Tipperary steamed for the Algol-Mizar transit at her best speed with the two junks and five Lancers flying just ahead of them. All Tig could see of the fighters with his naked eyes was the pinpoints of their exhaust flares. They looked like a constellation gone squirly as they rolled around each other and switched up their formation up every few seconds.
He didn’t notice the Chief had woken up until she spoke. "The hell you do to me, Meester..."
"Welcome back," Parker said.
"The Chief is back!" Rampone left his console and flew over the web of control leads and concatenators.
Wambach almost pulled out the leads from her shoulder socket yanking on them to get to the Chief faster. "You alright, Chief?"
"Do I look alright?"
"You had an overload," Tig said. "Like a seizure."
"What about the Squidy task force gunning for Hardway…. is it still in place or have they already hit the transit."
"They already left to lay their trap ahead of Hardway and the battlegroup."
"They’re gone, then?" Horcheese sounded as if she doubted it. "They know what a breaching ship is. They know we could warn Hardway. I’m surprised they didn’t send more ships than the one we killed."
"Oh, they didn’t forget us," Rampone said, "They dispatched a trio of destroyers to come after us, but we’ll beat them to the Mizar transit by almost four minutes."
"And Hardway will be there?" Timms said from the NAV console. "If we open the transit and jump to the Mizar system, then Hardway and the convoy and the battlegroup will all be there?"
"That was the plan..." She looked at the bundles of control conduits like jungle vines where her limbs should have been. "When we get there, you’re all transferring off Tipperary. Even you, Timms. You already did the math for us. I know where to collide the streams to open the transit."
"Thanks," Timms said.
The Chief said, "Meester, you know there’s a real chance that even if you rigged all this up right and it works, we could still die. You and Parker should ride in the junk. All of you."
"No, no, no. He can’t go," Raleigh said. "You said Cozen said he was lucky. So he’s got to stay."
"If he stays then I get to stay, too." Parker said.
"If the cherries get to stay... Hell," Rampone said. "Me an Wambach. We rebuilt this ship as much as anyone."
"Send Parker back," Tig said.
"Screw you, too, Tig!"
Horcheese actually chuckled. "You saying ESys Specialist Parker isn’t up to her job?"
"No."
"She stays, too," Rampone said. "I’ve seen you lookin’ all moon-eyed at Parker. I bet you’ll be luckier if she stays."
*****
Burn insisted on charging the capacitors in flight. While an already crackling Tipperary settled in position just 2Ks from the point in the vacuum where she would breach space, Jordo zoomed in with his flight helmet and interrogated the closing alien warships one more time. He’d seen their images painted in millimeter radar returns, grainy and monochrome. He thought maybe it was the angle they flew at that hid the gun towers, but now, they’d come closer and changed their angle of approach and he still thought they looked under-gunned. "Lancer 1-2, zoom in with your flight helmet and tell me how many gun towers you see on those incoming alien destroyers."
"Not enough," Paladin said. "One, maybe. Small-bore. Near the top."
"They're too fat. Those are pocket carriers," Dirty said. "Three of ‘em."
"Twelve red bandits flyin’ off each one. More than I’d like to tango with."
"They must have figured out our game. They don’t want us transiting out of here and warning Hardway about the ambush."
"Audacity, this is Lancer 1-1. We’re going to have company sooner than we thought."
"I see ‘em now, 1-1. They’re going to launch those fighters any second."
"And those bandits will accelerate. Haven’t run it through the OMNI NAV, but I figure we’ve got less than three minutes until they get in firing range."
Burn called out, "Tipperary, Chief, you there?"
As he flew across the breaching ship’s bow, through the dome he thought he glimpsed Chief Horcheese’s head and torso strapped in the command chair with a thousand cables trailing out of her, like a spider that had become its web. He lost sight of her when the meter-thick radiation shield meant to protect the breaching ship’s bridge closed over the dome and made him feel like a peeping tom.
*****
As the capacitors packing Tipperary’s ring came to full charge, the radiation shield closed over the dome like a slow, half-meter-thick eyelid. After that, he couldn’t see the ring and the lightning storms ripping up and down the hull and he was thankful for it. The arcing bolts had gone from discomforting to downright frightening after the Chief filled the capacitors past 80%. The charge that seeped out flayed overhead in whips that skated over the surface of the dome, leaving pools of charge trapped in the crystal.
Horcheese sweat now from her temples and brow. It ran down her neck and chest. She grit her teeth so hard she could barely get her words out. "Balancing the reactor input with the capacitor seepage."
"What’s wrong?"
"Reactor feedback you wrote goddamn hurts! It burns! It’s burning my feet!"
"The reactors must be close to overload."
"Well, I’m not going to shut ‘em down! Kill the sensory feedback!" She screamed once and writhed. He had his hand on the control conduit and he wanted to pull it, but he couldn’t. "Kill it!"
"I can’t without losing the system! I’m sorry!"
Then, she let out the kind of pre-verbal cry he’d only ever heard from animals and women in childbirth and he thought she’d have a seizure, but after a few more seconds, her squinting eyes opened. She said, "I’m taking Tipperary over the top." Once she topped off and overcharged the capacitor system, she’d get an extra 11% more power, but it couldn’t stay in there for long. "I’m all in," she said. "It’s now or never."
A tiny, arcing, charge came off the command chair and wormed and noodled its way into the back of Tig’s hand, making him let go. Then, he grabbed the back of the chair again because there was nothing else to hold on to.
"All ship, all ships, this is Tipperary." Rampone said, "Discharge is imminent," Rampone said. "Discharge is imminent."
"No countdown," Horcheese told him.
"Whatever you say, Chief. It’s your show."
She closed her eyes then, concentrating on the streams of imaginary sand running through her fingers and brought them to a point, making the particles into a stream of single nuclei at the same moment she released the power in the capacitors to drive them. There was no change in her face when it was time, other than she opened her eyes and stared up into the armored dome above her as if she could see through the shield to the point in the vacuum where she would collide the streams.
"Now."
Outside the breaching ship, the capacitors in the ring released their energy under Horcheese’s regulation. When all that energy flooded into the three NS191 particle stream emitters, every hair on Tig’s body stood up. It felt like the ship’s tremendous charge was bleeding into the atmo on the bridge just before all the charge from the capacitors went into powering the magnetic vectoring rings on the particle emitters and ejecting bright streams of heavy nuclei.
Timms said, "Good contact!"
Outside, up through the dome and the blast shield, three perfectly synchronized streams from Tipperary’s NS191s collided over the transit point. Out there, the pinprick star they made was growing. That burning fireball, the spherical inferno, that ball of hell at the end of their noses was getting bigger.
"100 meters," Tig shouted out the fireball diameter as it read on the console. "150." He stopped shouting out the size of the growing fireball when he could suddenly see it in flashes coming through the belt-iron steel radiation shield above. It was as if, for blinking moments, the blast shield and the dome weren’t there at all.
"Exotic particles!" Parker shouted. In those terrifying moments when he could see though the ship and his own flesh like it was made of nothing at all, the sphere of roiling hellfire filled the sky. It lunged at them as it grew.
"Hull temp! 3500, 4000, 5000!"
"We're way too close!"
Horcheese let out that pre-verbal cry again, and this time, when the next wave of Parker's exotics bathed the bridge, he saw right through the Chief as she screamed. All at once, he understood the wordless expression in her cry was defiance.
The monster outside the bridge swelled wider and loomed until the plasma that licked in furious waves over its surface slapped at the breaching ship, vaporizing hull plate and buffeting Tipperary so Tig thought she would rip apart. A second later, as the Chief's cry fell from the air, the discharge ceased.
"Chief!"
"Hull temperature dropping!"
"Open the shield," Rampone said.
The Chief must have managed to keep the streams on target because out in front of the breaching ship, the center of the hellish monster they’d created had gone dark. It was as if all that energy they'd poured in had fallen through a crack and gone somewhere else. When the waves of plasma dancing on the opening transit faded, he looked through a swarm of animated particles skating on the dimensional membrane and saw stars...different stars...the stars as seen from the Mizar system.
"It’s open!" Rampone shouted it over comms as if the whole system couldn’t see it.
"This is Burn," she said. "All ships into the transit! Go, Go, GO!"