by A. D. Bloom
Bodies caught fire in flight. Cones of brilliantly vaporizing smoke led back to the hidden Squidies, and Ram pumped round after round at the unseen enemy until the recoil from the railgun almost stopped his upward motion.
Orange, air-bursting detonations from Lucy's flechettes blossomed rapid-fire up the tube in a spiral ahead of them, making brief holes in the smoke. The 49 flew up right behind her fire. When she and Ram and Biko penetrated to the other side of the smoke cloud together, there should have been a dozen, grotesque, alien corpses up there, hanging half-shredded in a cloud of misty stink, but they only found three.
There had been more of them...far more. When he saw the molten-edged hole in the emergency bulkhead hatch, he knew where they'd gone.
*****
Dana watched the aliens' plasma cutter withdraw. After that, their oddly tiny, gloved and palmless 'hands' pushed on the red-hot piece of belt-iron they'd cut from the emergency bulkhead, and it floated free, up towards the bridge hatch. It blocked her vision, but once it tumbled away, she saw them coming up through the new door they'd cut.
The smoke behind their nubby heads flashed with orange and the bulkhead shook with jack-hammering impacts from the MA-48 fire. The alien things didn't even wait for the sides of the hole to cool. They just floated up through it like knotted gangles of eels until the space in front of the bridge hatch was filled with them. The single, porthole visors set in the middle of their skinny bodies all looked up at Dana together.
One of the company marines drifted across the mouth of the hole the Squidies had cut, angling for a shot. A Squidy pointed a maser down through the hole and set him on fire.
"How many do you see?" Li asked her.
She didn't take her eyes off them. "I see nine. The hole they cut through the emergency bulkhead is the only way up and they've got it covered. The crew can't push up the tube any further."
"We could open the emergency bulkhead for them."
"Or we could open the bridge hatch and spray those fuckers down," Dana said as Li came to the diamond-pane porthole and peered at the aliens less than two meters away.
"Can you see their plasma cutter? It's small," she said. "No bigger than liter bottle. But the blade's a meter-long. Get ready," Dana said. "Those things are about to cut through."
But when the 3 ½ meter alien set out to cut something, it wasn't the hatch to the bridge. It took its cutter and flew to the right with five others. It flew aft, towards Harry Cozen's office.
Cozen was probably in there right now.
"Can't see what they're bloody doing," Li said. Four of them still floated below the hatch, keeping their masers pointed down the hole and occasionally looking up at the humans watching them. All their skinny, boneless arms drifted like they were underwater. "Why aren't they cutting into the bridge?"
"I think they're cutting through Harry Cozen's hatch."
"But...wh-" The gut-rumble roar of a nearby detonation shook the bulkheads and deck as a blurred and burning streak erupted across the tube below. By the time Dana realized it was molten metal and plasma and the bodies of the Squidies that had gone to cut through Harry Cozen's hatch, the atmospheric shockwave hit the three alien commandos under the bridge. Since the liquids in their bodies couldn't compress, their insides got crushed and they burst out of their leathery skins. A thousandth of a second later, the pressure wave ripped their exosuits open and threw their burning bodies into the side of the tube as it compressed the ship's atmo around them to the point of ignition. The blast and brief firestorm burned what was left of the Squidies to the bulkhead.
It was over in seconds, leaving only yellow and black clouds. Dana opened the bridge hatch and inhaled rotten eggs as she peered down below. Her eyes watered. Ram and Biko and Lucy looked up at her through the hole the Squidies had cut in the emergency bulkhead. Inverted, Dana descended until she saw movement through the hole to her left where Cozen's hatch had been.
Harry Cozen emerged. He flew out of the haze slowly and caught a handhold that looked hot enough to sear flesh. He said, "I built a hull-breaching charge into my hatch a month ago when we docked at Sagan. It made a better anti-Squidy mine than I thought it would."
Ram said, "You mounted a breaching charge inside your own hatch? But...why?"
Cozen raised his eyebrows and looked back at Ram as if that was clearly an absurd question to ask now. "The Squidies stink like brimstone," Cozen said. When he caught sight of Dana hanging above him, a meter out of the bridge hatch, his upper lip curled. "Lt. Commander Sellis. You had the bridge. Would you care to tell me how the enemy got in here to pound on my hatch?"
Fire flashed under her skin, and Dana felt herself flush. This had happened on her watch.
There was nothing she could say to Cozen except the little she knew. "They came through the command tower hull. I don't know anything else yet."
"One hour, Lt. Commander." Cozen coughed and tried to slap the sulfur stink of the Squidies out from in front of his face. "I want to know how this happened. I expect answers from you in one hour."
Chapter Eleven
As Hardway and the Taipan battlegroup made for the Groomsbridge-Castor Transit on the far side of the system, the brimstone stink spread up into the bridge. Lt. Commander Dana Sellis had to work in it as she put together the account of what had happened on her watch.
First, she crafted a vigorous simulation that reconstructed the position of every ship and defensive patrol in the Taipan carrier group over the last hours and everything known about Squidy stealth craft. Then, using her simulation, she tried to penetrate the defenses and actually fly through the patrols to Hardway.
53 minutes later, she'd figured out how it was done and she even had the answers to Cozen's questions, but that didn't change the fact that it had all happened with her in the command chair. She was responsible.
As the bridge officers and Harry Cozen entered the observation deck, Dana took small comfort in the fact that Chief Terrazzi had got the artificial gravity back up. It's easier to stand tall when you can plant your feet on the deck.
Cozen stood up close to the windows and looked down at the redsuits 150 meters below, working to repair the holes where the Squidies cut their way in. He didn't turn around as he spoke. "The markings on the dead aliens' exosuits match those found on the lone Squidy sent to Sagan Yards to kill our hypermass transit expert, Dr. Noondie, almost a year ago. Lt. Commander Sellis, please explain to me how a team of no less than 24 suicidal Squidies from an alien special forces unit managed to penetrate this battlegroup's defenses, cut their way into my ship, set my crewmen on fire, and then, knock on my hatch?"
His eyes remained on the hole being repaired below.
"That's the primary point of access you're looking at right now," Dana said.
"You don't say."
"They cut through the armor and outer hull of the command tower. Once the alien boarding teams had penetrated the inner hull, they leveraged their physiology to worm their way through areas considered too tight for human passage. They traveled between decks and made it deep into the command tower where they used directed explosive charges to create two, separate points of egress...one into the aft tube of the command tower and one into the ship's spine."
Cozen said, "That part I know." He turned to face her. "I want you to explain how they evaded detection and got through dozens of patrols including Hardway's own junks." As he said the last part, he glared at Asa Biko. The carrier's Air Group Commander was the one who set the number of junks on combat air patrol and determined their patrol patterns, but no matter who set the CAP, they'd been flying it on her watch. It was her responsibility, all of it.
"The incident began when Hardway's arrays picked up intermittent radar contact returns. Taipan could not corroborate the returns, but directed a flight of their Bitzers to investigate – SOP for bogies that far out."
"The Standard Operating Procedure is actually to find and destroy the inbound bogies." Cozen didn't have to say that. He was riding her.
She would have been mad, but she felt like she deserved it.
"The contacts appeared and then disappeared. What produced the brief contact we saw on Hardway was most likely the bay doors opening on a distant, alien carrier with a reduced signature. It launched the single, much stealthier craft that ultimately penetrated the carrier group's defenses and delivered the boarding party."
"And how did this craft slip past the defenses?"
Dana exhaled. "Obviously, whatever boat was used to infiltrate the carrier group was equipped with considerable stealth capabilities, much like the single-pilot lamprey craft that latched onto us and concealed the alien assassin on its trip to Sagan Station all the way from the debris field at Deimos' Lagrange. But. Examination of that enemy craft revealed that while its ability to spoof detection systems was highly developed, it was far from perfect. Simultaneous and active radar or LiDAR returns from different sources have a decent probability of detecting it if they know what to look for and they're close."
"So if the patrols could detect it close up, how did the Squidies get through?"
"Simply put," Dana said, "There's a hole in Matilda Witt's combat air patrols."
"A hole?"
"A gap," Dana said. "A single gap between the patrols...a place where none of the fighters pass close enough to detect a stealthed alien boat like the ones we've seen. The Squidies' insertion craft hid inside that gap."
Ram squinted at her. "So the patrols were ill-planned and there was a hole. Okay, but it was just one hole. How did the Squidies leverage that to fly all the way into the battlegroup to reach Hardway?"
"The gap the aliens exploited is always moving," Dana said. "As the patrols move, so does the gap. It's like a moving blind-spot and it never quite disappears. The Squidies just stayed inside it, and eventually, with the movements of the patrols, the gap they hid inside moved as well and took the Squidies where they wanted to go – right here."
"But how the hell could that happen?" Biko said, "Taipan and her four carriers have pilots and planes to spare." Because of all Witt's fighter patrols, Biko had even temporarily reduced the number of junks flying Hardway's CAP because it seemed like overkill. "How could Witt's air controllers screw up like that?"
"I'll show you exactly how." Dana placed her matchbox computer on the table. "Project exhibit A," she told it, and the matchbox projected the battlegroup in the air above it. "The relative positions of the carriers and command ships haven't changed since we reentered the system. We've been steaming across Groomsbridge in this formation for hours." Her eyes flicked down to the computer as she spoke. "Add concatenated patrol paths as a layer."
The computer projected the paths of every one of Taipan's and Hardway's patrols around the big ships. It was a web of intersecting lines that glowed thick and bright and almost solid around the battlegroup.
"It looks pretty tight," Biko said.
"It does. Viewed from this perspective, it looks as if nothing's going to be able to creep up on Hardway without coming into close range of a fighter patrol and getting spotted. It looks tight. But it's not. Add the path of the moving blind spot as a layer."
The matchbox then displayed the changing position of the gap over time as a single, thick, red line projected through the carrier group. It wormed from the outer edge of the projection, cutting back and looping over itself over a hundred times, eventually intersecting with Hardway.
"To not get spotted," she said, "they had to stay in the moving gap, the blind spot. That maintained the minimal distance of 2Ks between themselves and the patrols required so we wouldn't detect their stealth. That's how they got in."
"That's impossible," Biko said, pointing to the red line showing the flight of the alien special forces boarding party. "No pilot, alien or human, could easily note that vulnerability and pick out that flightpath. You found it because you knew exactly what to look for."
"I agree," Dana said. "You'd have to have this kind of flightpath worked out before the insertion attempt..." That didn't raise many eyebrows, but the next part would. Dana said, "I believe this gap was purposefully designed into the patterns of the air patrols."
"Are you saying someone on board Taipan created the vulnerability on purpose?" Cozen didn't look as if he could believe that. Dana had a hard time coming to grips with it herself. He said, "Am I to believe it is your contention that the alien commandos got on board my ship because someone aided them by setting purposefully flawed patrol patterns?"
"The patrol pattern was engineered to create the vulnerability the aliens exploited and it's not the kind of vulnerability that one creates by mistake."
Mouths hung open. All except for Cozen's. He didn't look surprised enough, she thought.
Despite the fact that all of this had happened on her watch, when it came to figuring out what had happened, Dana had done damn good work and she was proud of it. She didn't think anybody would be recommending her for a bloody medal, but she never expected the reaction she got.
Harry Cozen bellowed at her like a hoarse walrus. "There is no way I'm going to believe that anyone on Taipan had anything to do with planning this attack. That is patently absurd. It is impossible. Besides it being unthinkable that a human would ever aid the Squidies, no avenue of communication exists between our species. Your explanation is an unreasonable fantasy, Ms. Sellis – a fabrication designed to shift blame away from your own negligence in preventing this attack when you had the command chair. You have failed this ship in the most grievous manner."
She was stunned.
"When I promoted you," he said, "I never thought I'd have to question that decision. I hold you responsible for the alien incursion. If I have anything to say about it, then you'll never sit in the chair again."
Dana didn't understand. Cozen wasn't an idiot; he had to be in some kind of willful denial of the apparent facts not to see this. The alien special forces unit had penetrated dozens of fighter patrols along with the combined LiDAR and radar arrays of eight warships. She'd been the one to figure out what was happening, but since she'd been the one sitting in the chair, Harry Cozen was going to blame it all on her. She'd probably never have the bridge again, she thought. But it was far worse than that.
"When Matilda Witt comes aboard to brief Hardway's officers on her plan of attack for the battle in the Castor system, there's no need for you to be present." Before he stormed off the observation deck, Cozen relieved Dana Sellis of duty and told her if he heard another word about her idiotic theory, then she'd find herself spending the rest of the war alone on a cold, dark rock.
*****
Dana Sellis betrayed very little, but Ram knew her face. They'd been close before the war.
As Cozen repeated again and again how he held her responsible, the way Dana's lids now flexed around her eyeballs told Ram she was trying like hell to make sense of this, unconsciously squinting at the problem. The millimeter of movement in her eyebrows, up towards the center told Ram this was wounding her.
She could never control her voice that well and they all heard the little stress vibrations and nervous spasms of her larynx when she spoke after Cozen stormed out in that decidedly uncharacteristic tantrum. "He's got to believe me," she said. "Matilda Witt is working with them somehow. Or Morrisey is. Someone over on Taipan is. Doesn't Cozen see that? Why can't he see that?"
"I'll talk to him," Lucy said. "Maybe its just the adrenaline still in his system. Makes him ornery."
Ram said, "He shouldn't have relieved you. And I'll be the one that tells him that. I'm the XO. It's my job to tell him when he's wrong."
He thought Cozen had gone back to his office, but when Ram went there to find him, there was nobody on the other side of the blown-out hatch. Everyone assumed taking the bridge had been the enemy's goal, but they came to kill or kidnap Harry Cozen. Ram was sure of it.
In the tube, the repair crews were just getting ready to start the welds over the holes the Squidies made. It had taken this long for the redsuits they sent in there to make sure
there were no more Squidies hiding between hulls or between decks. When a bot found an unknown alien device glomed to the inner hull's gees, the whole area had to be evacuated until nervous redsuits could remove it carefully and isolate what turned out to be just a spent explosive cartridge from an alien maser.
Haze from the detonations and the Squidies' yellow smoke still hung in places, but since Hardway's pinch was producing .3 gees of artificial gravity again, most of it had fallen. Standing on the passageways along the side of the spine, the smoke hung in a low, foggy layer now that ended at Ram's knees. Flowing towards the bow vents, it looked like a river.
Past the men and women lifting the patching plates into position for welding, Ram caught a glimpse of Harry Cozen's gray hair and black jumpsuit through the haze. He was fifty meters down the tube towards the stern. He looked right at Ram; there was no doubting Cozen saw him. Even at a distance, you know when you've made eye contact with someone. Cozen disappeared down the tube into the Hab module's sub-levels.
When Ram followed and looked down the Hab's tube, Cozen looked up at him from the deck where the greensuit reactor engineers lived. He must have slid down the ladder to get down three decks so fast. Ram didn't bother calling for him to wait. He even took his time getting down there because Cozen wasn't trying to lose him. Cozen was trying to lead him somewhere.
Once he disengaged the ladder, Ram saw him again at the end of the passageway. The old man passed a couple of junior warrant officers who looked shocked to see him. Then, he opened a hatch and disappeared inside an emergency radiation shelter.
It wasn't much more than a heavily shielded closet. Cozen had picked it for the shielding, of course. It was practically an EM skiff – a guaranteed, no signals in, no signals out zone where surveillance was unlikely. But that wasn't enough for Cozen. He reached into the pocket of his black jumpsuit, pulled out a small, cloth-covered box, and opened the hinged lid. Inside were a set of demi-ovoid devices, the size of robin's eggs cut in half. He attached one to each of the bulkheads around them - walls, floor and ceiling. As he switched them on, Ram couldn't exactly hear the vibrations and the noise they produced all across the spectrum, but in the small, closed and highly reflective space, he could feel them in his teeth. "Just in case one of us has been tagged with a listening or recording device," Cozen said.