COMBAT SALVAGE 2165 (18 page)

"
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!"
 

18

The warped and twisting stars sped past Jordo’s canopy on either side in a way that made him think they were flying underwater. The region of ‘other dimensional’ space that manifested between star systems as a hypermass transit was always narrow. The one they’d opened was narrower than usual. The passage the Lancers and the breaching ship and the junks had to traverse was less than 650 meters wide and constantly changing shape. With the junks and Tipperary and all the Lancers hurtling faster than light towards the Mizar system, it almost seemed for a moment as if they’d made it, as if they’d got away clean, but Jordo had been flying his fighter backwards for at least ten seconds now, staring at the transit’s opening onto the Algol system as it receded. It was still open.

"
How long is it going to take that thing to close?" Paladin said.
 

"
Too long."
 

All the Lancers had spun on their thrusters then to fly backwards, and Dirty was the first to spot them. "Squidyman, Squidyman, comin’ down the pipe. I count three, six…. Hell, it's an even dozen."

There were more. As they entered the transit, the plasma caught and trailed off the spikes on their
three
-dozen red hulls.

There was no room for evasion in there. "What’s our ETA to the terminus? Will they catch up before we make it?"

"
I don’t know. But if they follow us out of here, they will."
 

"Lancers, listen up," Burn said. "I am ordering you ahead. You are to accelerate as hard as you can for the terminus and leave us here. Your priority is to warn
Hardway
."
 

"
What?"
 

"
You’re faster than
Tipperary
and the junks. If anyone can make it out and transmit a warning it’s you and the Bitzers."
 

"
But we don’t all have to go."
 

"Yes, you do. There’s thirty-six red bandits back there just licking their alien chops. You really think you can stop them? I’m ordering you to fly ahead and warn
Hardway
. The battlegroup and the convoy are the priority here. That’s the end of it."
 

"
Burn…."
 

"D
on’t get mushy on me, Lancer 1-1. Do I sound like a woman who’s about to die?"
 

"
What are you going to do?"
 

"
Just make sure you let me know the second you’re clear of the transit."
 

*****

The terminus grew over Tig’s head like the end of a tunnel. The pinprick flares from the Lancers’ engines centered themselves briefly in it. He saw them against the foreign stars before they veered to port in formation and were suddenly lost from view. Their pale blue constellation flew across the terminus again and held station there, waiting for the breaching ship and the junks. "Lancers are clear of the transit," Jordo said. His voice didn’t change pitch or tone at all when he said, "We have
Hardway
and the battlegroup in sight. They're 471 million Ks out and still crossing the system."
 

"Roger that," Burn said from
Audacity
. "We’ll see you soon."
 

*****

The cockpit of a junk is a surprisingly spacious place if there’s only the pilot and co-pilot in the module. Once Burn added Phipps, the Crew Chief, the reactor specialist, Nysciz, Wrigley, and the gunner, Bubba, the cockpit module of
Audacity
felt more like a crowded lifeboat.
 

"
You load the NAV script and give it priority downstairs?"
 

Wrigley nodded. "She’ll fly just fine without us. Until we say so."

The reactor specialist told her what he told her before. "You know that’s not the kind of det that’s going to take out 36 enemy fighters. When the reactor cooks off, it won’t even be the yield of one warspite torpedo."

She nodded. "I’m not gunning for the fighters," she said. "Not directly."

"
What then?"
 

Burn turned to Ernie and said, "Blow the cockpit."

"
Seal green," the co-pilot said. "Circuit good. Bingo on your mark."
 

"
Bingo."
 

When they blasted the cockpit off the junk without any inertial negation, Burn thought the rockets might just turn them to spam. The acceleration gees flattened the junk’s crew against the rear bulkhead. Burn and her co-pilot couldn’t do much under those gees, but except for one remaining task, their job was done.

Burn got confirmation in her flight helmet a few seconds later that headless
Audacity
had obeyed her autopilot script and come to a stop behind them. The junk drifted close to the twisting stars and the waving wall of the transit.
 

The cockpit module tumbled slowly next to
Greenstone
and
Tipperary
on her way to the terminus. 63 seconds later, the cockpit module ripped out the hellmouth and entered regular space in the Mizar system along with the breaching ship and the junk.
 

*****

"
Squidy will exit the transit in… thirty-three seconds," Jordo said.
 

"
Negative, Lancer 1-1." Burn voice came over comms cold and even. "Nothing is coming out of that transit."
 

He could see deep down in where the Squidies now approached the drifting junk. They were wary of a detonation. They tried to fly past without opening fire as the junk’s reactor cooked off like a low-yield bomb.

Whatever dimensional membrane made up the walls of the transit echoed with the detonation, rippling with waves so violent, the walls of that great vein seemed to reverberate against each other before they tore. The membrane ripped and came apart in a hundred places at once and receded from all points simultaneously. The walls of the interstellar transit tore away everywhere, seemingly rushing at the still open terminus of the transit in a fiery wave. The three squadrons of alien aces vanished from sight, presumably lost somewhere in interstellar space or incinerated when some sizable portion of the energy that went into the transit's opening hurled itself out into the Mizar system in a fountain of high energy particles, microwaves, and infrared.

"
I’ve got incoming LiDAR beams. Multiple sets. Radar too. We’re being painted." Dirty said, "Multiple contacts."