The bridge was intact. Raleigh must have patched into their batteries because he’d got power hooked up and the lights were on. With the exception of the raised command chair in the center and all the extra consoles to run the ship’s more unique systems, it looked more like an observation deck than a command deck. The diamond-pane crystal dome over his head was stronger than the belt-iron-steel hull, but the fact that it extended all the way down to the deck made being on the bridge almost like being outside again. The ring section encircled the command deck at its center like a low, unbroken ridge and the ship’s five, reverse-engineered, alien particle stream emitters jutted up off it like stumpy towers.
"He’s over there," Raleigh said, pointing his chin to the black exosuit slumped over the NAV console. "That there is Lieutenant Timms. He does the math."
"What?"
"You’ll see."
"I already told your man what happened," Timms said. His voice was quiet and flat. He had blood on the inside of his visor and when he did finally lift his head from the console and look up, his face was half covered in it.
Chief Horcheese took the man’s helmet in her hands and tried to get a good view inside. "Headwound."
"It’s not…it doesn’t matter," he said. "It’s mostly a nosebleed. Minor concussion at most. I can get treated for it when we get back." Timms’ eyes shifted and when Tig followed them he saw the black exosuit near the deck on the far side of the consoles. Someone had laid the body out respectfully, but it had drifted sideways. The visor was nothing but purple-red with dark patches inside and he looked away as soon as he saw it.
"That’s Commander Elogin," Timms said. He opened the bridge hatch after the attack was over. He went through into the tube and Liu was about to follow him when it happened. When the reactors went nuts. He was about to go down there when the plasma hit. The hatch slammed shut and blew him back up into the dome overhead so fast I didn’t see him until he was bouncing off the deck. He’s spam now."
"You’re the only survivor we’ve found so far."
Timms nodded like he’d expected that. "This ship is built for one thing and it isn’t survivability."
"What happened, Mr. Timms?"
"I don’t know. Really. I don’t know anything."
"You’re a lieutenant on this ship. You’re a bridge officer."
"I do the math."
"What?"
"For the hypermass transit calculations. I do the math. I have to pretend steer the stupid ship, too, because Staas Company only wanted three, non-union bridge officers. It's mostly auto-pilot. I’m supposed to be doing my doctorate, but they wanted Noondie Hypermass Physics specialists for this and there aren’t more than two or three dozen in the whole world…"
"The accident," Horcheese said. "Focus, Mr. Timms."
"After it happened, I called out, but the whole battlegroup, the whole convoy sailed on past like I wasn’t even here."
"Your suit radio can’t break out of the shielding on this ship."
"Raleigh told me some kind of stealthed Squidy warship got the destroyer that came with us."
"Uh-huh." Horcheese looked up and out the dome at the dirty yellow clouds of the 2nd planet, some 700,000Ks out as she called down to Wambach in the reactor control center. "Give me good news, Wambach. I want good news."
"I got good news. I got great news. Tapped into the feeds using the pd-119ac and an interface daemon fro-"
"Faster, Wams."
"You’re going to have a fully lit reactor in ten minutes. Don’t complain because it’s only one. I got you power. And if you can manage to get all the hull breaches sealed, then we can have atmo in here in fifteen."
"I take back everything I said about you, Wambach. Raleigh… what’s the current state of this bucket's engines?"
Raleigh’s ugly mug looked over from the Ops console. "Engines check out fine from these diagnostics. Give me ten minutes and we can move. Slowly, but we can move."
"Lieutenant," Chief Horcheese said, "we are going to hide your ship. And then, we are going to fix it."
Timms stared at her like she wasn’t there. "Okay. Do whatever you want." He must have been in shock.
"I’m going to need your help." His eyes began to wander to the stars out the top of the dome. "The manuals for this ship and these systems are restricted material," the Chief said. "We’ve never seen some of this stuff up close before. I need you to help me understand the damage to this ship’s systems and tell me if Tipperary can breach space."
"I told you. I just do the calculations for the transit targeting. I just figure out where to collide the streams. Math... I just plot microchanges in interstellar transit point locations. I don’t know about anything else."
*****
Jordo and Paladin ripped past Tipperary and the junks keeping station alongside her. Out through the starboard side of his cockpit, Holdout and Gusher turned to starboard and pointed their engines at him. The glare from their exhaust spoiled the deep IR readings all around them.
"Every time I tune my array down low enough that we might get some kind of emission from that Squidy, all I get is noise from Algol’s flares or our own fighters."
"Burn said we have to be right behind him to even catch a whiff of his engine heat."
"Maybe we should just go active with the radar and the LiDAR."
"That Squidy’ll just lens the ping around his hull and if there’s any more of ‘em hanging around, that’ll call ‘em to us. No," Jordo said.
"Aliens I can fucking see to fucking shoot. Is that too much to ask?"
The new, high-energy emissions from the far side of the Algol system were detected by their 151s and the arrays on the Lancers’ flight helmets. Projected in their visors, it was quite a light show and it was one the Lancers knew well by now. The opening hypermass transit was clear on the other side of the system, but there was no mistaking it. X-rays jetted in the first seconds of the terminus’ bloom. Then came the starburst gammas and the fiery exotic particles. And then, when the transit was open, out came the Squidies.
"Are those cruisers or big carriers?" Dirty said, "They’re so far away I can’t tell."
The Squidies were a billion Ks out on the other side of the system where Algol’s light was dimmer. Jordo couldn’t make out the gun towers very well. Illuminated mostly by the radiation from the transit, the image of the alien vessels his flight helmet could produce wasn’t detailed. The alien warships looked like long, chiseled tusks, trailing fire in thin streams as they steamed into regular space and emerged.
"Nine, ten," Holdup counted.
"You’re going to be at that a while," Paladin told her. "I got a bad feeling there’s plenty more."
"It’s a whole, alien armada," Dirty said. "They’re gunning for our battlegroup. It’s a trap for Hardway and the convoy."
"They’ll never catch up with Hardway and the rest of them."
Jordo said, "They won’t have to. The aliens will transit from here to Eta Ursae or Beta Andromedae and cut Hardway off. Yeah. They’ll go to Beta Andromedae and ambush the battlegroup and the convoy when they come out of the transit from Mizar. The enemy isn’t as thin here as everyone thinks. It’s a set up. If Hardway doesn’t get a warning they’re being herded into a trap, they’re as good as dusted."
"I guess we’re not the only ones Squidy fooled," Gusher said. Knowing that didn’t make Jordo feel much better.