vessels ruptured outward in leaves or jagged strips like flower petals. The fluid inside now floated everywhere in the null gees like a semi-opaque, dark and oily mist. Ram batted large globs of it from the visor of his helmet and looked for the thing that had been living in the pressurized environment inside.
What he saw floated, but half was shredded from the decompression and the rest of its mass was stuck together somehow, the folds adhered by some mucous and its own burst cells. Like this, it looked like an amorphous fish without discernible features beyond that torn leather skin.
Lucy used the muzzle of her MA-48 to prod the bits apart. What he saw confused him more, but at least he found some kinds of asymmetric appendages and an orifice. It expelled brackish fluid in a stream that missed her, and then it was still.
"Not as handsome as our Shediri friends," said Lucy.
"This way," Ix said. All six of his upper arms gestured, waving them to the right, to the compartment's starboard where a hatch of sorts had been placed in the curving bulkhead.
What they found inside, Ram would have taken for an enormous metal reactor vessel. It was at least thirty meters tall and narrow like a silo, held in place in a similarly shaped chamber by struts so thin it was easy to look up or down and miss that they were there at all. Because of that, the gigantic vessel almost appeared to float between the walls like the dozen or more dead Ekkai in can-suit
s.
"The 'primary vessel'," he said. If this was a bridge, then the vessel at its center was where the command crew were. It wasn't entirely opaque. The circular sections set into what he now knew as a pressure vessel were now easily identifiable as portholes or windows because the surviving Ekkai inside could be seen, floating in front of the meter-wide viewports, flashing up and down with a chatter of bioluminescent patterns.
They looked better before explosive decompression, but not any less alien. They had two sets of wings, nested and curving, without any rigid elements and would have covered almost two meters stretched out. They scintillated with dots of color and flapped slowly in more than one direction as if maintaining their position in the fluid.
What was between those wings followed no symmetry. The main body, the center mass of it, was over a meter and half, he guessed. He counted nine things that looked like tentacled appendages with specialized tips. One sported barbs so small they had to be vestigial. The others looked dextrous. Sub-appendages thin as anemone fronds tapped tip to tip on one in an apparently nervous gesture. That's what Ram took it for.
Tips tapped at tips as the single orifice opened and closed like a sphincter knot, but uneven. It grimaced and rolled some kind of muscle there as he looked for the eyes and realized they were on one of the limbs, like buds on a thin tentacle that branched from its main trunk with a fractal pattern of node distribution he'd seen in branching coral and rivers and streams as they made a delta. It fanned out into an array of little eyeballs. The fifty or more budlet eyes looked like peas. All the little pupils followed him as he approached for a closer look.
Ram lifted his gloved hand to the tank and Ix removed it. He turned to see the bug's vertical chitin jaws clack inside its helmet. Ix was talking to the Stripeys and the translator daemon only understood a single word that it could pass on in Ram's ear - 'speak'.
One of Ix's Stripeys gently moved Ram aside while another unrolled something Ram would have called a scroll but for the fact it unrolled only a few centimeters before the chitin shell case of the interface got in the way. It projected a dim red pattern in the air over itself that Ram recognized as a Shediri computer interface.