COMBAT SALVAGE 2165 (5 page)

"
35%? Hell," Paladin reasoned, "that’s a 65% probability of it being my johnson."
 

Jordo thought they were light effects in the clouds, but within a second those shapes turned more menacing. The lightning went off again like a storm around them as a trio of Squidy warships rose fast out of the murk like 600-meter tusks, like flying stone teeth, spiked with gun towers and glowing on one side from all the atmospheric friction.

"
Contact, Contact! Squidy warships!" The particle streams from the aliens' gun towers stabbed then waved, chasing the 7-meter fighters, slashing in long, two-second bursts, drawing burning lines in the outermost atmo as four more trios of Squidy gunboats rose out of the soupy atmo and revealed themselves.
 

Most of them were out of effective range, but they fired on the Lancers anyway, forcing them to fly defensive while the aliens blasted themselves out of orbit unopposed. "
Hardway, Hardway!
" he called out as the Lancers flew between the slashing beams. "
This is Lancer 1-1. B
e advised you have fifteen, repeat: one five Squidy warships inbound from the 2nd planet."
 

The Squidies waiting to ambush
Hardway
accelerated faster than the Lancers had ever seen a large alien hull propel itself. "When the hell did they get so fast? Estimated time to intercept is now less than two minutes."
 

"They're going to beat us back to the convoy.
"
 

"
It’s going to start before we effing get some."
 

"
Like hell it is." That’s what Jordo said through grit teeth, but his flight helmet projected the unfolding battle for him in his visor and it looked like Dirty was right. The Lancers had dodged some alien fire in and around Algol’s atmo, but ‘first blood’ bragging rights would not belong to the Lancers today. SCS
Araby’s
fighters and junks along with other elements of the
Hardway
air group would be the first to kill Squidies at Algol.
 

The aliens attacked the convoy and led with their biggest ships. The three heavy cruisers took the lead, flying close abeam, narrowing the gaps between their hulls as they came until the tallest of their gun towers nearly came together like cactus spines. They launched warheads together. Over a hundred of the aliens’ flying bombs flew unpredictable, twisting paths, making for the UN and Privateer ships, but without fighters to disrupt the screen protecting the battlegroup, their warheads never made it past.

The alien bombs blossomed green and lurid as they cooked off under streams of 140mm cannon fire from over 120 fighters and junks. Then, before the hot gasses from the detonations had even faded, the Squidy warships opened up all at once with their guns, stabbing across the vacuum at the fighters and junks, slashing their particle streams in vengeful, extended bursts.

The aliens’ small bore streams sliced fast across formations of approaching Bitzer fighters and junks. The lumbering 50-meter junks couldn’t get out of the way as fast as the fighters could.
Araby’s
torpedo junks took more than a few fatal hits, but not before they’d loosed their warspites. A swarm of Mk3 Warspite torpedoes ripped across the blackness, riding blue fire as they hurled themselves at the Squidies.
 

The smaller alien warships, their destroyers, slim frigates and other, less identifiable craft tucked in behind the cruisers as their guns sliced the sky with a hundred different rivers of hyper-accelerated nuclei. Smashed and sliced torpedoes cooked off under fire, blooming bright with mortally wounded fighters and junks, lighting up the Squidies with their dying flashes as the enemy closed.

The fighters spiraled down the Squidies’ defensive streams, firing on the enemy gun batteries to give the torpedoes their best chance. The F-151 Bitzers of
Hardway’s
own 99th Wild Weasels pulled away a fraction of a second before the first detonations against the alien hulls.
 

When the new constellation of stars that had risen faded enough to see again, it was clear all three of the Squidies' gunboats had been mortally wounded. They burned from the inside. Fire jetted out the vaped holes up and down their hulls.

The three biggest ships were done for. They were dying even before UNS
Tamerlane
and all the big guns on all the UNS ships and attack carriers opened up with their railgun salvos, but those dead, half-molten hulls sailed on without stopping, protecting the smaller warships behind them.
 

Jordo could see what was about to happen, but from 50,000Ks back, there wasn't anything he could do.

In front of the Privateer carriers, the UN gunboats formed a range of steel mountains in the enemy’s path with the dreadnought
Tamerlane
standing
as its highest, most impassible peak. The faces of that armored range sparkled as the guns that clung as densely as alpine forests all fired their alpha strike together.
 

Magnetic acceleration drove the osmium and tungsten sabot to speed and produced inertial gees in excess of 80,000 Earth gravities. The already hyperdense missiles compressed further during their .0004 second trip down the barrel. They superheated into a new state of matter.

The railguns of the UNS and Privateer ships coordinated their fire and Jordo couldn’t count the number of hits the hurtling, burned-out alien cruisers took. The impacting sabot sprayed molten metal and hull like a hundred volcanoes, and all three ships bled wet atmo and fire and melting ship out exit wounds.

The three, dying alien cruisers finally cooked off seconds after that, their overloading power plants leaving nothing behind but hot gas and fast debris. The remaining, smaller alien warships that had been hiding behind them kept their tight formation. The alien destroyers now took the brunt of the railgun fire from the ships of the battlegroup while one, singular and smaller ship now used
them
for cover. It had the outline of small launch bays on its fat, vertical hull.

"
Pocket carrier..." Paladin said through his teeth. He saw it, too.
 

"
Al-most there…"
 

As the line of alien warships plowed through the fighters and junks, 140mm cannon nipped at the aliens’ light cruisers and destroyers, but those little shells couldn’t stop them fast enough. The alien line ran straight into another salvo from the combined railguns of the entire battlegroup. Burning Squidy hulls tumbled and fell out of formation like broken teeth. The last of them closed ranks, protecting the single ship in the rear.

As the next salvo hit, the last, doomed alien destroyers broke up into parts less than 10Ks out from the battlegroup. Before the railguns could fire again, the debris cloud continued on the collision course the aliens had set. Some of it impacted against the armored hulls of the UN cruisers and bounced off
Tamerlane’s
steel slopes. Some of it sailed between the steel peaks along with the last, single, remaining alien warship.

The Squidy ship had flown into the middle of the convoy and now, none of the gun batteries could fire on it easily. Before the fighters could swarm it and the junks could put torpedoes into its hull point blank, it streaked right between
Hardway
and
Araby
, loosing a single warhead at each of them.
 

The automated defense systems on the carriers fired over fifty turrets at once, filling the space between the alien warheads and the Privateer hulls with a fiery storm of range-det shells, all blooming like a string of flowers in the black.
Araby’s
system got lucky in the .3 seconds it had. It caught the warhead early and only got buffeted with dissipated plasma.
Hardway
wasn’t so lucky. The hailstorm of range det shells didn’t catch the warhead until it was less than a hundred meters out from the carrier’s sides, and when the alien bomb felt its hull casing peppered with shells and knew this was as close as it would get to the carrier, it detonated itself.
 

The exotic metals and alien composites that made up the Squidies’ flying bomb all converted to high-density plasma and the force of the detonation accelerated it right into the forward, port-side launch bays. One bay took most of the blast. After the flash, the inside of it glowed like a hellish, 70-meter kiln.

The alien warship blew past the carriers and opened up on the cargo haulers with its particle streams. Fat, SCS
Luxor
took six hits at once and it was like she’d been raked by claws in three directions. She vented and drifted until secondary detonations blew out her sides, and she spilled her cargoes. The rear third of the 800-meter ship spun away with the severed engines and reactors. After it spewed x-rays and gammas, it wasn’t more than a second later that it blew.

With all the speed they'd built up, the Lancers ripped past the fighter and junk squadrons still coming around to chase the last Squidy warship. Jordo coaxed more acceleration out of his Bitzer as he pulled ahead of Paladin and the rest of his squadron. He couldn’t lift his chest to breathe at all now, but it didn’t matter. He'd get there before he passed out.

He shot past the capital ships and carriers and veered around the dense debris clouds from the haulers. Then, he was so close to that last Squidy ship that when its bay doors opened and a squadron of red bandits launched out of it, he almost rammed them. Jordo and Paladin jinked wildly and dove through the enemy fighter formation, trying to take as many targets as they could before the alien aces could recover. The 140mm cannon shook his cockpit hard enough that the three alien aces he scrapped on that pass blurred in front of him.

The battlegroup's combined railguns finally found the Squidies' pocket carrier, and Jordo ripped past the burning wreck with Paladin and rest of the Lancers close behind. They rolled in on the trio of alien aces already lining up to draw their razor-thin, small-bore particle streams across
Fat Anne.
They planned to slice the breaching ship’s ring or cut her reactor stack in two.
 

The Squidies were fixed on their targets and never saw it coming. Jordo’s shells stitched a line across the aliens' three-plane formation along with Paladin’s, flashing up and down the alien hulls where their shells impacted, blasting and melting armor, destroying the thing inside, that disgusting knot of hose-like limbs and ribbon-thin body the aliens called a pilot. The two they hit veered off course for a fraction of a second before they spun and their shell-torn power plants cooked off.

Nine red bandits remained, but by the time the alien aces recovered and spun on their thrusters to put the breaching ship back in their sights again, the 99th Weasels and the 55th Hellcats and nearly every fighter in three carriers’ air groups were on them. There was nowhere for the aliens to fly that wasn’t stitched tight with hellfire. Even the gunnery junks got some, and when all the blossoms from all the HE range-det shells and all the alien reactor dets had faded, the Squidies’ fighters were gone, and it was over.
 

The convoy steamed on. The aliens had massed everything they could at Algol and thrown it at them. They’d targeted the breaching ship
Fat Anne
and given their best shot, but she was unscathed. Her fragile, wonder wheel hull was intact and there wasn’t anything between the battlegroup now and the transit to the next system but clear skies on radar, LiDAR and IR. They’d won Algol.
 

The cheers went up on most of the comms channels, and the pilots from three air groups were still cheering when, on the far side of the battlegroup, the other breaching ship, SCS
Tipperary
, rocketed jets of blue fire out the emergency vents on her axle-shaped main hull. A moment later, she jettisoned a reactor core. It streaked across 5Ks of vacuum, riding a column of fire before it cooked off like a low-yield fission warhead.
 

The breaching ship,
Tipperary
fell dark as she began to turn off angle and tumble in her line of travel. There were more no enemies in sight...not on radar or IR or LiDAR. Everyone asked what happened and none of them knew. Now, all the voices that had called out on victory on comms had the same mix of defeat and astonishment when they said the only thing they knew for sure: "
Tipperary
is down. The breaching ship is down."
 

5

Tig’s crew used explosives to put out the fire in bay 39. Or Raleigh did, anyway. As usual, Tig watched while Raleigh got to do everything. Raleigh was the one that got to huck the charges off the back of a knuckledragger mech-suit passing the open bay door. He even insisted on detonating them himself so he could whoop as all the molten steel shot out into the vacuum from the rippling shock waves.

Tig and Parker’s duty shift ended, and after he went out the airlocks, he made straight for the primary bays. Out in the passageway, he strode fast for the interdeck tube before he even took his helmet off. He wended his way between the junk crews and pilots hoping that if Parker was following him, she’d lose sight of him and give up. Parker didn't. She called out to him over local comms. He almost broke into a run trying to make it to the lift before she caught up.