DREADNOUGHT 2165 Read online

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  "Hey!"

  "I owned that dogfight, Gush. You and Paladin were my bitches. I could see it all – every move you could possibly make – every Marine running across the top of the bays... I even saw the dumbass look on the XO's face when I put practice rounds on the Marines that were charging him."

  Holdout said, "Take all the credit why don't you? I was there, too, sunshine."

  "Those were my kills," Dirty said.

  Holdout pointed to the ship's internal comms – the squack – a crude audio transducer in a dented metal box set above the hatch. "She keeps it up there."

  "You bitch!"

  "Relax, spas," Holdout said. "Squadron leader Jordo isn't going to take it away. He saw the way we flew. Jordo likes his pilots bad-ass and dangerous."

  Paladin was tall enough to reach the squack box without standing on anything, but he couldn't open it. His big paws shook it. Dirty sighed and said, "The transducer pops out from the center, ya' goon. Don't break it. You can reach inside."

  He gripped the edges of the circular module set in the front of the box and it came away in his hand, trailing actual wires. Paladin shook his head. "Hell of a ship." He groped inside and pulled his hand out of the narrow space holding an apparently seamless fifty-cal sabot round. He handed it to Jordo.

  Right away, Jordo felt how the ultra-high-density osmium and tungsten alloy round wasn't as heavy as it should have been. It had to be hollow inside. He turned it over in his hands looking for a button or a release or a seam of some kind. Dirty rolled her eyes and mimed a twisting motion with her hands holding it at top and bottom. "It unscrews," she said. "Here. Give it." She held her little hand out and Jordo put it in her bony fingers.

  "I'm the one that drilled it out and cut the threads," Holdout said.

  "Yeah, yeah," Dirty said. The lid was on tight and she had to press it to her belly and twist it like a stubborn jar to open it. Then, she held up the hollowed-out MA-48 railgun round. "Hold out your hand," she said to him. Dirty gently tapped the casing with her index finger and what came out in his palm looked like millimeter-long shards of glass.

  He looked at the way the light hit the crystals and swallowed the lump in his throat.

  Chapter Four

  Hardway would make for the Sol-Procyon transit, but first the carrier detoured to Earth. As the blue jewel spun under them in the black, ringed by battlestations, Dana Sellis asked Cozen, "What are we doing back here?" He only pointed from the command chair at the new contact blinking on the tactical display.

  The AT controller console projected an image of the approaching ship into the air and Ram Devlin could already see how wide and boxy it was. "That's a Bartok class transport ship." It had no visible guns.

  Comms crackled with static: "SCS Hardway, this is SC Perth-remote. We will guide the Charon in on your two-four-niner. Requesting clearance to set station 2km to starboard. Command transfer will be manual-only. We've got control until your people hit the bridge."

  "Clear it to approach," Cozen told Bolo from the Captain's chair.

  "Roger your last, Perth, clearance to approach. CAP will pass Charon through. You have priority."

  As she came into sight over the Indian Ocean, SCS Charon passed close to a convoy of inbound H3 tankers and showed her true scale by dwarfing them. That ship could hold five-thousand men. "Mr Devlin," Cozen said, "Your new command has arrived – a ship named after the ferryman that takes men across the river to hell." Cozen grinned like he'd made a joke, but since he'd kept his plan for this mission a secret, his officers didn't get it. He explained, "The Charon is the ship that will take Mr. Devlin to the Dreadnought's hull," Cozen said.

  Dana Sellis nodded at the projection of the approaching transport. "I'm reading IFF tags from over 5000 exosuits on that ship, but... but they're all reporting ice cold."

  "Perth-remote left the heat off for now," Cozen said. "Mr. Devlin knows why. Tell them, Mr. Devlin."

  "I imagine that's to keep the crew fresh," Ram said. "Apparently, everyone on-board my new command is already dead."

  *****

  Bolo and Pardue piloted the longboat over from Hardway. Ram and Lucy Elan stood behind them with Hollis and Chief Horcheese and a half-team of redsuits. After they cleared the bays and the carrier and came about, Charon loomed large in the cockpit canopy. "Don't bother to take your helmets off," Ram told them over local suit comms. "We're going in through the airlocks near the topside pads. And there's pressurized atmo inside, but the air is still too cold to breathe comfortably."

  "Why not use the landing bay?" Lucy asked.

  "You'll see."

  Bolo took them straight in at the Charon's port side. Faces stared out the portholes of that mammoth ship, hundreds, of them. Ram zoomed in using his helmet. They'd been posed there to look as if they were alive, but their mouths were wide-open in death like something had pried their jaws open to escape. If you didn't know they were dead, then their morbid faces expressed terror and surprise. The Squidies would never know the difference, he thought. We're as alien to them as they are to us.

  Pardue said, "Where did Cozen find five-thousand..."

  The port side of Charon fell away as Bolo flew up the transport's hull. He turned the longboat and set her down on the forward, topside pad, right behind the tower on the bow, the ship's command section.

  The airlocks were right in front of the pads and the longboat's running lights illuminated the two dead crewmen that had been fixed to ladder rungs outside. Their arms extended in welcome. "That ain't right," Pardue said.

  "Woods. Khazir." Chief Horcheese half-whispered it on comms. "Cut 'em down. We'll bring them inside with us."

  The dead had been posed everywhere inside Charon, seemingly in mockery of the living. They'd been leaned up against bulkheads in pairs all along the passageways as if they were having conversations and chatting each other up at a party.

  The bodies had been posed on Charon's bridge as well. The one at NAV had his hands fixed to the console. "Mr. Devlin," Khazir asked, "Do you want us to move these bodies out of the way?"

  "Leave them," he said. "We're going to run the ship from the boarding craft. We don't want to be up here on the bridge when the shooting starts." Ram found Charon's vault set in the aft bulkhead. Inside it was an input pad for his command codes. After he used them to take control of the ship, the remote command console unit tied in to Engineering, OPS and NAV blinked at him from where it had been taped to the bulkhead. He plugged the remote into his suit and gestured through the menus projected in his visor. He found the command interface for all the suit heaters and started warming up the five-thousand bodies on board. By the time they got to where they were going, those corpses had to appear more or less alive at first glance.

  "They won't stay posed like this," Pardue said. "Not when they thaw."

  Bolo backed into the body at the ship's OPS console and accidentally knocked it off its seat to the deck. When it hit, a voice cried out on local suit comms. It shouted in all their ears, "This is Lt. Barker of SCS Charon! Help us! We're under attack!"

  "What the shite!" Pardue kicked the frozen body out of fright and reflex. In the low gees it bounced off the console and came back at her.

  "Easy!" Ram told the pilot, "It's just a computer generated voice. Must be tied to the suit's accelerometers."

  "That's sick," Pardue said. "Why would they do that?"

  "So I can yuk it up watching you spas, Pardue," Hollis said, laughing at her along with with Woods and Khazir.

  "Acting Captain Ram Devlin," Lucy Elan said.

  "Major Elan..."

  "Take me below and show me the fun stuff." She grinned inside her helmet. "Show me the armored boarding craft. I want to see Harry's AB-1As. Show me the Ticks."

  *****

  One deck down, Ram opened the hatches to the port side bow lifeboat and what he showed Lucy Elan and Lt. Arroyo was anything but standard. The inside of the armored boarding craft was a low ceiling compartment with room for almost thirty, but l
ike on a tank, the space to fit the people had been only grudgingly ceded by the designers. Crash couches had been set where higher priority design requirements permitted.

  In the center of the deck was the equipment the craft had been built around. Above a circular hatch some four meters across was a PDB derrick – a rig to hold a vertically tracked plasma drill. "It's a '41," Hollis said. "Same model we have on the junks, but with a bigger bit." Beams to support it went from deck to ceiling.

  "It's all built around the drill," Ram said. "The magnetically focused plasma bit on that monster will cut through two-meters of solid, high-density belt-iron steel per minute."

  "How thick is the alien Dreadnought's armor?"

  He didn't have an answer for Arroyo. Nobody knew. And nobody was entirely sure what it was made of either.

  "It's cozy in here," Lucy said. "And we have six of these?"

  Ram nodded. "We'll launch two squads plus the drill team in each one. The Ticks are armored against the Squidies' small arms and their light shells."

  Lt. Arroyo shook his head. He wasn't convinced, "What about the aliens' main guns? Can't they just blow us off the hull?"

  "No ship is designed to shoot at its own hull," Ram said. "Once landed, the Ticks are only 4 meters high – low enough that the Dreadnought's recessed tower guns can't aim down at them. The Squidies will have to come out and pry us off with a crowbar. And before you ask: the Squidies' inertial negation and artificial gravity field extends six meters outside their hull. We won't get thrown off if that beast accelerates or maneuvers."

  "I wish we had more of these Ticks so we could field a larger force," Arroyo said. "We've got to do this with less than 150 shooters."

  Lucy Elan said, "If we get inside that alien battleship, 50 will be enough. Hey, how do we get outside?"

  "There." Ram pointed at rectangular airlock doors set in each side. "No airlocks. Just a thick, armored door."

  "And it's only 2 meters across," Arroyo said. "Great." Ram heard the sarcasm. "I hope we have at least one side to egress that's not under fire."

  "There's a topside hatch, too," Ram said. "But you have to exit through the topside turret. Each Tick has five turrets they're all 4x140s like the ones on the gunnery junks. One on each side and up top."

  "Ammo?"

  Ram ducked under a conduit and walked to the port turret. He slapped the feed running down to it from above. "Mix of sabot and range-det HE flak rounds. Not as much of it as I'd like. Good news is the guns all run off one central magazine. This way we won't end up with empty guns on one side where they're attacking and full guns on our safe side."

  "At least that part isn't ass-backwards," Arroyo said. "The rest is serious insanity."

  Ram opened the channel to the redsuits and Chief Horcheese. "How is my new command, Chief? Are we ship-shape?"

  "I'd hardly call us Bristol-fashioned, Mr. Devlin, but the preloaded ordnance all checks out."We're ready for action."

  Chapter Five

  After the trip to Barnard's Star, Tipperary breached space in a second hellfire conflagration and opened the Barnard-Altair Transit for Hardway and Charon.

  During the transit to Altair, Dana kept her eyes on the waving, foreign constellations visible at the end of the immeasurable tunnel. The NAV console and projection in front of her read 'ERROR' and with the exception of Hardway, Charon, and the breaching ship Tipperary at the center, the rest of the NAV projection was tinted red, expressing the OMNI-NAV's lack of confidence in any information displayed regarding a region roughly the size of the entire universe. Without a good starfix to locate itself, Hardway's navigational computer always got confused during FTL transit.

  Once Hardway rocketed through the veil of exotic particles skating across the mouth of the terminus and reentered normal space, the stars fixed themselves to the heavens again. "NAV console is coming back on line," Dana said. "We're at Altair, close to the third planet. We're fairly close to where they said we'd be."

  "Captain Elogin has a new navigator aboard Tipperary. He's a specialist in Noodie hypermass equations," Cozen said. "Send congratulations to the breaching ship. NAV, Lt. Sellis, what do you see?"

  "Passive LiDAR calls the system clear so far."

  "Look to the inner system," Cozen said. "That's where the UN spybird saw it."

  Bolo leaned into his console as he thumbed the comms for all Hardway air group squadrons. "All junks, all fighters, maintain alert. Standby."

  "I see something." Dana pointed to a shadow that hung in the NAV display like a specter. "There."

  In the glare of the system's massive sun Hardway's LiDAR had trouble seeing it at first. For the initial seconds it appeared on the display, it was only a ghost, a piece of darkness floating over the bridge like a malevolent shadow. "It's not one of ours. It's just over 5 million Ks out, hiding in Altair's glare," she said, "like it was waiting for us to come through the Transit."

  Cozen gripped the arms of the command chair. "But is it the right ship?"

  "Estimated size," Dana said, "800 meters." Hardway's computers compiled all the scarce photons its arrays could observe over those seconds and as it concatenated them, the alien vessel resolved into a dark and familiar hull. They couldn't yet see the armored towers that housed its particle beams, but already, they knew that ship. One feature identified it beyond doubt. Coming out of the sun it was hard to make out, but when it turned its port side to Hardway, it showed them the skull.

  The 500-meter human skull had been drawn with such willful disregard for actual human anatomy that anyone who looked at it could tell it was drawn by aliens. It was a caricature, wider than it was tall. The silvery paint smeared on the hull had been vaporized in places and painted over again. It was pockmarked with craters from point-blank detonations, but no Earth bomb or gun had ever breached that armor.

  This alien ship had halted the Sirius Offensive and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that if humans saw the Squidies' Dreadnought coming, the only option for survival was to run.

  "Active radar and LiDAR coming from the alien. It's lighting us up," Lt. Bergano said from the console behind Cozen. "It's looking us over." Twenty seconds after the active pulses bounced off Hardway, they arrived back at the Dreadnought and gave the enemy a clear view of the Privateer attack carrier and the lumbering Charon with resolution down to the millimeter.

  The Dreadnought turned slowly towards them again until all they could see of it was the line of its gun-studded bow. "It's coming for us," Cozen said. "Good."

  "Charon is spitting out gammas," Dana said. "Her reactors are sputtering. They're shutting down. Her engines are dead now. The transport is drifting."

  Dana had no idea whether or not the Squidies understood, but Cozen spoke to Ram Devlin over an open channel in case the aliens had acquired a proficiency in human languages. "Hardway to Charon... Interrogative: are you experiencing engine failure?"

  "That is correct, Hardway. We are experiencing engine failure. It will take hours to fix. Leave us. Save yourselves. Goodbye." Dana's eyes rolled as she heard the transmission. Ram Devlin had turned into a fine XO, but he was a lousy voice actor.

  "Your deaths will be avenged, Charon. God save your souls." Cozen seemed more practiced. He opened a channel to Tipperary. "Captain Elogin, can we reopen the transit to Barnard's Star?"

  "Not for...seventy-one minutes."

  "Acknowledged. Have your NAV follow Hardway on bearing... 315 true. We'll hide from the Dreadnought on the far side of the third planet. We're leaving Charon behind."

  *****

  The Lancers stood between their F-151 Bitzers in bay 12. They huddled together out of view of the cameras. Dirty unscrewed the dummy MA-48 round that held the compound she'd printed.

  Gusher said, "But you feel okay now, though, right?"

  "Yeah, sure," Dirty said. She winked every now and then without meaning to.

  "The AGC is going to scramble us any second," Paladin said. "Hurry it up. We should already be in our coffins."

&nb
sp; "Can't you just call it a cockpit for once?" Beads of sweat glistened on Gusher's forehead.

  "It's not my fault it looks like a coffin."

  "Hold out your hands." From the hollowed round, Dirty tapped out little piles of glass shard into the Lancers' palms – thumbnail-wide mountains of it. With every tiny movement of hand or eye, the light caught the crystals differently. It sparkled against the dirty orange palms of their exosuit gloves. Dirty said, "Eat it."

  Holdout had tasted it before and she took her time staring at the pile before she bent her head and ate it out of her palm. Jordo ate it the same way. It cut his tongue and the roof of his mouth. It tasted like metal. A second later, it all seemed to melt. The stinging glass shards were gone. There was nothing but bitter. "Ugh. That's awful."

  The bottom fell out of Jordo's stomach and his nostrils flared. "Alright," he said. "Hit your Bitzers and keep quiet on comms."

  Jordo put his bug-eyed flight helmet on and climbed the ladder. As the cockpit lid closed and he settled in, Harry Cozen spoke in his ear. "Now hear this. The Squidies' Dreadnought has taken the bait. She's coming for Charon. We will fire a single alpha strike at the aliens' battleship and then, Hardway and our breaching ship, Tipperary, will make for the far side of the third planet. We will pretend to hide while Commander Devlin springs his trap. That is all."

  "Is that it?" Paladin said. "What about us? We're the damn air-support!"

  "This is AGC Bolo to the 133rd Squadron. Launch bay doors open. All Lancers standby to scramble."

  "Roger that, Hardway AT," Jordo said. "Lancers are on-deck." Jordo plugged his helmet into the 151. The modded Dingo AI inside the machine wanted out of the bay. It wanted to hunt and kill. It was going to get its wish.

  The doors opened, and he got his first view of the system's ringed third planet. Its banded clouds hung dark and murky, but the rings themselves shone brilliantly in swollen Altair's light. As the carrier flew low over them, they rushed underneath, punctuated with black, starry gaps and rings between rings until Hardway steamed into the shadow of the gas planet itself. There, all you could see of the rings were glitters that appeared at random like bits of tumbling glass shard. The sight of it made Jordo's mouth taste like metal again.