DREADNOUGHT 2165 (13 page)

When the static faded from comms, the XO
shouted: "It's a breach! We're in! All squads... go! Go! Go! Back
over the top!"

Jordo charged over the edge of the hull
again, but what he saw 300 meters down the hull, where the Ticks
had been, wasn't any hole they'd be boarding through. None of the
detonating Ticks had blasted through the Dreadnought's armored hull
to the inside. The armor was unbreached, but the way the ringed
planet rose off the lip of the hull then told him the alien
Dreadnought's engines were out and it was falling into the planet's
gravity well. They ran back to the top of the hull as the wounded
alien battleship headed into the atmo, skull side down. Lucy
shouted. "Everyone to the far side!"

Jordo ran like he really believed if he just
made it across the top of the ship and to the other side he'd be
safe. The aliens' battleship was going into the atmo and it didn't
matter where they were – they were all going to burn.

Above, tiny
Hardway
crossed between them and Altair. She was
a half-million Ks out now and there was no way she could reach them
with a longboat or a junk. Jordo counted 15 pinkish plasma blooms
chasing her – fifteen enemy ships.
Hardway
had all her engines back and she was
moving fast, but when Jordo zoomed in after she'd crossed the face
of the star, he saw the forward bays were all on fire. A flash that
could only be a detonation against the hull winked on the
sub-tower. Fire and gas jetted out a hole big enough to fly
through.
Hardway
was losing
this battle.

"Can they see us you think?" The voice
on comms came from a Marine next to Jordo. He had a round and
sweaty face. "Can
Hardway
see
us? You think they're looking?"

"Yeah," Jordo said. "They can see us. They
know."

"Long as they know we got it."

The Dreadnought hit the outer atmo
skull-side first. The survivors stood in the middle of the hull on
the other side and rode it in. Plasma licked over the edges of the
Dreadnought all around them in 50-meter-high waves, continuous and
hypnotic. Where they crashed down and rolled, the hull glowed
bright. The waves got bigger the further the behemoth fell and the
denser the atmo got. The plasma broke and swirled over a hundred
meters in from the edges of the Dreadnought's hull, and the
survivors clustered in a shrinking island of safety in the middle
of the ship. There was nowhere to go after that and nothing to do
but look up into the waves of superheated atmo and ionized gas
crashing in from all sides.

Jordo could barely see far-off
Hardway
now through a glowing haze,
but he swore there were more lights around her than before. And
flashes – flashes everywhere around her and across the enemy hulls
like
Hardway
had somehow shot
a hundred main guns at the Squidies'.

He zoomed in and once his helmet
filtered out some of the distortion from the veil of fire he spied
them through, he saw all the new stars in the sky. Pale blue
engines burned in the black behind
Hardway
– a dozen Staas Company privateers – an
attack carrier just like
Hardway
escorted by fat-hulled freighters turned into armored
gunboats. Reinforcements had arrived. In the rear of the battle
group was wheel-shaped
Tipperary
. She'd come back with the
reserves.

The Squidies' fifteen ships found
themselves suddenly outnumbered. They turned away from
Hardway
and the Privateer
battlegroup. The line of them came around together and ran. The
attack carriers' junks chased them out of orbit, loosing warspite
torpedoes after them. There would be no alien task force bursting
through at Barnard's Star and pillaging the Sol system
today.

As the Squidies' Dreadnought fell into the
ringed planet's grasp, burning up under his feet, the waves of fire
crashing in from around the edges of the hull reached closer every
second. Soon, they'd wash away the survivors.

"This is Ram Devlin..." the XO said over the
crackle on comms. Jordo actually wanted to hear this speech. He
wanted to hear the XO tell them what an honor it had been to
command them, but another voice broke in on the same, half-jammed
channel, and once it did, Jordo couldn't hear anything on comms but
cries of joy.

"This is
Malta
of the
Hardway
Air Group
.
Looks like we missed some fun. We're coming
down hot with five junks. All survivors, prepare for extraction."
Jordo looked up high in the waves of plasma. The brightness made
his vision blur with tears as he watched the boxy silhouettes
of
Hardway's
junks coming
down from above to save them.

The junks sank down through the crashing
waves of plasma and blasted them from all sides with exhaust. The
fifty-meter boats landed hard, bouncing Jordo off his feet so he
was running in the air in the first seconds he scrambled for them.
As the airlock doors closed on the hell outside, it engulfed the
junks completely. The hell-storm tried to pry its way in with fiery
fingers before the airlock sealed and severed them.

The flames licked at the porthole and he
felt the vibrations in his feet as the hull of the junk expanded
around them. It groaned like a tortured beast in the moments before
they all fell to the deck from the inertial gees of liftoff.

They cheered as the junks blasted away from
the Dreadnought's hull and escaped with the survivors. They cheered
like it was a victory. And it was. But only a few thousand Ks out,
when Jordo looked out the porthole, back towards the planet, he saw
that cursed ship exit the atmosphere trailing hell behind it. He
put his hand over the porthole quick, like he was killing a bug,
blocking the sight of it as if obscuring it would stop anyone else
from seeing it...seeing the way the human skull painted on its side
grinned, mocking them as it broke orbit and escaped.

Epilogue

Scuttlebutt said they hid
Hardway
in a semi-enclosed dock on
the far edge of Sagan's yards, guarded by QF-111s so the Squidies
couldn't watch the rebuild. Jordo thought they just didn't want to
show the press the holes in her hull. They didn't want the cameras
to see the metal that had melted and reformed like candle wax where
plasma storms had burned through the decks.
Hardway
would be shooting a lot of coffins off
into the sun at the official memorial service.

There would be no cameras for
Hardway
, but there would be plenty
for her crew and Lucy Elan's Company Marines in a few weeks, when
the VIPs would be coming to the service to make speeches and give
medals and be seen with the 'heroes of
Hardway
'.

"I can't stand those things," Dana said when
Jordo asked her what they'd have to do during the event. He'd never
been to anything like that and neither had any of his pilots. VIPs
didn't come to prisons to honor convicts. In fact, nobody had ever
honored any of them before for anything and Jordo had been looking
forward to it. Maybe the three people on Earth that still
remembered his name would see him up there. "It's hell," Dana said.
"You sit up on this platform in a dress uniform and you can't move
for hours while politicians and execs blow hot air on the stage in
front of you and say things you want to strangle them for."

"What do you mean, 'you can't move'?"

"Oh, you can move," she said, "but
twitch, sneeze, or scratch your
balls
and it'll never be forgotten."

Jordo understood what she didn't like about
that, but he was a convict and he already lived with the
unfortunate fact that nothing he did would ever be forgotten. At
least now, they'd remember something good he'd done.

The 133rd
had even been
assigned to show off the new Bitzers. During the arrival ceremony,
they'd fly in as a hot-dogging escort for the VIPs' longboats. The
cameras would love it. Everyone loved fighter planes and fighter
pilots. That's what Paladin said anyway even if it never got him
laid.

It wasn't until a day later, when they
flew their 151s into Sagan Yards during a rehearsal that Jordo
found out the flyby in their planes was the
only
part of the ceremony they'd be required to
attend.

Jordo Colt had heard that phrase before. He
knew what it meant when you weren't 'required to attend'. It meant
nobody wanted you there.

So Lancer 1-1 took it to the XO, Ram Devlin.
He found him off-duty, drinking in Sagan's OC with Chief Horcheese
and Lucy Elan. Something about seeing him relaxed like that pissed
Jordo off. He walked up to their table and stood there, waiting
while they laughed it up about some joke he didn't want to get.

"No medals for us, huh, Mr. Devlin?"
He said, "The Lancers just aren't as pretty as the other heroes
of
Hardway
, I guess. Not
pretty enough for the cameras and the folks back home."

Devlin's smile left him. Lucy Elan knocked
back a shot and said, "What bullshit are you talking about, Lt.
Flyboy?"

"We just did a rehearsal for the part
where we fly the Bitzers in as escorts for the arriving VIPs before
the memorial service. You know, since we have to land and all after
the flyby, on a private channel, I asked the Staas PR coordinator
about it. I asked her where we should set down. She told me
nowhere. Our job is to fly in with the VIPs' longboats and then
disappear. There's no seats for us on the stage. No medal ceremony.
I haven't told my pilots yet, Mr. Devlin and I don't want to. I'd
rather
fix
this."

The XO's eyes stayed on the shots of
liquor in front of him. He reached forward and pushed two at Jordo
without looking up and it took every measure of restraint Jordo
could muster not to smack them off the table with the back of his
hand. "No medals for
us
– no
seat on stage behind the VIPs – none of that crap. They're hiding
us, aren't they."

Chief Horcheese sat up. "That's crazy. It
must be a screw-up. Why the hell would they do that?"

"So nobody asks Harry too many questions
about them," Lucy said. "Questions like: how come there's only five
left? And why use convicts for test pilots? Mostly, Harry probably
doesn't want anyone to hear about the other thing. You know exactly
what thing I'm talking about, Lt. Flyboy. So do you, Devlin." She
took the shots Jordo passed on.

The XO said, "I didn't know."

"Well," The muscles clenched in Jordo's jaw.
"Who do I talk to about it, Mr. Devlin?"

"Him," Lucy Elan pointed her thumb at the
XO. She had a collection of shot glasses in front of her now. Most
of them were empty. She held up the last full one for Jordo, and he
took it.

*****

The Lancers were in Sagan Yards' shittiest
tin shack bar when Jordo told them the bad news. Paladin threw the
table into the Staas logo painted on the external bulkhead so hard
that he must have triggered some defect or stress fracture in the
belt-iron steel because the pressure variance alarms went off.

The table landed on a crew of redsuits
from SCS
Venture
. It all went
downhill from there. It wasn't the grease-monkeys' fault, but once
it started, the Lancers pounded on that maintenance crew like there
was a chance someone might give them a medal for it.

*****

Three weeks later, two days before the
memorial ceremony with the VIPs, Ram Devlin brought up the Lancers
with Harry Cozen. He found him in his quarters, the same luxury
quarters Sagan had given him before, in the separate tower
overlooking the yards, set on the far side of the station. He stood
in front of the floor-to-ceiling, diamond-pane window with his back
to the door, watching the rebuild outside in the yards. Only 3Ks
off, across the black, the station's crews were fitting new launch
bay modules on the carrier. What could be seen of her flashed up
and down with welding. "Is there a problem of some kind with
Hardway
?"

"The work is on-schedule. I came about the
Lancers," Ram said.

"What about them?"

"It has come to my attention that the
Lancers will not be seated on stage with the VIPs during the
memorial service in two days nor are they to receive the medals and
promotions that Asa Bolo,
Hardway
's AGC, recommended in his
reports."

"And?"

"The Lancers deserve the same recognition as
the rest of the crew."

Cozen's back was still turned, but his
shoulders rose and fell like he'd silently laughed. "Giving people
what they deserve isn't always possible, Mr. Devlin. You know
that."

That's right, Ram thought. If everyone got
what they deserved, then someone would have killed you by now.

When it comes to dealing with Harry Cozen,
knowledge concealed is more dangerous than knowledge flaunted, but
Ram still told Cozen everything he knew. Ram told him he'd heard
about the last push at the Battle of the Amazon Crater and Cozen's
troops that could run between the bullets and the 'magic minute'
compound he gave them that had such tragic side-effects.

And Ram let Cozen know that it was no
mystery to
him
who had put
the blueprints for a highly dangerous, experimental compound
derived from 'magic minute' in the Lancers' path. "Only you could
have made this happen, Mr. Cozen. Only you could have changed the
ship's mainframe permissions to give the Lancers access to both the
recipe and Doc Ibora's molecular assembler."