War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan (13 page)

It watched her, but she could see it was doing something down below the porthole, out of sight. Maybe it kept looking at her because it wanted to see the surprise on her human face when the meter-wide spot on the emergency hatch began to glow red and then white and then melted away completely, sparking and burning as the tip of an alien, plasma-based cutting tool emerged from the molten metal.

"Two minutes," Dana told to the rest of the bridge crew. "Two minutes, maybe less and they'll be through that emergency bulkhead. The bridge hatch should take them even less time."

Li handed her one of the MA-48s from the bridge's small weapons locker and passed out the rest of the double-barrel, over/under weapons.

Katz pointed to the bottom barrel. He said, "If we're fighting them on the bridge without gees, then I recommend using the pulse laser. Unlike the railgun, there's no recoil and if we miss, we won't have ricochets in here."

Biko's voice came over comms. "Bridge what is your status? Please respond."

Dana lunged for the button. "Biko! We've got the top emergency bulkhead of the aft tube sealed, but they're cutting their way through! They've got something like a plasma cutter. A minute and a half more and they'll be cutting their way in the bridge."

"We're coming." That's all he said.

Li stared out the hatch's porthole and from all the orange light on his face Dana could tell the cutting was going quickly for the Squidies. He looked at Katz first, and then at her. "The laser, then?"

She said, "Railgun, pulse laser... either one will work. Just remember to disengage the safety." Dana held up her MA-48 for Li so he could see her thumb flipping the assault rifle's fire selector switch out of the '
SAFE
' position.

*****

When they saw the crewmen and marines retaking the spine, Ram and Biko launched themselves through the smoke. Drifting, severed limbs and gangly, alien corpses reached out trying to entangle them like jungle vines.

The aliens were still thick in the command tower's aft tube. Marines and crew sent rounds up into the smoke and the Squidies threw cones of microwaves back at them making the smoke ignite in four-story, tapered columns. The Squidies' masers used a kind of explosive shell to help generate the enormous microwave pulse and this was the first time Ram had ever heard one fired inside a pressurized atmo. It made a loud, but dull, whumping noise like a sledgehammer on hard dirt.

Lucy Elan was assembling squads to re-take the command tower's tube. Biko shouted to her, "They're cutting through the bulkhead up there and trying to get to the bridge! We've got to go now!"

"Mr. Devlin," Lucy shouted. "Here!" Lucy launched an MA-48 sailing across the mouth of the tube to Ram. "I don't want
you and your toy
cutting through any bulkheads either."

49 armed crewmen and marines sheltered to the sides of the tube going up into the command tower. That was enough. Ram almost asked Lucy what the hell she was waiting for until he realized she was waiting for
him
to give the order.

Ram looked from one face to another. "The topmost emergency bulkhead is shut. The enemy is trapped and exposed. We will ascend that tube hard and fast. We will lay down heavy fire ahead of us and we will shoot them until they are dead. We go on my Bingo."

He braced himself against the deck and fired sabot into the smoke. After he'd loosed three rounds and the space all around him to the left and the right had filled with shooters, too, he aimed himself up the tube, shouted, "Bingo! Bingo! Launch! Launch!" and pushed off. Together, with rifles firing, the 49 flew up the path of the beams and bullets that swirled the smoke in front of them.

Bodies caught fire in flight. Cones of brilliantly vaporizing smoke led back to the hidden Squidies, and Ram pumped round after round at the unseen enemy until the recoil from the railgun almost stopped his upward motion.

Orange, air-bursting detonations from Lucy's flechettes blossomed rapid-fire up the tube in a spiral ahead of them, making brief holes in the smoke. The 49 flew up right behind her fire. When she and Ram and Biko penetrated to the other side of the smoke cloud together, there should have been a dozen, grotesque, alien corpses up there, hanging half-shredded in a cloud of misty stink, but they only found three.

There had been more of them...far more. When he saw the molten-edged hole in the emergency bulkhead hatch, he knew where they'd gone.

*****

Dana watched the aliens' plasma cutter withdraw. After that, their oddly tiny, gloved and palmless 'hands' pushed on the red-hot piece of belt-iron they'd cut from the emergency bulkhead, and it floated free, up towards the bridge hatch. It blocked her vision, but once it tumbled away, she saw them coming up through the new door they'd cut.

The smoke behind their nubby heads flashed with orange and the bulkhead shook with jack-hammering impacts from the MA-48 fire. The alien things didn't even wait for the sides of the hole to cool. They just floated up through it like knotted gangles of eels until the space in front of the bridge hatch was filled with them. The single, porthole visors set in the middle of their skinny bodies all looked up at Dana together.

One of the company marines drifted across the mouth of the hole the Squidies had cut, angling for a shot. A Squidy pointed a maser down through the hole and set him on fire.

"How many do you see?" Li asked her.

She didn't take her eyes off them. "I see nine. The hole they cut through the emergency bulkhead is the only way up and they've got it covered. The crew can't push up the tube any further."

"We could open the emergency bulkhead for them."

"Or we could open the bridge hatch and spray those fuckers down," Dana said as Li came to the diamond-pane porthole and peered at the aliens less than two meters away.

"Can you see their plasma cutter? It's small," she said. "No bigger than liter bottle. But the blade's a meter-long. Get ready," Dana said. "Those things are about to cut through."

But when the 3 ½ meter alien set out to cut something, it wasn't the hatch to the bridge. It took its cutter and flew to the right with five others. It flew aft, towards Harry Cozen's office.

Cozen was probably in there right now.

"Can't see what they're bloody doing," Li said. Four of them still floated below the hatch, keeping their masers pointed down the hole and occasionally looking up at the humans watching them. All their skinny, boneless arms drifted like they were underwater. "Why aren't they cutting into the bridge?"

"I think they're cutting through Harry Cozen's hatch."

"But...wh-" The gut-rumble roar of a nearby detonation shook the bulkheads and deck as a blurred and burning streak erupted across the tube below. By the time Dana realized it was molten metal and plasma and the bodies of the Squidies that had gone to cut through Harry Cozen's hatch, the atmospheric shockwave hit the three alien commandos under the bridge. Since the liquids in their bodies couldn't compress, their insides got crushed and they burst out of their leathery skins. A thousandth of a second later, the pressure wave ripped their exosuits open and threw their burning bodies into the side of the tube as it compressed the ship's atmo around them to the point of ignition. The blast and brief firestorm burned what was left of the Squidies to the bulkhead.

It was over in seconds, leaving only yellow and black clouds. Dana opened the bridge hatch and inhaled rotten eggs as she peered down below. Her eyes watered. Ram and Biko and Lucy looked up at her through the hole the Squidies had cut in the emergency bulkhead. Inverted, Dana descended until she saw movement through the hole to her left where Cozen's hatch had been.

Harry Cozen emerged. He flew out of the haze slowly and caught a handhold that looked hot enough to sear flesh. He said, "I built a hull-breaching charge into my hatch a month ago when we docked at Sagan. It made a better anti-Squidy mine than I thought it would."

Ram said, "You mounted a breaching charge inside your own hatch? But...why?"

Cozen raised his eyebrows and looked back at Ram as if that was clearly an absurd question to ask
now
. "The Squidies stink like brimstone," Cozen said. When he caught sight of Dana hanging above him, a meter out of the bridge hatch, his upper lip curled. "Lt. Commander Sellis.
You
had the bridge. Would you care to tell me how the enemy got in here to
pound on my hatch?
"

Fire flashed under her skin, and Dana felt herself flush. This had happened on her watch.

There was nothing she could say to Cozen except the little she knew. "They came through the command tower hull. I don't know anything else yet."

"One hour, Lt. Commander." Cozen coughed and tried to slap the sulfur stink of the Squidies out from in front of his face. "I want to know how this happened. I expect answers from you in one hour."

Chapter Eleven

As
Hardway
and the
Taipan
battlegroup made for the Groomsbridge-Castor Transit on the far side of the system, the brimstone stink spread up into the bridge. Lt. Commander Dana Sellis had to work in it as she put together the account of what had happened on her watch.

First, she crafted a vigorous simulation that reconstructed the position of every ship and defensive patrol in the
Taipan
carrier group over the last hours and everything known about Squidy stealth craft. Then, using her simulation, she tried to penetrate the defenses and actually fly through the patrols to
Hardway.
 

53 minutes later, she'd figured out how it was done and she even had the answers to Cozen's questions, but that didn't change the fact that it had all happened with her in the command chair. She was responsible.

As the bridge officers and Harry Cozen entered the observation deck, Dana took small comfort in the fact that Chief Terrazzi had got the artificial gravity back up. It's easier to stand tall when you can plant your feet on the deck.

Cozen stood up close to the windows and looked down at the redsuits 150 meters below, working to repair the holes where the Squidies cut their way in. He didn't turn around as he spoke. "The markings on the dead aliens' exosuits match those found on the lone Squidy sent to Sagan Yards to kill our hypermass transit expert, Dr. Noondie, almost a year ago. Lt. Commander Sellis, please explain to me how a team of no less than 24 suicidal Squidies from an alien special forces unit managed to penetrate this battlegroup's defenses, cut their way into
my
ship, set
my
crewmen on fire, and then, knock on
my
hatch?"

His eyes remained on the hole being repaired below.

"That's the primary point of access you're looking at right now," Dana said.

"You don't say."

"They cut through the armor and outer hull of the command tower. Once the alien boarding teams had penetrated the inner hull, they leveraged their physiology to worm their way through areas considered too tight for human passage. They traveled between decks and made it deep into the command tower where they used directed explosive charges to create two, separate points of egress...one into the aft tube of the command tower and one into the ship's spine."

Cozen said, "That part I know." He turned to face her. "I want you to explain how they evaded detection and got through dozens of patrols including
Hardway's
own junks." As he said the last part, he glared at Asa Biko. The carrier's Air Group Commander was the one who set the number of junks on combat air patrol and determined their patrol patterns, but no matter who set the CAP, they'd been flying it on her watch. It was her responsibility, all of it.

"The incident began when
Hardway's
arrays picked up intermittent radar contact returns.
Taipan
could not corroborate the returns, but directed a flight of their Bitzers to investigate – SOP for bogies that far out."

"The
Standard Operating Procedure
is actually to
find and destroy
the inbound bogies." Cozen didn't have to say that. He was riding her. She would have been mad, but she felt like she deserved it.

"The contacts appeared and then disappeared. What produced the brief contact we saw on
Hardway
was most likely the bay doors opening on a distant, alien carrier with a reduced signature. It launched the single, much stealthier craft that ultimately penetrated the carrier group's defenses and delivered the boarding party."

"And how did this craft slip past the defenses?"

Dana exhaled. "Obviously, whatever boat was used to infiltrate the carrier group was equipped with considerable stealth capabilities, much like the single-pilot lamprey craft that latched onto us and concealed the alien assassin on its trip to Sagan Station all the way from the debris field at Deimos' Lagrange. But. Examination of
that
enemy craft revealed that while its ability to spoof detection systems was highly developed, it was far from perfect. Simultaneous and active radar or LiDAR returns from different sources have a decent probability of detecting it if they know what to look for and they're close."

"So if the patrols could detect it close up, how did the Squidies get through?"

"Simply put," Dana said, "There's a hole in Matilda Witt's combat air patrols."

"A hole?"

"A gap," Dana said. "A single gap between the patrols...a place where none of the fighters pass close enough to detect a stealthed alien boat like the ones we've seen. The Squidies' insertion craft hid
inside
that gap."

Ram squinted at her. "So the patrols were ill-planned and there was a hole. Okay, but it was just one hole. How did the Squidies leverage that to fly all the way into the battlegroup to reach
Hardway
?"

"The gap the aliens exploited is always moving," Dana said. "As the patrols move, so does the gap. It's like a moving blind-spot and it never quite disappears. The Squidies just stayed inside it, and eventually, with the movements of the patrols, the gap they hid inside moved as well and took the Squidies where they wanted to go – right here."