War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan (21 page)

The old man had never tried evasive combat maneuvers with a thousand-meter attack carrier. There was a reason Dana Sellis had never made it look easy.

The alien prototype unleashed its ray again. The storm blasted out into the black and ripped past
Hardway's
starboard. Ram thought they'd missed until the weapon's fire leaned towards the carrier like water from a hose. It waved faster than Ram could move the ship out of its way.

Cozen said, "Break off our direct approach. Increase our angular momentum, Mr. Devlin. It's the only way we'll avoid that thing's fire. And be
evasive
!"

This was going to get them all killed. Ram hit the thrusters in opposition and turned the ship with the main engine thrust harder than the inertial negation could compensate for – hard enough he swore he saw the spine bend all down the carrier's length.

Once
Hardway
traveled across the aliens' aim, they were harder to hit and the terrifying weapon seemed slower. "I'm spiraling in around it," Ram said. "That way, the midships batteries can maintain fire."

"Just don't let us get hit again," Biko said. "It could snap our spine."

"Midships batteries," Cozen said, "put a salvo in that ship, a tight grouping along the craft's equator if you please. Fire at will."

The gun commander's voice came up from the midships battery more shaken than before. "Salvo away. Impact in three."

The salvo flashed brightly off the alien hull, but when the spectacle was over, there was no hull breach. The alien prototype appeared undamaged. "Look at the impact blooms on IR," Ram said.

On the projected display's thermal overlay of the alien ship, the places where the sabot had landed were hot, but the way the heat from the impacts spread out wasn't encouraging. It cooled too fast. "Its armor really
is
just as bloody tough as the alien Dreadnought's."

"Disengage the alien prototype, Mr. Devlin. Take us outside that weapon's effective range."

Ram kept the carrier in a high-gee turn, spiraling outwards as they increased range from target. It was the only way to disengage while maintaining angular momentum.

The alien fired again, but
Hardway
was too far away now and Ram flew the carrier too erratically to be easily hit. The relief he felt was tempered with the stabbing realization that they'd been driven off.

Hardway
must have been outside what the Squidies considered effective range because the prototype stopped firing. Then it made speed in the opposite direction, making for the hypermass transit to Gliese.

The first test of the aliens' prototype had been a stunning success.

"We can't let it get away!"

"Agreed, Mr. Devlin. This new weapon of theirs is a gun platform. It's not fast, but it doesn't have to be. I believe we're looking at the Squidies' newest blockade gun. Smaller than what we've seen them use in the past... Place one of those at the terminal end of an interstellar transit and you could destroy almost anything that came through. You could hold an entire system with a handful of them. Unless we want to face these at the mouth of every transit in Squidy space, then it must be proved ineffective here, now, today."

"I can see why Matilda Witt wanted to board it," Biko said. "Maybe we should rearm the junks with the fizzler torpedoes she wanted to use before and try to disable it."

Cozen squinted at the projection of the alien prototype. Then, he shook his head. "It's valuable IP, no doubt, but we won't be boarding it. We're going to destroy it."

Biko kept his eyes on it as he spoke. "There's only one place to attack that thing."

Cozen said, "I can imagine what you're thinking, but we can't put a torpedo or a railgun salvo down any of the gunport apertures. They'll simply use the weapon to destroy our projectile or missile before it reaches its target."

"Unless someone plugs up the barrel first," Biko said.

"With what?" Cozen asked him, and when Ram realized what Biko intended to use, he shivered. They'd promised the pilots lower casualties, not a suicide mission.

"We use the fighters," Biko said. "The junks are too wide, but we can jam up the barrel of the Squidies' new super-gun with fighters... with F-151s."

Even Harry Cozen looked appalled.

*****

The Lancers hung on the opposite side of the formation from the Hellcats. As they grouped up for the assault, his flight helmet picked Pooch out of all the hundreds of planes. He wanted to open a private channel to her, but he didn't know what he wanted to say – maybe that he was sorry – that he didn't know it would be like this. He wanted to tell her how he didn't know
Hardway
would give the orders they'd just given.

Witt's pilots followed Pooch and Pooch followed orders. Now that Biko had given them to her, she was already busy on comms, tightening up her squadrons for an assault conceived in madness.

Six junks with 4 warspite torpedoes apiece went in with the fighters.

"Send them to Squidy hell," Cozen said, and hundreds of Bitzers dove on the Squidies' new weapon together. They spiraled down around the massive, waving hose of its ray, teasing it. It couldn't catch them, but it kept firing as the fighters barrel-rolled around the beam like they followed Jordo's golden thread or Gusher's shining path.

Jordo jeeked the rear thrust to maximum so it pushed him back in his flight couch as he raced Paladin to the front of the pack. He pushed both sticks forward and rocketed in, screaming all his hatred for bloody war and its bottomless appetite. The ten-meter mouth of the gun threw itself at him like a hungry maw claiming its sacrifice. But Jordo wouldn't feed it today.

Before he flew his Bitzer
into
the alien beam and straight down the enormous gun's throat, he spun his fighter around on its maneuvering jets so it flew backwards. He pitched it forty degrees, pulled the handle, and ejected. The 151's coffin-shaped, vertical cockpit blew off the starboard front side before the rest of the fighter flew down into the beam and the barrel of the alien gun.

Jordo's cockpit hurtled towards the curve of the armored hull. It smashed the coffin hard like someone had thrown a little moon at him. The whole frame of his cockpit bent around him and the diamond-pane canopy actually cracked, but after that single impact, he bounced only once more before he spun off. He tumbled fast enough that he had to fight the gees to pop the cockpit latches and manually egress. Arresting his own personal spin was no cakewalk.

When he'd stabilized enough to look back on the battle, his heart skipped a beat with the raw beauty of it – of all of
them
– the hundreds and hundreds of nuggets, all flying down that cone of light, into death's maw, hell bent like mad suicide angels.

They all cheated death like Jordo had. They denied him and ejected, and now, hundreds of coffin-shaped cockpits tumbled in the black with him, reflecting the light off their smashed canopies.

220 fighters flew into the beam and down the barrel of the alien's new gun. The beam ripped apart the first of them before the reactors could even det, but in their brief-lived shadows, the next, tumbling craft made it further down the barrel. Even that mighty gun couldn't
instantly
blast away all the mass and all the energy of a speeding, 7-meter fighter. Each one that blocked the beam with its hull shielded the others in death and the next of them flew deeper down the barrel. Jordo never knew if it was the physical debris blocking the beam or if all the F-151s and their reactors damaged it, but the beam stuttered, and the gun went dark.

The remaining fighters pulled away while the six junks in the rear fed the darkened maw all the warspite torpedoes it could eat.

In the first milliseconds, the blast from the torpedoes' detonation funneled up and out the 'barrel' so that the alien craft shot a geyser of X-rays and plasma into space. After that, Jordo's helmet picked out gammas and weird gravitational emissions from an erupting, hellfire fountain of unknown, alien elements – colors human eyes had never seen.

That geyser rocketing out the barrel began to move the alien ship, but before it had gone even half a kilometer, the far side of the spherical hull gained a pregnant distention. The alien ship's thick skin bent outwards and bulged impossibly, stretching like a caul. The deformed hull radiated fantastically across the spectrum and two-tenths of a second after that, it burst.

Roughly forty percent of it remained intact and flew out into space propelled on a column of fire. The rest of it blew apart in every other direction, sending molten pieces hurtling down to join the rubble orbiting in rings around the pale dwarf star.

*****

"He's won nothing," said Matilda Witt. She stood in the middle of the tactical projection of the battle where hundreds of search and rescue beacons pinged from the ejected cockpits of the F-151 pilots. They made a cloud of blinking gnats around her. The rest of her fighter squadrons flew towards
Hardway
. "Harry Cozen lost this battle," Witt said without turning to face Dana.

Dana barely heard her. Unless she planned to die on Witt's command ship, then it was time to go. She rolled over and tucked her knees under her, and it was as if little microjets of molten metal had been injected into every muscle at high pressure. It made her limbs twitch and fail and betray her. She couldn't fight that level of pain and she knew it. It was like swimming against indefatigable current that promised to outlast her. It was stronger than she was, so she didn't fight it. She swam
with
the pain like it was a riptide or a river and let it carry her.

As she pushed off the deck, Dana swallowed her cries and let them lift her up. Besides Morrisey and a handful of officers at the consoles behind her, Witt had four guards stationed on her bridge. Two stood on either side of the main hatch at Dana's 8 o'clock. The other pair stood on her 2 and 3 o'clock, one in front of a hatch to Witt's observation deck and one in front of a hatch marked '
LIFEBOAT
'.

"He's probably feeling pretty smug right now," Witt said. "Harry probably thinks this embarrassment with the command and control relay network will end my career."

It will, Dana thought. And there's only one thing now that could screw that up: me.

Dana couldn't let that happen. She looked at the guard standing in front of the lifeboat's hatch through a pink haze of pain. Even if she surprised him, even if she could overpower him, while she was busy with him, the others would be in motion.

Having a hostage would help, but the only life of value to Witt was her own. Since Dana couldn't exactly snap her neck like a twig, she'd need a weapon to be a credible threat.

But Witt's guards didn't know that.

Matilda Witt finally turned to face Dana. "It's a very good thing I have you, my dear, Dana Sellis. When you confess to how Harry put you up to this, the Board will most certainly see things my way. I win, Harry.
I win
. Not you; me.
I
win."

Dana turned her head towards Matilda Witt and twisted her body and pushed off the deck. She got her feet under her, and the pain was a cacophony of fifty loud notes at once like a pipe organ gone mad in her head. She screamed that sound out her open mouth and let it propel her.

She pointed her head at Witt and dug in and pushed and charged. Witt's guard came off the lifeboat hatch to intercept her like she'd expected him to. He was fast. He got between Dana and Matilda Witt before Dana was even halfway to her. That was good. That was
perfect
.

Dana heard her own banshee wail as she rolled away from him and threw herself at the wide panel on the right side of the lifeboat hatch. It was really two hatches – the bridge's external hatch and the lifeboat's main entry hatch and they both shot open so fast when Dana's palm slapped the emergency open button that she barely slowed down as she ran through and into the lifeboat. She slapped the 20cm-wide, blinking green button on the panel she saw next to the hatch inside marked '
SEAL
' and the red one marked '
LOCK
'. Both hatches slid shut in the blink of an eye, cutting her off completely from the bridge and the guards who now pounded impotently on the hatch. Matilda Witt stood behind them, furiously gesticulating and shouting soundlessly for them to, '
Open that goddamn hatch and get her out of there!
'

Before they could freeze the lifeboats and cut the hatches out, Dana hit an even larger glowing button marked
'LIFEBOAT LAUNCH'
. It blinked a warning about occupants not being strapped in, and she slammed the button again and again. A hatch opened in front of the lifeboat's canopy and Dana saw stars. 

There wasn't much inertial negation. The instant the lifeboat's thrusters kicked in, she flew backwards across the cabin. The rear hatch threw itself at her. Through the rear hatch's porthole, the guards and Matilda Witt and the bridge and
Taipan
all receded so quickly as the lifeboat blasted out of its berth that a half-second later, Dana was stunned to look out the lifeboat's canopy and see the black vacuum and the stars all around her.

Taipan
was kilometers behind and the engines were still firing. But it wasn't over yet. Witt had kept at least 150 fighters around to protect her command ship and her breaching ship. Her patrols would be coming for Dana very soon.

The engines stopped, and she floated in zero-gee. Pain colored her vision red as she searched for the one thing she needed now. This was a medium-sized lifeboat, meant for the bridge crew, she thought. There would be standard Staas Company exosuits stashed in the lifeboat somewhere. More importantly, there would be helmets. Her own exo-suit would still keep her alive, but her helmet was lost somewhere back on
Taipan
.

Dana tore into the hold and tried to figure out how long she had – how long it would take Witt to send her dogs out after the lifeboat and how long it would take them to get in position to dust it with a quick burst of 140mm autocannon shells.