DREADNOUGHT 2165 Page 4

  Below, in the dark banded clouds of the night side, lightning flashed in the murk and shot upwards in 600km sprites shaped like clusters of jellyfish. They appeared, and they were gone. It all happened in less than 80 microseconds. That was too fast for a human eye and mind to hold, but now, he watched them grow as slow as smoke puffs from a fire. He almost grew impatient waiting for the next, laggard branches of slow-crackling zap to appear.

  "Let's get on with it!" Paladin's voice yanked Jordo back into his cockpit. "How long until they scramble us?"

  "I am freakin' itchin' to go, go, go!" Gusher retracted the three legs on his Bitzer and floated the fighter above the deck, shifting back and forth with miniscule jitter-thrusts from the maneuvering jets. Holdout and Paladin and a few others did it too. It wasn't easy.

  "Keep the fighters on the deck until we scramble," Jordo said. "You're making the redsuits nervous." The maintenance crew that had been loitering for the view were already making for the airlock just in case one of the over-eager Lancers hit the thrust and slammed them with a blast of exhaust. Floating and shifting their fighters back and forth within a half-meter like that took about ten corrections a second. Jordo looked around and saw half his squadron doing it as casually as if they were chewing gum.

  "Dammit, launch the Lancers!"

  "Let's go!"

  Air Group Commander Bolo's voice spoke in their ears again. "Lancers, standby to launch. Charon has engaged the Dreadnought."

  *****

  Ram left the data feed from the Charon's bridge open to all the crewmen he'd brought and to Lucy's platoon as well. He'd originally thought that while they were strapped in the six boarding craft, waiting to launch, it was better for them to be tactically aware. Ram now questioned that decision as he watched the feed from the Charon's bridge projected in the visor of his helmet and saw the alien battleship up close. It came for them like a slow falling mountain. Its slopes were studded with towers across its breadth. Altair drew long shadows with them, striping the Squidy battleship's dark hull. Those guns would open up soon. All his men could see the same thing he saw and he wouldn't blame them for felling terror.

  Lucy Elan watched the same feed Ram watched projected in her helmet and she snickered at it on local comms. Her eyes looked devilish in her helmet's red light as if it was the Squidies that should be worried.

  The Dreadnought loomed over Charon only a few hundred meters away and showed them its port side, the side with the human skull on it. It showed them what it came for. Ram looked it right between those crudely painted eye sockets and steeled his voice to hide his own fear that this battle couldn't be won. "All boarding craft, standby and brace for enemy fire."

  The particle beams stabbed out from the Dreadnought's guns and the razor-straight matter streams cut fiery gouges across Charon's hull in fifty places. Already, the atmo vented from her bulkheads. Hundreds of warmed corpses blew out into the black to spin towards the hull of the Dreadnought. They all cried out with computer-generated last words before the Squidies' small-bore streams sliced them into pieces.

  Harry Cozen's secret boarding craft, the Ticks, had been mounted on Charon's underside, where its lifeboats should have been. Using the remote helm, Ram leaned the Charon's blocky hull to port and into the attack. That way, the beams wouldn't rip through the lowest decks and the lifeboats first.

  The remote view from the bridge he saw in his helmet transfixed him. The alien Dreadnought hypnotized him with a hundred different beams like pale searchlights. They waved across the blackness, tearing metal like claws. Passageways and bulkheads rippled with internal shock waves. In sections containing pressurized atmosphere, it compressed so fast and so forcefully that it ignited. Firestorms filled the decks. Bodies blew out into space trailing zero-gee flame.

  The fat-bellied transport shuddered and wrenched and twisted. Its frame buckled and bent, and the vibrations that came up into the Tick and up into Ram's suit helmet sounded like a dying groan. "Now or never," Ram said.

  Lucy shouted, "Do it!"

  The launch bay wasn't far from the bottom of the ship where the boarding craft rode and even through all the shaking, Ram felt it when the explosives blew the doors off. They tumbled across the open space between the hulking transport and the Dreadnought like wrinkled pieces of paper. .3 seconds later, 88 fusion-tipped, Mk3 warspite torpedoes blasted out of the Charon's launch bay together and hurled themselves at the 800-meter-wide, tower-studded hull of the alien battleship.

  Ram didn't fool himself. The Squidies probably weren't even scared. He bet they were surprised, though. More importantly, when 43 of those torpedoes launched from Charon's bays successfully dodged the faster, small-bore particle streams and crossed the 300-meter gap between the two ships to detonate all across the alien hull, the Squidies went blind.

  The warheads threw so much energy across such a wide swath of the spectrum that for a precious few seconds, whatever sensors they had became useless. While their overloaded arrays recovered, all either ship could see was static and radiation.

  "This is it; launching missiles." Ram gestured at the command menus projected in his helmet and launched the second salvo. 24 chemically propelled warheads blasted out the far side of the transport ship and ripped around Charon to dive at the blinded Dreadnought. Instead of detonating against the hull, they skimmed low, and flew closely along it, just over the towers.

  The missiles flew over the blinded beast undetected and unchecked. The simple, solid-propellant rocket engines still functioned in radiation that would have knocked out the reactors and engines driving any torpedo. When they'd flown across the skull and reached the aft edge of the battleship's hull where the alien engines' exhaust ports spat rosy plasma, they ripped 80-gee button-hook turns, dove into the half-K-wide river of exhaust, and detonated.

  The missiles' fission detonations were well-nigh harmless to the Dreadnought on their own, but they sent shock waves up the plasma exhaust stream coming from its engines. Ram couldn't see the extent of the damage the compressive wave did to the battleship's propulsion systems, but the river of rosy plasma trailing out the rear of the Dreadnought was cut like a ribbon. The alien juggernaut drifted.

  "This is Ram Devlin. Launch! Launch! All Ticks launch! Go! Go! GO!"

  Hollis nodded at Ram and slammed the single, 20cm-wide button that launched the Tick. The boarding craft's engines fired, and the sudden acceleration slammed them all into the crash couches. When the Tick's highly specialized (and experimental) inertial negation system kicked in, it was the first time Ram had ever felt a pulse-pinch tearing at his body. The waves of artificial gravity it made ten-thousand times a second shook every cell and made him think he was coming apart inside. He was. Doc Ibora had showed him what rapid grav flux did to flesh – to brain tissue in particular.

  This was a thousand times more dangerous than the inertial negation system in the Lancers' F-151 Bitzers. Ibora told Ram thirty seconds in a Tick's rapid-pulse gravity field would kill a man, but it was the only way to make the 'rapid deceleration landing maneuver' survivable. They should have just called it 'crashing' because after blasting away from Charon, the Ticks didn't have time for deceleration.

  The flight only lasted 3.49 seconds before the six boarding craft slammed into the hull of the Squidies' Dreadnought hard enough to bend their frames and set all the bulkheads at off angles. Altair's pale sunlight shone into the main compartment now through a crack across the bulkhead.

  "We're down! Get up and out! Up and out!" Chief Hollis shouted, "Go, go! Go!"

  "We've got 1/5 of a gee of artificial gravity leaking out on the hull," Lucy said, looking at the feed in her visor. "It's pretty radioactive out there, but we'll survive it."

  Ram spoke into comms, "This is Devlin. All Ticks standby to deploy perimeter squads."

  "Man those turrets," Hollis said. "Don't forget to shut the hatches! Let's get those drills online!" Chief Hollis slammed his fist against the three buttons that opened the drill port in the middle of the T
ick, underneath the suspended drill. The doors opened a centimeter and jammed. "They're bent maybe," he said. "From the landing."

  "Cut through if the doors won't open," Ram said.

  Tse was already opening the shunt from the reactor and warming up the massive magnets that would shape the plasma into a two-meter drill bit. It was hot enough to melt anything they'd ever used it on.

  "Drill teams!" Ram said into comms, "Step to it and sink those teeth in! I want you gum-deep in Squidy hull in less than sixty seconds. Perimeter teams deploy and hold the line."

  Lucy Elan powered up the capacitors in her rifle and nodded at Ram's sidearm. "You taking that thing?"

  As a rare collectors' item and an antique, the gold and ivory Honma & Voss X-ray laser was worth more than five years of VP salary, but it was too good a weapon to keep in a case. He nodded. "This is what it was made for."

  All of the breaching craft called in. Ram was pleased to hear reports of working drills and easy hull access. Somehow Arroyo in Tick 3 had even been cutting for thirty seconds, but he didn't sound optimistic.

  The hatch out to the Dreadnought's hull opened into Altair's glare. The aliens could see again. Particle beams shot up from the tops of the armored towers and waved overhead like thin carnival searchlights as they continued to cut into the Charon. Bodies, whole and not, packed the vacuum. They drifted together with Charon and the Dreadnought.

  Ram hoped the Squidies didn't even know they were on the hull.

  The Dreadnought drifted, an 800-meter, flat planet, slowly spinning. Now, it was day, but in roughly four minutes, Ram thought, it would be night. Ram jumped and landed on the battleship's hull and bounded to the port-side rear of the Tick. From there, he had a view towards the center of the giant ship and the five other armored boarding craft clinging to the Dreadnought with his own. They were all bent from the impact, like armored shanties leaning to one side or the other on the barely curving, blast-scarred hull.

  The Ticks had landed in a rough hexagon as planned. Hopefully they could support each other with turret and small arms fire because as soon as the aliens knew they had boarders on the hull, the Squidies would be coming out in force to kill them.

  Fifty meters out to port, squads from Tick 3 took up positions around their craft, facing outwards. The surface under them had been flash-burned from the nuclear dets, but between the shallow, circular wales that dotted the outer hull like smooth bomb craters, Ram could still make out the shape of the human skull the aliens had painted on their battleship. Just ahead of Tick 3 was the edge of the left cheekbone. Most of the Ticks were clustered in the skull's left eye socket. The chin was at least 300 meters away, over the slight curve of the hull.

  When they faced Charon, the towers and guns fired everywhere, waving and slicing. Ram couldn't see the particle emitters themselves. The Dreadnought's guns, big and small, had been set recessed into the tops of the low, rounded, blast-protected towers that rose up from the hull. "Look at all those hardened guns," Lucy said.

  "They can't hit us," Ram insisted.

  "You sure about that?"

  "We already bet on it."

  The voice in Ram's helmet was casual and relaxed. "Commander Devlin, this is Arroyo in Tick 3. My topside gunner has movement down by the uh... chin. He said he sees big, mechanized Squidies poking out from behind gun towers and eyeballing the Ticks."

  "Copy that, Arroyo," Ram said. "All Ticks, all squads, this is the XO. Deploy the knuckledraggers and get 'em on the line. I'm calling in the air support to cover us while we drill. ETA should be five minutes, tops. All units, hold the line." Ram gestured and tapped at the command menus projected in his visor to open a channel to the carrier. "Blackbeard to Red, Blackbeard to Red. This is Blackbeard requesting seagulls." The Lancers could dodge the battleship's big guns and provide air support. That was the plan.

  There was no answer from Hardway. There was nothing but noise on comms. Ram tried a second and third time. He checked his system and his suit computer. There was nothing wrong on his end. If Hardway was out there, they just weren't answering. The whole plan depended on having close-air support from the Lancers and long-range artillery support from Hardway's batteries to help fight off the hundreds of murderous aliens that would soon pour out of holes and hatches to squidge along the hull.

  Ram gave the task of calling Hardway to a crewman and two minutes later, the carrier still hadn't answered. Lucy crouched beside Ram and opened a private channel. "I don't know what happened to Hardway," she said, "but Ram, you need to prepare for the possibility that air support isn't coming. I have a feeling we're on our own out here."

  Chapter Six

  As Hardway and Tipperary made for the far side of the third planet, the carrier deployed a string of meter-long proxies behind her to monitor the battle on the Dreadnought's hull and to enable communications with the boarding parties. Harry Cozen and the bridge crew used those proxies to watch the battle unfold until, without warning, the projections in the air above the deck of the bridge turned grainy. They saw the boarding craft 'land' more or less on target and then, the image from the microsats faded out. "Bergano... Ops, what's happened to our imagery?"

  "Signal to noise ratio... spectrum's filled with noise. It's Squidy jamming."

  "I can hear it in inside my helmet," Dana said from Nav. They all could. It sounded like a cicada's warble mixed with an elephant's roar and it filled every comms frequency. "Switch to internal comms or local IR suit comms." She had to shout it over the noise.

  Bolo looked away from his console to Cozen in the command chair. "We should launch the Lancers now," he said, "Ram can't call fo-"

  "Mr. Bolo!" Cozen's arm shot out and his finger pointed at a swarm of new contacts appearing on Bolo's display.

  "New contacts!" Bolo said. "Active LiDAR and radar returns... hundreds of them... "

  "Where the hell did they come from and why didn't we see them?"

  "They're coming out of the rings... they're tiny... less than 3cm across. No thermal signature. It's not ejected material; they're actually maneuvering, changing course. In seconds, they'll be all around us." They appeared on the AT controller console's projected display like a cloud of gnats coming for Hardway and Tipperary.

  "Are they bombs? Miniature warheads?"

  "I don't think so," Bolo said. "They're not closing range under 50Ks... just deploying around us... They're some kind of miniature electronic warfare proxies or drones. They're going to jam us as long as we're in orbit."

  "We need the planet between us and the Dreadnought," Cozen said. "Use the gunnery junks. Begin shooti-"

  "More contacts! Coming up from under the pole. Enemy warships. Three. No, five enemy contacts. Six. Seven...eight..." As the menacing alien hulls appeared projected over the bridge on the AT controller's display, Bolo counted off twenty-five. They were already maneuvering into higher orbits. "I count nine, no, ten destroyer-sized ships," Bolo said, "and five medium and five heavy cruisers. Five more are some kind of support ships, I think."

  "Good god, that's an armada," Dana said.

  "Not quite, Ms. Sellis, but it certainly is an uncomfortable number of alien warships to encounter."

  "It's more than one carrier and one air group can hope to successfully engage," Dana said.

  Bolo said, "You'd expect to see these ships around Sirius. Or the new front at Kapteyn's Star, but that's what... thirty light years away?"

  Harry Cozen sat forward. "They're assembling. For a surprise attack."

  "But the Dreadnought wasn't trying to hide. It was right out in the open where the spy drone would see it," Dana said.

  Harry Cozen nodded. "Because we were supposed to see the Dreadnought and stay away. Any captain with half a brain would see an unbeatable ship and keep his distance – run at the first sight of it. That thing showed itself here to keep us away from Altair – to make sure we didn't come here and see this spearhead as it assembled." Cozen snorted out his nose.

  The alien destroyers fanned out a
s the formation rose, and when they climbed high enough over the banded clouds, Altair's rays briefly lit their hulls and asymmetric towers so that you could see their main guns and the vectoring rings of their particle cannon outlined in silver.

  Dana said, "They'll be in effective range in four minutes unless we evade them." She didn't expect to hear an order to run.

  Cozen squinted like he was boring into the alien hulls with his eyes. "With most of our carriers moving to cover losses at Sirius," he said, "there's enough firepower massed here to overwhelm the defenses in the next system. The Squidies could easily break through to Sol with more ships than we could repel. This alien task force is a rapier pointed at Humanity's heart and both the Privateer and UN fleets are out of position to parry."

  Already, more contacts blinked on the NAV and the AT controller's display. "Three more alien destroyers coming around the limb of the planet behind us and pushing into higher orbit."

  "If they're trying to surround us," Dana said, "they're going to have to do better than those puny ships."

  Harry Cozen ground the truth out for her with the gravel of his voice. "They don't actually have to surround us, you see, because we can't run. If Hardway runs, then the Squidies will follow us into the hypermass transit and simply push forward with their offensive before Earth can react to any warning we bring. Our only hope is to delay these ships and send warning ahead. We're not going anywhere. I think the Squidies already know that. Those three destroyers aren't maneuvering to stop Hardway from leaving. They're scrambling to stop our breaching ship, Tipperary. She's the one that's running. Tipperary is going to run and warn the fleet while Hardway delays the alien battlegroup. Mr. Bolo," Cozen said, "form up a fighter and junk escort for Tipperary."

  "How many fighters?"