Tipperary and Greenstone lowered themselves down into the dirty yellow atmo slowly, using only their own artificial gees. They disappeared into the murk like sinking ships while the Lancers patrolled above the second planet.
Jordo rode solo escort for Audacity as the salvage junk shot brazenly across open space, making for the debris field with a bellyful of nervous redsuits inside. There wasn’t time to creep around and the junk’s blazing engines stood out so painfully in the cold vacuum that it made Jordo wince. If the Squidy stalking them hadn’t called its buddies across the system yet, then they might just see Audacity’s exhaust flares from there. Jordo actually mouthed the words to himself and thanked Burn when she finally cut the thrust and drifted.
He flew in over the junk's cockpit inverted and glanced up through the top of his canopy at it. Audacity looked like pieces of five different ships stuck together. Those things were originally made to work the Jupiter Trojans, not evade enemy warheads and salvos. Hardway had been a mining carrier once...
Jordo thumbed comms. "Audacity, your ass is a fifty-meter target in that thing." Burn looked back at him up through the top of the junk’s canopy. The two pilots sat side by side in there with room to spare. In the seat next to her Ernst shifted. "You got something to say about that, Ernie?"
"Don’t worry, Lancer 1-1. We’ll keep your ass safe."
"Whoa," Jordo said. "Hold up, Audacity. I’m the one flying a 660KSS barrel of whoop-ass. You’re going to protect me?"
"Fighter jocks," Ernie said it like he was bored with them. "None of 'em get it. Not even Burn, here."
"Really?" she said.
"Really." Ernst said it like he'd been thinking about it for a while. "This fight. This one right here between us and this Squidy? It isn’t about speed. It ain't about firepower. It’s about who sees who first. You and those flashy F-151 Bitzers have speed, maneuverability a decent sensor package…. some cannon, not many, but beyond our torpedoes, junks have sensor arrays originally made for prospecting. They’re made for finding metals and high density materials at a distance. That stealthed Squidy out there? He’s the one that should be afraid." Jordo wondered if Ernie really believed that or if was just bluster. The junks hadn’t spotted the Squidy in their first encounter. "If that alien is smart, then he’ll keep his distance. My man, Wrigley? My man down on the prospecting console? He can read the distortion a foil wrapped prophylactic makes in a stellar mag field from 120,000,000Ks out. If anyone can see an invisible Squidy, it’s my scope man, Wrigley."
*****
Wrigley squinted at his prospecting console. "I can’t see a fucking thing out there." This time, Wambach and Posjic hunched over his shoulders looking for Squidy, too. "There’s nothing to see here," Wrigley said. "No contacts."
"Is that good?" Wambach said. "That’s good, right?"
"Yes. And no. Why don’t you go watch out the porthole or something."
"Squidyman is stealthed," Posjic said. "I can’t see him."
"Then go watch for enemy warheads."
"Nah, Posjic," said. He put his hand on Wrigley’s shoulder. "It won’t be a warhead he uses. Squidyman won’t use a warhead this time. Squidyman knows we’ve got the 6x140 turrets and a fighter and we might pick those flying bombs off unless he uses a whole lot of ‘em." Posjic glanced at Wambach then, over Wrigley’s head.
"Yeah," Wambach said a second later, when he picked up on the fun. "Yeah, Squidyman will definitely use the particle streams this time." In the reflection off the console, Tig saw Wrigley roll his eyes, but all he could do was listen as Wambach droned on. "See, an alien particle stream, even one of the small bore ones…that’s enough to slice right through a hull like this one. Yup. See it all the time. Just last week we got to salvage what was left of Peanut’s Pride. Took a shot straight through her gunnery module."
"Yup," Posjic said, "We had to part that one out. The way the stream ripped into the inner hull, it sliced through most of what was there. But not before it filled the compartment with plasma from the vaporization. Worst part was cleaning out the crew. That beam didn’t care what was in front of it. Those heavy nuclei moving that fast… just rips right through flesh, but not the way you’d think. Unless the corpses are frozen, all the pressure of the impact builds up in this fluid wave inside a body and within a couple thousandths of a second…." he made a popping noise with his lips into his mic. It was soft, but Wrigley twitched. "Squidyman is gonna use the small-bore particle streams maybe… cut up this junk slow."
Wambach grinned over Wrigley’s shoulder. "The Ripper, Wiggles, The Ripper... Like Burn said. It’s gonna stalk us out of the black with that Squidy stealth shite and then, when we’re looking to port, Squidyman is gonna sneak up from starboard… maybe puffin’ quiet and dark on some kinda cool alien gas jet like they got in their suits... comin’ to cut us up."
Rampone started in with the fake Squidy noises on local suit comms again, the same insect warble noise that fooled Tig before. Wrigley at the console half shrugged, half-flailed to get Posjic’s hand off his shoulder so he could look over and see Rampone just before Posjic grabbed him again and shouted, "The Ripper!" Wrigley tried to spin his eyes back to his console so fast, he would have flown out of his seat if he hadn’t been strapped in.
"Fuck! Why the fuck do you do that!" Wrigley said. He didn’t take his eyes off the console again. "You know he’s out there. You know I’m watching for him. He killed UNS Duer. There were 128 men and women on that ship. What the fuck is wrong with you people? This is some serious shit we’re in!" That was too much for Wambach and Posjic. They doubled over laughing in mid-air. "You guys know if he gets by me you’re all going to die, right?" That was the punchline. Even Parker lost it.
Horcheese called down from the cockpit module on internal comms. "Tig Meester, get your ass to a terminal and run your bloody script. Make the transmitting array speak Staas Company Inventory Language for us and map the debris from SCS Luxor. Show us something after all that talk, cherry. Amaze us."
Parker smiled at Tig like he’d never seen before and Tig didn’t know why it made him want to cringe. He pushed off the bulkhead and flew to the terminal set near Wrigley’s prospecting console. "Can’t wait to see this stunt," Wrigley said. "Why the fuck did you learn to spoof inventory protocols?"
"To find the parts we wanted back on Staten Island. At the spaceport."
"At the spaceport’s storage depot?" Tig nodded. No sense in trying to hide it. "You mean to tell me you used this stunt for mapping the cargo depot and finding things to steal?"
Tig shrugged. "I had specific orders to fill," he said. "And there was never enough time to search it all by hand before security arrived." He gestured in front of his helmet to call up the spoofing script he’d written to emulate Staas Company’s Inventory Query Protocols and passed it to the terminal in front of him without missing a stroke.
To most folks, that doesn’t sound like much to brag about, but it was a point of pride for Tig because he knew that under pressure, real pressure, the kind where very bad things happen if you fuck up, even the easiest things like basic interface can become nearly impossible. The fingers can numb and the mind can cloud in an instant. Forget all the things you think you have going for you. If you can’t keep your cool...if you let the fear get inside and panic your ass, then it doesn’t matter how smart or how strong or how anything you are because you won’t be able to use it.
This time, Tig was proud to be as cool as he’d ever been. That’s what made it so confusing for him when his script instructed the junk’s transmitters to call out just right and there was no response from any of the containers in Luxor’s debris.
He spent those first seconds of knowing failure listening to the blood pump like crashing surf in his ears and waiting for the inevitable call from Horcheese in the cockpit. "Where’s my containers, Mr. Meester? You promised your Chief a treasure map."
"We’re in range, but it’s not working. I...I don’t get it. I don’t understand. It should be mapping the containers in the debris, but it doesn’t work. I think…. I think maybe we have to get closer."
The Chief didn’t even try to hide the sigh on comms. "How much closer?"
*****
Lancer 1-1 held his fighter just a few hundred Ks out as Burn flew the junk over the remains of a dozen Squidy warships all mixed up with what was left of Luxor and her cargo. His flight helmet painted the cloud of debris from the battle as an impassible, red-tinted no-man’s land strewn with hunks of metal and composites, jagged hull fragments, and pieces of bulkhead.
After only a few seconds of silent flight with the debris field passing below, Burn’s voice spoke in his ear. "The radiation from the battle is blocking the signals from the containers. We have to go in there."
*****
The redsuits scanned at the portholes. Tumbling bits of debris everywhere glittered in the raw starlight like the vacuum was full of brilliantly winking dust motes. The larger pieces of alien hull shone with high albedo on one side and velvet blackness on the other. The soup of scrap materials and ruined ships and bodies rose up around the junk on both sides as Burn submerged them in it.
Only a few pieces of alien deck plate floated past before the first of it hit the bow. Tig felt the impact come up through the bulkhead and the handhold and into his arm. The junk maneuvered after that like it was under fire, but another impact followed. And then another and another. Every one of those impacts felt like Tig’s fault.
"I thought Burn was supposed to be some kind of hot shit pilot," Posjic said.
"Burn is a hot shit pilot." Horcheese came out the angled tube that led from the cockpit module. "If she wasn’t, then we’d be taking those impacts a lot worse. You see how thick the debris is out there?"
"But it’s working," Tig said. "We’re getting our map."
"Now that we’re in the middle of the debris field. Now that we’re flying through a scrap heap and hitting hunks of hull every three seconds. Yeah. It’s working. So far, we’ve found lots of cold-vac lube, canned eggs, and barrels for carrier auto-turrets."
Tig couldn’t help things by being at the terminal, so he shared Parker’s porthole and watched the wreckage pass by on the junk’s port side. As the omnidirectional array broadcast his spoofed Staas inventory query, the intact containers from the wrecked hauler Luxor responded, and the information was projected in his visor. He only had to watch for a few seconds before wire-framed geometries appeared around the storage containers making them look like tiny, slow-rolling dice, tumbling over each other through the debris, accompanied by the product codes of the contents and range to the junk. So far, nothing worth coming in here for had drifted past, but it was gratifying to see his script working. He felt partially vindicated.
"These omnidirectional radio bursts are calling Squidy to us," Wrigley worried. "All these inventory pings you guys are sending out into the debris are like a beacon."
Posic said, "Here, Squidy, squidy, squidy."
"He can joke, but if there are any aliens around, then sending coded pulses flying in every direction as we cruise through a debris field at 15m/s is asking Squidyman to come and get us." Through the next, two-second-long silence on local suit comms, Wambach and Posjic glanced at each other with just a hint of fear in their eyes. Tig hoped Wrigley was just trying to put the spook on them for a change.
When they saw Tig smirking, Wambach said, "Wipe that shit off. It’s your fault we’re in here, cherry."
"How the hell is it my fault?"
"You said it would work from long range. You said we wouldn’t have to fly in."
"LiDAR anomalies," Wrigley said. Horcheese floated over his shoulder, and he frowned. "There’s a handful of amorphous transient contacts moving in the debris…. all bearings…"
"What does that mean?" Wambach said.
Tig already had visual contact with one. "Port-side! 9 o’clock low," he called out. "I see something. It’s moving. There’s survivors out there."
He zoomed in expecting to see a human figure in an exosuit floating out there in the debris, clinging to a piece of rent bulkhead like some parody of a castaway. What he saw looked like a knot of malevolent hoses slowly flying through shafts of light and shadow. Its ‘limbs’ trailed behind it from both ends as it came. It led with the single, circular visor in the alien suit, set in the center of its main body mass. He knew they didn’t have heads or necks the way we did, but there were eyes of some kind behind that visor. It was looking back at him and it was coming towards their junk for one reason and one reason only: it wanted them dead.
Burn came on the channel, "Contacts to starboard. Two more."
Wrigley said, "We’re lucky the Squidies never send SAR teams to look for their survivors."
The junk’s grizzled, swell-bellied crew chief, Phipps, who’d so far been content to ride in the reactor section, now came through the hatch like a runaway knuckledragger. Tig wasn’t sure if Posjic jumped out of his way or if she got knocked aside. "Turret up! Turret up!" the crew chief barked as Posjic bounced off the bulkhead in his wake.
The vibrations from the topside turret hummed as Phipps tried to open a panel on the forward bulkhead. It resisted, and he held on to the bulkhead straps and kicked at it with one heel until Chief Horcheese thumped it once with her artificial fist and a few hundred kilograms of force. It cracked open after that. "Positional readjustment is my specialty," she said. "No charge."
Phipps opened it all the way and revealed the loading mechanism for the turret. As he triple-checked his gunner’s load and ammo feed, he said, "Those Squidies all got propulsion built in their suits."
"Are there going to be a lot of them?" Parker wasn’t ashamed to ask.
"Don’t you worry. Probably can’t catch us if we keep moving at this speed," Phipps said, "but we’ll have to stop if we actually find anything and we want to secure it."
"Wish we’d brought the gunnery junk instead," Parker blurted out without thinking. "It’s got a lot more turrets." Audacity’s crew chief scowled a little at that. "Sorry," she said. "I mean I just wish we brought more guns, that’s all. No offense."
He flew like a dirigible to the rear bulkhead and opened the door of the junk’s armory where a dozen MA-48 rifles rested inside on their rack, waiting patiently for their chance kill something. "If it’s guns you want," he said with a grin. "MA-48 over/under. Pulse laser up top, point seven zero gauss rifle slung underneath. I bet you scored pretty high with one in basic. My daughter did." For a second, his chest puffed out farther than his belly. "She looks just like you."