Patch her in.

Boland? Are you there?

I'm here, Penzington. We thought you were dead six years ago.

Yeah, well, I'm not. Listen, Deanna Moore is aboard the enemy supercarrier here.

Yes, I know. I'm here to get her.

Well, you better G.o.dd.a.m.ned hurry, because we are QMTing back to Tau Ceti in seconds!

s.h.i.t! Can you get to her?

No, not in time. Try to get here, fast!

Roger that, Penzington. You do what you can to keep her safe. I'm coming.

Hurry then.

"CO Madira Madira! DeathRay!"

"Go DeathRay!"

"Sir, our missing package is on that supercarrier! I also have confirmation that Operation Bachelor Party is in play! Repeat, Bachelor Party is in play, and our package is on that enemy supercarrier! Bachelor Party has made visual confirmation."

"Understood, DeathRay!"

Jack pushed at the throttle more, but it was already against the stop. He wasn't sure he could take the g-load much longer anyway. He sure as h.e.l.l couldn't keep talking and do it. Any further communications would have to be DTM or from his AIC only. Then he started taking on anti-aircraft fire from the Seppy supercarrier.

"Warning, enemy radar targeting signal detected. Warning, take evasive maneuvers," the b.i.t.c.hin' Betty chimed.

"No s.h.i.t!" he screamed back at it. Jack killed the throttle and yanked the HOTAS left and down and then in a corkscrew inward toward the ship. Orange tracer rounds the size of racquetb.a.l.l.s tracked all around his flight path, but he managed to keep out of the targeting solutions. The AA rounds kept coming. His best chance to keep from getting shot down would be to get inside the range of those things. The only way to do that was to get really, really close to that enemy ship. That fit into his plans perfectly. The problem was that the enemy ship was a long G.o.dd.a.m.ned way off, and he was running out of time.

As the enemy ship drew closer and closer to the QMT facility, Jack continued to struggle against the AA fire while trying to keep the most time-efficient vector to the QMT jump-intercept point. Jack was still way outside range of the QMT sphere that would appear.

"f.u.c.k the AA. We either make it or we don't!" He pushed the throttle back down to the forward stop, picking the acceleration back up. At that high thrust, the evasive maneuvers put extreme g-loads on him-upward of thirteen gravities at times. But Jack had to persevere and beat that QMT before it was too late. He had no idea how he was going to slow down and not slam into the enemy ship if he got there, but first things first. He had to make it through the gate, or slowing down was a moot point.

"Come onnn!" he shouted. Several AA rounds. .h.i.t the forward hull armored plating, but the SIFs held. The impact rocked the fighter's nose upward slightly, and Jack fought to correct the pitch. More AA tracked him, and he jerked the HOTAS left and right, tossing the mecha around like mad. His stomach retched several times, and he heaved into his faceplate. Only bile managed to make it out. He choked his stomach back down as best he could and fought against the wild ride. The fighter spun and pitched and yawed, with each evasive maneuver putting him under near bone-crushing pressure. Then a big sphere of light formed over the QMT pad and rippled inward.

"Mooove, d.a.m.nit!"

The Separatist supercarrier accelerated into the QMT gate that opened and vanished in front of him. Jack held his throttle against the stop while he grunted and squeezed every muscle, fighting as best he could against blacking out.

We're not gonna make it! Candis shouted in his mind. Candis shouted in his mind.

We're gonna make it! Jack thought. Jack thought.

Jack, we're not gonna make it!

We're gonna make it!

His vision began to tunnel in front of him, and everything went dark around him briefly. Jack grunted and fought blacking out as best he could. He squeezed his legs and abs. The pressure suit constricted around his body like a prey-crushing anaconda. It was all he could do to breathe. He forced his breath like a woman in labor with triplets. He bit so hard on his TMJ bite block that he thought he would bite through it. The biting action triggered more fresh oxygen and stimulants into his mouth. The stimulants helped him hold on to the tunnel vision a second or two longer.

"Aaarrrggghh!" he grunted in a most guttural scream. He would have p.i.s.sed on a sparkplug if it would have helped and he could've actually moved to do it.

Kill the throttle, Jack! Kill the throttle!

Two things immediately went through Jack's mind. The first was that the rings of the giant gas planet filling the sky out in front of him were beautiful. They reminded him of Saturn. The second thing was that the supercarrier rapidly rushing against him was way too f.u.c.king close.

Reverse throttle, Jack!

"Warning, collision imminent. Brace for impact. Warning, collision imminent. Brace for impact," his b.i.t.c.hin' Betty chimed.

"This is gonna hurt!" Jack yanked the throttle all the way to the reverse stop and then pitched the fighter over tail first toward the supercarrier. The propellantless drive of the mecha pushed him in the opposite direction of the relative speed he had with the supercarrier. But it wasn't going to be enough to prevent a catastrophic collision. And the maneuver made him vomit into his helmet. "f.u.c.k!"

He gurgled and heaved a few times more as his suit cleared the faceplate by absorbing the stomach material into the organogel layer. He put his left hand on the eject handle but didn't pull it.

Give me a countdown to impact, Candis!

Roger that! Nine! Eight! Seven...

Jack kept the fighter's a.s.s end to the ship right up until the last second. The supercarrier was all he could see, even though he was still several hundred meters away. At those speeds that was only seconds. He pitched the nose back over, placing the c.o.c.kpit away from the supercarrier's hull. The seconds ticked slowly since the gravity load was well above ten gravities. Time crunched by slowly, but the deceleration was working.

Three! Now!

Jack brought down the nose of his fighter and shouted "Eject, eject, eject!" as he pulled the handle. The ejection couch fired its thrusters just as the fighter slammed into the hull of the Seppy supercarrier. Jack's fighter spread out into an orange and white ball of hot vaporized metal plasma. Then the ordnance and the powerplant blew, making the explosion even more spectacular.

Jack hoped the thrusters of the ejection seat would give him just enough deceleration to survive the impact. That didn't mean it wasn't going to f.u.c.king hurt like h.e.l.l. Shrapnel from his mecha's impact against the hull spread out in a hemisphere in all directions and slapped into the backside of the ejection couch. Jack held his breath and prayed that none of it hit him. Statistics were on his side, though, since the impact was at such a high speed most of the big chunks stuck. Anything that escaped was small or vaporized, and the relative velocity wasn't extremely fast. His armored flight suit and the ejection chair should protect him.

How long to impact? he asked Candis, but it was too late. The couch slammed into the hull plating with an impact that would have broken his teeth were it not for the bite block in his mouth. The couch was designed to absorb a lot of impact, but Jack could still feel the vertebrae in his back crunch, fracturing his tailbone and rupturing several discs in his lower back and his neck. The pain was overbearing, and he pa.s.sed out for a few seconds. he asked Candis, but it was too late. The couch slammed into the hull plating with an impact that would have broken his teeth were it not for the bite block in his mouth. The couch was designed to absorb a lot of impact, but Jack could still feel the vertebrae in his back crunch, fracturing his tailbone and rupturing several discs in his lower back and his neck. The pain was overbearing, and he pa.s.sed out for a few seconds.

Jack! Captain Jack Boland! Captain Jack Boland! Wake up, Jack! DeathRay, DeathRay, wake up!

Chapter 16.

July 1, 2394 AD Ross 128, Arcadia Orbital QMT Facility Friday, 2:45 PM, Earth Eastern Standard Time "DeathRay and the enemy ship have vanished, Admiral!" the STO shouted from the science and technology officer's station. "Sir! We've got missiles launched from the planet and the facility!"

"Plot the trajectories for me, Captain Freeman," RADM Wallace Jefferson ordered his STO. "And see if you can detect what type of warheads they are."

"Aye, sir! Coming to you now. They're nukes, Admiral."

Wallace had the entire sphere of the battlescape in his mindview and could see the missiles firing up from the planet at near the speed of light. They were only a second away and not a lot he could do about them other than hope and pray that the ship's SIFs and armored hull plating held in place against the tactical nuclear warheads about to detonate against them.

"Full power to the SIF generators!" he shouted. There was no time for a hypers.p.a.ce jaunt. "All countermeasures fire! Nav, evasive maneuvers! And keep the facility between us and the planet below!"

"Aye, sir!"

Sound it, Timmy!

Aye, sir.

Uncle Timmy sounded the bosun's pipe over the ship's 1-MC intercom. "All hands, all hands, brace for impact and incoming fire. All hands, brace for impact."

"Larry!"

"Sir!"

"See if you can get me some a.n.a.lysis of that ship that was just here! I hope they don't have more of those." The first wave of missiles. .h.i.t before the evasive maneuvers and countermeasures could have any effect, and Wallace gritted his teeth.

A handful of the missiles slammed against the starboard hull structural integrity fields with multiple tens of kilotons each. The explosions rippled the SIF barrier fields with an opalescent blue wave of light. Seven smaller missiles. .h.i.t random locations across the belly of the supercarrier. But unlike a turtle or an alligator, the belly of the Madira Madira was as hard as any other part. The SIFs held, for the most part, but multiple systems were overheated, and there were a few hull breaches in some noncritical locations. There were no casualty reports or systems failures as far as the admiral could tell, and the attack was merely annoying. But you could never be too sure about how badly something was damaged by simply depending on diagnostic sensors. was as hard as any other part. The SIFs held, for the most part, but multiple systems were overheated, and there were a few hull breaches in some noncritical locations. There were no casualty reports or systems failures as far as the admiral could tell, and the attack was merely annoying. But you could never be too sure about how badly something was damaged by simply depending on diagnostic sensors.

"COB, check on my ship!" the admiral ordered the chief of the boat. The impact of the missiles rocked the ship upward and to port. The internal inertial dampening fields kicked in and reduced the effect of the missiles' impact. The crew was still tossed about a bit, but they had seen worse, much worse. These missiles had merely caught them off guard. The countermeasures should take care of the next wave.

"Aye, Admiral." Command Master Chief Charlie Green finished his coffee and was out the hatch in double-time. The COB would take care of the ship; that was his job, and he was good at it. Wallace had to focus on the fighting and taking that QMT facility.

"XO! Get the troops deployed!"

"You heard the admiral! Air Boss, why ain't the G.o.ds of War already out? Ground Boss, get those drop tubes moving. I want the AEMs, AAIs, and the Warlords on the ground five seconds ago!" the XO shouted in his gravelly voice at the appropriate bridge crew members. It was his job to make certain that things got done right the first time so the admiral could focus on what to do next.

"Aye, sir!"

"Gunnery Officer of the Deck!" the admiral called out. The youngest member of the bridge crew looked a little nervous.

"Sir!" Lieutenant Junior Grade Guy Hall replied.

"Fire at will at any potential targets. But do not, I repeat, do not destroy that QMT facility!"

"Aye, sir!"

"Nav!"

"Aye?"

"Take us in closer than we had planned. If we sc.r.a.pe the surface of the facility, then maybe that'll keep those missiles from the planet off of us." RADM Wallace Jefferson sat back into the captain's chair and tapped at some of the sensor controls on the chair arm's console. He widened the DTM view of the battlescape in his mind all the way out to beyond the moons of Arcadia. There were three moons of appreciable size, not counting the QMT facility, though it was mostly artificial. Or, if he recalled right, it was half an asteroid that had been tugged there from the rings of the gas giant that Arcadia orbited. The artificial moon looked like a jagged half sphere with craters all over. The moon was standing on edge with respect to Arcadia. On the flat surface there were many concentric octagonal rings. At each point of the outer octagon were towers reaching several hundred meters up into s.p.a.ce. The largest such tower was right in the middle of the thing. The facility looked pretty much like the one at the Oort Cloud in the Sol System, without the extra moons and sc.r.a.pped ships moored to it for structural integrity. This system looked newer and better thought out. It had been built by the U.S. military, not the Seppies on a shoestring budget.

He scanned as best he could for any other surprises. The Seppies were known for using clever guerrilla tactics, b.o.o.by traps, and kamikaze ships loaded with gluonium bombs, and they had used ma.s.s-driver guns at the Battle of the Oort very successfully. He hoped they didn't have any of those here. The problem with ma.s.s drivers, though, was that the d.a.m.ned things were usually kept underground and were hard as h.e.l.l to find until after they had been fired. With all the American traffic in and out of the Ross 128 system, it would have been difficult for the Arcadians and/or the Separatists to build ma.s.s drivers in the system without anybody spotting them. Wallace doubted they had them here, but he wasn't taking anything for granted or making any undue a.s.sumptions. When in doubt, check it out.

"CO!" The air boss, Captain Mich.e.l.le Wiggington, turned from her console. "G.o.ds of War are out, sir! The Demon Dawgs and the Utopian Saviors are deploying."

"Good, Mich.e.l.le."

"Drop tubes away, CO," the ground boss, Brigadier General James Brantley, added. "The Warlords and the Robots are out. The AAIs are right behind them."

"Good. We are stuck here without that facility." RADM Jefferson could do little more than wait at this point. The battle plan had been put into action. There was no gauge of the enemy's real strength until they started using it. Were there ma.s.s drivers? Did they have any ships? How many troops were on the QMT pad? "And I don't want to spend the next eighteen months in hypers.p.a.ce."

"Sir! We're taking in some serious AA fire from the QMT facility," the XO said.

"I've got it, XO," the air boss replied. "I'm putting the Utopian Saviors on it."

"Ground Boss, any sign of enemy troops on the facility?" Jefferson asked.

"No, Admiral. Only automated defenses," Brantley replied. "But, sir, there are apparently a h.e.l.l of a lot of the automated defenses. A lot more than were originally installed on that thing, according to our records."

"That's not what I expected to hear. They have been planning this for some time, it would appear. Who knows what modifications the d.a.m.ned Seppies have made to this facility? There could be traps, ambushes, and minefields. Better tell the ground forces to dig in and cover until we take out the automated systems from the air." The admiral was happy to see there were no defenses to speak of at the facility moon, but that also gave him a queasy feeling in his gut. The Arcadian amba.s.sador had claimed to have a million manstrong Armored National Guard. Where were they?

"All right Saviors, listen up." Lieutenant Colonel Caroline "Deuce" Leeland bounced her USMC FM-12 strike mecha around to avoid the QMT facility AA fire. Her mecha in fighter mode screamed across the surface at just over fifty meters high. Her wingman, Captain Timothy "Goat" Crow, was off her right wing at five o'clock, and the rest of the Utopian Saviors were in pairs spread out behind her. "We've been given new orders from on high, and those are to take out the surface defenses and that AA fire. Skinny and HoundDog, Golfbag and Volleyball are on me. Jawbone, you and Popstar split off with Beanhead, PayDirt, Romeo, and Freak. My team will hit the AA and, Jaw, your team takes the ground defenses."

"Roger that, Deuce," Jawbone replied.

Deuce pushed her throttle forward a bit, tapped her right top pedal slightly, and crabbed her fighter to her right a few degrees to line up on the enemy AA cannons. From what she could tell, the cannons were dispersed on the towers of the facility at each of the points. There were eight points across each of the octagonal concentric rings. The outermost ring had half-kilometertall towers on each, and there was an even taller one dead center. The three-dimensional image in her mindview was fused together by QM, IR, lidar, radar, and optical sensors into an extremely detailed view of the targets. The cannons looked like large gray metal cubes with a gun turret sticking out of each of the five faces that were not attached to the ground or tower or other structure the thing rested on. Deuce picked the first one in her general flight direction and locked it up with a QM guided missile.

"Fox three!" she shouted. The missile twisted out across the surface of the Arcadian QMT toward the AA box on the tower nearest her. She guided her mecha low to stay out of the AA firing solutions so she could watch the impact of her missile. The missile never got close to the target before it turned upward and tumbled wildly out of control, landing somewhere beyond the engagement zone and never exploding. "What the h.e.l.l!"

"Fox three!" Goat shouted. Her wingman followed up her attack the same way. The second QM guided missile spiraled out of control and went dead as well. "s.h.i.t, we're being countermeasured."

"Roger that, Goat. s.h.i.t." Deuce pulled away from her current run and out of the AA as best she could. "Saviors! Abandon present mission approach and pull back to angels ten. The facility is Gridiron. I repeat, the facility is Gridiron and fox three is ineffective."

"So why don't we just go to guns, Deuce?" Skinny called back over the net. Just because they were Gridiron-meaning electromagnetic countermeasures were taking out the missiles-didn't mean that guns would stop the AA boxes.

"Negative, negative, Skinny. We can't take the chance of damaging any part of the tower. If we can't hit the boxes, we don't hit them at all." Deuce thought about the problem for an instant and then had an idea and switched channels to the AEM command-net frequency. "Colonel Roberts, this is Lieutenant Colonel Leeland."

"Go ahead, Deuce."

"Colonel, the locals have us Gridiron and zapped, making our missiles useless against the AA boxes mounted on the towers. I'm DTMing you my sensor data of their locations now." Deuce thought to her AIC to link up with the AEM commander's AIC. "We need someone to burn them for us so we can go to laser-guided seekers."

"h.e.l.l, Deuce, we were getting bored down here anyway. I think my senior NCO is taking a nap. I'll see if I can wake her up and get it done for you."

"Roger that, Colonel. We'll see if we can't help keep the ground defenses preoccupied while you do it. Keep us posted on the status of the burn."

"Roger that. Robots are on the move, Deuce."

"All right, Saviors, watch for the AEMs making a move for the towers and let's see if we can't give them some cover," Deuce ordered her flight squad.