The Otherworld Rebellion (War of Alien Aggression #9) Page 25

  Ram said, "I was hoping it wouldn't come to this," and ignored the way Hank shook his head as if it couldn't realistically have gone any other way. Ram switched to a separate comms channel and thumbed it. "Sajjada, Sajjada. This is Devlin. Take them in, Bix."

  The millstone voice came back fast over comms. "Acknowledged, we are 75 seconds from target."

  He called out to his squadron next. "All destroyers and cutters, this is Devlin. close on the Xihute hull and try to lure the surrounding fighters to you. Don't fire at the topside of the carrier. We want it dark up there. It's time to give our youngest Commodore his shot."

  "Any sign of them on LiDAR?" said Hank.

  "Not yet."

  Millet shouted it into their helmets on comms. "Bridge! You've got engines back!"

  "NAV," said Hank. "Follow the squadron in at best speed."

  32

  ICV Sajjada

  Bix and Em's junk closed on the immense Xihute battle carrier and the swarm of fighters still protecting it as stealthed as she could manage. The energy shunts couldn't suck any more up without more power and there wasn't any more power to give. As a det on the far side of the carrier's hull lit the fighters around it and threatened to throw more light on them than they could absorb, Bix Aider transferred control from the NAV to his stick and got ready to engage the junk's four, exceptionally large and bright outboard nacelles.

  "We are 50 seconds out," said Em. She looked forward, out through the canopy at the fat, twisted battle carrier passing into the planet's shadow. Glowing scattergun fire from the fleet of rafts and skiffs streaked above it, chasing the alien fighters still engaged with the Legion's interceptors.

  "Legion won most of the orbital space," he said.

  "Yeah, well, they still couldn't get more than a few warheads through at the carrier. For that job, they had to call us."

  The last eight destroyers and cutters came together with the last two Chitin-hulled Shediri warships and a few raiders. When the formation passed within effective range of the carrier, dozens of particle streams leaped from the tops of all four sets of towers, stabbing out at the slender hulls with nearly every gun they had and forcing Ram Devlin's squadron to break formation. He saw the targeting beams from the Shediri vessels pegging the carrier's towers. The thin streams of harmless charged particles shone like spider web in the instant before the Shediri frigates fired the discharge. It traveled right down the stream of charged particles flashing a crackling line like lightning that took a deep crater out of the carrier's armor in a splash of plasma and shower of sparks.

  A lightning bolt's flash revealed Hard Eight on Bix's port and Heartless Sal on his starboard side. Both of Split Aces' junks and the five pirate corsairs were easy to spot with the naked eye. LiDAR would have them for sure. "This is Bix, light 'em up and punch it!" The junks along with Hotjacket, Split Aces, Totoro, Smedly, and Elkhorn all lit their main engines and nacelles, spitting out bright plasma as they jinked to port and starboard straining their modules on their frames. Elkhorn pulled ahead quick with only a few small modules on her spine and a tug's engine behind her.

  The guns on the carrier shifted their fire to the eight small, unarmored craft descending on their topside, and the streams ripped past to starboard side only a fraction of a second after he jinked them to port. Bix came back on line for the topside of the carrier while the Xihute thrust and slashed at the vacuum all around them. Totoro took a hit that burst and shredded her modules and sliced her spine. The foundered halves tumbled, still in line, still on target.

  He pushed Sajjada as hard as she would go safely and then gave it a little more until he could feel the nacelles and the mains at the rear guttering with too much pressure and shaking the junk as they threatened to blow. "Fifteen seconds now at this speed," said Em. "I'm opening the bays." After she hammered the det switch, the doors blew off the two, mining containers on the underside of the junk's bow and flew ahead of them until he jinked to avoid a waving particle stream.

  The emitters on the gun towers of the carrier fired frantically now. He could almost read the panic in them as they stabbed and slashed. To starboard, Dell Pardue piloted Split Aces like a fighter, spiraling the junk tender around an incoming beam to gain a final approach the Xihute gunners didn't expect. She was the first to drop her payload. Split Aces spun sideways showing her starboard side as she vectored thrust in the same direction to hit the brakes. The mines flew out of her open bays and hurtled down towards the hull of the Xihute battle carrier. As Split Aces pulled out of the dive, they impacted, digging in deep and holding fast to the enemy hull while they ticked away their fuses.

  "Mark the count! Ten seconds!" Adderly shouted it.

  Bix began to count in his head as the hull of the carrier and the waving net of particle streams rushed at them and quickly filled the canopy. "Here it comes! Now, now, now," she shouted in his helmet as he rotated the four nacelles and vectored thrust hard to decelerate while maintaining the angle of the junk. It was the only thing aiming the string of two-dozen crude fusion mines that inertia carried out the front of the mining containers. For an extended moment, they seemed to sail out slowly and just fly with his junk. He pulled away before he got to see the first of them hit and jinked so hard to starboard the gees blurred his vision.

  Adderly called out from below, "Hit! Hit! Five seconds to first det!"

  "Punch it!" she cried and he tried to find the path that wouldn't be someone's exit vector after the dive, but there was no time to check the NAV, only time to grit his teeth and accelerate the junk as hard as he could without turning them to spam in their suits.

  He only saw five boats pull away from the carrier. The Xihute guns chased them briefly. In the last second that Adderly counted down before the mines began to blow, Bix looked back over his shoulder at the Xihute.

  The initial flashes made his helmet dim, but as the rebel yells went up all over comms and whooped and howled in his helmet, the light from the first dets just seemed to grow larger. More and more of the mines detonated until nothing could be seen of the battle carrier but the faint hint of its edges. When the last of the flashes faded, he still couldn't see the top side of the ship; the expanding spheres of plasma were still too bright. When they'd grown out into the vacuum and expanded to softly burning clouds, he saw the surface of the hull then and the sounds of the human and Shediri cheers in his helmet turned tinny and bitter with the sight of it.

  The Xihute battle carrier was pocked with starburst vape craters 10m-deep up and down her length. The metal at the centers of them burned hot and glowed in his helmet on thermal, but no matter where he looked, he couldn't find a single breach. Nowhere did their chlorine atmo vent from the hull and no firestorms jetted out of mortal wounds.

  "It...it didn't do anything at all," Em said. Bix jinked hard to avoid the streams of fire that now erupted again from the battle carrier's armored spire towers, but Em just kept staring through the canopy in shock. "That was it. That was all we had," she said. "It wasn't...it wasn't enough."

  The despair hit Bix too in that moment and the rage at his own futility made him want to spin the junk on its nacelles and ram the Xihute. Out the starboard side of the cockpit he saw two more destroyers take raking hits up their sides that cut them so they bled metal and exosuits. Bix saw them losing this battle. He saw it clear and terrible in his mind and his guts tied up in a knot until the flashes of the weapons fire revealed a stealthed Shediri corvette rising up through the atmo fast, on course to intercept the carrier.

  "Is that the Ketok?"

  He didn't answer. Bix was lost in the strange feeling creeping over him like a sunrise casting warmth over his shivering body. It melted away his fear and his anger. He glanced over at Em and she stared back at him in astonishment, smiling thinly and shaking her head the way she always did at good luck. "Do you feel that?"

  The Shediri vessel dropped its stealth as it popped out of the atmo and emerged less than 2000Ks from target, right underneath the Xihute battl
e carrier.

  33

  The Ketok

  Upper atmosphere

  In the last moments of the ascent, Samhain felt the Weirdling artifact's anticipation grow to a frenzy. When he looked back at Auntie Kill behind him, he could see the feeling in her, too. He heard it in the Shediri monks' chanting and chitin thumping under their suits. He felt as if he'd starved for longer than he could remember and only now was he being fed. It would have felt like a kind of heaven to him, but he remembered that what gave the artifact such joy was the thousands upon thousands of Xihute sailors and pilots and marines it was about to consume.

  The dropships on the surface held only hundreds; they were an appetizer. The crew of the 5000-meter carrier above was the meal it wanted. "Soon, my lovely creature, soon," Devlin's ex-wife cooed to it on comms as the Ketok broke through the topmost layer of atmo and the haze of thin plasma riding the curve of their drive field disappeared, leaving nothing between them and the Xihute battle carrier but 1900Ks of vacuum.

  She spoke breathy into comms. "Bridge, nix the power to the n-space shunts and kill the stealth. Route everything to my deck gun."

  As they all zoomed in on the battle carrier with their helmets, the intensity of the artifact's hunger and excitement increased as if it too was glimpsing the curving twist of the Xihute's enormous ship at the very same moment. "That's a beautiful sight, Mr. Samhain," she said as he lined up the targeting reticule over the center of the carrier's keel, halfway 'round its curving hull. He didn't want to agree with her, but it was a beautiful sight. Not a lick of fear betrayed his thoughts as the first of the beams stabbed out from the carrier's batteries and missed them by only a few hundred meters.

  The Shediri chief quietly hissed and clicked in his ear. "Ready to fire."

  She cried, "Now, Mr. Samhain, fire the cannon!"

  The ecstasy hit even before his thumbs depressed the two buttons, but once the beam fired, the feeling passed over him and through him in a heavenly wave. Auntie Kill cried out and the Shediri monks all made a noise like bagpipes as the beam passed through the Weirdling artifact and emerged on the other side over a meter wide, nearly the same diameter as the artifact itself. It extended up and out to middle orbit and plunged into the keelside armor of the Xihute ship. The drilling beam sprayed clouds of plasma and hot ejecta from the wound. In just a few seconds, the volcano they'd created in the hull of the carrier spewed jets of plasma and burning atmo as the beam penetrated. The outer hull of the battle carrier swelled and the armor plates cracked around the wound as the beam continued to drill.

  It was more like the harnessed radiation jet from a small nova than any weapon made by puny mortal hands. Samhain felt the slugs dying in there, withering and burning alive in firestorms or being boiled away by scatter from the amplified beam reflecting inside the hull. When the last of the battle carrier's decks were filled with the feeding fire and it jetted molten metal from the bays, they all felt the joy radiating from the Weirdling's creation. Martin Samhain didn't take his thumbs off the triggers until the deck cannon behind him burned out its feeds. He tried to shake his head clear as his helmet filled with victory cries and the sated artifact changed shape next to him slowly, exuding satisfaction.

  34

  Absolom's Revenge

  Middle Orbit

  Scilla Price had held on during the battle locked in the captain's quarters wearing her exosuit and helmet minus, of course, the comms modules that Hank had ripped out to keep her quiet. That was understandable, she told herself. Scilla considered herself quite generous to be so bloody understanding when he'd left her to potentially die alone, melted away or crushed by a shockwave that burst her in her suit.

  Now, as she drank from a bottle Hank Devlin had earlier rejected, the battle had clearly been over for some time, but for the last hour she'd had only the taste of the exuberance pervading the ship to let her know they'd defeated the Xihute's battle group. Hank certainly hadn't come to see if her skull had been dashed against a bulkhead or if she lay crumpled in a broken heap. As she took another swig, she conceded that yes, the compartment was at the base of the command tower and he knew it hadn't been hit, but what a...a cad. Yes, he was a cad and a scoundrel for leaving her locked up like this for so long without even a hint of consideration. She understood there was all that searching and rescuing to be done, but dammit, Hank. She drank again and thought he'd deserve the embarrassment he got when she broke out.

  The hatch lock was easy. They hadn't reprogrammed the software in her suit when Hank took the comms module and finding a standard fit cable to patch one to the other was a simple matter. The lock's data port was even accessible since it was only to keep people out, not in. It was a shame she had to tear into the helmet lining and cut through the shock pads to pop the inner panels and get at the part of the suitcomp she needed, but finding an emergency helmet on a recently captured Staas Company Cutter wouldn't be hard.

  The exploratory script took five minutes to write and launch. The scrubbing program that looked for easy hits took another two, but it scored three out of five codes based mostly on luck and left her only two to solve manually. In another six minutes she was drunker, and in six and a half minutes, the lock popped.

  She sighed. Even the easy ones feel good to crack.

  Outside in the passage Scilla tasted the triumph in the crewmen she passed immediately. She also tasted the sheer relief that came with victory and she soaked both those things up from their smiles and their eyes and found a part of her that had felt that way once or twice. It didn't feel that way now, but she indulged the absence there so that it flooded with the thoughts in the air around her and let her reflect back her own version so her smile really was genuine. She thought about how she was supposed to be there as she rounded the corner and ducked out of sight into the tiny compartment next to the lifeboat hatch where the emergency helmets were always stored. She pulled the bag off a shiny, standard fit helmet with the ship's old name, SCS Cornwall, painted on it.

  After the lock cycled, she swung open the port-side external airlock hatch and stepped onto a ledge on the hull of the command tower. Three decks up were the lights of the bridge. Out in front of her, the wreckage of the battle for Otherworld stretched in clouds around the day side of the planet some 2000 Ks below. The smaller pieces of debris tumbled and caught the light from Alcyone and were colored red and orange by the burning ships and pieces of foundered hull drifting around the planet. She thought the big pieces would all auger in and burn up in a few weeks at most, but the smaller bits, the fragments of insulation and foil and suit liners would form thin rings around the planet along with what was left of the unrecoverable dead.

  Scilla hugged the hull as a longboat passed to port. She followed its path with her eye and finally saw the ruined Xihute cruiser, still drifting in orbit, nothing more than a burning tomb now. The craters on the top showed that the armor had been far thicker than a UNS battleship's. She suspected the gaping wound that killed it might go all the way through, but there was no time to find out. She knew what killed it; Samhain's Weirdling toy thought its joy so loud when it blasted the carrier that she'd almost been incapacitated with it herself. She imagined their ancient device carried at the head of battle, spurring on the vanguard like with god-like firepower and shivered.

  While the lights and engine flares of the SAR teams darted through the debris fields, Scilla composed, encoded and sent a burst transmission from the underpowered transmitter in the stolen helmet. The reply came surprisingly fast - less than twenty seconds. No further than the orbit of the 2nd moon, she thought...probably closer if she knew Pavic.

  The reply hadn't been encrypted in any way so she examined the maps 4SI had sent showing the updated positions of the ships in the Alcyone system. The UNS battleship Westmoreland and its escorts that had been guarding the fifth planet with the home fleet had sortied. They were halfway around the star already and on course for Otherworld. Westmoreland would be wanting the artifact, she thought as she
stepped into the airlock hatch and closed it.

  It cycled until the green light told her the pressure had been equalized. As she reached for the hatch, she felt somebody on the other side wasn't happy like the rest of them. Someone was cross. That was the word. Hank Devlin was cross; she could tell. Why did he have to be so bloody serious?

  Scilla Price removed her helmet before she spun the hatch and swung it open to see Hank frowning at her. The motion in Zi'vt's mandibles indicated he was amused so she winked at the bug.

  "What were you doing out there?"

  "I'll tell you everything, dear Hank. Even though you've been an absolute cad to me. My price is a drink."

  "You're drunk now, he said."

  "Oh, you're going to wish you were drunk too when you see what I've got."

  Once they got inside the captain's quarters, closed the hatch, and Hank deployed counter-surveillance, Scilla didn't feel like explaining anymore so she simply put the standard fit helmet on his head and let him gesture through the control menus until he found the map.

  She tried to drink Commodore Grieve's lesser scotch without tasting it as she watched the reaction on Hank's face. Hank had a good poker face. When he saw the approaching UNS battleship and its escorts, his eyes only widened slightly, but the usual ruddy color was gone from his cheeks after he lifted the helmet off his head. He looked at her with a curious blend of resignation and resolve. "I want to talk to him."

  "Who?"

  "Don't be coy. I want Balthus Pavic. I want to talk to the Director. If he responded to your transmission that quickly, he's here at Alcyone, maybe even close by."

  She grinned at Hank. "Ready to sign a deal with the devil are you? That's probably a fine idea. The UNS battleship coming this way wants what you have and probably won't take no for an answer without Pavic's intervention. That wouldn't be a pretty fight. That would be a good one to avoid."