Cyber Dreams - 6.44 Good Hunting

“Holy shit! These arm cannons hit hard!” Bennet crowed into comms as Athena X’d out another anti-ship battery on Juliet’s tactical grid.

“Keep comms clean,” was Juliet’s reflexive response. Then, after switching to a direct line to Bennet, she added, “I know, big guy. That suit’s awesome. Be careful, though.”

“Roger, boss.” He didn’t sound at all contrite, and Juliet smiled, picturing his face as he stomped around those gun emplacements, blasting anything that wasn’t solid plasteel and using the plasma torch to cut things he couldn’t blast. Even as she imagined it, though, she glanced at her various timers and saw that Crocodile was about to enter the effective range of the guns, and there were still three operational.

“Athena—” she started, but Athena spoke into her comms at the same instant.

“Juliet—”

Juliet chuckled. “Jinx! Anyway, I was going to say the Crocodile’s about to get real uncomfortable.”

“Yes. I can use the maneuvering jets to avoid some of the incoming cannon fire for the next few minutes, but soon, we’ll be too close to outmaneuver the incoming ordnance. I think we’ll need you to use your rail gun on the furthest installation from Bennet.”

“Um, okay, but we should angle it so my round travels through to hit the surface well away from the dome.”

“My thoughts exactly. I’m sending you a new approach path. It’ll only add seventy-nine seconds to your plan of action. I’ve already warned the CCC of our intention and provided a model of your rail gun’s projectile path.”

“Roger.” Juliet looked over Athena’s plan even as Angel began to implement it, helping her adjust her course with the maneuvering jets. All she had to do was swoop toward Ceres a bit and approach the WBD installation from that new direction so she could bring the rail gun to bear at a sideways angle to the anti-ship battery. If her round punched through the facility, which was likely, it would hit the asteroid hundreds of kilometers from the dome.

Juliet activated her crew comm channel. “Athena’s plan uses the railgun shot to begin our braking maneuver; we’ll flip and begin our deceleration burn right after firing so we don’t come in too hot to maneuver for docking.”

“How many Gs?” Chevy asked, his voice already pained.

“Only a peak of five, and that’s just for about a minute. You ready, Aya?”

“Yes, ma’am! Back in my couch—coolant leak all patched up.”

Juliet smiled and glanced at her HUD. “Firing rail gun in T-minus twenty-seven seconds.” Holding her breath, she carefully lined up her crosshairs on the massive, double-barreled cannon installation on the far side of the WBD shipyard. She watched her HUD and saw the Crocodile cross the faint red demarcation line Athena had drawn. Sure enough, the remaining three gun batteries, including Juliet’s target, began firing a steady stream of tracer rounds toward the incoming corvette.

In space, guns could, indeed, shoot very far, but the problem with trying to hit a distant target was that they could see your rounds coming and move out of the way. Even with its main drive offline, the Crocodile had enough functional maneuvering jets to shift its bulk in time to avoid most of the incoming cannon rounds—most of them. Juliet watched as damage reports streamed through one of her HUD windows, listing off the systems, major and minor, being destroyed on the light corvette. She hoped the mercs were safely hunkered down in the drop bay and that they’d get out in time.

Angel began a countdown, bringing her attention back to her crosshairs. “Fire in three . . . two . . . one.” Juliet squeezed the trigger, the ship lurched, and she killed the drives, using her maneuvering jets to flip the Cherry Blossom so her main drive cones were pointed at the WBD installation, still thousands of kilometers away. Before her rail gun round hit home, she fired all three drives and rapidly ramped up to five Gs of thrust.

“Hang tight,” she said into her ship’s comms. “Reducing thrust in less than a minute.” Her eyes were trained on a rear view of her ship’s drive plumes and beyond. She zoomed in on the shipyard and the gun batteries just in time to see a flash of white that forced her camera to apply filters. When the flash faded, she saw jets of gas, twisted metal, and floating debris where the gun installation had been. “God…” she was startled by the destruction; that gun battery had been the size of a small building. “Kinetic energy, I guess.”

“Drop to two-point-seven Gs in three… two… one.” Angel’s reminder broke Juliet’s gaze away from the destruction she’d wrought, and she complied, gently throttling down to Chevy’s heaved, vociferous sigh of relief.

“Bennet has removed another battery. I should be able to keep Crocodile in one piece while he works on the final battery, at least long enough to deploy the mercenaries.” Athena’s update brought Juliet’s attention to her countdowns, and she saw that Tanaka and crew were meant to drop in just over a minute.

She opened a comm line with Tanaka and Leo. “Good luck, boys!”

“You too,” Leo answered immediately. “Remember why you’re there; don’t try to save the world on your own. Get Athena connected, then get out.”

“Well…” Juliet didn’t want to go into all the other objectives she’d given herself, so she just nodded—though only she could see it—and said, “Same to you. Don’t be afraid to bail out once you’ve drawn the responders down.”

“We will be fine,” Tanaka grunted. “We drop soon, clearing comms.”

“Right—” Juliet started, but Tanaka had already cut the connection. “I guess I should have said something sooner if I was going to do that.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” Angel said. “Next thrust reduction in just under three minutes.”

“Right.” Juliet zoomed out on her tactical grid, marking the location of the Lady Hawk and the Furies’ Wing, still tens of thousands of kilometers from Ceres, keeping a sort of overwatch. Then she zoomed in and saw nine green dots emerge from the big green oval of the Crocodile. Tanaka, Books, and all their mercs. They were still a hundred klicks from the shipyard but moving fast. Another green blip appeared and streaked past them—the torpedo.

“Payload deployed,” Athena announced in the combat group’s comms. Then, just to Juliet, “Crocodile is still holding together. I’ll fly it past the shipyard and toward deep space, hopefully drawing the fire of the last turret so the mercs get through.”

“Bennet hasn’t—”

“I’m tracking and communicating with him through the Atlas exoskeleton; he’s pinned down but, as yet, unharmed.”

Juliet pictured the Atlas in her mind’s eye and frowned. “Pinned down, how?”

Athena’s response was smooth and sounded practiced, as though she’d anticipated the conversation, “Juliet, you can’t bail everyone out of every little predicament. Bennet met some resistance we didn’t expect, but I’m monitoring him as he deals with it. If worst comes to worst, there’s enough fuel in the Atlas’s boosters to allow a drop to Ceres’s surface. I won’t let him be taken.”

Juliet nodded, again primarily for herself. Firmly, she said, “I’m trusting you, Athena.”

“Thank you.”

Juliet waited, watching the timers, watching the dots on her tactical grid, and then, when the time was right, she reduced her thrust to one-point-two Gs. She wanted to move fast when she arrived at the shipyard but couldn’t move too fast, not if she hoped to maneuver alongside the Starjumper and force a hostile docking maneuver. A flash from the direction of the shipyard and a beep on her HUD let her know the torpedo had hit home, blasting the doors off and scorching the inside of the bottom-central, unoccupied hangar at the shipyard.

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The floating station was built like a tiered spindle with half a dozen arms jutting out from the main structure. Each arm was lined with hangars and wide, open platforms on which ships too large for the hangars could be constructed. The biggest hangars were on the main spindle and stacked one atop the other. The ark ship sat at the top, its front third sticking out into space, too long for even the massive industrial ship hangar to contain.

It was easy, from Juliet’s vantage out in space, to think of the shipyard as a “building,” but she knew it was more massive than most single structures you might find on Earth. Each of those docking arms was a half dozen kilometers in length, and the hangars on the main spindle were easily large enough to contain gas harvesters or cruise liners—ships that were measured in kilometers, not meters.

“When you have open space and no property lines or gravity to contend with, it’s easy just to keep on building, I guess.”

“Yes, as I review the blueprints filed with the CCC, I can see that this shipyard is at least five times the mass of its original design.”

Before Juliet could think of a witty jab about corporate greed or cancer metastasizing, Athena cut into her conversation with Angel, “Juliet, the Starjumper just fired up her main drives. I believe they’re going to try to flee.”

“Oh, no, they aren’t!” Juliet growled. She could see the green dots representing the mercenaries slowly inching closer to the shipyard, but they were still only halfway and would have to begin firing their jet packs to slow down for a safe touchdown. “Are they trying to get out before the mercenaries land?”

“Yes, I believe so. In that case, our plan is still a success; Tanaka and his team have put the pressure on. If Apollyon thinks he has to flee from a handful of attackers, we may have caught them even less prepared than we’d hoped.”

Juliet tried not to sound snide as she replied, “Or he’s ready to jump and doesn’t want to waste time or loyal soldiers when he can just take them all with him.”

“Perhaps.” Athena didn’t say anything more, and Juliet focused on her job. She was almost moving slowly enough to turn and make a proper approach to the ark ship; if Apollyon or Gentry, or whoever was calling the shots, wanted to start moving, Juliet didn’t care. She was still going to board that ship and get her job done.

A thought occurred to her, and she spoke into her direct line with Athena, “What will happen to the Blossom if that ship jumps while she’s docked with it?”

“I don’t know. It depends on the design of the dark matter warp generator that Apollyon came up with. There’s a chance the Blossom, being attached to the Starjumper, would be encompassed by the bubble of distorted space-time and travel with the ark ship. There’s also the chance that it will be sheered off and left behind, or, quite possibly, utterly destroyed as the fabric of space-time is breached.”

Juliet turned to Chevy and, aloud, outside of comms, she said, “After I disembark into the ark ship, you’re to get the Cherry Blossom clear. Move off a couple hundred KMs; you can pick me up when I’m done.”

“Um, roger.”

Juliet nodded and then spoke into the full combat team’s comms, “I’m moving in to dock ahead of schedule; the Starjumper is on the move. Don’t do anything heroic, everyone.”

Tanaka’s response was immediate, “Understood.”

“Be careful, Juliet,” Alice said, breaking protocol and bringing a smile to Juliet’s lips.

To her relief, Athena didn’t offer any objections or even any advice. Instead, she said, “I’m piloting the Crocodile, slowly but surely, on a collision course with the Starjumper’s nose. They’ll want to avoid the collision and will have to spend some time maneuvering. Hopefully, it’ll buy you a few minutes.”

Juliet looked, zooming with her ship’s powerful lenses, and could just make out the sparking, leaking, venting form of the beleaguered light corvette as Athena used maneuvering jets to painstakingly perform a slow, arcing turn toward the enormous, hulking, angular black shape of the ark ship, still sulking under the four-hundred-acre roof of the open hangar. “I’m still finding it hard to believe that WBD has a ship that size without covering it with guns and missile batteries.”

“It was built by Ark Industries. Given time, perhaps WBD would have lived up to your expectations, but you deprived them of that luxury.” Angel sounded a little smug, and Juliet’s smile spread wider.

“Let’s see what else we can deprive them of.” Into her ship comms, she said, “Brace for maneuvers.” Then, she took the stick in her hand, reduced thrust, and fired her port maneuvering jets, rolling to her right as she, once again, began thrusting forward, aiming for the space between the ark ship’s hull and the hangar roof. She could see the Starjumper was emerging, but it moved like a glacier getting rolling. She wondered at the power output of its reactors; it had to be more than most cities relied on. “I think I can still get aboard before it’s fully out of the hangar.”

“Incoming fire!” Angel flashed red arrows to port, and, as she pulled up on the stick and accelerated to half a G, she glanced that way in time to see a streak of tracer rounds flying from the last-standing anti-ship battery. “Oof! Bennet’s still not there?” she hissed under her breath. She hoped he was all right but resisted her urge to reach out to him on comms, standing by her promise to trust Athena.

The battery was a good ten kilometers from her current position, and, as she began to roll and strafe, it proved unable to land any solid hits. She had to fight to balance her speed—avoiding ramping up too much while moving fast enough to keep ahead of the turret’s fire. To compensate, she performed a series of rapid direction changes, firing her main engine hard in the opposite direction, slowing her momentum while confounding the gun’s AI or, perhaps, human operator.

In just a few minutes, she’d cleared the plane of the hangar’s side wall, and the turret lost its line of sight on her. Juliet grinned and got back on track, slowly approaching the emerging ark ship. “Sorry about the rough ride—had to dodge some ordnance.”

“All…good,” Chevy grunted.

Aya’s reported, “I’m fine,” was clear as a bell. Juliet wondered if she was trying to one-up Chevy and slowly shook her head, stifling a chuckle at the poor pilot’s expense. She felt a little sorry for him; this wasn’t his thing, but he was doing his best.

As she came within five clicks of the hangar opening, Juliet throttled her drives down to an idle and began using her maneuvering jets to slow her even more. By the time she passed the front, exposed portion of the ship, she was gliding very slowly by space-faring standards. Even so, the matte-black exterior of the big ship with its hundreds or thousands of windows or viewports—Juliet didn’t know what they were actually called on a ship like that—drifted by surprisingly quickly. She tried to spy something, anything, within those amber, white, and sometimes red-toned diamatex viewports, but she only glimpsed a few shadows, gone too quickly to analyze.

Once she’d cleared the edge of the hangar and her sensor array got a good picture of what was before her—nothing save empty scaffolds, plasteel panels, and the ship itself—she unbuckled and said, “Chevy, I sent you details about our approach to the docking collar. Get us lined up, and I’ll do the rest. Once I’m in, get this ship away from here.”

“Copy,” Chevy said, shifting, perhaps a little nervously, in his seat.

“You got this, Chevy. Easy sailing from here on out—no guns on that big boat, and the other hostiles are dealt with. When you follow the ark ship, keep the hangar between you and that last turret, okay?”

“Yeah, no sweat. I got this, Captain.” His repetition of her encouragement brought a smile to Juliet’s serious expression.

“Good.” She stood and walked past him, giving him a clap on the shoulder as she used her magnetic boots to clip-clomp over to the weapons rack. Her new armor had locking, magnetic clasps for her scabbard and holster, so it took all of two seconds to arm herself. She wasn’t done, though. Smiling grimly, Juliet took out an SMG, ensured it was loaded, and clipped the sling to a hardpoint on her left shoulder. She added a couple of extra magazines to the magnetic clips on her belt. Athena had stocked the weapons racks with concussion grenades, and Juliet clipped four of them to various points on her armor. That done, she walked down the central corridor to the engineering ready-room and spied Aya, secure in her couch. “Hey, sis.”

“We’re docked already? I didn’t feel anything—”

“No,” Juliet waved a hand. “Chevy’s bringing us up to the docking collar. I’m going to the airlock so Angel can hack it.” She pointed to the weapons rack near the aft access bulkhead. “Wanna cover me?”

Was it suicidal for a small team—all that could fit on a ship the Blossom’s size—to try to board a ship with, potentially, thousands of armed personnel? In normal circumstances, yes, but the ark ship wasn’t a typical vessel, and these weren’t normal circumstances. Juliet was hopeful that whoever was in control on the giant vessel wouldn’t be able to scramble much of a response to all the docking bays, collars, and hangars the Blossom could approach and that, once she’d opened one of the airlocks, she could get aboard before they got to her.

When Athena told her the ark ship was moving, Juliet revised their docking plan. All in all, she felt like her new approach was better anyway—it added to their element of surprise. The instructions she gave Chevy wouldn’t have him actually dock the Blossom; she’d just float close to the ark ship’s hull, and Juliet would EVA over to the access panel. If Apollyon had a significant response waiting for her, she’d know before the door opened, anyway; Juliet intended to take a peek with her other senses beforehand. If things looked too one-sided, she could retreat to Aya, and they could try something else.

“Yes!” Aya leaped out of her couch and nearly slammed into the ceiling. Juliet snagged her ankle and, just as Aya’s helmeted head thunked against the plasteel, pulled her down. “Oof!”

“Relax!” Juliet laughed. “Grab a shotgun and follow me.” She worked her way aft, to the galley and then through the bulkhead to the cargo or, if the mission called for it, troop transport bay. In the aft-port corner of the bay, a circular bulkhead opened to reveal a short access tunnel and ladder leading to the underside docking collar.

While she paused, waiting for the bulkhead to slide open, Aya stepped forward and knocked her knuckles against the hard, armored case attached to the small of Juliet’s back. “What’s this? Extra batteries? My armor doesn’t have that—”

“Just a little extra…bargaining power from Athena.” Juliet turned and gently knocked her own armored knuckles on Aya’s helmet. “Thanks for coming with me. Thanks for having my back for all of this.”

“I haven’t done much—”

“You being here is everything. Now, get that shotgun ready, missy!”

Aya nodded and straightened, gripping the weapon with both hands. “Yes, Captain!”

“Are you trying to make Aya feel more…useful?” Angel asked.

“Yeah, but don’t say anything!” Juliet subvocalized. The truth was that Juliet knew Aya would be out of harm’s way, watching her from the safety of the Cherry Blossom. Still, if she felt like she was “covering” Juliet, hopefully, it would compensate for her earlier angst about feeling useless during the dogfight.

“I won’t. I just wanted to make sure I understood what was going on.”

Chevy spoke into comms, “We’re almost lined up. Are you sure this is close enough?” Juliet’s instructions had been for him to hold position fifteen meters from the ark ship’s hull.

“Yep.” Juliet looked at Aya. “Listen. You’re going to stay on this side of the airlock, but if I come running, be ready to open it up and lay down some cover fire, okay?”

“Roger!” Juliet wished she could see her face rather than the matte-black, armored visor, but she took comfort in knowing Aya was all the safer for it.

She touched the button to open the airlock, then reached out and squeezed Aya’s shoulder. “I love you. Stay safe.”

Aya almost dropped her shotgun in her haste to grasp Juliet’s armored shoulders. “I love you too! You better come back to us!” Juliet nodded, too choked up to speak, then dropped through the open airlock. When she keyed in the cycle command and the red lights began to flash, Aya spoke through comms. “Wait a minute! Aren’t we docking?”

“No! Just hang nearby—all I need to do is get off that ship, and you guys can pick me up.”

“But that wasn’t the plan—”

“The plan wasn’t for the ark ship to be moving! I don’t want the Blossom attached, Aya.” The outer airlock door clicked, then rolled open, and Juliet pushed out. Sure enough, the vast, black hull of the ark ship loomed before her, and Juliet felt like she was swimming in dark water beside a mountain, not floating in space.

“Lucky, if you don’t make it off that ship—”

“Aya,” Athena said, cutting into their comms. “Please allow Lucky to concentrate; she only has seconds to open that hatch if she wants to catch them by surprise. Chevy, as soon as she’s inside, continue moving toward the aft portion of the ship; with any luck, they won’t realize you dropped her off.”

Juliet sent Athena a private comm message, “Thanks for that. I…feel bad for springing this on her, but I don’t want them hurt if this creepy ship jumps.”

“Understood. Good hunting, Juliet.”