Six hours later, Hardway steamed for the outer system with a fifteen ship battlegroup and a convoy of ten haulers. The UN cruisers that had briefly dropped anchor at Sagan now accompanied Hardway and two, sister carriers along with several destroyers and the dreadnaught, UNS Tamerlane. The mountain of armor rode on the port side of the formation. Between her and the carriers, under as much protection as the battlegroup could deliver, no less than five breaching ships flew together like a flock of spoked wheels on long, fire-spitting axles.
The only destination of note in the direction they headed was the Sol-Procyon transit. There hadn’t been any official announcements, but Tig knew something big was going down on his first day. Parker said Devon said he heard from a turret gunner that they and the whole convoy were going deep into enemy-occupied space.
The comms chatter of the Combat Air Patrols played in Tig’s helmet along with local comms, over which Raleigh narrated the proper reassembly and priming procedure for a maneuvering thruster plasma shunt on a QF-111 Dingo. Tig stood under the curving, pilotless hull of the autonomous combat drone in Launch Bay 47 and wondered if its AI felt anything with Raleigh pokin’ around up there. AMTS Raleigh’s whole torso was up inside the junction M-port and Tig could distinctly see movement in the AI’s spider-like eyes, at least the ones that faced out the open bay doors where UNS Bull Run and SCS Araby were visible cruising a few Ks off Hardway’s keel along with a pair of jumbo haulers.
"Here," Raleigh said.
"What." Tig said it without looking. Like the drone, he watched the ships outside. Shadowing someone else doing basic maintenance he could do in his sleep was already killing him with ennui.
"Stupid cherry!" Raleigh blindly waved the burnt-out tri-joint shunt assembly under the lip of the maintenance port where Tig now noticed it. "Take it!"
He took it from Raleigh’s gloved hands and stepped back and looked inside the pipes. This piece was meant to help shunt the Dingo’s engine plasma where it needed to go, but the superheated gases had vaporized holes clean through the walls of the pipes separating the thrust channels "Feed split’s melted out," Tig said. "Ceramics must have had a defect and failed."
"No shit, cherry." Raleigh dropped himself down out of the MSys junction port and stood on the deck next to him. "Why you think I removed it?" Tig liked Raleigh less when he could see his face. The man had beady little eyes that caught the lights inside his helmet like a rat’s eyes. "We don’t have any more of these units up here. Have to go down to B6 and get another."
"The 56-ACB shunt assemblies they use on the longboats are almost identical. Same fittings and everything. Good ceramics, too. I saw a heap of those in MB2. They had more than Hardway’s longboats could use up in a year. There’s even some on the cart right over there." He nodded his chin at the SC-66 longboat service kit, sitting just a few meters away. "We can use one of those."
"The day I cherry-rig a plane with a bullshit fix like that is the day I vent my suit. And if I want to hear your opinion… no… forget it. I won’t. I’m going to get the part. You stay here and don’t touch anything." Raleigh made for the lock and left him standing under the drone.
He heard a double beep in his helmet...Parker opening a private, line-of-sight comms line. "I think Raleigh is sweet on you," she said as she appeared from under the drone. "We’re all done with the ESys back there, Rampone is sealing the EIA panel. How much longer are you grease-eater, MSys, boneheads going to take on one thruster junction?"
Tig glanced at the airlock. Raleigh would be gone for a good fifteen or twenty. "About sixty seconds," he said. He was already moving for the longboat’s service cart. He knew the 56-ACB shunt assembly in there would do the job. He’d have that Dingo fixed up before Raleigh even got back.
"The hell are you doing?"
"I can fix this thing without Raleigh."
"Raleigh’s not going to like it."
"It’ll work just as well. It’ll work better."
"I’m not saying it won’t. I’m just saying..."
"Nobody's giving me a chance to show ‘em what I can really do, Parker. I can do more than…" He tried to find a way of saying it nicely. He couldn’t. "I can do more than this bullshit." He had to crouch and then bend and then rise up inside the Dingo’s thruster assembly to mount the 56-ACB in place. It fit perfectly of course. These fittings had been standardized for decades. "I can do a lot more around here than anyone’s letting me."
She said, "Yeah, I know what you can do…" Now that he was inside the assembly and she was outside it, he couldn’t see her face anymore, just hear her voice in his helmet, and from the hesitation he wasn’t sure if she did really know. How could she, really? She’d never even seen one of his custom jobs. Only smugglers, blockade runners, and a select few criminal denizens of SI City had seen those. "I ever tell you about the first hot rod I built?"
"About 16 times."
He crouched and bent again to extricate himself from the thruster assembly and rose next to Parker. "Made it from three anti-grav whizzers I stole from some polo-sissies at SI Prep when I was 12." The next part they said together. She mocked him, but he said it with pride. "That baby did 400kph." Parker rolled her eyes. "All decked out in Vanta Black. Made runs over the border at will for a month and then traded it for a used Intercontinental Hopper. If it flies, Parker, then I’ve ripped it, stripped it, and made it into something faster. I should be doing more than swapping parts on a Dingo 111."
Three minutes later, Tig, Parker, and two whole service crews watched the QF-111 Dingo hover and rotate on its jets as it tested its newly repaired maneuvering thruster assemblies. Raleigh started shouting from the other side of the bay when he came back and saw the 111 in the air. "What the hell is that thing doing?"
"I put in the longboat ACB like I said, and it works great." The 111 rolled, pitched, and yawed, turning in place. It almost looked happy. "We’ve got to talk, Raleigh." Behind Raleigh, Parker waved her hands to stop him. He ignored her. "I can do more than swap parts on a QF-111, but you won't give me a chance."
At first, he thought all the red he saw in Raleigh’s face was reflection off his exosuit, but then he realized the color he saw was Raleigh’s blood rising. "It’s the wrong part," Raleigh growled at Tig with his helmet centimeters away. "Take it out."
"What? Why? You’ve got loads of these and they work better," Tig said. Behind Raleigh and the veins now throbbing with fury at the senior redsuit's temples, Parker mimed shooting herself in the head and then walked away.
"Now hear this, now hear this." The XO’s voice boomed in his helmet. "Tipperary is at T-minus ten minutes to discharge and breach. Hardway will transit to the Procyon system in ten. That is all."
Chief Horcheese's voice came on next. "This is the Ops Chief. All cherries to the bow decks if you want your eyeful. Tipperary is going to breach space and open the hypermass transit to Procyon. Since you’ve never seen it happen, this, people, this is your one chance to gawk."
A few hundred meters up the ship’s spine to the bow gunnery decks was where the saltier reds said to go for the best view. By the time he and Parker and the others made it there, the show had almost started.
The twenty-five ships of the battlegroup had already come to a stop out past Saturn's orbit, where a pair of 2000m Paul Bunyan class blockade guns stood guard in the starry blackness. A herd of torpedo mines surrounded the same, empty region of space at which the absurdly large railguns had been aimed. The breaching ship Tipperary flashed them all as she came to full-charge.
She held station 5Ks ahead of the battlegroup like a burning wheel, sheathed in zero-gee plasma and crackling with lightning. It danced over the 375m diameter, ring-shaped bow section that housed her capacitors. The seeping discharges arced from the ring out to the five spokes and down her axle-shaped main hull. The lightning jumped and crackled out from the ring to arc and skate along its surface and pool up and down its length.
And then, in an instant, all that zap, all that seeping charge disappeared, leaving Tipperary darker than every other hull in the battlegroup before she suddenly released all the energy she’d been storing up and used it to hyper-accelerate five streams of heavy nuclei on a collision course.
Five, luminous shafts ripped out of the emitters near where the spokes met the ring and lanced out so razor thin, that in the first moments they fired, Tig wasn’t entirely convinced he saw them at all. But he saw where they collided.
Tipperary’s five particle streams smashed into each other at close to lightspeed, hurling high-energy spray in all directions. It was so bright that it took Tig a whole second to note how, where the streams collided, a ball of white-hot fire had formed out of burning plasma so dense and brilliant as to defy his eyeballs' scrutiny. It appeared as a featureless white opposite of the dim vacuum of space. It was energy; it was mass. As the streams continued to collide, the nascent inferno grew. The ball of hell swelled outwards, feeding off the energy released by the streams as they crashed into each other from five directions without pause.
What had begun as a burning point in the black had become a kilometer-wide sphere of swirling destruction until all at once, it was as if the insides of it drained out… like they somehow fell inward and imploded. All that energy…all that mass...it was gone now, leaving only a ghostly, hollow sphere, a thin curtain of fire over a spatial membrane so thin, they said it actually only had one side. The membrane ruptured. It withdrew suddenly from all sides like the skin of a torn balloon to reveal a hell-mouth passage between star systems.
Tipperary had breached space.
He pressed his fingertips to the porthole. The fire-ringed, unknown constellations Tig saw through the transit, at the other end, were the stars as seen from Procyon, twelve light years away.
As Hardway boldly led the ships of the battlegroup and the convoy through the threshold and into the transit, her hull pierced a secondary spatial membrane over the threshold where something that looked like fireflies skated, trapped by unseen forces. The exotic particles splashed onto the carrier’s bow and ran down the barrels of the railguns and flowed towards the stern of the carrier like a sparking liquid.
The warped and blurred stars shone faintly visible through the waving walls of the hypermass transit as Hardway raged down the narrow passage. That’s when Harry Cozen chose to speak. His voice came over the squack channel, booming out every speaker and filling every helmet.
"This is Harry Cozen. As you all know, the battle along the Sirius Front has raged since the first months of the war. What you do not know, is that the third UN battlegroup, charged with holding the Sirius end of the Sirius-Sol Transit, has been routed. The Squidies control that end of the transit now. Task Force 223, the combined Privateer/UNS battlegroup on operations in that sector is now cut off from all reinforcement and logistical support."
Parker’s eyes widened in her helmet. The significance of what Cozen had said wasn’t lost on Tig either. They had a lot of ships at Sirius.
"Without support or a path to retreat," Cozen said, "their position is untenable. The enemy forces now flooding Sirius are superior in number and 223 cannot retake the system. Intel indicates that in order to win the battle at Sirius, Squidy rushed most of his fleet there and left the backfield open, hoping we wouldn’t notice. Knowing he had only a limited time to exploit this weakness before enemy forces could maneuver to counter him, UN Admiral Ming plunged his task force deep into Squidy-occupied space. Task force 223 is currently fighting its way through Regulus, making for the Squidies home system. Admiral Ming's force isn’t large enough or well-supplied enough to drive all the way there. That’s why we're going to rendezvous with the task force and drive to the enemy's home together, like a single dagger into Squidy’s heart." Cozen let that image sink in. "You’re going to hear scuttlebutt saying that without Sirius, Earth can’t last more than six months. It's true. But we’re going to drive hard to Gamma Draconis, hit the Squidies' on their homeworld moon, and end this war in three."