War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan (6 page)

Taipan
's carriers, Witt's command ship,
Hardway,
and the two breaching ships steamed together to the point on the far side of the Groomsbridge system where Dr. Noondie's calculations and stolen alien charts said they could breach space and open a transit to Pollux.

From the windows of
Hardway'
s bridge, Ram had a fine view of the breaching ship
Malibu
where she'd moved to hold station 2Ks out over the starboard bow. Lightning danced up and down the spokes of her fragile, wonder-wheel frame as her capacitors came to charge. "This is
Malibu
. Discharge is imminent. All ships, standby." Fifteen seconds later, using technology stolen from the enemy, she fired crude, converging particle streams from five emitters. They crossed precisely over the charted location of the transit, and the continual release of energy from the colliding nuclei moving near lightspeed tore an already weakened spatial fabric. Over the next seconds,
Malibu
ripped a kilometer-wide hole in regular space and opened the interstellar passage.

Hardway
sailed into the burning breach first. Then, the box carriers. Then,
Taipan
and the breaching ships followed the others through the plasma-covered membrane and into the transit for the roughly seven-minute, faster-than-light trip from Groomsbridge 1618 to Pollux.

*****

Hardway
entered the Pollux system trailing fire – plasma and exotics picked up off the mouth of the breach. Matilda Witt watched the last of it lick at the diamond-pane windows of
Hardway's
bridge and then stepped forward to squint out into enemy space as if she could find the Squidies with her naked eyes.

She'd already found an appropriate target to try her new methodology on – armed, but not to the teeth – armored, but not a dreadnought – and, most importantly, alone. It could be attacked and boarded before its calls for help were heard.

Matilda Witt leaned into the comms button on the arm of Cozen's command chair. "Commander Dahl," she said, "you have your orders. Execute them."

As
Hardway
continued forward, Ram glanced out the rear windows of the bridge. Beyond the pale blue plasma flare of
Hardway's
engines he saw Matilda Witt's ships began to turn to starboard and come about together until they'd maneuvered into a diamond-shaped formation with
Taipan
at the center. They held station just a few hundred Ks from the Transit point where only sporadically appearing infrared and X-ray irregularities remained to evidence the now closed FTL passage.

The F-151s swarmed out the bays of the four box carriers. Hundreds of them scrambled at once. They spread out to attain broad air superiority across the system so nothing could get close to Matilda Witt's carriers and her command ship.

Hardway
continued towards the inner system.

Ram said, "NAV confirms everything in the Pollux system is exactly as reported by recon elements, but comms is a nightmare here, too. There's a lot of adaptive noise spread across our frequencies. We're being jammed. We won't be able to communicate over a few thousand Ks without using IR lasers and line of sight."

Matilda Witt said, "Most of the sectors this far behind the lines are positively rife with alien jamming craft dropped at one point or another. There's bloody clouds of them in places. Self-repairing. Some follow our ships; some lurk in Lagrange points and foul the spectrum from there. It would take weeks to shoot them all out of the sky. Instead, my fighters deploy a comms relay network as they advance. We use disposable microsats as coded q-comms relays. Can't send or receive much over our network, of course, but besides positional location data and tactical imaging, traffic is mostly one-way. There's no delay and it's secure. Don't you worry about command and control, Mr. Devlin. We've got that covered."

Dana showed them an out of scale projection of the system and the solar storms ripping across it. "Terrible weather. There's 16, super-X-class coronal mass-ejections underway. The system's innermost planet is currently getting charred by one." Raging Pollux had thrown pieces of itself out into space and a 100-million-kilometer trail of glowing, high-energy particles bent around the lines of the planet's distorted magnetic field, blowing towards the outer system. Viewed in the right part of the spectrum, it looked like a stone in a burning river.

"It happens often here," Witt said. "Every few days. The enemy has a mining operation on one of that planet's moons and when the weather gets bad like it is now, a vessel evacuates them. They usually ride out the storms by holding station in the magnetic shadow of that planet. They're mostly blind in there." Matilda Witt turned to Ram, now standing on the other side of the command chair where Harry Cozen was still seated. She literally spoke over Cozen's head. "No problems with the modifications to the warspites, Mr. Devlin?"

Ram lied, "Our engineers have done that modification to more torpedoes in less time before." He glanced at Cozen then. From the little tick in his cheek, Ram could see Cozen felt Witt's breath moving the silver hairs on the top of his head when she exhaled out her nose. It annoyed the hell out him, but he wasn't about to get up out of that command chair and let Witt have it.

"And the junks carrying the boarding parties?" she asked.

"Two gunnery junks configured for boarding," Ram said. "Each one will have a knuckledragger mech with them and squads commanded by officers and senior NCOs who've already been inside a Squidy ship."

Witt said, "You must mean Chiefs Hollis and Tse," she said. "From the incident on Moriah."

"And don't forget Mr. Devlin," Cozen added, "Our Mr. Devlin will be leading the boarding parties himself."

 *****

"133rd Lancers and 55th Hellcats,
Hardway
AT has you cleared to launch."

"Lancers copy,
Hardway
."

"Hellcats copy that."

"Vector 152 flat to assembly and proceed. Good hunting."

The 133rd blasted out of the bay together and accelerated so hard that if they hadn't enabled the inertial negation early, then the g-forces would have killed them. It wasn't standard operating procedure, but how else were they going to beat the Hellcats to the rally point?

The 7-meter fighters ripped out of the bays while
Hardway
's junks flew out slow on their four, vectored nacelles before they hit their rear engines to get up to speed.

Jordo and the Lancers looked down through the bottoms of their canopies to see if they could spot the Hellcats rocketing out of their launch bays on the starboard side. He caught a top view of Pooch's 151 a couple hundred meters below. She flew point on one of three, 8-plane elements. It gave him hot flashes of anger to realize that despite the fact that the Lancers were at full-open throttle and accelerating as hard as they could, the Hellcats were
passing
them.

"Bleeding hell," said Paladin. "Do you
see
that?"

"They've got faster planes..." Dirty said it with the bitterness they all felt.

"Same planes," Jordo said. "It's probably their pulse-pinch. They've got better inertial negation than we do. It's probably a 2nd gen system made with the rare elements from 211-Lovis." Might mess up the pilots' heads faster, too, but he didn't mention that.

Gusher said, "We
bled
to take that system! Why the hell didn't
we
get that gear?"

"We lost thirty-two pilots on that mission," Holdout said. It had been the Lancers' baptism in blood.

"The Hellcats can counter more gees," Gush muttered into comms. "Not only can they accelerate harder, they can turn tighter than we can."

"Don't mean shite," Dirty said. "Alien bandits fly superior craft and we still hold our own." Dirty was right, but it didn't change how smug Hellcat 1-1 sounded on comms.

"Lancer 1-1, this is Hellcat 1-1. Interrogative: Are y'all flying vintage planes? You want us to slow down so you can keep up?"

*****

Ram flew in Biko's junk,
Gold Coast
. Seconds after the 151s blasted away, all Ram could see of the interceptors from the cockpit was their bright pinpricks of burning exhaust. 1000 Ks out, it almost looked as if the Lancers were chasing the Hellcats and trying to maneuver into an attack position of some kind.

Pardue shook her head in the pilot's seat next to him. "Those zoomies keep it up like that, they're going to kill each other." There was something going on between those pilots and he was well-aware he had no idea what it was. She said, "Makes me wonder what the hell it's like aboard Witt's tin-hulled box carriers with hundreds and
hundreds
of those Bitzer pilots at close-quarters. They must need riot police to keep order. Or prison guards, maybe."

A few seconds later, all the interceptors were out of sight. Ram could still put on his helmet and zoom in on them or even project their images upon the canopy of the cockpit module, but he was happy not to have to look at them for a few minutes. Instead, he checked on the junks. Their formation tore across the starry black towards the charred planet's magnetic shadow where Matilda Witt said the target would be waiting, hiding from the very solar storms the junks and fighters now had to risk.

They'd been lucky so far. Their timing had allowed the junks to fly around a huge arm of the storms without forcing the assault group too far out of its way. The pieces of itself that volatile Pollux whipped out into space threatened to fry them and end the trip fast. The way the OMNI flight computer projected the storms and tinted the hazardous areas of space red, the entire system looked to be filled with fantastic and bloody nebulae. Two-dozen, hard-blown storms of staggering destructive energy and scale swept across the system.

"All junks," Pardue said into comms, "follow me to 118, mark 022." After they followed her through the turn, she nodded at the electrified planet slowly filling the canopy. "That's the last course correction we'll have to make," she said. "The target is dead ahead."

The planet's scorched atmo was fifteen shades of crimson. Its sheltered night side flashed and crackled with colossal discharges. Somewhere down there, the Squidies' ship would be waiting for the storm to pass. With so much energy zapping the magnetic field that sheltered them, chances were good they'd never see the fighters or the junks coming.

*****

The Lancers and the squadrons of Bitzers found the Squidies' ship riding a low orbit, smack in the middle of the planet's night side. Through the storm, from far out, even with the optics and transducers in Jordo's flight helmet working overtime, the alien cruiser read as nothing more than a 412-meter, granulated shadow silhouetted by continual discharges in the atmo below it.

Jordo thumbed comms to Pooch. "Hellcat 1-1, you got eyes on that thing?"

"I see it."

It was fatter than a Squidy cruiser should be and its four, main gun towers rose asymmetrically on either side, near the "top" side of the hull.

"99th Squadron, this is Hellcat 1-1. The target's location is confirmed. Congrats, 99th.
Taipan
says you have first blood."

The 99th were a few thousand Ks out, so the voice that came over comms was pocked with alien jamming. "....oger tha..., and thank
you
, 55th. The Wicke..Weasels ..re ..inbound for primary strike."

Chapter Six

The 151s closed on target and the image of the Squidies' ship relayed back to
Hardway
resolved in greater detail. The projection of it hung, meter-tall in the air where Lt. Commander Dana Sellis studied its guns and towers. The wide-mouthed apertures that punctuated the ends of their "barrels" appeared as near-perfect circles because the squadrons providing the imagery were flying right at them. The fighters got closer still, and Dana noted the smaller guns of similar design studding the alien hull. The fighters weren't in range yet, but very soon, every one of those defensive batteries would open up on them.

Matilda Witt stepped to the front of the bridge and faced Harry Cozen and his officers, looking at them
through
the image of the alien ship.

Her aide, Mr. Morrisey, had seen her making for that spot. He followed and stood two steps behind her, sixty degrees to her left. "Mr. Morrisey will assist me," she said. Apparently, she didn't need to see him for that. "Kindly show me all of my squadrons, Mr. Morrisey."

Morrisey's glasses housed additional projectors and when they came on, the glow from them lit his jagged dueling scar green from his cheekbone to the corner of his mouth. "Yes, Ms. Witt." The fighter and junk squadrons now appeared, newly projected into the bridge's tactical display, surrounding the alien cruiser. It was all out of scale, of course. The squadrons closest to the Squidies' ship were represented largest. The 55th Hellcats and the 133rd Lancers smaller since they were holding high some 50,000 Ks out on the opposite side. Smallest in this proximity-based size schema was the sortie of
Hardway
's junks.

"There are only a few viable paths for the Squidy cruiser to break orbit and get away," Witt said. "Currently, all of them are blocked." She looked at Dana and said, "I have five tactical specialists to assist me on
Taipan
's bridge, but with such a small a number of ships as this to coordinate, I like to get my hands dirty." She stepped forward, reached out into the projections with her manicured paw, and seized a flight of eight fighters from the 99th Squadron. She moved them a half-meter to her left, and Mr. Morrisey spoke silently. Dana became aware of an almost inaudible hissing sound he produced, but for the most part, Mr. Morrisey's lips moved in silence as he passed along Witt's commands.

"It's an implant," Witt said when she caught Dana staring.

Harry Cozen didn't do much to hide his exasperation. "Is there
anything
you want us to do?"

"I'd
like
you to pay attention to how I do this, Harry. I'd like Mr. Biko, the AGC, to pay particular attention because if all goes as planned, then this is how I want
him
to direct the attack tomorrow – exactly like this." She moved a flight of fighters from the 38th a meter closer to the enemy and then stepped back.