by A. D. Bloom
"Incoming salvo!" said Devlin. "Fix it and prepare to fire again."
"I need thirty seconds!" he said as he called up the hammerhead control interface from his suit comp with one hand and directed his team with the other. "I can give you one more shot."
SCS Doxy
Captain Garlan Foet had too good a view of the Imperium warships and the incoming fire. The alien plasma salvo had already begun to fill the starboard windows of the Doxy's bridge and by the time Hardway gave the order to fire the disruption salvo he could already discern the crackling bolts within the spiraling weapon.
Graves said, "The Shediri have fired from the launchers on the flight decks." The bulbous headed, modified Shediri missiles burned a chemical fuel that left thin trails of white smoke behind them in the vacuum as they flew straight out from the curving flight decks of the Doxy and fanned out to detonate across the length of the front. "Eighty-seven missiles."
"Here come the fireworks," Annie said.
The Shediri pulse warheads detonated with a dull green flash that was almost lost against the bright burning storm, but as the radiation and magnetic pulse from the modified alien weapons collided with the enemy salvo, the whole thing flared up electric blue so brightly they lost a whole half second waiting for their arrays and helmets to clear. When they did, Garlan looked out the starboard windows in horror to see the barely disrupted, spiraling arms of fast-moving plasma still coming.
A voice from Hardway said, "Get under cover, Doxy. Maneuver behind Guerrero, now! Impact in ten seconds."
"Acknowledged," he told Hardway. Then, to his bridge, he said, "Screw that. The bugs still have the port side loaded and ready to fire. Spin us, Singh!" The nightmare shifted across the windows of the bridge to loom off the starboard bow as Singh fired maneuvering thrusters in opposition to spin the ship and put their opposite side to the incoming salvo.
The Shediri loosed their missiles as soon as they had line of sight. "Bug missiles away!" said Graves as another eighty-seven, bulbous-nosed, modified missiles were swallowed up in the glare of the spinning hellfire front.
SCS Hardway, over the hull
"I'm firing the hammerhead!" Tig shouted over comms as he extended his finger and pressed the illusion of the button projected in the visor of his helmet. Behind the translucent command interface, the port side hull of Hardway's wrecked forward bays and the shattered horn of the hammerhead were cast in deep shadow, silhouetted by the spiraling plasma front now less than 10 Ks from the ships of the task force.
In the millisecond between the moment Tig gave the command and the moment the hammerhead fired for the very last time, when their fate was a thing of complete uncertainty, all of the ships in the task force, down to the smallest Sky Jack, appeared to flatten out into things not three-dimensional or two-dimensional, but some sort of shadow caught between. Task Force Liberty turned to ghost ships before Tig Meester's eyes.
The hammerhead's chitin shell shattered, and the uncoiling, nested pinches inside burned brilliantly like they were the marrow of a bone caught fire. The hammerhead jetted plasma in the instant before the last magnetic pulse it would ever produce arched Hardway's spine and curled the ship up around the flattening forward bays.
The pulse hit the Imperium ships' plasma salvo like a hard wind. This time, the field stretched more. This time, a bright blue, glowing fog seemed to rush at the starboard side of the task force. Lightning storms discharged inside the billowing front as last-ditch warspite detonations squeaked like firecrackers against the brightness and force of the incoming storm.
Before it impacted Tig and Rye and the rest of his team and the engineer bugs, it hit Guerrero and crashed over her stripping away the atoms of her armor in a blinding wind. Junks and raiders and Sky Jacks spun. Doxy twisted and debris and bugs blew from her curving flight decks. Then, the part of the salvo that made it past Guerrero's bulk pummeled and burned Hardway's side. Her armor sprayed like hot sand, sparking in front of him before her entire bulk seemed to throw itself at him. He saw the section where he'd impact and then the specific spot welds he remembered checking himself.
There was no time to say anything. There was just enough time to wish he could stay.
UNS Guerrero
Deep inside UNS Guerrero's armored mountain of a hull, Captain Chun lifted his hand from the arm of the command chair in horror, reflexively trying to reach out and stabilize the small ships that had been pulled one way by the nearly unshielded burst from the hammerhead and then batted in the other direction by the kinetic energy of the salvo that made it through the weakened defensive pulse.
"Thirty seconds to contact with the enemy shields," said Whip.
"Recover," Chun whispered in his helmet to the pilots in the spinning fighters and raiders. "Recover..." The enemy now loomed in front of the task force, three ships abreast, each of them spanning across sixteen kilometers with those stabbing spires. They wouldn't get a chance to fire at the task force again. But the battleship and the rest still needed to slow down. There was no way to engage the Imperium ships the way they planned to if they couldn't decelerate first.
"Chun, this is Devlin," the commodore said on comms. "The task force has orders to rotate around Guerrero on your command."
Chun said, "We're out of room for this maneuver. We need to do it now." He made a point not to look at Whip's tactical display so he couldn't count the number of small craft that still hadn't recovered enough to slow down. "Energize the hybrid coils. Power up the Shediri shield penetrator."
"We have a stable field," said Whip, "with a 1.2K radius around the ship. All the ships of the task force are safely inside."
"This is Captain Chun on Guerrero. Be ready for my call on the burn. Begin the maneuver on my bingo in three...two...one...bingo."
SCS Hardway
"Chun should have mentioned it was going to hurt," Dana said as she began to spin the ship around its center using the maneuvering thrusters to point the carrier's engines into their line of travel. "Because when the gees overcome the pinch, our brains are going to spam against the backs of our skulls."
"All hands, all decks," Ram said, "brace for deceleration gees."
Her hands worked the NAV while her eyes pointed out the windows taking in the spin, roll, pitch, yaw and direction of all the ships spinning with her at imperfectly matched speeds. She tried to apprehend them all at once and failed until something broke in her brain and her eyes looked in no direction in particular, but she saw them all, every fighter and raider and ship. Her unfocused eyes and her broken mind found the path for Hardway that avoided them all as her hands worked the NAV and spun the carrier on a second and third axis to dodge six junks and a gaggle of raiders still struggling to keep up.
The 950 meter ship heeled over and twisted, and the whole solar system rotated around them. As she straightened out and pointed the ship's stern at the enemy, she glimpsed a few disabled raiders and a Sky Jack impacting on Guerrero's sides and then spinning ahead of the task force, out of control. Hellcat 3-3 was the deadstick bird, and Dana couldn't tell if he was alive. "Hellcat 3-3," this is the AGC, shouted Pardue, "Hit the brakes or blast out of there! Any goddam direction! Get out of there!"
When Chun shouted out the order over comms to initiate the deceleration burst, the rest of the task force fired their main engines and slowed down. Hellcat 3-3 and the other deadsticks kept going. They impacted on the enemy shields and sublimed in flashes.
A second later, the inertial gees of the braking maneuver overpowered the artificial gees produced by the inertial negation system, and the difference was a brief, but body-crushing ten gees that pressed her back into her seat and fixed her skull against the headrest and threatened to drive her eyeballs back through her brain. Her skin sagged outside and inside she felt like her organs were being driven against the back of her chest cavity so hard that her guts and all the cells inside them would burst and she'd be nothing more than fluids and spam in there.
Maintaining awareness was like
hanging on to the edges of a deep well with her fingertips while her own body mass dragged her down with ten times its normal weight. Force of will alone let her maintain a coin-sized circle of blood-tinted vision - just enough that when the penetrator shield projected from UNS Guerrero that surrounded all of them made contact with the shield of the first Imperium ship, she saw the glint against the stars betray the shape of the newly formed combined field. In an instant, the relief flooded her as she saw how it successfully extended around Hardway, Doxy, the monitors and all the small craft of the air group. As the shields intersected, they merged and Guerrero effectively cut a hole in the Imperium ship's shield and allowed the entire task force inside.
"Collision ahead! Collision!" she heard Biko shout as the spires of the Imperium ship lanced out and threatened to skewer the ship from her engines forward. A cloud of electric plasma fog formed in front out the one that they would impact on. It splashed hot over the crystal-pane windows, sparking charge and leaving Lichtenburg patterns like traces of miniature lightning bolts as Dana slammed all port thrusters to veer the bent, half crushed carrier to starboard and rotate the engines out of the line of impact. She screamed obscenities when the bow thrusters refused to respond. The gas thrusters weren't enough for her to spin and blast them clear of the closest spire of the enemy ship - not entirely.
The carrier hit the spire almost broadside, making impact along the topside port section of her primary bays. They collapsed and bent around the spire, and the rough, stony hull of it streaked past the bridge windows as the whipping gees made the straps threaten to cut off her arms and slice her at the waist.
In all the flashes from all the warspite torpedoes and railgun impacts on the tips of the Imperium ship's spires, she lost vision and mashed the thrust based on only a rough guess of where they were and the positions of the ships around them. Above and below, the space between the gargantuan ship's spires was full of railgun monitors flying lone-wolf and fighters and Shediri raiders and fragments of the Imperium ship's blasted spire tips.
"This one's shields are down!" Biko said. "They're down!"
"NAV stay in close to this one. Maybe the others can't hit us if we stay close."
Dana regained control and gave a quick burst from the engines to keep them between the spires as the enemy tried to maneuver away. "They might outrun us, but they won't shake us," she said, vectoring thrust from the engines to correct their drift away from the enemy and keep up with it.
Ram said. "This is Commodore Devlin. All ships but the carriers, break away. Stay close in on UNS Guerrero."
The helmsman on Guerrero actually spun that monumental ship on her thrusters to make the turn, rotating her like a little moon under the hovering railgun monitors and small ships. They turned with her to fire their engines at the same time and begin the assault on the second Imperium ship, still only scant kilometers away.
When Guerrero penetrated the shields of the second spire ship, the fighters and junks and raiders she escorted inside immediately launched fission-tipped warspites and hundreds of Shediri missiles at the 14 tips of the 7 spires from which the Imperium vessel's shield was generated. The battleship Guerrero didn't open fire on that one herself. Not yet. For now, it left the railgun monitors and the air group to pull the second warship's teeth on their own. Chun and his battleship didn't even slow down.
Dana imagined the UN helmsman's grit teeth as she watched him drive the steel mountain at the third Imperium vessel and burst through its shield and the new and barely formed plasma salvo it didn't have time to hurl properly. The skin of the two shields was visible as they merged and the battleship penetrated. After that, all Dana saw was flash from her railguns and debris moving outwards fast.
"Rabal reports the shield is down on the second Imperium ship as well. It's defenseless, but they don't have the firepower to finish off the main hull."
Between the impact flashes, she saw the shape of the third one. It's jagged and broken spires surrounded a stubborn hull that now refused to crack even under UNS Guerrero's brutal and brilliant salvos.
"The three Imperium ships are moving," Biko said. She saw them on his display, moving off and making for the transit point. "They're trying to maneuver away. They're going to escape if we can't hull them!"
The wounded Imperium ship Dana had been trying to stay close to accelerated away so quickly she could see the full breadth its shattered spires in a heartbeat. Warspites detonated against its main hull, but they vaped craters so shallow that using torpedoes to hull the Imperium ships would take more of them than they had. Even Guerrero might not be able to finish them off before they escaped.
"All three of them are exposed," he said. "We can hit them, just not hard enough and fast enough."
Margo said, "This would be a good time for the Earth fleet to show up..."
Pardue shook her head. "They're an hour overdue."
"New contacts!" Biko said, pointing to the projection over his tactical display where the contacts had now vanished. "I think it's..."
"The Ekkai!" Ram pointed out the port bow where the anvil hulls and vertical fins were now uncloaking themselves in staggering numbers and closing for attack with more ships than she could easily count.
"It looks like the whole Ekkai home fleet!"
"Revenge," Margo said. "It's time for revenge. Look at that. Look hard at that, Ram. That, out there is the sight of victory. That is how empires crumble."
The Ekkai warships swarmed the wounded Imperium vessels and cast their beams so thick that where the crisscrossed stitch of burning rays intersected on the hulls of the spire ships, the stony alien hulls flared and spat pieces of themselves out into space. Secondary decay from the focused gamma rays rolled across the skins of the Imperium vessels scattering grains of their burning armor behind them like comet's tails as the Ekkai tore at them in their flight.
Dana's heart rose in elation and relief as one and then another of the wounded Imperium ships came cracking apart, leaving broken spires behind them like gecko's tails until their denuded hulls were breached and the beams found whatever volatile powerplant heart that beat inside. They burst like immense walnuts in a vacuum before the fire and the light consumed them and sent their pieces spinning across the system in an ever-expanding cloud.
When it was clear they'd won and that they were still alive and that it was over, what pushed Dana over the edge to tears was the sound of the other voices in her helmet on local comms. So many voices and she could hear them all and feel what they felt in that moment so that it was as if her heart beat outside her body in every other chest on that ship and the other ships as they cheered.
In that moment, she didn't want another ship. She wanted this one.
"New contacts!" Biko shouted. Nobody seemed to hear him, but Ram's head swiveled in his direction. Margo heard him, too. "New contacts! Three new contacts coming out of the star's atmo!" he said again. This time enough heard him that the jubilant cries on comms dimmed and faded over the next few seconds. The bottom dropped out of her stomach as Biko spoke just like it dropped out of everyone's. "Three contacts. They've just emerged from the photosphere...three more Imperium spire ships. They'll be in range in just over an hour."
Dana stared at the projections over Biko's tactical console in utter disbelief and rage. They'd gone above and beyond and done more than even they thought they could do. That was supposed to be enough and it wasn't and it made her want to scream. "No," she said. "No. That's not right."
"Fair was never part of the game," Margo said.
"Why? Why didn't they attack us with those ships before? Were they just toying with us?"
Ram sighed. "Maybe they weren't in-system. Maybe the Imperium captains or AIs thought they'd win with three."
"It doesn't matter why," Pardue said. "It just is."
Ram Devlin said, "Comms, patch my voice to every Privateer ship out there. Send it to Captain Chun on Guerrero, too."
"You have the line."
"This is Ram
Devlin. I have only one thing to say to you all - one fact of which I wish to remind you. The Shediri and the Ekkai will tell stories about what we humans did here today. Maybe others will tell them, too - stories that tell the truth about us, about Humanity and the truth of what we are and what we can be when we give ourselves the chance. The ending to our story is looking increasingly dark and increasingly out of our control. But the way we face that ending - that...that is under our control. I'm already proud of how you will face it. I've always been proud of you. I know we're going to give those Imperium ships more of a fight than they expected. Send damage reports to Mr. Biko, patch what you can, and stand by your stations. We're not done fighting yet."
"That was a lovely way to say goodbye," Margo said. "I can't believe Harry told me you lacked a proper sense of theater."
The doors of the lift at the rear of the bridge opened then and the two Marines there were slow to move. Young Hank made it past them and rushed to his 'mother'. She didn't flinch from the boy's embrace.
Dana hated Margo Devlin, whatever she was, but in the woman's face then, Dana saw something soften as Margo closed her eyes and hugged the child. Young Hank wasn't the only one comforted. It wasn't that they were deluded into the relationship, she thought. Margo really was the boy's mother now. Whatever that meant, that's what she was, DNA be dammed. And whatever a son was to her, that's who the boy really was. That was the little monster's only true identity.
To see that the two of them had each other made Dana feel empty at the core and alone until she realized that after watching the boy embrace his mother just like she had, Ram had felt the same thing and he had turned and looked at her - at Dana. She could read his eyes by now and in the fleeting moment they held the contact, the lonely void receded from both of them. She wanted to tell him that she loved him. She couldn't say it here, but she'd already said it enough times that he knew.