War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan (17 page)

*****

Dana Sellis closed the service airlock at the very tip of
Hardway's
sub-tower and stood on the ledge, just under the copse of antennas there, a humming forest of spires. 'Below' her, Matilda Witt's box carriers and the breaching ships kept pace with the attack carrier. Beyond them, at the other side of the battlegroup,
Taipan
floated against the stars of Groomsbridge like a little armored mountain. Tight constellations of fighters in echelon flew everywhere around the battlegroup and through it, patrolling, watching.

The gunnery junks surrounded
Hardway,
but Biko had promised her a hole in the carrier's defenses so that she could slip away undetected. After that, she planned to stay inside the same moving gap in
Taipan's
fighter screen that the alien SpecOps team had used to reach
Hardway
.

Dana gestured through the menus projected in her helmet and linked control of the slim-jim jet-pack to her left hand. She needed her right hand free to hold on to the dead Squidy.

She knelt and wrestled her arm around its main body mass. The gangly, garden hose limbs would have to trail behind. Through its suit she could feel how it didn't have proper bones and it nauseated her. She held the rubbery thing to her chest and gave a burst from the slim-jim. The Squidy's grotesque limbs trailed meters behind them, waving as if there were a current in the vacuum.

Measured in a straight line, the distance between
Hardway
and
Taipan
was under 15 kilometers, but Dana didn't fly a straight line. Her planned course twisted and turned back on itself over three-dozen times. That's what it took to maintain enough distance between herself and all of
Taipan
's patrols to ensure that she wouldn't be spotted by any of them. Without any kind of stealth gear, she'd show up on LiDAR and radar if they lit her up, but a pair of bodies in exosuits can be a hard thing to spot unless you're up close and you know where to look.

Making the trip from
Hardway
to
Taipan
wasn't as impressive a feat as penetrating the entire defensive screen from thousands of Ks out like the enemy did, but when Dana and the dead Squidy were halfway across the great, black chasm between Harry Cozen's carrier and Matilda Witt's floating castle of a command ship, Dana Sellis couldn't help but feel damn pleased with herself. The fact that she'd been able to make it that far proved she was right.  

Dana tried to remember that smug feeling and not give in to fear whenever the zipping constellations of Bitzers veered her way. They'd never come close enough to notice her. She had every reason to be confident, but still... The pilots in those 151s had some pretty decent multispectral capabilities in their bug-eyed flight helmets. She'd tried one on once.

She gestured a semi-circle with her left hand and brought her flightpath into line with her planned course to
Taipan
. She hadn't clocked that many hours of flight with the slim-jim, but the thin, UL jet-pack she wore had been designed to be forgiving. Staying on course wasn't difficult.

Things were going so well that her worries seemed like only echoes of her own insecurities until she saw
Taipan's
fighters beginning to return to their box carriers' bays. The unarmored doors closed behind them. That meant the carrier group would transit soon. Sooner than she thought maybe.

Dana's whole body shot with fear as she imagined what would happen if they breached space and entered the transit without her. Using only the slim-jim, she'd never be able to keep up. She'd be left behind, alone. The thought made her want to panic and ditch her carefully calculated flight plan and jet herself straight at
Taipan
like a torpedo.

I will make it, she told herself. I will not get left here. My calculations were good. If the battlegroup accelerated, then I'd have noticed. I will not get left behind. I will make it to the command ship before they enter the transit.

Dana had done her numbers right. With seven minutes to the projected transit time, she impacted on the steep slope of
Taipan's
hull, not far from the landing bay. The command ship's heavy, artificial gravity seeped outside and it embraced her. Dana hugged the ship's absurdly thick armor for a good ten seconds before she even thought about getting up.

She dragged the dead Squidy behind her and looked for a place they might hide - a place where they wouldn't get burnt off as the ship rode the hypermass transit from Groomsbridge 1618 to Castor.

Chapter Fourteen

Dana had traveled via hypermass transits plenty of times, but always inside
Hardway
.
As a stowaway riding on the outside of
Taipan's
hull, it was a rougher trip. 

The lightning crackled all around the breaching ship's frame until it discharged. Once it opened the hell-mouth transit, the battlegroup steamed in, and the sheets of plasma and exotic particles that clung to the passage's entrance broke over each vessel in fiery waves.  

The exotic particles flashed x-rays as they penetrated the command ship's armor. Its belt-iron steel skin glowed with them, and Dana swore the light came up from a meter down inside as if she could see through it.  

She and the dead Squidy hid between clustered, 2-meter-high platforms. Above them the lightning arced up and down over the branches of the antennas. Every time it flashed, Dana got a look through the dark-tinted, cycloptic visor set in the center of the dead Squidy's suit. Most of its nubby, neckless 'head' was gone, ripped away by the MA-48 round that drilled in through the other side.
Taipan
's crew won't notice, Dana thought. When they found it on the hull, they'll put fifty more holes in it. 

A swarm of super-charged particles clung to the command ship's bow. Over the first minutes of the transit, they dislodged in flurries and glomed on to
Taipan's
gravity. They fell to the hull like burning, alchemical snow before they transmuted and winked out. 

Hardway
and
Tipperary
entered the Castor system first. After the energy storms from the terminal membrane roared over
Taipan
and the ship reentered normal space, Dana poked her head up cautiously before climbing out from between the antenna platforms. 

The Castor system's biggest stars orbited each other as a binary pair. Each of those stars had a pair of dwarf stars in orbit around them and those dwarfs each had pigmy stars in orbit for a total of six, discrete, stellar masses.

The battlegroup entered above the rocky ecliptic accretion disk of Component C in the Castor system, YY-Geminorium, one of the red dwarfs. The system seemed so packed with material it was a wonder gravity hadn't pulled it all together into a half-dozen, rocky planets.

Dana carried the dead Squidy up the slope of
Taipan's
hull to the base of the antenna forest growing high off the starboard side of the ship. The arrays there clung like skeletal spruce on an armored, alpine face.  

Squidies didn't get rigor mortis or freeze up fast without a heated exosuit. That made it easy to rig the alien corpse up like a scarecrow. Dana fixed it to the lowest branches of a Yagi antenna so that it would look like it was standing with its back to the Staas Guards that found it. If everything went as planned, then it would take the blame for what she was about to do.

The transmissions that came off the antennae forest in front of her tingled over her skin as Dana gestured through the comms channels in her helmet. Ram's software daemon found the right frequency and decryption combo just in time for her to hear Witt's coordinator, Morrisey, give the departing fighter squadrons the order she'd been waiting to hear: "Blackbird, blackbird. Begin CCRN deployment." He was talking about Matilda Witt's Command and Control Relay Net.

As Dana climbed the surprisingly thin branches of
Taipan's
towering main antenna, it already hummed with signals going out to the battlegroup. To starboard,
Hardway
broke off to launch her fighters and junks from a different attack vector.
Tipperary
and
Malibu
huddled together between the four, thin-skinned box carriers as they maneuvered into a diamond around the fragile breaching ships. Bay doors opened on all sides of the carriers at once, and the F-151s flooded out. Dana clung to the antenna for a moment to watch them – a thousand, hastily-folded, paper cranes on their way to burn. Matilda Witt had to be stopped. 

Twenty-five meters up
Taipan
's main antenna, at the very edge of the artificial gravity, Dana found the unprotected junction she was looking for. She pulled a magnetic driver from her belt to remove the bolts and got to work. 

*****

Jordo was grateful Biko launched the Lancers first. After the Hellcats swarmed out of
Hardway'
s bays with the 99th Wicked Weasels and the 38th in tow, the AGC launched the junks behind them. Jordo looked over his shoulder to see them fall into formation a couple of Ks behind the fighters. The redsuits had configured almost all of the junks as bombers, carrying little more on their tensegrity rafts than a reactor module, engines, a cockpit, and warspite torpedoes. Jordo spotted a few, fat gunnery junks mixed in among the bombers. Their long-barreled cannon lanced out on nearly every side. 

"All
Hardway
flight elements, your collective designation is Icarus." Even with the carrier just a few hundred Ks away, the aliens' warbling signal wormed its way into the background. The Squidies' jamming was powerful, but Matilda Witt's Command and Control Relay Net cut through it just fine.  

Orders from
Taipan
appeared in Jordo's helmet. They sent him and the rest of the Lancers down the intercept course he was about to take the squadron on anyway. The one-hundred and forty-four fighters launched from
Hardway
turned onto the new heading in unison. The 50-meter junks behind them took longer to make the turn. 

Twenty million Ks ahead of
Hardway
's sortie, seven alien warships hung low over the system's rubble-filled ecliptic. Six of them displayed the armored gun towers and long, 400m incisor-shaped hulls common to heavy cruisers, but the seventh vessel at the center of their formation was nothing like them.  

The 200-meter craft looked unlike any Squidy ship he'd ever seen. It was spherical. Radar picked out large, threatening apertures on its hull. Jordo knew gunports when he saw them.

Dirty pulled up inverted next to Jordo's fighter so their cockpits were close. She pointed to a fast-moving sparkle against the black. "You see that?"

They appeared on LiDAR now. On the far side of the enemy cruisers, the exhaust plumes from the
eight-hundred
planes in Matilda Witt's primary attack wave made it look as if a swarm of stars had ripped loose from the black to hurl themselves at the Squidies.

Jordo hoped Pooch was watching all of those nuggets just like he was and he hoped for their sakes that he'd been right about her.

*****

Matilda Witt had returned to her command ship for the battle and all hands aboard SCS
Hardway
wore full exosuits and kept their helmets nearby. Ram peered into the tactical display and the battle unfolding over the bridge, scrutinizing the eight-hundred and seven fighters that Matilda Witt had ordered in as the primary wave.

That many F-151s could probably manage to shoot the teeth off all the cruisers. If they were willing to take the heavy casualties, they could. It was a bloody way to get the job done, but after that, the Squidies' ships would be easy targets. The prototype at the center of the formation was made of tougher stuff, though. It wouldn't go down so easily.

If
Hardway
wanted to be close enough to communicate with the squadrons over normal comms when Dana took down Matilda Witt's command and control relay net, then
Hardway
couldn't stay back out of the fight. She had to start moving now. From where Witt had placed the attack carrier, it would take them time to reach the engagement. "We can't wait any longer to commit," Ram said.

"Agreed, Mr. Devlin." Cozen thumbed internal comms. "Bridge to Engineering."

"Terrazzi here."

"Chief, I need more power and more speed than we're expected to have. What can you give me?"

Terrazzi knew this was coming, of course. The greensuits on the engineering deck had been spit-polishing the reaction chambers to get the edge she knew Cozen would be looking for. She said, "I can give you an extra 17% more power if you don't mind gambling a little with our reactor stability."

"Thank you, Chief." He turned to Ram and nodded.

Ram had the NAV console in Dana's absence. He set
Hardway
on a course to intercept the Squidies and pushed the carrier's engines hard enough that even with the ship's inertial negation system working overtime, two-tenths of a gee still got through as they accelerated. It was enough to make everyone on the bridge lean and stagger a step to the rear.

 Cozen thumbed the shipwide squack. "This is Harry Cozen. Our battle plans have changed. You are now to disregard any and all signals received from
Taipan
. I have chosen to engage the enemy directly and
Hardway
is moving into the fight now at her best speed. That is all."

Biko said, "The alien cruisers might have some fighters with them." Biko nodded up at smaller contacts breaking away from the Squidies' incisor-shaped hulls. "Only pocket squadrons... No more than a dozen bandits per cruiser. They'll engage the primary wave of 151s from
Taipan
in a little over ninety seconds. Matilda Witt has her squadrons pointed right at them."

"Incoming message from
Taipan
," Bergano said from a terminal behind the command chair. "Text only." Seconds passed.

"Well," Ram said, "are you going to read it?"