by A. D. Bloom
Millet said, "What kinda bugspeak is that, NAV?"
"What Mister Zi'vt means," said Hank, "is that we are no longer at a crossroads. We have already chosen a path. Mr. Millet, get on the ship's squack and give the call for the crew to arm the external mounts to port and starboard and prepare for close combat."
"Asa Biko's orde-"
"He has no authority."
"What about the Shediri? We'll need the Ketok and the Zo'tok."
"Zi'vt," said Hank, "Interrogative, Ketok and Zo'tok willingness to fight?" The bug gave a wet, sharp hiss out its jagged jaws at the deck as if spitting. He was clearly insulted.
Hank said, "Record this message for coded burst transmission to the squadron. 'Attack pattern MCR, Mike, Charlie, Rome. We finish the fight. Orders of Ram Devlin. End Message." Blancoeur at comms hesitated behind him. "Send it or I'll shoot you and do it myself." He rose to get a closer look at his XO's console and then turned to his pilot. "NAV, as soon as that transmission goes out, put Absolom on an intercept course with this cutter in the very rear." His finger lanced the projection of the company ship like he was spearing a ghostly fish. "Split Aces and the others will join in once we start. They won't have a choice."
Split Aces
487Ks from Absolom
Biko and Split Aces steamed evasive to elude the next set of incoming flares and dowser charges. "Continue this pattern for another fifteen and then resume our turn. I want out of this trap."
"I've got no sign of any of our ships turning yet."
"There!" Biko couldn't help but point at Absolom and the two ships with her when the cutters' flares revealed her. "He's steaming right at them like he wants to ram."
Dell said, "They saw the kid that time for sure."
"If the company cutters don't kill him, I will. It didn't have to go like this. It wasn't supposed to be this bloody."
Dell Pardue just shook her head over the tactical console. "Did you really think it could go any other way?"
Parker called out from behind his command chair. "Comms has a burst transmission from Absolom. 'Attack pattern MCR. Orders of Ram Devlin. End Message'."
"MCR...maximally close range?" said Dell. "Does he want us to board them?"
"No...If Ram was going to give orders now he'd have done it through me," said Biko. He was about to risk being located once more to send out another message saying as much, but the next salvo of flares to come out the tubes of the cutters hunting them detonated in a spiraling string of nuclear hell-flashes that lit up Gondola Six, Hotjacket, Sajjada, and the two Shediri corvettes. Every one of those ships had turned their bows to the enemy and all of them accelerated, following Absolom in for a knifefight.
"They're all going in," Dell said. "What's it going to be?"
"God damn you, Hank Devlin. NAV, follow them in."
"17 degrees, mark 7, aye."
Dell thumbed the ship's squack and her voice went out to the separate modules all bolted and welded down to the ship's wide raft frame. "This is the XO. All designated crews mount the external guns port-side and starboard, warm up the Shediri fish. Prepare for close combat."
SCS Cornwall, Bridge
Commodore Ian Grieves wanted blood. He wanted to see it jet with bright burning metal and flaming atmo from cracked and burning pirate ships. They'd hulled not one or two, but four of his cutters. There hadn't been any lifeboat transponders at all sighted from two of them. Since SCS Boniface and Nellis threw flame out blown hatches and hull breaches, no lifeboats probably meant no survivors. Blood demands blood.
"I have tracks on six pirates and intermittent contacts on another five, Commodore. They're coming right at us."
"It's our lucky day. OPS, load all four tubes with full-yield Mk5 warspite torpedoes," he said as the gunners let fly another spread salvo from the twin railgun batteries on the bow.
"They've launched torpedoes at us. Contacts are fading in and out. They're Shediri torps; they're running on drive coils. We won't be able to spot them until they're close."
"Should I advise the squadron to engage in evasive maneuvers, Commodore Grieves?"
The blood throbbed in his temples as he glared at the dimwit at comms. "My god, no. That would break up our net and let them escape. No. Order all ships to tighten the net around them. Those dirt-farmers killed over 150 sailors today. If they want to die on our guns and torps, I'm more than happy to oblige."
Grieves' XO leaned on the squack button. "This is the XO. 6x140s, engage the incoming Shediri fish. Damage control standby."
The gunners on SCS Rickenbacker managed to put their salvo in the path of one of the pirate corsairs. Grieves zoomed in on it just in time to see the frame of one of their ships folding over on itself where the sabot had blasted their way through, leaving three sizable holes across its keel. The welded-on tower from a tug broke away after secondary detonations and for a few moments, the ship and all its pieces flew together, burning until some ill-stored ordnance cooked off and the unarmored ship's blazing reactor walls ruptured. She and her murderous crew sublimed in a flash of light and gammas. He thought it was too good a death for them.
A few seconds later, another of the pirates came visible and a lucky shot across their bow caught its port side, shattering its shunting panels and blowing a hole through its engineering section. It heeled over and launched a spread of 12 more torpedoes from hand-loaded tubes welded to the bottom of the command tower before his cutters shredded it in a crossfire.
"We'll have those torpedoes sighted now with no trouble at all, Commodore. They're coming in on a direct line. The gunners can't miss.'
The 140mm turret gunners on the topside and keel chased the elusive Shediri torpedoes, stitching walls of fire across the vacuum to catch and pepper them with shrapnel until they flashed bright green and cooked off in a blinding series of dets across the Cornwall's bow. The crystal-pane windows of the ship's bridge dimmed to protect the bridge crew's eyes from the flash. "Arrays are overloaded. We're blind...coming back online....now."
As the ship regained her sight, Commodore Grieves saw a pair of pirate corsairs drop their stealth and blink into being off the bow to starboard so close he could make out the patch welding. One was covered in stealth shunting panels and had the command tower from a UNS frigate, the bow from a tug, and a set of curving Shediri drive coils set between a pair of stolen six-shooter railgun blocks. The other was a striped bug ship, a Shediri corvette with high spikes coming off her hull and emitter batteries of some kind visible at bow and stern. Even as he shouted for all guns and tubes to fire, he knew he'd been duped the bastards had never meant to hit them with he torps at all. Those were just to mask their approach. "Fire! Open fire!" cried Grieves.
"The turrets are still turning...five seconds."
"We don't hav- NAV! Turn!"
There was no time. The Shediri corvette fired maneuvering thrusters and slid itself sideways across the bow only a few scant Ks out. To starboard the human pirate cut even closer to the Cornwall, and he saw the figures in the bridge windows at the top of her command tower.
All three ships opened fire at the same moment. The Shediri vessel's bow-mounted ion cannon fired at the same time nearly her whole length lit up with smaller cannon flashes. The tightly-focused, rose-colored bursts of hyper-accelerated plasma ripped across the narrow gap between ships to impact on the topside bow railgun battery, vaping the skin of it away in a flash and blasting the molten metal into twisted ruin.
The shock waves that rolled up the ship from the bow weren't as bad as the slamming railgun impacts to the tower from starboard. They blurred the bulkheads around him and shook his brain and they continued well past the firing of the few batteries he'd seen. Those ships couldn't possibly have so many guns, he thought. Utter shock and wordless astonishment set in when he realized the staccato hammering of smaller sabot and plasma bursts on both sides of his ship came from hull-mounted, portable light cannon manned by human and alien figures wearing exosuits and standing out on the hulls of t
he Otherworlder ships.
He recognized the lines of the pirate vessel's midships six-shooter railgun turret as it fired and shook Cornwall with a hammering blow to the rear. "We've lost engine power!" shouted his XO. If it wasn't for the potentially fatal damage to his ship and his officers cries repeating the damage reports as they came in, then Commodore Grieves would have cheered for joy at the beautiful sight when the Cornwall's aft guns finally fired into the pirate at point blank. The six sabot in the spread penetrated the unarmored ship with ease and the resulting release of energy inside the pressure hull burst their midships compartments open like tin shacks. Even the 140mm sabot shells spaced between the HE penetrated.
The pirates manning guns on the hull near the points of impact simply disappeared in the flash. The others were torn and blasted with high velocity metal spray and shells from the 140mm autocannon batteries. The spine severed where two compartments had been obliterated, and the rear third of the ship drifted while the cracked reactor spat fire that wrapped around it in the null gees. The command tower still looked intact, but it wouldn't be firing at them anytime soon. "All batteries, fire on the Shediri ship!"
As he turned to port, his eyes grazed the tactical display and Commodore Grieves saw all of his cutters engaged in the same, point-blank, winner take all firefight with the pirates. Already, five of the company ships drifted with dead engines and flame jetting from torpedo-blasted hulls. His next thought came as wordless panic that seared him inside. We're losing this fight. The Cornwall's 140mm turrets fire raked the Shediri gun batteries and his last remaining railguns scored a penetrating hit on her at midships, but despite her wounds the guns pointing out that half-cracked chitin hull kept firing.
ICV Absolom
Foundered Absolom drifted alongside SCS Cornwall in two pieces. Her stern melted slowly, consumed by her runaway reactor. He hoped the severed aft end would drift away further in case anything cooked off.
In the vacuum outside his ruined ship, Captain Hank Devlin crouched and gripped the edge of the command tower's port-side external hatch, looked 'up' to sight the pocked hull of SCS Cornwall in his visor, and pushed off hard with his legs. He gave a quick burst from his gasbelt to accelerate while the 21 remaining crew of his ship launched behind him, jumping out into the black untethered and flying on their belts. He checked to his right and caught sight of the ones jumping from the bow gunnery sections with old MA-48s, Shediri rod-rifles and a pair of man-portable plasma drills with full-meter blades. He'd said they wouldn't need them, but Millet insisted.
For a moment, he couldn't see Scilla Price, but then she launched near his XO and puffed out a burst to accelerate after him. Only seven had made it out of Absolom's burning midships bays. Two of them brought the single Shediri torpedo warhead he'd asked for.
"Make for the command tower," he said over comms as he corrected his course with a short double tap of thrust that brought the cutter's armored tower into the center of his helmet visor. The cutter now drifted with dead engines and blasted batteries. Silhouetted figures backlit on their bridge pointed and moved to the port-side windows as they spotted Absolom's boarding party coming for them. A boxed 'X' projected two-meters below the bridge windows marked his landing point as the range to target counted down in a blur in the upper right corner of his visor. The numbers representing his speed felt comfortably abstract until the last seconds when the 35m-tall composite-steel armored cliff seemed to throw itself at him with speed that exceeded his reflexes capacity to react by hitting the braking jets. In the last half-second before he spammed himself on the external hull, the gasbelt's auto-deceleration feature kicked in with a burst off the front of the belt so powerful, his body doubled over as if his harnessed hips had just been yanked backwards. Hank landed in a crouch at a comfortable meter-per-second and looked 'up' along his line of travel to see Absolom's boarders coming together above to land behind him on the charred armor of SCS Cornwall's tower.
SCS Cornwall
The remaining batteries on the Shediri ship to port ceased fire, and Commodore Grieves knew why. "XO, gather two squads of six and clean those bastards off my hull," he said. The sneer that crossed his XO's face as the man's eyes flicked to the starboard windows of the bridge told Grieves what was outside. "Belay that order, XO."
Commodore Grieves stepped past the tactical console and met the figure looking in from outside in the vacuum. Interior helmets lights now lit the pirate's face, presumably to show off his arrogant grin. The Otherworlder held up three gloved fingers and then two. Grieves said, "Comms, give me a local patch on common 32."
Only half a second after his comms officer nodded, he heard the voice from outside. "Knock, knock."
"You're young," said Grieves. "I'm surprised."
"And you're a Commodore; I'm surprised." A helmeted Shediri face appeared to the pirate's right and eyeballed him with at least six of its ten eyes. Behind them, a few hundred Ks out, the flare of a company reactor cooking off cast pale light on his alien face.
Grieves had fought enough battles in his long career to know when he didn't have a chance. For a moment, he envied the face of stupid youth looking in at him. The boy hadn't been experienced enough to know how against him the odds were at the start of this fight. If he had, he'd have run. Fortune favors fools. "I'm sending my men outside to kill you now," he said.
"There's no need for that, Commodore Grieves. If you want to kill us, we're happy to come inside. All you have to do is open the starboard hatches on the command deck and open your bay doors for us."
It put some heart back in Grieves to laugh in his enemy's face then. "Why would I do that?"
The young face in the worn exosuit outside raised his right hand and gestured to someone in the rear, out of sight on the side of the tower. Two Shediri and a human appeared to his left carrying a chitin-cased module, three-meters long and over a meter thick with rounded edges. They pressed it up against the bridge windows. The grin widened on the face outside. "This is the warhead from a full-yield, Shediri fusion torpedo. Were it to detonate against your command tower, the vape crater would most certainly extend through three decks and the internal shock waves could turn your sailors to spam in their suits even before the firestorms cooked what was left. Open the hatches and the bay doors, Commodore. We're coming in one way or another. You can deny me your ship, but it will cost your sailors their lives. The choice is yours."
The pride in Grieves almost cracked his voice as he said the words. "What are your terms?"
"I want your ships. You will order your remaining cutters to surrender. Keep the longboats. After SAR, you and their captains and crew will be guaranteed safe passage to the Alcyone/Beta-Draconis transit."
Grieves let the static hiss, withholding his response.
"Have you had enough blood for one day, Commodore? What is your answer?"
"Comms, patch this through to all ships." Grieves leaned into the squack button like he was trying to break his own thumb. "This is Grieves aboard SCS Cornwall. All surviving Staas Company ships will cease fire immediately. Repeat: cease fire immediately. I am ordering the Alcyone squadron to surrender. Prepare to be boarded. Do not resist. God save our souls."
23
Otherworld
The Hive of Auntie Kill
Martin Samhain, reluctant agent of Balthus Pavic and Staas Company Intelligence stood on the far end of the landing pads as Auntie Kill's Hive prepared for war, loading small vessels with ordnance and launching them into orbit. The four Shediri assigned to guard Samhain gave him some room to stretch his legs and kept to themselves some ten meters away. He thought maybe they didn't like the sound of the Hs'tok warrior monks' incessant drumming.
Eighteen of them beat out a song together on their chitin with all four of their arms at once. while the hive's dogs barked far away, towards the sound of the surf.
He was surprised they hadn't killed him after he'd tried to assassinate Ram Devlin. They'd just left him with Devlin's ex-wife, Margo, aka Auntie Kill
and gone off to start their war. She'd been surprisingly civil, even pleasant. He decided she must need him for something. All his requests to see the Weirdling artifact had gone unanswered, but at least she granted his request to go to the surface. No degree of filtration could remove the cheese smell of a Shediri hive.
Since he'd been on the pads, at least two-dozen, antique, 27-meter raiders from decades past had been lifted on the elevators and moved out on the pads. In the bright silver light of Otherworld's rising 2nd moon, the modified wings that spread from below their coil sets left shadows like rows of teeth. The bugs moved ordnance to them in teams, loading it by hand from a genuine relic - a hover cart stenciled with the name SCS Hardway that must have been saved before the induction chargers melted her storied hull into a 350-meter sphere of burning metal.
The Shediri heavy fighters looked to have been modified for endo-exo atmospheric flight and they were being pulled out now to meet the reprisal that would be coming soon from the company. It wouldn't be much of a fight. First, Staas carriers would seize the transits and surrounding space to isolate the planet. Then, they'd take orbital space above and after that, they'd bombard and invade.
He looked up into the sky and wondered how many hours did they have before Staas Company came to take their revenge. Less than two days, he imagined. Unless they wanted time to make speeches like the NAU leadership and Staas Board members did before the Staas Contractors overran Houston.
The furious, chitin-on-chitin drumming of the Shediri monks snapped at the atmo and stung his ears as he recognized their song. It was the same as the arrhythmic whumping of the shambling Freezt, the walking trees that wandered the barren plains of the Southernmost continent where they'd found the Weirdling artifact. The beat of their vine-like appendages on the dirt had been ten-times slower, but it was the same song, arrhythmic as rain.