2166 - FORCE LIBERTY Page 3

  "Bighorn has the contact. It's...moving."

  "Diminishing range...it's rising."

  Crunch and the rest of them zoomed in with their flight helmets to discriminate the cold speck from the solar storms. It appeared in the outer wisps of raging photosphere. They zoomed in further to see a shadow, a specter in the flames.

  "It's still ascending."

  Its lines grew less diffuse as the bubble of calm surrounding the towering spires now surfaced. As the vessel and its cowl emerged, the shape of the ovoid shield that protected it was fully revealed along with its scale. "It's...it's sixteen Ks from tip to tip," Bighorn said.

  "Is that an Imperium warship?" Nobody answered Crunch's question.

  "This is Hardway, transmit us your data, Bighorn, and get your flight out of there. RTB at max speed."

  "Acknowledged, Hardway, you don't have to tell us twice."

  "It's accelerating. The bandit is now approaching fast with maximally decreasing range and bearing. It's heading for our ju-" The comms channel filled with a loud and painful shrieking until Crunch's flight helmet filtered out whatever it was.

  "Magnetic Arrays are spiking. They're going crazy. We...we're in a new electromagnetic line. It loops from the alien right through Fillie's Flank."

  Crunch looked for the mag line, but he couldn't see anything. You can't see electromagnetism, only its effect on something. You need a minimum density of plasma. Then, it glows like the northern lights.

  "Surge, surge!"

  "We're getting hit with an electron stream." The voice of the junk's EWO fuzzed-out on comms. "It's not too bad yet."

  The alien sped at them, and a flash from the tips of its spires was the only warning before it attacked. A glowing, arcing cloud, spinning like a ball of electrified plasma formed in front of it and tore out across space, following the magnetic loop that now connected the alien ship to the junks.

  They pivoted on their maneuvering nacelles like they were fighters, sucked up the inertial gees, and blasted themselves out of there as fast as they could. A few seconds later, the EWOs on all three boats confirmed the looping, artificial magnetic line that had fallen over the formation was still following them. So was the plasma weapon the alien had fired.

  It flew down the line of the projected mag field like a train on a track, spinning as it came and changing shape. Halfway to target, the cloud of charged plasma looked like a young spiral galaxy. It even shot jets of particles out its poles ahead of it and behind it along the line of charge.

  The junks couldn't shake it, and they disobeyed orders then, but Crunch didn't see how anyone could blame them. All three of them came about and pointed their noses at the alien, still 15 million Ks away from them. When they launched their torpedoes, the flare from the engines blotted the junks out for a moment. When he could see them again, the junks had already come back on course, chasing Hardway and the task force and trying to escape.

  The mk3 warspite torpedoes sped together towards their target as the flight of junks widened their formation, putting 10Ks between them. "We're clear," Pandy reported. "We have negative artificial magnetic fields."

  "Bighorn is also clear."

  Ten seconds later, the alien weapon finished its trip down the magnetic field line. Spiral arms spun across five kilometers as the fast-rotating disk of electrified plasma hit Fillie's Flank and obliterated her with a flash and spray of small debris. Most of her sublimed to gas and ionized to plasma that spread outwards from the impact and glowed with charge like a lurid nebula.

  The warspite torpedoes they'd fired lit off together against the shield, far away from the spires of the alien ship. The blossoming fission detonations did little more than draw the ovoid shape of the energy shield around the alien more clearly. None of the torpedoes managed to penetrate.

  The alien took Pandy next and then Bighorn.

  Crunch's flight of Kodiaks followed their orders and they ran. And when that nightmare ship that had come out of the sun lassoed them with a magnetic line and fired, they flew as fast and evasively as they could. No matter what they did, they couldn't outrun or outfly the storm of plasma it hurled at them. That futility was the most frustrating part of it. All the training, all their preparation....none of it made any difference against that weapon.

  The horror of his own impending obliteration seemed to pale in comparison to the torture of watching those terrible, spiraling nebulae fly out and wipe his fellow pilots from the sky. But when his turn finally came, he found he was wrong. Watching the alien plasma weapon come for him across the starry black was worse, much worse.

  SCS Hardway

  "Hardway, Special Envoy Gilead says the task force is to make for the transit at Guerrero's top speed. Do not engage the unknown ship."

  Ram thumbed into comms from the arm of the command chair. "This is Devlin. Let me speak with Gilead."

  The UN Envoy's voice was on the channel in seconds. Ram could picture the big bones of Gilead's face moving under his skin as he spoke. "We're running, Devlin. Fall in line."

  "Mr. Gilead, I believe if we combine our firepo-"

  "You're a mercenary, Commodore. You've got a big hammer so you see everything as a nail that needs to be hit. It's no surprise you want to start a battle, but our mission isn't to scrap with unknown ships. Our mission is to get to Shedir and open relations."

  "What if that's an Imperium shi-"

  "This isn't a discussion, Devlin. And don't come to me over Anton Cyning's head again. It's bad enough for me just having one of you to explain my decisions to." Gilead killed the channel.

  "A charmer in charge, that Wilhelm Gilead," said Cyning.

  "Stand down from battlestations," Ram said, "NAV, come back on course for the transit. Pardue, recall the alert squadrons. Biko, stand down the gun batteries and damage control teams." Anton Cyning, the company man stood then as if there was something he wanted to say. "Mr. Cyning, we've just lost three junks and four interceptors to what was likely an Imperium warship. Would you mind telling me why my attack carrier and the UN's largest battleship were just ordered to turn and run from a fight?"

  "Because the UN Envoy knows we can't fight that," Cyning said. "In fact, he's already informed me through the diplomatic console that he'll be establishing secrecy around this entire encounter. I am, in fact, giving orders similar to his and issuing a special directive to all hands aboard the Staas Company ships of this task force."

  "And that directive is?"

  "This encounter did not happen. Every person in this task force will be sworn to secrecy regarding this non-occurrence or face prison as outlined in their contracts. It will not be spoken of ever. It did not occur."

  "That's a lie because 28 of my pilots and crewmen are dead."

  "It's a necessary lie," Cyning said. Ram had already suffered enough of those for a lifetime. He didn't plan to go along with any more of them. "The crews of all Staas ships will maintain this lie as does the crew of Guerrero under Gilead's orders. There was an accident. An unexpected solar flare of inescapable violence and breadth. I'll write the actual report if you won't, Devlin. I certainly didn't expect push-back on this. Not from you."

  "We need to group our ships and fight. Maybe massed firepower can overcome it."

  Cyning almost laughed at him. "Commodore Devlin, did you not witness that vessel's power? We have no way to fight that ship. Not with one torpedo or a thousand. No railgun salvo we can launch will breach its shield. That is the real secret that must not get out. It cannot even be known that we have faced this opposition let alone that we have found ourselves inferior. If it became known to the other species indigenous to our local space that we couldn't stand up to the Imperium, then it would make forming alliances well-nigh impossible. We have defeated the Squidies, and now, Humans appear to be strong allies - strong enough maybe to protect the Shediri against the Imperium should they choose to secede and ally with us in our struggle. But they won't side with us if they think we're weak."

  "But you say
we can't actually protect them from that Imperium ship."

  "We can't protect them from the Imperium yet, but with the technologies we gain from the Shediri we'll have new weapons and we will be able to defeat the Imperium's ships."

  "There's a lot of 'if's' in that plan," he said. "It will find us, Mr. Cyning," said Ram. "That ship will follow us and it will find us and we will be forced to fight it. I'm going to demand that the UN Envoy to abort the mission until we can proceed with more firepower."

  "He won't abort." Cyning said, "Neither would I. We left that thing behind in the Beta Ceti system, Devlin. We could have gone to seven different systems after Phonecis. It simply doesn't know which way we went. We'll meet with the Shediri, acquire the tech we need to help us against the Imperium ships, and our forces will be gone from the system long before that monster finds us."

  4

  SCS Hardway

  Seven more transits and fourteen hours later, Ram Devlin listened to the reports from his Air Group Commander as the task force neared its destination. "Hellcat Squadron is about to clear the terminal membrane and enter the Shedir system. Twenty seconds until threshold." Pardue thumbed comms to her bays and squadrons, "Bay doors open in twenty-five..."

  Out through the windows of the bridge, past the launch bays and gun batteries, the cold blue flares from the F-223 interceptors flew in four sets of diamond formations, rocketing ahead of the carrier and the task force down the last stretch of twisted, fire-walled, transit-space. The stars as seen from the Shedir system loomed large ahead of them. "The fighters are exiting."

  From the front or the back, the F-223's hull shape and four, arm-mounted thrusters gave the Sky Jacks silhouettes like flying skulls and crossbones. The sixteen fighters picked up plasma from the terminus membrane and entered the Shedir system trailing fire.

  "Hardway, this is Hellcat 1-1, we are in-system, repeat, we are in-system. LiDAR shows multiple small contacts. Thousands of them. All outside our threat zone. All of them small. Passive arrays detecting possible comms traffic, possible reactor sigs. Closest contacts now moving with increasing range and bearing. Far as we can see the Shediri are scattering like we spooked 'em."

  The carrier's bowplate burst through the shimmering skin of the terminus, and Hardway flew into the system with veils of plasma trailing from her bow and midships gun batteries. All at once, the waving walls of the transit were gone, replaced with the blackness of space and the raw light of Shedir.

  Ram saw the contacts Hellcat 1-1 was talking about as Biko coordinated the incoming imagery and projected a false-scale representation into the air at the front of the bridge.

  The small vessels swarmed around the fourth planet and a couple of moons orbiting the system's minor gas giant. Biko isolated a few ships traveling together among the closest contacts and used the carrier's arrays to zoom in. "They're three-hundred-twelve million Ks away," he said. The image assembled from stray photons was grainy. "Thirty meters is the biggest one I see," Biko said. "How do they move cargo?"

  The Shediri ships were too distant to resolve the level of detail he wanted without a return from a radar bounce, but all the craft he saw looked like small utility craft - like Staas Company junks, but only half their size. "No visible guns," Devlin said.

  "Guerrero will enter the system in ten seconds," said Pardue.

  "Some of the alien ships are painted. Look." In some regions around the 4th planet and the gas giant's moons, many of the hulls sported what looked to Ram's human eye to be a kind of dazzle camouflage. The black and white stripes and geometric shapes must have been for looks because it did nothing to hide their ships from LiDAR or radar.

  "War paint," Pardue said. "Looks like they're wearing war paint."

  "You see any engines? Any plasma exhaust?"

  "Nothing. They sure don't show up on IR much. They're stealthy."

  UNS Guerrero's bow plate hit so much of the membrane at once that she knocked the high-energy particles skating there out into the system ahead of her like a mist. As the fireworks faded, her sixteen main gunports opened and the darkness inside them drew a dotted, black ring around the edges of her bow armor. She streaked into the system looking grand and unstoppable in a way that made Ram's scalp tingle.

  Little Taipan splashed into the system next like an armored keep on fire. She made for the carrier's side and got out of the breaching ship's way.

  "All task force ships are now in system," Biko said. "We're getting the signal from Gilead on Taipan. He says to come about and head straight for the fourth planet following him as prearranged."

  "NAV, you have the flight plan. Let Gilead set the pace." Wei nodded at his orders.

  In the time it took the task force to cross the system to the fourth planet, no bogies or bandits buzzed them and no active EM sources painted them with radar or LiDAR bursts. "These aliens seem to have manners," Cyning said.

  The Shediri did more than make way for the task force. By the time the forward fighter elements of Hellcat Squadron came within a million Ks of the fourth planet's pinkish clouds, not a single Shediri vessel remained in sight over the planet or across the entire system. Even the swarm around the distant gas giant's moons had hidden themselves.

  "It looks like they're laying low," Biko said.

  "I'd run and hide, too," Ram said. "An attack carrier with a full air wing and a UN capitol ship make an intimidating pair."

  "We must show strength," Cyning said.

  "We go any closer to that planet with all this firepower," Pardue joked, "We're gonna invade this planet without even meaning to."

  Cyning must have thought that was funny because the company man's lips curled. "This is not gunboat diplomacy, Lt. Commander Pardue. Our muscle flexing is just to show ourselves to be strong allies - allies who can help protect them. If Earth wanted to invade, the UN would have hired and brought more Privateer carriers than just Hardway."

  "All Hellcat flight elements will hold position with the rest of the task force in geosynchronous orbit over the capital city as planned," Pardue said. Out in front of the carrier, the plasma flares from the Sky Jacks of Hellcat Squadron all veered high to three o'clock and began a soft deceleration turn.

  Taipan steamed ahead now to descend into the planet's atmosphere alone, an armored keep against the pink clouds. She receded and shrank against that lurid rose planet as the task force waited above. The whole time, Ram couldn't get the fearful thought out of his mind that he'd suddenly lost something.

  Neon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Lightning made the atmo glow all around the storms on the night side and some sort of algae made the seas shine almost as brightly as the alien cities along the coastline. In the fringes of dawn where Taipan was landing, he could see water and clouds and foliage-covered continents. That pinkish color seemed to infect everything.

  The rose tint of the atmo seemed to stain her hull as Taipan slowly sank. It took a lot of power for a ship's pinch to counter that much gravitational pull for that long. He decided the officer Dana put at the NAV was showing off for the Shediri how much reactor power they had because that ship lowered itself down so slowly that she didn't even cook her belly on the way in. When she hit the wet layers, she trailed thin steam behind her. When she hit the rose-colored clouds, she punched a neat hole and was gone from sight.

  SCS Taipan

  "Taipan, this is Hardway." Captain Dana Sellis heard Ram's voice. It should have been his comms officer calling from the carrier, not him. "We'll be maintaining an open channel with your bridge throughout your descent and the contact ceremony."

  "Roger that, Hardway," Lt. Weiss told the commodore from the comms station.

  She missed the bridge of the carrier, but there's nothing like having your own ship. She'd gotten the briefest taste of it on Hardway. For eighteen months, she'd take any watch to sit in the carrier's command chair. Now, she was a captain. Ram had given her responsibility for Taipan and everyone aboard. It was all her responsibility from bow to stern, but it felt right - like she
was finally in a position to make sure things went the way they were supposed to.

  Ram said, "We show Taipan descending with negligible drift, you're coming down right on top of the prearranged landing zone. Plenty of alien radar lighting you up now."

  This time, she answered him herself. "Roger that, Hardway. Our arrays can see it. We've got this." Ram Devlin gave her the ship. He should let her do her job. "We'll keep the line open."

  Dana had strapped herself into her command chair as a precaution against turbulence, but, contrary to all sound advice, UN Special Envoy Gilead insisted on standing at the front of the bridge, holding the rail, and looking out on the pinkish atmo and clouds like he'd probably imagined himself doing in this historic moment. Once they hit the wetter denser atmo, the chop nearly threw him off his feet. There was nothing to see then but steam, but still, he held on to the rail, sticking to his choice.

  "We're coming down on the prearranged coordinates on target and on schedule," Lt. Skolds reported from the NAV console on Dana's right.

  "I'm reading 95km/h winds out there," said her executive officer, Reitz.

  "Compensating for drift with bursts from the chemical thrusters. And...we are still on target," said Skolds.

  When they broke through the undulating, rosy cloud layer, it fell away above them looking like a rippling liquid frozen in time. Below, coastline. "Their oceans look green," Gilead said.

  "It's an algae," Reitz said from the Ops Con. "If I'm reading this right."

  She said, "Give me a projection of the continent and the coast below."

  It appeared in the air over the front of the bridge, and Gilead had to move back to see it properly. The verdant waters washed white against black sands on reddish shores, spotted with development - rounded structures built along straight lines that all led to their destination.

  "That's the capital city," Gilead said. Directly below, the reddish color of the native foliage was almost completely absent. It had been replaced by whitish, processed stone, an extruded organic cement maybe, great expanses of it in varying shades, all arranged in discrete, radial organizations.