by A. D. Bloom
"You gonna paint a really tiny satellite on your turret now, Horty?"
"Stifle, Timms. And pay up."
"Bricklayer to Hardway, we have zero remaining alien contacts. This gasbag is as clean of Squidy hardware as it's gonna get."
"Roger your last, Bricklayer, 223rd is cleared to lay an egg."
1000Ks above Bricklayer, the junk Trifecta ceased accelerating, opened the doors of the single ore container slung under her bow, and pulsed the blast from her four, outboard nacelles forward to decelerate herself by only a meter per second. As the junk slowed, the third and final Special Boat Service commando team's stealth incursion craft slipped out the open doors of the ore container slung under the junk and launched on its mission to destroy the aliens' blockade gun.
"Good hunting," was the only call on comms to mark their departure
*****
Inside the boat Major Healey prayed silently. This was the third attempt. It had to work. He'd scrapped their original approach plan. The incursion craft's reactor was now dead cold. Sergeant Chuckta's electronic warfare systems now ran on jury-rigged, cold-state batteries from one of the mining junks, courtesy of Hardway's redsuits. In an effort to keep their IR signature down, the incursion craft wouldn't run a reactor or even tap their thrusters this time. The entire approach to the blockade gun would be made using the energy they got from launching off the speeding junk, the gravity of the gas giant, and the tug of its four largest moons.
Once they broke the limb of the planet, the aliens' blockade gun had line of sight on them.
The imagers on the incursion craft were good enough to show them the Squidies' asteroid staring back as the SBS team screamed towards it at over 10000K/sec. Lentiform. It was bean-shaped. And smooth. Less than 5 kilometers on its longest line. Defensive batteries studded the surface, but the blockade gun itself and the alien reactors that powered it had been buried deep in the rock. This was the longest, closest look anyone had got at it and Healey could see now that even if a dozen capital ships faced off against it and lasted long enough for them all to fire, no bombardment could touch the aliens' gun itself. All that was exposed on the surface were the apertures, the holes dug out of the rock for the gun's particle beam to fire out of. Healey could make out the rings set into the rock starting just ten meters down the 'barrel'. From the briefings he'd read, he was convinced they had to be magnetic vectoring rings. They probably lined the 'barrels' up and down, accelerating the particle stream. Since they hadn't been rotating the rock to aim the gun, Healey assumed the last rings lining the barrel, the largest ones near the surface were most likely used to aim the stream.
Those outer rings were the best place to attack it with the demolition charges. The gun had three 'barrels' cut into the rock facing in three directions. All three sets of the vectoring rings used for aiming would have to be demolished. After that, the Squidies' wouldn't be able to hit a thing. Their super-gun's particle beam would stab out into space harmlessly. It wouldn't be any threat to the approaching UN task force and the mercenary Privateers. Healey even believed that if his team did the job just right, then with a heaping bit of luck, they might even make it off that rock alive.
*****
At just under 300,000 Ks to target, Sgt. Chuckta wiped the frost off his screen and called out the spike on the incursion craft's electronic warfare terminal. "We're being painted. Active, alien emissions from an array on the blockade gun's rock. Six different bands." He felt the twinge of alarm that passed through the men and women in the boat. They'd been spotted.
"Phase-shift the returns," the Major ordered.
Chuckta lifted his head from the terminal to explain to the Major that they were out in the open, 300,000 Ks close to target and no matter what the boat's designers had said, once you were spotted with an active beam, the jig was clearly up. Chuckta was about to say that, but one glance at Major Healey was all it took for him to realize Healey knew that already. He knew their goose was cooked. He was just trying to give the team in that boat some hope. "Phase-shifting and sending it back," Chuckta said. "Engaging spoof. Locking down all remaining systems. Turn those suits off, people."
The commandos turned off their suits even though it wouldn't do a thing to help hide them now. Chuckta imagined there was a pretty good chance everyone knew that, but the last thing anyone ever wants to hear is that there's nothing more they can do.
"Turn out the suit lights, as well," Chuckta told them. "Everything."
"You're making that one up," Wheelan said. She actually chuckled before she put out her suit light, and that was the last he saw of her ruddy cheeks. Goodnight, Wheelan. "Bloody Chuckta," she said from the dark. One by one, their faces disappeared until the only light was starlight. Chuckta felt all his muscles relax as an entirely unexpected wave of relief washed over him.
*****
Hardway's microsats saw it when the blockade gun fired. The broad beam of hyper-accelerated heavy nuclei waved across a huge swath of space and impacted a previously unseen target 283,000 Ks out. Bergano pulled a spectral analysis of the light resulting from the beam's impact and the target's destruction to determine the elemental composition of whatever the blockade gun had hit. "Mr. Cozen..."
"Was that flash of light from the third SBS team?" Bergano nodded. "They got close," Cozen said. "Begin to prep Hardway for a high-speed, run, Mr. Bergano. And tell Chief Terrazzi we'll need more inertial negation gees from the pinch if we're going to get up to speed."
"She's going to ask me how fast we plan to go."
"Tell her 20,000K/sec," Cozen said. "That's our ramming speed."
Chapter Seven
"No sign of alien bandits yet." Asa Biko flew Gold Coast as low over the gas giant's pole as he could without hitting the atmo. The junk's cockpit jutted out in front of the frame and as Biko flew them over the South polar vortex and the eye of the persistent storm, Ram looked down between the pilot's and co-pilot's consoles, down through the transparent, diamond-pane section of the cockpit's deck, down into the storm's rotating eye. He could see between the vertical cloud walls for thousands of Ks into strobing blackness where lightning flashed.
Biko said, "Wind speeds at the pole and the center of the eye are actually low – not even 100 kph. With the planet's heat rising up through the eye of the storm, the temp outside is up to about -122 Celsius. Good weather to hide a junk."
"Can you see anything hiding down below us right now?"
"Not a thing on IR, radar, or LiDAR," Biko told him. "But ask Dana; she's your electronic warfare specialist. At short range, that prospecting array she's monitoring can see better than anything else we've got."
"Dana," Ram called on internal comms, "anything showing up in the clouds below?"
"Looks all clear," she said from below. "How long until we round the gas giant and the blockade gun has line of sight on us?"
"From their perspective," Biko said, "we'll break the limb of the planet in 37 seconds. It'll take roughly five seconds for the photons bouncing off us to reach them. 42 seconds, relativistically speaking. After that, they'll be able to see us."
42 seconds doesn't sound like a long time, but in the last two hours, Ram and Biko and Dana had planned this mission, gotten Cozen's approval, and briefed the pilots while nearly every warrant officer, chief, and redsuit on the ship had worked to make all the modifications required. After that frenzy of action, 42 seconds to sit and breathe seemed like forever.
Ram established a private channel with Biko. When Biko heard the double beep in his helmet, he must have known what Ram was going to say because he spoke first. "I know you don't want my job, Ram."
"I really don't." Ram told him, "I want you to take it back."
"I got fired," Biko said. "Besides, I'm better at this. I'm better at flying and getting a job done and taking care of my people. That's what I'm good at. Someone else can send them out to die." Biko made a gesture in front of his helmet like he was shoeing a fly with the back of his hand, and Ram heard a quick, trip
le beep in his helmet that told him Biko had closed the private channel.
Over the junk's internal comms, he called out to Gold Coast's crew, "Fifteen seconds to enemy exposure, people. Sing out loud for me." Ready calls came in from the turrets and the torpedo deck.
"All quiet across the spectrum," Dana said. "Nothing but the same background fuzz we sampled on arrival and what's coming off the gas giant. No active radar or LiDAR emissions."
"This is where the second SBS team got it," Ram said. The second of the Special Boat Service teams had run smack into a flight of red bandits.
"They managed to hide their fancy boat in those polar cloud fronts for a while," Biko said, "But a little boat like that doesn't have the power to linger low without getting pulled down the gravity well. Not like a junk."
Seconds after Gold Coast broke the limb of the planet and had direct line of sight to the blockade gun, the junk would get bathed in alien search emissions. Biko counted down. "Exposure in 3...2...1... Mark."
Dana informed them that in spectra invisible to the human eye the whole planetary system now flashed bright with beams pointed right at them. "Everybody wave at the Squidies."
Ram used his helmet to zoom in. The enemy's hollowed out asteroid looked back at him like a misshapen eyeball.
"Picking up the expected beams from the blockade gun," she said.
Biko gave it another five seconds of hiding against the planet and then pulled Gold Coast away, gaining distance from the gas giant as he made the break across open space to the icy, second moon. That's where the pieces sliced off Hardway had ended up.
The bottom half of the sub-tower had already augured in, but the forward railgun batteries had fallen into a slowly degrading orbit. If the Squidies knew anything about humans, they knew humans didn't like to abandon their dead. Ram thought they'd probably expect Hardway to send a junk to collect the bodies. Maybe the Squidies wouldn't smell the trap.
Biko flew an evasive course to ensure they wouldn't be an easy target, changing direction at least every few seconds just in case the Squidies' super-gun let off a shot hoping to get lucky. Dana called out, "We're lit up extra bright! I've got K-band direct and hot from the blockade gun and theta-band from the fourth moon, the little one."
"They see us for sure?"
"They can see us," she said. "Everyone can see us. Hell, we're lit up so bright, in 12.43 years, they can see us back home."
"Wait ten seconds," Ram said, "and then give me active, directional LiDAR pulses at the blockade gun and that moon. I want to know how many bandits they're sending for us."
The blockade gun's gargantuan beam reached out for Gold Coast, slicing for a full five seconds, making a wall of atomic nuclei hundreds of meters high that slashed past the junk like a phantom sword. Biko veered away, and after an astonishingly short cycle, the gun reached out for them again from the blackness. The beam waved high over the junk and chased it. As Biko evaded, it tried to corral them and lit the whole cockpit in a queer, polarized, monochrome gold.
That weapon was made to destroy carriers and puff-chested capital ships, not 50-meter junks at 1.2 million Ks. Since it took over 4 seconds for the fire to arrive, Biko made it look like he could have flown Gold Coast all the way down the blockade gun's throat, but Ram knew if they'd been within 200,000 Ks, then the blockade gun would had them with ease.
Dana called out the bandits, "Return from the active pulse confirms three red bandits departing the airbase on the blockade gun's rock. Three alien fighters and three only, flying echelon. ETA four minutes 15 seconds."
"Go ahead and make the turn," Ram told Biko. "Reverse our course like we're aborting the mission and running for the barn."
Biko pulled them back towards the planet in a loop and put the junk in a half-roll at the top. Even with the inertial negation system working hard, this close to the gas giant they felt the gees from maneuvers like that pull on their guts.
Before Gold Coast got behind the limb of the planet again, the blockade gun's beam took one more shot. It missed and the particle stream left a thin, glowing scar of slow-roiling turbulence in the gas giant's upper atmo.
Ram said, "Okay, Dana. Give us an excuse to slow this junk down. Make us look like a wounded animal." Below, down the angled tube, through the personnel compartment, and in the reactor room, Dana Sellis ran through the sequence of scripts Chief Terrazzi had given her. In moments, the junk's reactor was misaligned and running dirty. She tweaked it so that it spat out x-rays and gammas like it had a serious malfunction, like maybe it had ruptured a fusion mix element in the last high-g maneuver.
"We're trailing blood in the water," she said.
"Slowing our speed to match," Biko said. "If the alien fighters don't accelerate any harder, then they'll now come into gun range when we're just on the far side of the South Polar Vortex, when we're just across the eye of the storm."
Biko kept the forward vector, but used the maneuvering thrusters to spin the junk so Gold Coast faced backwards. Under the cockpit, where the two ore containers used to ride the bow, the hatches opened on the torpedo tubes. In a vacuum, without an atmospheric shock wave, four, regular, fission-tipped warspite torpedoes didn't have too much chance of catching and downing three red bandits, but Gold Coast had to look desperate, so they played the part.
As the warspites launched, they rocketed up and away at the fighters, now visible, coming like an angry constellation. Zoomed in with his helmet, Ram could already make out the spikes coming off the 10-meter alien hulls. "Biko, rotate us 180 to run. Dana, execute the last set of Terrazzi's scripts."
Inside the reactor, the scripted sabotage produced a set of shutdown emissions that would make it look as if Gold Coast had just experienced an even worse failure.
Ram called in to Hardway: "Hardway AT, be advised Gold Coast has three bandits in pursuit. Our reactor is failing and we cannot escape. Repeat: we cannot escape. Request junks to cover." No response. "Please, Hardway, we're just waiting to get popped out here."
"Twenty seconds until the Squidies are in range," Biko said. There was nothing left to do but watch them come.
"Tally-ho! Tally-ho!" Lapuis shouted it from the topside turret. The junk was still inverted and from where he was Lapuis had the best view down into the storm's eye. He could see what Ram and Biko couldn't. More importantly, he could see what the aliens coming into range couldn't see.
Biko hit the thrusters and rotated the junk again and when Ram looked down between the swirling cloud walls below, he saw a rough circle of fifteen, new stars glowing bright down there and rocketing up between the clouds. The glowing plasma trails they left behind them all pointed straight up.
The flight of alien bandits saw the fifteen junks as the trap was sprung. The junks shot up at the bandits from between the cloud walls and fired four torpedoes apiece. The Squidy interceptors were smart enough to cut a turn to their high nine o'clock only to see more torpedoes rising up on that side and already closing on them.
The junks had waited low enough in the eye of the South Polar Vortex that they could accelerate up at the bandits and give all that extra speed to their torps when they launched them. They rocketed up out of the eye everywhere around the Squidies' fighters, launching a total of 60 torpedoes. The warspites used that speed to get around and above the red bandits before the aliens could evade, forming a tightening, spherical net.
The red bandits broke formation, jinked, and rocketed in three different directions, hoping to blast their way free. The torpedoes distributed themselves roughly evenly between the three targets and now, each red bandit was on its own and facing about twenty modified mk3 warspites.
The bandits whirled around on their jets and sliced across the black with their streams, trying desperately to cut themselves a hole. The torps they hit flared up and blinked out before they could properly detonate. The ones that got within 300 meters of the aliens and detonated didn't produce a standard fission reaction. They seemed to light-up and flare on the tip like an old s
tyle match as the warheads blew in puny reactions that produced barely enough energy to vaporize the casings and make a brief, dull, blue glow in the visible spectrum. It wasn't a malfunction. "We've got big X-rays! Big gamma! And neutrons! Swarms of fast-penetrating neutrons!" Dana shouted.
Chief Terrazzi and her engineers had turned 60 fusion torpedoes from explosive warheads into fizzlers – a kind of dud where the reaction never goes off properly and the material fizzles to produce almost no explosion, just a bunch of radiation. The Squidies fighter drones were shielded against radiation and the first torpedoes to silently flare blue next to a red bandit didn't appear to do a thing to it. The alien drone continued to evade and spin around and shoot down torpedoes as the warspites continued to close. Second and third fizzler torpedoes detonated at point-blank range. After Ram had seen one bandit take six hits and keep going, it appeared as if this plan wouldn't work, but Ram knew they didn't just need hits to be successful – they needed to get lucky, too.
Each of those torpedoes and all the radiation they threw was an attempt to get an armor and hull-penetrating neutron to strike some element of whatever the alien drones used for processors or memory and hopefully induce some kind of a fatal error – a soft kill. Ram hoped that a near hit on a bandit would lead to at least some small internal malfunctions that would allow subsequent torps to more easily catch them.
The alien fighter that broke first went to 3 o'clock high and took nine fizzler hits. It wasn't exactly flying straight when it broke free of the engagement, but it got away. Six torpedoes gave chase and nobody saw what happened after it went back over the limb of the gas giant, but before it dropped out of sight, it'd gained enough distance between it and the warspites chasing it to spin on maneuvering thrusters and stab at them. Most likely it got away.
The one that broke towards 10 o'clock high took even more fizzler torpedo hits. Eleven went off around it, and after it briefly tumbled from a maneuvering thruster malfunction, it turned tail and ran with five torps chasing it. They were falling behind when Ram last saw it.