by A. D. Bloom
She dragged the dead Squidy behind her and looked for a place they might hide - a place where they wouldn't get burnt off as the ship rode the hypermass transit from Groomsbridge 1618 to Castor.
Chapter Fourteen
Dana had traveled via hypermass transits plenty of times, but always inside Hardway. As a stowaway riding on the outside of Taipan's hull, it was a rougher trip.
The lightning crackled all around the breaching ship's frame until it discharged. Once it opened the hell-mouth transit, the battlegroup steamed in, and the sheets of plasma and exotic particles that clung to the passage's entrance broke over each vessel in fiery waves.
The exotic particles flashed x-rays as they penetrated the command ship's armor. Its belt-iron steel skin glowed with them, and Dana swore the light came up from a meter down inside as if she could see through it.
She and the dead Squidy hid between clustered, 2-meter-high platforms. Above them the lightning arced up and down over the branches of the antennas. Every time it flashed, Dana got a look through the dark-tinted, cycloptic visor set in the center of the dead Squidy's suit. Most of its nubby, neckless 'head' was gone, ripped away by the MA-48 round that drilled in through the other side. Taipan's crew won't notice, Dana thought. When they found it on the hull, they'll put fifty more holes in it.
A swarm of super-charged particles clung to the command ship's bow. Over the first minutes of the transit, they dislodged in flurries and glomed on to Taipan's gravity. They fell to the hull like burning, alchemical snow before they transmuted and winked out.
Hardway and Tipperary entered the Castor system first. After the energy storms from the terminal membrane roared over Taipan and the ship reentered normal space, Dana poked her head up cautiously before climbing out from between the antenna platforms.
The Castor system's biggest stars orbited each other as a binary pair. Each of those stars had a pair of dwarf stars in orbit around them and those dwarfs each had pigmy stars in orbit for a total of six, discrete, stellar masses.
The battlegroup entered above the rocky ecliptic accretion disk of Component C in the Castor system, YY-Geminorium, one of the red dwarfs. The system seemed so packed with material it was a wonder gravity hadn't pulled it all together into a half-dozen, rocky planets.
Dana carried the dead Squidy up the slope of Taipan's hull to the base of the antenna forest growing high off the starboard side of the ship. The arrays there clung like skeletal spruce on an armored, alpine face.
Squidies didn't get rigor mortis or freeze up fast without a heated exosuit. That made it easy to rig the alien corpse up like a scarecrow. Dana fixed it to the lowest branches of a Yagi antenna so that it would look like it was standing with its back to the Staas Guards that found it. If everything went as planned, then it would take the blame for what she was about to do.
The transmissions that came off the antennae forest in front of her tingled over her skin as Dana gestured through the comms channels in her helmet. Ram's software daemon found the right frequency and decryption combo just in time for her to hear Witt's coordinator, Morrisey, give the departing fighter squadrons the order she'd been waiting to hear: "Blackbird, blackbird. Begin CCRN deployment." He was talking about Matilda Witt's Command and Control Relay Net.
As Dana climbed the surprisingly thin branches of Taipan's towering main antenna, it already hummed with signals going out to the battlegroup. To starboard, Hardway broke off to launch her fighters and junks from a different attack vector. Tipperary and Malibu huddled together between the four, thin-skinned box carriers as they maneuvered into a diamond around the fragile breaching ships. Bay doors opened on all sides of the carriers at once, and the F-151s flooded out. Dana clung to the antenna for a moment to watch them – a thousand, hastily-folded, paper cranes on their way to burn. Matilda Witt had to be stopped.
Twenty-five meters up Taipan's main antenna, at the very edge of the artificial gravity, Dana found the unprotected junction she was looking for. She pulled a magnetic driver from her belt to remove the bolts and got to work.
*****
Jordo was grateful Biko launched the Lancers first. After the Hellcats swarmed out of Hardway's bays with the 99th Wicked Weasels and the 38th in tow, the AGC launched the junks behind them. Jordo looked over his shoulder to see them fall into formation a couple of Ks behind the fighters. The redsuits had configured almost all of the junks as bombers, carrying little more on their tensegrity rafts than a reactor module, engines, a cockpit, and warspite torpedoes. Jordo spotted a few, fat gunnery junks mixed in among the bombers. Their long-barreled cannon lanced out on nearly every side.
"All Hardway flight elements, your collective designation is Icarus." Even with the carrier just a few hundred Ks away, the aliens' warbling signal wormed its way into the background. The Squidies' jamming was powerful, but Matilda Witt's Command and Control Relay Net cut through it just fine.
Orders from Taipan appeared in Jordo's helmet. They sent him and the rest of the Lancers down the intercept course he was about to take the squadron on anyway. The one-hundred and forty-four fighters launched from Hardway turned onto the new heading in unison. The 50-meter junks behind them took longer to make the turn.
Twenty million Ks ahead of Hardway's sortie, seven alien warships hung low over the system's rubble-filled ecliptic. Six of them displayed the armored gun towers and long, 400m incisor-shaped hulls common to heavy cruisers, but the seventh vessel at the center of their formation was nothing like them.
The 200-meter craft looked unlike any Squidy ship he'd ever seen. It was spherical. Radar picked out large, threatening apertures on its hull. Jordo knew gunports when he saw them.
Dirty pulled up inverted next to Jordo's fighter so their cockpits were close. She pointed to a fast-moving sparkle against the black. "You see that?"
They appeared on LiDAR now. On the far side of the enemy cruisers, the exhaust plumes from the eight-hundred planes in Matilda Witt's primary attack wave made it look as if a swarm of stars had ripped loose from the black to hurl themselves at the Squidies.
Jordo hoped Pooch was watching all of those nuggets just like he was and he hoped for their sakes that he'd been right about her.
*****
Matilda Witt had returned to her command ship for the battle and all hands aboard SCS Hardway wore full exosuits and kept their helmets nearby. Ram peered into the tactical display and the battle unfolding over the bridge, scrutinizing the eight-hundred and seven fighters that Matilda Witt had ordered in as the primary wave.
That many F-151s could probably manage to shoot the teeth off all the cruisers. If they were willing to take the heavy casualties, they could. It was a bloody way to get the job done, but after that, the Squidies' ships would be easy targets. The prototype at the center of the formation was made of tougher stuff, though. It wouldn't go down so easily.
If Hardway wanted to be close enough to communicate with the squadrons over normal comms when Dana took down Matilda Witt's command and control relay net, then Hardway couldn't stay back out of the fight. She had to start moving now. From where Witt had placed the attack carrier, it would take them time to reach the engagement. "We can't wait any longer to commit," Ram said.
"Agreed, Mr. Devlin." Cozen thumbed internal comms. "Bridge to Engineering."
"Terrazzi here."
"Chief, I need more power and more speed than we're expected to have. What can you give me?"
Terrazzi knew this was coming, of course. The greensuits on the engineering deck had been spit-polishing the reaction chambers to get the edge she knew Cozen would be looking for. She said, "I can give you an extra 17% more power if you don't mind gambling a little with our reactor stability."
"Thank you, Chief." He turned to Ram and nodded.
Ram had the NAV console in Dana's absence. He set Hardway on a course to intercept the Squidies and pushed the carrier's engines hard enough that even with the ship's inertial negation system working overtime, two-tenths of a gee still
got through as they accelerated. It was enough to make everyone on the bridge lean and stagger a step to the rear.
Cozen thumbed the shipwide squack. "This is Harry Cozen. Our battle plans have changed. You are now to disregard any and all signals received from Taipan. I have chosen to engage the enemy directly and Hardway is moving into the fight now at her best speed. That is all."
Biko said, "The alien cruisers might have some fighters with them." Biko nodded up at smaller contacts breaking away from the Squidies' incisor-shaped hulls. "Only pocket squadrons... No more than a dozen bandits per cruiser. They'll engage the primary wave of 151s from Taipan in a little over ninety seconds. Matilda Witt has her squadrons pointed right at them."
"Incoming message from Taipan," Bergano said from a terminal behind the command chair. "Text only." Seconds passed.
"Well," Ram said, "are you going to read it?"
He read it out loud in a deliberately expressionless tone. "'Return to position, Harry. This is your last, bloody chance.'" His voice went up a fifth. "Last chance before what?"
"Never you mind that, Mr. Bergano," Cozen said. "Put on your helmet."
Ram leaned into the comms. "All decks, prepare to vent atmo for battle."
"Getting green lights all across the board," Bergano said. "Ready to vent on your mark."
"Now hear this. Now hear this. Hardway is venting for combat in sixty seconds. All hands, all decks in full suits and helmets. Action stations. Damage control teams make ready. We're going in."
*****
The emissions from Taipan's main antenna made Dana tingle with pins and needles under her skin. The junction box had been placed twenty meters up off the hull, just inside the outer edges of the artificial gravity. If it had been placed just a few meters further out, then the antenna and the junction box would have been in zero-gee. It should have been. In the plan it had been, but the ship's gravity extended farther out than anyone had thought it would.
There was enough gravity up there at the edge of the field that Dana had to hang off the antenna and try not to fall while she attempted to patch into Taipan's comms system directly. She thought she'd be able to have two hands to do this, but now, she only had one and it was slowing her down.
Dana perched on thin branches and wrapped an arm around the trunk while her free hand extended the hard-wire from her suit. She patched it into the antenna's diagnostic port. The ship locked her out, of course. It denied her access without proper credentials, but Ram had given her a daemon - software to introduce her to Taipan as Captain Augustus Horan. Once it knew her, it would be happy to pipe her signals out the antenna to Matilda Witt's network of command and control relays.
Ram's daemon compiled its payload for injection and flashed the word 'READY' in her visor, but the instant Dana mimed tapping the projected button marked, 'EXECUTE', smoke puffed out the connection between her hard-line and the antenna. The wire connecting them burst into brief and brilliant flame. Before it melted, it carried a shock from the antenna's junction box into Dana's exosuit.
All her muscles convulsed at once so that she hugged the antenna's trunk. She ground her teeth on the charge running through her. The lights went out in her helmet. When Dana's muscles finally failed, Taipan's gravity pulled her down to the hull, twenty meters below.
Her arms and legs caught in the boughs and branches of the smaller antennas. She landed on her back with all her limbs out to absorb the shock. The fact that it tingled and hurt everywhere right away meant she wasn't dead or paralyzed.
The dead Squidy looked down at her and in the reflection off its cycloptic visor she saw the sparks coming from the melted module on her chest. The heater, the AC, and the rebreather still worked, but the suit's computer was fried. There was no doing this from the outside of the ship – not anymore.
Dana was the only one that could take away Matilda Witt's command and control network and she wasn't about to quit just because the price of victory had gone up.
She left the dead Squidy where he'd be found, climbed out of the antenna forest, and scrambled up the steep slope of Taipan's hull. Thirty meters starboard from the base of a vertical face she couldn't climb she found a service airlock she hoped led into the upper decks. It was set almost two meters back into the added armor, but the airlock's input panel remained accessible.
They'd never talked about her actually going inside Taipan, but from what she knew, any airlock on any Staas Company ship would open for a Staas Company Officer with valid executive command codes. She couldn't remember Augustus Horan's codes. She tried, but after being electrocuted, she could barely remember her own command codes. Dana's heart pounded and her hands trembled with too much adrenaline. She shivered in her suit.
Dana pulled the matchbox computer from her pocket and set it against the input panel where it could interface. The handshake only took milliseconds. After that, Taipan's airlock met Ram's second software daemon. It welcomed Captain Augustus Horan and opened the doors for him. It probably notified the bridge of his arrival, too. That was going to be problematic. Dana tried not to think it through too much or dwell on what a lousy idea this was. She genuinely believed she could make it to a terminal and complete her mission. After that, what would happen was anyone's guess.
A beep in her ear prompted her to enter. The open airlock looked hungry. Lt. Commander Dana Sellis retrieved the matchbox computer from the input panel, drew her sidearm, and stepped inside.
Chapter Fifteen
Jordo winced as small-bore particle streams stabbed and slashed at the Privateer fighters from scores of fast-tracking batteries on all six of the Squidy gunboats. They crisscrossed and hatched the space above the alien hulls. The flashing reactors from all the Bitzers they smashed and skewered lit the scene like a thunderstorm. It was bloodier than Jordo had imagined.
Dana Sellis was supposed to sabotage Matilda Witt's command and control. She was supposed to take out the CCRN so the orders from Taipan couldn't reach the fighters, but the stream of suicidal orders coming to them from Matilda Witt continued unbroken.
Alien fire ripped past Jordo's cockpit, reaching for Paladin and missing. Jordo and the Lancers flew in behind the Hellcats, following the squadron-specific attack and targeting vectors in their helmets given by Matilda Witt and her tacticians on Taipan. Two minutes into the battle, Jordo was sure 90% of them would be killed.
Out the corner of his eye to port and starboard, above and below, fighters from the 55th and 99th twisted off their line of travel as the Squidies' particle streams ran them through. They turned and pitched with the enemy streams before their breached reactors cooked off.
Dirty jinked around Jordo's 151 and rolled over him, "How much longer?" She knew Jordo had no idea when Dana would kill the relay net.
New orders from Taipan came in. The target vectoring arrow projected in Jordo's flight helmet twisted and shot to starboard. He and the rest of his squadron followed it, veering away from that wounded cruiser with the Hellcats and flying to the next target on the next Squidy ship selected by Matilda Witt and her tacticians. Ahead of them, the 23rd dusted one of the big guns. The last of the 112th took another one of the fast defensive batteries off the broad, cliff-face wall of a 400-meter tooth-shaped hull.
They flew from ship to ship together in a cloud, diving into the alien guns to blow them off and then moving on to the next target. And it was working. Jordo couldn't deny that. The Lancers and the Hellcats were starting their second lap around the six escort ships and Jordo could see plenty of damage on the cruisers' hulls. On the one coming up fast below, a third of the guns were already gone or damaged beyond use.
Debris from a hundred, blasted and melted F-151s tumbled and spun through the battle. Jordo didn't know how many pilots would be left when it was over. Already, they'd lost ten percent; already, they'd been decimated.
The 133rd Lancers bore down on the next cruiser as its guns plucked the 99th from the sky. But the battle was about to get bloodier. Bay doors opened near midship
s on the alien hull; the enemy had kept fighters in reserve.
A dozen red bandits blasted out of their bay. The alien aces and their spiked hulls came up at the 99th and ripped through the middle of the attacking squadron while spun sideways, delivering enfilade fire, and shooting down the longest axis of the Bitzers' formation. They killed five pilots on that first pass. Two of the planes they hit continued down into the hull without pulling up and impacted below. One cooked off almost up against the cruiser, but it only marred the armor.
Jordo couldn't wait any longer for Dana to disrupt Matilda Witt's command and control. They'd all be dead soon unless they changed tactics right now. He said, "Lancers, on me." Then, he turned and spun on his jets to engage the bandits.
"About goddamn time," Paladin said.
The Hellcats stayed in their dive.
"Lancer 1-1 to Hellcat 1-1, We can take those bandits, but we can't do it alone." Pooch stayed silent. "Hellcat 1-1, do you copy?" There was no answer, and Jordo took his feet off the pedals and kicked and kicked at the front of his cockpit.
The red bandits took six more as their formation tore past the Weasels and headed for the Hellcats. Pooch was waiting too long. When the Hellcats dove in on that cruiser they'd get the same bloody thing the Weasels got.
Gusher said, "Jordo, you count those bandits down there?" The dozen were getting closer fast.
"There's enough for everyone."
"We got more bandits!" Paladin shouted, "Launching from the other cruisers." The Squidy ships had all held back a pocket squadron and now, they poured out looking for vengeance. A total of seventy-two, angry, alien aces tore into Taipan's fighters along with the Squidies' gun batteries. The only way it could get worse, Jordo thought, was if the unexplained, spherical ship at the center of the Squidies' formation now opened fire on them as well.
Jordo screamed for Witt's squadrons to break off the assault and engage the enemy fighters, but Witt's pilots all followed the arrows in their helmets. They dove and fired on the guns Matilda Witt ordered them to, and the vastly outnumbered alien aces had themselves a turkey shoot.