by A. D. Bloom
Using the ship's IR comms laser, he pulsed out a message to the array of miniscule proxies that trailed the orbit of the eighth planet like the fractured moons and asteroids there. The proxies waited to receive the right pattern and frequency so they could pass the signal on down a chain of relays to reach deep into the debris fields and archipelago where the seventeen ships of Devlin's Privateers hid. They'd get his orders and leave the Grinder within an hour, running only as fast as they could while maintaining stealth. It would be at least four hours before they could intercept him and the train of company cutters now trailing behind him. "Zi'vt, I see three, no... four more cutters at three o'clock low. I think we can get them to chase us too, what do you think?" The Shediri just veered the craft hard on a new vector and waved his top two arms up over his head in alarm.
"I'm glad you approve."
The next message that came through wasn't from the cutters. It was simple, encrypted text. Looking at the alias on the decrypted header told him it was from his father so he deleted it. Right now, communication between them could only go in one direction.
He'd already called out their small fleet. All that remained now was to call out the rest of them on Otherworld and in orbit. He drafted his message to his father quickly and easily because he wasn't trying to convince the man of anything. As always, as he had when his name was Harry Cozen, today Hank's task was to tell Mr. Devlin what he already knew. 'I can wait no longer and neither can Otherworld. Four hours after this message reaches you, the Staas Company ships that I lead on this chase will be destroyed. Our fleet will accept no further orders, not even from you. In four hours, when I achieve this objective, you will have no choice but to begin the larger operation. Devlin's Privateers will provide the distraction you need to steal your destroyers from the orbital yards. You'd be smart to take it. Estimated time to intercept is just over four hours. The Legion needs time to relieve officers of command and secure the bases as well as push the final software through the units. Fighter support will not be available to you for some hours, but Absolom and the rest of our ships will draw nearly every Staas Company vessel out of orbit. You can handle the patrol boats. Most importantly, you'll need to begin now. I won't lie and say the choice is yours, Mr. Devlin. The choice simply is. The day is upon us. Embrace it.'
Hank sent the message without reading it again and checked the distance to the closest of the nine Staas Company Cutters now following Zevo's Tour Boat to their doom.
*
The golden hull sped towards the outer system trailing nine ships behind her. They'd fired only a few salvos of scatter from their bowguns before they gave up on hitting the slender tour boat. Instead, they called in more cutters that had been returning to the inner system from a patrol around the Draconis transit.
Four hours later, he'd maintained his lead and not long after that, he caught the first glimpses of LiDAR irregularities at multiple points on several bearings. The timing was no coincidence. That was a signal for him. "Our ships are here," said Hank. "Still 13,400 Ks to the cutters behind us..." He did the math in his head. "Less than a minute now until they intercept, I think."
The transmission that blared across the frequencies thirty seconds later had to have come from a micro-proxy dumped by a nearby ship hiding with full stealth engaged. When he heard it, his blood nearly boiled. "Staas Cutters, Staas Cutters, break off your pursuit of the smaller vessel or you will be engaged with deadly force. We are not alone. You are surrounded. I repeat..."
"Nobody ordered you to give them a warning, Biko!' he screamed out at the stars in front of the pilot. "Just shoot them!"
"This is the cutter Pompeii. Do not interfere. If you interfe-"
Hank killed the comms speaker. "Turn us fifteen degrees to starboard." Zi'vt brought the boat around just in time for him to see Split Aces as she shunted power away from her stealth and emerged from the starry black running only a few scant Ks off the starboard high side of the leading company ship. The railgun block mounted on her topside bow fired a fanning warning shot, thin and pale against the black. The hyper-accelerated sabot cut a swath across the path of the company ship, and then, Split Aces vanished again, too close to be hunted with spatial charges, but close enough to hit the Pompeii at will.
As the nine company cutters scrambled to spread themselves into a more defensive formation without coming under fire again, Hank decided the Staas officers weren't the only ones that needed prodding. "Kill the forward thrust and spin the boat!" Zi'vt hissed and whined like a blown reed. "Do it, goddammit; do it!'
"What are you doing, Hank?"
When Zi'vt kicked the bow and stern maneuvering thrusters in opposition, the inertial gees twisted Hank in his seat and threw Scilla into the bulkhead again, but when the maneuver was over, Hank could peer past his pilots shoulder and out the front canopy at the fast-growing flares of the company ships still chasing them.
"Opening the cargo bay doors," he said as he tapped it out on the console. The shudder as they opened came up through the seat under him. "Deploying launcher...seven seconds." Underneath the ship, the doors of the bay were open to the vacuum and the same derrick rig that deployed the plasma drill was now lowering an ad hoc launcher into place.
The Shediri torpedoes and their minimal AI pinged down the wires from their magnetite chitin casings and told him they'd found targets with a flashing projection and a chirping. Six of them together sounded like a nest of hungry chicks. Zi'vt whined and clicked. "Don't do it."
"They need me to." There would always be fear, he thought. It changes nothing. "Firing." He hammered the projected launch button, and the six torpedoes he'd loosed fired up their drive coils and ripped past the hammerhead bow of the tour boat shining an eerie red light from their maneuvering thrusters that filled the cabin. "Six out! Spin us back and hit max thrust. Evasive maneuvers!"
The last he saw of the torpedoes with his naked eye was the stutter-puffs of plasma they spat as they maneuvered hard to port and dove. After the boat spun, he watched on his console as the six warheads carved out a series of individual paths like tendril roots seeking water, all of them closing on the Pompeii.
Her arrays must have spotted them about thirty seconds out because that's when the four, 6x140mm batteries opened fire and put up clouds of range-det shells in fiery curtains that chased the Shediri torpedoes too slowly. One cooked off in a dull flare and another broke up under fire, tumbling in shattered pieces. Fifteen seconds out, the gunners aboard SCS Pompeii found a third of the incoming torps. The remaining three stuttered red flame from their maneuvering jets in one last chattering synchronized burst as they closed the last kilometers.
The hosing streams of rapid-fire tracers painted splashing orange blooms of color back and forth, chasing after the last three. They caught one. It flew head on into the streams of all four batteries until they shredded it.
One impacted on Pompeii's top side. The first detonated and melted through the armor and half the outer hull giving the force of the explosion a path into the shock space. It had been meant to protect the crew from shock wave propagation and it did, but on smaller ships, the force of vaporized metal and casing driven by a fission blast into the shock space was enough to burst compartments if the blast hit in the right spot. It filled the ship with firestorm while the shock rippled the outer hull.
The second torpedo impacted over the reactors, detonating against the hull as the first one had. It made an inferno out of the engineering section and left a molten-edged hole out of which yellow jets of fire erupted like geysers. They got trapped in the ship's artificial gees and curled around her until the ship's fields collapsed. After that, the smoke and the glowing plasma became a shroud. Only one lifeboat appeared.
There was no time to listen to the silence on comms. The arrays flashed warnings of incoming salvos. "Evasive!" he shouted. Twelve batteries on three ships hurled coordinated fire like shotgun spreads across their path, and Zi'vt jinked and spun the boat as unpredictably as he could to make the
m hard targets. This close, they could only be so hard to hit.
Absolom was the first ship he saw drop her stealth and open fire into the faces of the three cutters still pursuing the tour boat. Three salvos impacted on the bow of the first of them, disabling a railgun batteries and possibly breaching the hull. The company ship fell out of line as HotJacket rose from the murky blackness between the stars and winked with fire from her railguns. The Ketok and three more Shediri hulls appeared and launched torpedoes that chased the cutters as they broke and ran.
"They'll regroup and be back soon with reinforcements."
Hank didn't feel they were all in the fight until he caught sight of Split Aces. Backed between three cutters and under fire, Asa Biko had finally been forced to fire into them. The blasted and disabled company ship he'd hit drifted in Biko's wake launching lifeboats, but only a few.
Biko spoke with monotone shock. "What have we done... It wasn't supposed to happen like this...not like this."
Hank Devlin thumbed comms. "These are my father's orders," he lied. "We've been preparing for this for twenty-one years. This is how it starts. The Otherworld Rebellion has begun."
18
Otherworld Legion
158th AG, 3rd Dragoons, 1st Squad
Fort New Madras
Now that training was almost over and graduation was only two weeks off, the NCOs had given them an hour of free time a day. Most of 1st squad used their time to raise hell. Bart Jurcik used his to make a buck.
The impact of Hojo's open palm batted Jurcik's hands to the side and for a split second it knocked the pain right out too, but it came in the next heartbeat. It stung him with deep needles that seemed to go all the way through and skewer his hands together. He hadn't flinched and given Hojo the free hit he would have liked at least, but as he brought his hands back into position, the color of burst vessels bloomed under the skin. The game wasn't just about speed; it was about pain and how much of it you were willing to take.
"Put 'em up or pay it up," said Hojo.
"You blind? My hands are up. They're all up in your ugly face. Get set and swing, tin man. You aren't so tough once the armor comes off." He saw signs of fatigue now; Hojo couldn't keep it up forever. Jurcik had 100 Ameros that said he couldn't.
Hojo put his hands behind his back and leaned in, staring hard at Jurcik. How any goon with a tell like that made squad leader he'd never figure. As Hojo swung, Jurcik was moving his hands out of the way, but he could already see it was too late. It was the sound of the klaxon that saved him. It split the air and made Jurcik's opponent tense up and swing in too tight an arc. Jurcik felt the whoosh of air over his face as Hojo missed by a full hand's width.
"Now, it's my turn," he said, but Hojo was already making for the door along with everyone else in the room. "This isn't over!"
"Can't hear you!" Hojo pointed at the squack box on the wall still blaring the alert.
Jurcik's boots hit the pads and like the rest of his squad and the hundreds of others, he didn't stop running for his hangar and his armor no matter what he heard or what he saw. But when he glanced to his left at Burroughs speeding past him in the sprint for the hangar, he couldn't explain what he saw between the fast-printed training barracks.
Six of their Staas Company officers stood up against the Quonset shell of the barracks, held at gunpoint by their own NCOs.
"Keep running, nugget! Nothing to see!" said Sergeant Baines as the NCO ran past on Jurcik's left and blocked the view with his body. "Suit up! Suit up!" the Sergeant barked. "It's time to blast off this rock!"
"Is this a drill?" Horst asked from behind him.
"This is no drill. Today is the day you bust that cherry, nugget."
The redsuits had the armor powered up and waiting in their bay with the torso doors swung open. The twelve EEAA personal armor units standing together like that looked like gutted, 2.5-meter robots with butterflied chests and bellies waiting for their fighting insides.
As he climbed up the short, rolling ladder the two redsuits had placed in front of his suit, he noticed the stripes on the forearm-mounted ion cannon were red and the yellow squares painted on the sides were gone. "Live weapons and full charges today," Etone said. "Operating system upgrade as well. It'll look mostly the same to you."
"Mostly the same to me..." Jurcik repeated as he stepped into the suit one leg at a time, backwards, ducking under the top of the chest and collar until his head popped up in the diamond dome of the helmet. Once he was looking at Etone's smug grin, he said, "You like that you know more about this rig than I do. You're just envious because this suit looks good on me and you'll never get to wear one."
"Never get to... That's a good one." Etone slammed the butterfly hatches shut, one after the other and checked the seals as Jurcik's system powered up around him, depth-projected in the dome over his head. The redsuit said, "If I want to wear one of these with my own name on it, all I have to do is get my dumb ass sent to prison and pass the physical. Stupid jailbird. I ain't jealous of you. Besides," Etone said with a grin as he slapped the dome and gave a thumbs up to let him know he was all good, "When you guys are sleeping, we wear your suits for testing. I left you a present. Can you smell it yet?"
Jurcik was afraid to breathe as Etone walked away laughing until he was out of sight and the green lights told them to go. Inside the forearms of the metal suit, he gripped the twin sticks blindly and engaged the neural interface. It itched under the skin of his scalp where the implant's antenna communicated with the suit as he began the slightly jarring run for the boarding craft. He followed the arrows in his dome as he and his squad leaped thirty yards at a time in the planet's low gees, breaking regulations and saving at least twenty seconds by allowing them to cross over a string of ordnance carts headed across their path.
Sergeant Baines already stood by the open side-bay doors of the JJ Marie. Clouds of coolant poured off her four nacelles and the way the dust swirled around the bow of the boarding craft told him they'd already powered up the forward drive coils before launch. Everyone was breaking regulations today.
He didn't have to ask Sarge what was going on; five people were already trying to do that over local comms until they saw he signed-off the common suit channel without giving them another to call him on. Jurcik clambered aboard into the barn-sized hold, found his place between Gorder and Brim, and slotted in with his back to the bulkhead.
"Strap in, strap in!" Sarge came back on comms barking in their ears. "We're going up! You beauties are going to see some action today. That's right, Christmas has come early for you people!"
"They can't wait until we graduate to get us killed?" he said. Everyone knew the Legion's casualties were legendary.
Sarge grinned inside his dome. "The company sells our lives at a volume discount, son. But your ugly hide isn't going to be sold cheap by Staas Company anymore. Today is the day everything changes. We're kicking the company off this rock. Today is the day we fight for Otherworld."
"Aren't we going to get in..."
"Trouble? Jurcik, you are an 0-2 jailbird, a prison-conscripted contractor with a life expectancy of less than a year. I'd say you're already in trouble. This is the rebellion. The Legion chose a side. No more forced factory labor in the penal colonies. No more suicidal missions for us. It all changes today. Listen up for the ROE! We're blasting off and heading for the shipyard docks to commandeer a few warships. Staas Guard units are declared hostile, but you are not to fire unless fired upon first. All ships and suits with valid Legion transponder codes are friendly, regardless of type. That includes alien craft and unlicensed privateers. Civilian dock workers are declared non-combatants. Don't shoot them. We're meeting friendlies on the docks. It's our job to get them on-board twelve destroyers in the shipyard. Remember...don't shoot first, but anything in a Staas uniform is hostile. So charge those cannon on your arms and keep 'em hot."
The boarding craft's artificial gravity and the drive coils kicked in at he same time straining the reactors a
nd jerking them up and forward off the pads with Mercuria and Slag Wagon following close behind. Who knew how many were sortieing on this stunt? Probably the whole planet...
Brim caught his eye and mouthed, "852." Jurcik patched it into his feed and heard the triple beep as Brim opened a private channel. "Fuck, man. I hate the Company as much as the next guy, but, shit....Are we going to have to shoot at people?" It was too late to tell Brim he'd forgot to sign off local comms and everyone had heard him.
"We shoot what the Legion tells us to shoot!" said Sarge. "Yours is not to reason why! Yours is to make sure they fucking die! Is that understood?"
"But all our officers were company men. Who's giving the orders now?"
"Governor Ram Devlin himself."
"Are we rebels now?" Hojo sounded stupid saying it, but it was a legitimate question. He didn't wait for an answer before letting out a blood-curdling war cry over local comms that shook Jurcik's brain in his helmet.
"The fuck was that?"
"Rebel yell, man!"
He'd never heard of it before, but Sarge had and so had Gorder. Jurcik wasn't sure which one of them joined in first, but they wouldn't let up until they got him and Brim to join in.
"No matter who, no matter what, you tangle with the Legion and you're done for. Glory, glory, what a hell of way to die, indeed!" The ship popped out the top of the atmo then and then began to shudder as the nacelles and the main engines kicked in as Sarge began to sing. "They blast us into orbit on cheap-ass rocket sleds because the Company checked the balance sheets and we were worth more dead..."
"Holy hell," said Hojo, pointing out the tiny porthole.
"They made our armor out of scrap-metal and put fishbowls on our heads..."
"It looks like every DIY gravity sled, rock-hauler, and skiff on the whole planet just launched into orbit. They're all headed for Bofor's Station and the shipyards just like us."