He and Parker boarded Audacity last. The junk's Crew Chief stopped them and the rest of the redsuits right after coming through the open airlock. "I am Crew Chief Phipps." Phipps had a lunar drawl, the thick kind that made him sound like an actor. His belly swelled outwards in his exosuit. Big guy like that probably liked spending most of his time on a boat without any environmental gravity. "Do not interfere with my loading mechanisms, my airlocks, or my hatches. Do not obstruct my cockpit tube. I like my cockpit tube clear!" That gave half the redsuits the snickers. "If you don’t know what something is, then for fuck sakes, don’t ask me, just don’t touch it!"
Ellis, Rampone, Willby, Hongston, Wambach, Pasjic, Komora, Parker and Tig entered Audacity’s belly under Phipps' stern gaze and filled up the personnel module’s seats. The gunner rode up top in the turret and Chief Horcheese was above in the cockpit with the pilots. One glow-pecker babysat the reactor in the next compartment. Besides Phipps, the only crewmen in there with the redsuits was the figure hunched over the electronic warfare console set in the starboard bulkhead.
"No more seats," Raleigh said as he came down the tube from the cockpit. Raleigh... Tig had thought this trip would keep him clear of Raleigh for a least a day, but he’d been dead wrong. At least he didn’t look any happier to see Tig. "There’s plenty of room for you two cherries up there once we clear Hardway’s gees." He gestured over the electronic warfare console, pointing to the upper bulkhead where webbing and straps had been bolted into the steel. "I don’t know how you talked Horcheese into taking the two of you, but if you go over my head again I will strap you both to an inertial negation coil and crank it up until the artificial gees pull your heads out of your asses."
Tig and Parker found a spot against the bulkhead on either side of the the hatch to the engineering module. Wambach was sitting closest. He said, "Keep those helmets nearby."
"I know."
"And if we hit action, put it on before the pilot hits the combat maneuvers. The inertial negation system in this thing won’t stop the inside of this module from rotating around you and smacking you in the side of the head."
He watched her fiddle with her helmet and wanted to say something, but it was like a bubble of air caught in his throat that wouldn’t come out. What he wanted to say was that he was sorry he got her into this, but he was finally part of something decent and he wanted in as deep as he could get. Parker wasn’t supposed to come along. This was stupidly dangerous. Parker had an expensive education and a future after this. She didn’t have anything to prove like he did. Tig figured he didn’t have much to lose, but he wasn’t ready to have Parker’s death on his head.
Parker said, "Fuck you, Tig."
"What? I didn’t say a goddamn thing!"
"You’re looking at me just like you did before you tried to ditch me. And you did a shite job of that, by the way. You told me where you were going before you pushed me out of that mover in the spine. You wanted me to come on this mission. Just couldn’t say it. Passive-aggressive mutherfucker. Fuck you."
He was a little stunned to find out she thought she had a better idea of what was going on in his head than he did. That pissed him off a little, mostly because of the the last part. He thought he knew what passive-aggressive meant... Whatever it was, it wasn’t his style. Wambach and Posjic at least pretended they knew what it was because they were laughing.
He leaned back against the bulkhead while Parker fumed. A second later, the pilots up in the cockpit slid Audacity sideways, out into the black. Once they were clear of Hardway's artificial gravity, Tig’s feet lifted off the deck.
The pilot rolled the junk clockwise and the bulkheads began to swap places around him. He and Parker grabbed the netting before the real fun started. That little roll was just a warm up. If Burn was flying, she had a sadistic streak, Tig decided after the junk pulled up and over with fully rotated nacelles. She blasted it in a high-gee turn that flattened him against the bulkhead as she pulled up around the carrier’s keel side inverted. She rolled out of it so Audacity had the same attitude as the junk Tig saw through the porthole. It had launched from the keel side of the primary bays.
"There’s Greenstone," Rampone said. "All packed full of whoop-ass."
The turrets with the 4x140s on her topside and her keel rotated. She carried her torpedoes in between. She hung next to Audacity for only a moment before her maneuvering nacelles rotated to blast to the rear and lit up with blue plasma exhaust like her main thrusters. Audacity's kicked in at the very same time.
The ships of the battlegroup slid past like armored islands as the two junks maneuvered around the haulers and a pair of UN destroyers not much bigger than a couple of junks. "Bet we could grab one of ‘em with the salvage arms and take it with us," Wambach said.
"No need. We got UNS Duer coming with us...all hundred-and-twenty meters of her." Raleigh didn't sound impressed.
Audacity and Greenstone flew together for a few more seconds before Greenstone broke formation first. She rolled over, tilted her nacelles and veered down and out of the battlegroup completely. She disappeared from view for a moment or two before Audacity followed her through the same maneuver. That brought on the inertial gees again. They tugged at Tig's insides and tried to pull him off the netting.
They settled in behind Greenstone some sixty degrees off to starboard while UNS Duer pulled past the two junks, her small-gauge railguns pointing off into the starry black ahead of her.
Out the corner of his eye he noticed Parker put on her helmet for a closer look. She gestured in front of her visor, zooming in. "What are you looking at?" he asked.
"Tipperary. You can see the breaching ship from here. She’s only a couple million Ks back behind the convoy. She’s drifting."
The junk’s crew didn’t seem interested, but practically everyone else filled up the portholes for a gander. After he got his helmet on, he pushed in next to Parker, spotted the transponder and zoomed in on the wounded breaching ship for himself.
No lights. When looking at her from this angle, the damage didn’t seem so bad. She was missing a section of hull where the bad reactor had been ejected. That’s all he could see.
"What the hell happened to her?" Wambach didn’t say it to anyone in particular. "Anybody ever say?"
"Saw them eject the number one reactor," Rampone said. "Not before it flared out bad, though. You see those jets comin’ out her vents?"
"Some of those weren’t vents," Raleigh said. "Some of those were hatches blowing out after her decks flooded with firestorm." That put a momentary quiet over the compartment.
"Since when the hell does that happen?" the crewman at the electronic warfare console said.
Rampone took affront. "You implyin' something?"
"Implying... That’s a big word for you redsuits. No. I’m saying something took a shot at Tipperary and spiked her reactor from a distance… That was no random malfunction. That was a soft kill. Something must have snuck up on her during the last attack and zapped Tipperary to make her overload the way she did."
"I didn’t see any Squidy ship zap Tipperary."
"I know," the electronic warfare officer said. "That’s why I’m keeping my eyes glued to this console. I’m watching for radar and LiDAR and IR sigs. Passive contacts."
"Passive-aggressive contacts," Wambach said, and he and Posjic laughed about it again. He was pretty sure now. They didn’t know what it meant. They threw some other jokes around for another ten or fifteen seconds, but Tig didn’t hear them.
Tig was fixed on the sound in his helmet. It was similar to the alien jamming he’d heard dirtying up comms since they’d left Sol. It sounded like a faint warble, like a bug he’d heard in summer and a bird and a wailing baby all at once. It clicked, too. The crewman at the electronic warfare console had his helmet on and it tilted to the side like a dog tilts his head when he's confused. He hears the alien signal, Tig thought. He hears it. There's Squidies out there.
The EWO spun around from his console and suddenly flipped off Wambach. "Knock it off. Quit screwing around on L-comms." Wambach and Posjic doubled over where they floated, laughing hard enough they strained at their straps.
"That was me, actually," Rampone said into his helmet, making the alien noise again. "What’s a matter? You hear the invisible Squidies coming get a kill? I so got you, Warrant Officer Wriggles."
"Wrigley. My name is Wrigley. And fuck off."
"God bless the Staas Privateers," Wambach said. He winked at Parker.
Hundreds of millions of Ks away, the battlegroup’s last breaching ship, Fat Anne, opened the transit to Beta Ursae Majoris, the convoy's next stop. Wrigley reported the emissions. They sent no last message before Hardway and all the ships of the battlegroup and the convoy entered the passage. Wrigley told them when the transit had closed behind them. "We’re all alone at Algol now," he said.
Because he’d just been fooled by Rampone’s impersonation of a Squidy transmission, Tig almost didn’t say anything about the formation of five stars that seemed to have ripped themselves loose from the black just to follow the junks and the destroyer towards their rendezvous with the drifting breaching ship. He zoomed in with his helmet, but they were too close to Algol for him to see them clearly in visible light or IR and too far away to read their transponders. He couldn’t even make out the color of their jets. The swollen star’s glare made even the Squidies’ pinkish exhaust flares look pale blue like a friendly craft. When he pointed them out to Parker, Rampone heard him and said, "What? That formation out there? Oh, that’s not Squidy. That there is way more dangerous. That’s the Lancers, the 133rd Fighter Test Squadron.
He said, "Why are they rolling in on us like that. They look like they’re rolling in for an attack run."
"You’re right," Rampone said. He zoomed in on them, himself. "That’s weird. They do look like they’re about to attack."
*****
"Maintain attack formation," Jordo said. "I lost the contact again, but I swear it’s out there."
The flares from the two junks’ engines grew larger in Jordo’s cockpit canopy as the 151s closed on them. The Lancers would have to pull away in less than sixty seconds. Jordo hoped that would be long enough to get a fix on his LiDAR ghost.
Dirty whispered her next words like whatever was lurking out there might hear. "We’re coming in pretty hot on those junks and that destroyer."
"Hold course and speed. And tighten up the formation," Jordo said. "Make a LiDAR net. Holdout and Gusher, pull parallel with me and Paladin. It’s out there and we’ll spot it if we get close enough." Holdout and Gusher accelerated and then tapped their maneuvering thrusters forward to fall into line with Jordo and his wingman.
Gusher couldn’t contain the excitement in his voice. "I got a glimmer! Between us and the destroyer, 3 by fifteen off my nose. 43,000Ks out. Shite. It’s gone."
"I got it now," Paladin said, and Jordo’s 151 saw it too. His flight helmet projected a faint, specter in the visor for an instant, and then, it was gone again. "Lost it."
"39,000Ks. Three point five by fifteen off my nose."
"Whatever it is, it’s not a reflection. It’s moving closer."
"Move to intercept. We’ll be on top of it in twenty seconds." It had only been less than a minute since the first flickers on their LiDAR screens and Jordo hadn’t called it in yet because he wasn’t sure, but now, as they closed on the contact, it appeared in his visor again, and this time, it was close enough that he could zoom in and see the waving patch of stars with his naked eyes. Something was there, bending the light around itself. Jordo thumbed comms to the junks and UNS Duer. "Lancer 1-1 calls bogie, bogie. Duer, you have an unknown craft on your port side closing out of the sun. Best range estimate is now under 15,000Ks from your position."
The UN destroyer responded. "Lancer 1-1, this is UNS Duer and we have zero bogies on LiDAR, radar or IR. You run a syscheck on that Bitzer's array?"
"Lancer 1-1, this is Pardue in Greenstone. My EWO had something, but now, he can’t see squa-" Pardue broke off in mid-sentence and as the Lancers ripped past the location of the last known contact, Jordo knew why.
At only a kilometer’s distance, it looked like a pale, blackish silver ghost made only of the searing light from Algol that it couldn’t lens around itself. It was gone again even before the Lancers shot past, but before it slipped back into the starry black, it launched four warheads.
"Vampire! Vampire!" Jordo called out on comms. "Four enemy warheads 15,000 Ks out to port and… headed for Tipperary! Bearing 182 mark 12."
The junks and the destroyer were a lot closer, but it had shot at the breaching ship. The alien warheads accelerated and left faint trails pointing to Tipperary where she hung, not far from the muddy yellow, second planet, where the Squidies had waited in ambush the first time.
"Tipperary, this is Lancer 1-1." He had no idea if they could hear him or even if there was anyone alive on that darkened and fragile hull, but he told any potential survivors the only thing he imagined they’d want to know about right now. "The Lancers will handle those alien warheads for you. Sit tight."
*****
Tig tracked the four alien bombs and zoomed in on them with his visor. They rolled on their spiky thrusters as they streaked towards the breaching ship. Whatever had loosed them had done it close enough to Audacity that Tig had a detailed view of their casings from the rear. The alien warheads were almost as big as the alien fighters. They’d been packed with maneuvering thrusters like a fighter, too. Once you engaged them, they put on a hell of a set of evasive combat maneuvers. He’d seen a few of them come in at Hardway, corkscrewing around the shells from the turrets.
"The Lancers will get ‘em," Rampone said, poking the porthole with his finger like the line of alien torpedoes crawling across it were bugs and he was squishing them. All of the redsuits pressed to the portholes. Wrigley stayed glued to his console and Phipps was too busy checking his systems one more time to watch someone else’s action.
"Those Squidy warheads are goin’ pretty fast," Wrigley said. "They got a lead and a jump on the Lancers. "They might not catch ‘em before the bombs hit Tipperary."
"You're stuffed full of it," is what Rampone said to that.
Parker went to the data, of course. "At max acceleration, the Lancers F-151s will put Squidy’s flying bombs in cannon range in…" Parker gestured in front of her helmet, trying to get an estimate based on observed speed of the alien warheads. She knew how to work the slimmed down version of the OMNI NAV system built into a standard Staas exosuit pretty well. Tig knew she had the answer when she stopped gesturing. She opened her mouth to speak, but Raleigh cut her off.
"Stifle it, Cherry. Don’t you spoil our pool. We start the clock in 30 seconds and my fifty Ameros say the Lancers take the Squidy bombs in 30 to 35 seconds after that. "
"I got 35 to 40." Wambach was in.
So was Posjic. "25 to 30."
"With that lead? Squidy bombs fly over 1060 KSS. And they got a head start. The shells won’t catch up until at least 50 seconds."
"So what’s your claim?"
"45-50. Money, money, money." Komora was superstitious.
"50-55," Rampone said. "And it’ll be a long-range kill."
"Anyone else? And…..mark," Raleigh said. "The clock’s ticking."
The alien warheads barreled ahead as if they thought they’d make it.
Tig could have worked it out like Parker had, but he didn’t have to. The alien warheads were flying flat out, as fast as they could and he could see the Lancers gaining on them a little bit at a time. He knew their relative ranges so what he saw was no trick of the eye. "Sixty-five seconds," Tig said.
"Cherries ain’t allowed to play."
The 151s rolled in on the flying bombs for a long-range deflection shot. Rampone said, "There it is. 55 seconds..."
Tig said, "The haven't hit them yet." The streams of fire from the first 151s stitched across the black, curving, reaching out for the alien bombs. The alien bombs jinked hard to avoid that first salvo and Tig realized the first two planes were herding them just before the rest of the Lancers opened up and the alien bombs flew into a hellfire rain of 140mm shells. The HE-443s and OT Sabot loaded by some redsuit’s hand sparked on the alien hull casings before they penetrated, detonated, and shredded everything inside.
The Squidies’ bombs cooked off harmlessly in empty space nowhere near Tipperary. "62 seconds on the nose," Parker said. "How’d you do that, Tig?"
"Too easy." That’s what Tig thought he heard Wrigley mutter to himself just before the junk spun around him and the bulkhead smashed into him from the side and tried to brain him with the edge of the electronic warfare console. It had been on the other side of the compartment just a second ago.
"Brace for ACM," Burn said over internal comms like it was an afterthought. You were supposed to say that before you bounced your passengers off the bulkhead. She called out to the other two ships. "Greenstone and UNS Duer, come about for gunnery, now, now, now!"
Out the starboard porthole, Greenstone’s pilots didn’t ask questions, the gunnery junk fired thrusters in opposition and spun to put more of its turrets on target.
"Audacity, this is Commander Tobin on UNS Duer, what the hell are you doing?"
"Come about for defensive action!"
Only 2Ks behind the destroyer, the stars shimmered like someone had thrown gravel in a puddle reflecting them. The distortion hung behind UNS Duer like a killer raising a knife. Tig knew UNS Duer saw it too when the Commander in the chair thumbed comms at the same time he gave orders to his NAV. "Oh my god…. come about! Come about! One Eight Zero! All defensive batteries, contact bearing one eight zero, fire! fire! fire!"
The stealthed Squidy ship that snuck up behind Duer fired a single warhead, almost point blank. The flying bomb traveled for less than a second before it detonated up against the slender destroyer’s engines. Tig’s helmet dimmed to save his eyes and when it let him see again, Duer had been knocked forward and its shape had changed. It was bent around a volcano where its main engines should have been. The doomed ship tumbled past the port side of the junk and shuddered before her hatches blew and she jetted fire. Internal detonations rippled her hull in nauseating waves in the moments before she burst.
Audacity and Greenstone blazed from their turrets and raked the sky in vengeance, but they hit nothing. The shells streaked off across Algol until they spread thin and dim, and their fire petered out in the black.