"Thank you," Ram said as he took his sidearm back from a stunned Medoc. "Is it stupid to ask if you’re alright, Chief?"

  "It doesn’t hurt," she said, extending her skeletal claw-fingers and flexing them in Medoc’s face.

  "This is the most important mission of the war," the pilot pleaded. "Don't...don't do this..." Behind him, out the cockpit canopy to port, the shell-fire hail and the warhead detonations from the Privateer fighters and the thousand alien warheads had finally stopped. He could still see the blue plasma flares of Staas Company fighters out there, but far less of them now.

  "You’re right, Medoc." Ram said. "This is the most important mission of the war. So we’re doing it my way. Fly this ship," Ram said. "Get us to the homeworld moon."

  "And if I don’t? If Max and I refuse?"

  "You won’t refuse. Because if you don’t pilot this ship, then I’ll have to do it. That won't help our chances any."

  Medoc shook his head, but he turned in his seat and went back to piloting Boomslang on her course to the Squidies' homeworld moon.

  "I’m going aft," Chief Horcheese said.

  "36 minutes to target."

  "Redsuits are on it, Mr. Devlin."

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Squidies outnumbered the UNS and Privateer ships and there was no way to win in a straight up fight. Cozen ordered the fleet to maneuver away from the alien dreadnought while attempting breakthrough for an effective counterattack that could turn the tide of battle and save them.

  The large-bore particle streams that caught Hardway cut her from three angles. They gouged her mighty bow plate sending up jets of molten metal from the wounds. Pieces of her forward guns now tumbled end over end down the length of the ship. Dana had to roll the kilometer-long carrier to keep them from impacting on the midships guns or the command tower.

  "Only one forward battery left, Mr. Cozen."

  "Thank you, Mr. Bergano. Ms. Sellis, continue to steer us away from the aliens' dreadnought, but keep our bow to the enemy cruisers. That's still where we can take the most punishment."

  From the top of the command tower, she could see the secondary bays on fire. Almost all the topside launch bays jetted flame out of incendiary storms feeding on the metal itself. Clouds of hot plasma glomed onto the ship's artificial gees and hugged it like a thick, luminous fog. The midships’ batteries fired their railguns through it as they unloaded on the trio of Squidy cruisers that had tried to cut the carriers off. There was nowhere to go but through the enemy. It was that, or face the alien dreadnought no ship had ever wounded.

  "Signal Pont Neuf to shelter behind us," Cozen said. "We’ve got to hold out."

  "We could pull back," Bergano said. "The sixth planet has moons and rings to restrict their movements."

  "We're not a guerrilla force, Mr. Bergano."

  "Hardway Flight 7," Biko said to the torpedo junks. "Launch on the lead cruiser and RTB for reload." Flight 7 was down to 3 junks. "Maybe he’s right, Mr. Cozen. We’re smaller now, They’re the larger force. We’ll have the maneuvering advantage in there."

  The fire that hit them then came from starboard, from a flank they’d thought was covered. Those particle streams been meant for a UNS gunboat, but they'd missed and stabbed Hardway just as efficiently. Dana's chair tried to throw her out of it when a stream of nuclei punched through the command tower three decks below the bridge. Fiery ejecta burst out the port side like arterial blood, but after the shock wave rippled up and down her, Hardway kept steaming into the enemy line under Dana's hand.

  Cozen said, "You’re right about one thing, Misters Biko and Bergano. We are now the inferior force, but there’s no backing away from this fight. They’ve already advanced on our flanks. We can maneuver to avoid the dreadnought, but we can’t run away. Not anymore. They’ll chew us up. We’ve got to make our stand here. Now. We’re in this fight until the end."

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tig Meester lay on his back on the deck of the Boomslang’s CO2 scrubber hold, where crewman Clark had locked them up at gunpoint without explanation. It was cold and damp in there and the hiss of the reaction plates fueled Parker’s rage. She banged on the hatch, ramming it with the armor plate on the back of her glove over and over, punctuating each word. "Let! Us! Out!"

  She still hadn’t noticed the half-millimeter micro-barrels along the front face of the plate, right above her knuckles. "Be careful," he said as he flipped and backhanded his way through his suitcomp’s control menus, now projecting from the chest module of his exosuit. He still couldn’t find any reference to the hidden weapons system or how to enable it.

  "Let! Us! Out!"

  "Parker. Stop banging the knuckle-plate of your glove into the hatch. That’s the muzzle of a twelve-barrel flechette gun you’re hammering with. Look closely at the apertures."

  She made a fist and then posed like she was about to punch herself in the face. Parker looked right down the barrels at first like she didn’t believe him, but Tig saw the moment when maybe she’d decided he was right. She pointed the weapon away from herself.

  He said, "Trace the line of the barrels back to the little rise near the middle of the main backplate. There’s a polygon seam there. Hard to see without your helmet for a macro-zoom. It’s about the same dimensions as the slide mag on a six-barrel flechette. There’s a hidden battery and capacitor system right behind it. I think. It’s all drawing power off PWRSYS. It shows in the suitcomp's logs, but I can’t get access to the control systems."

  Parker looked hard at the back of both her gloved hands. "Why the hell didn’t you tell me?"

  "When? In front of the Boomslang’s crew? Since they locked us up in here is the first time we’ve been alone."

  "If it's a gun, then why the hell didn’t you use it? Why’d you let them lock us up in here?"

  Tig said, "I don’t know how to turn it on for one thing. Still don’t." He backhanded the projected control menus floating in front of him and dismissed them.

  Parker’s face suddenly flushed with renewed anger. She turned around and began beating on the hatch with her elbow plate and her frustration. "Let us out!"

  "Might as well save your energy," he told her. "Unless you want to make a bomb out of our power packs, then we’re stuck in he-"

  "Shut up. I heard someone outside the hatch." She spread her fingers unconsciously while she listened as if the tremble in the atmo was palpable.

  "I’m pretty sure they skin-welded the wheel on that hatch. I don’t think they could open it if they wanted to...not without a knuckledragger mech to turn the wheel."

  "Shut up..." She jumped back when she heard the body hit the deck outside. There was no mistaking that sound. He thought he saw the wheel of the hatch shaking before the metal-on-metal shrieking began.

  As the wheel slowly turned, the sound reverberated through the bulkheads and made the scrubber plates around them all vibrate and sing in sympathy. That sound tried to tie his nerves in a knot. They clamped their gloved hands over their ears, and a few seconds later, the impacts began.

  "Get back!" he shouted. On the third, resounding clang, the hatch burst open on its hinges, and Chief Evelyn Horcheese stood framed in the open hatch. In one hand, she held the panel cover she’d used to beat her way in after twisting the skin-fused hatch wheel open. "I thought I’d find you cherries loafing in here."

  "What the hell is going on, Chief?" Then, Parker saw the Chief’s arm. "What happened? Can you feel that? Does it still work?"

  "Most of the strength is in the tendons and skeleton," the Chief said, "The artificial muscles I lost are mostly for fine control. It still works without 'em, see?" She used her titanium claw to flip the bird at the prostate body behind her on the deck of the compartment. "Come out of there."

  Crewman Marquez lay face down near their confiscated helmets. "He’s alive," the Chief said. "He’s unconscious." She retrieved her own helmet from the passageway, glancing up and down it nervously before she shut the hatch.

  "Why the hell did he lock us in here? What’s going on, Chief?"

  "The Boomslang’s crew locked you up because they thought you might take control of the bombs and the ordnance bay."

  "We’re redsuits. We fix things," Parker said. "Why would we take control of the bombs?"

  "Because Mr. Devlin has ordered us to take control of the bombs."

  Parker was as speechless as he was.

  Chief Horcheese said, "We’re going to give the Squidies one chance to surrender before we kill them all. We’re taking control of the ordnance bay before the Boomslang reaches the aliens’ homeworld moon. If we don’t, then once we attain a low orbit, Boomslang will launch every single one of those bombs at once and they will kill every Squidy living under the surface of that shite moon of theirs without even so much as a warning."

  "I hate the Squidies." Tig's mouth formed the words like a reflex. And he did hate them. Just the sight of all those rubber hose limbs or the squidgy nightmare thing they called a face was enough to make him flash hot lightning under his skin. Even the sight of a dead one made him want to kick it and shoot it again.

  The Chief bored into him with the evil eye. "AMTS 3rd class, Tig Meester, are you going to follow my orders?"

  It all made sense now. This was the whole reason he and Parker were even on this mission. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah. I always do what you say, Chief." The Chief didn’t look like she believed him.

  "Parker? Are you with me?"

  She nodded.

  "Alright then. Listen up. The ordnance bay has two fire control sections. We’ll need to secure both. One is through a couple bulkheads, that way, at the bow end of the ordnance bay. The other is at its far end, nearly 80 meters to the stern. There’s plenty to hide behind in there and there’s three armed crewmen waiting for us. We will not have the element of surprise." She continued to brief them, telling them things they needed to know but Tig's mind actually wandered then, to what he only now managed to identify as the question sticking in his craw.

  "...and once we’ve take the Ord Bay, we’ll have t-"

  He said, "Does Commander Devlin think me and Parker are traitors?" It just came out.

  "What did you say, Meester?" the Chief looked at him and squinted a little.

  "Did he pick us for this mission because he thought we’d disobey Harry Cozen’s orders? We have less than an hour combined small-arms combat time. That’s me and Parker together. I mean, he could have picked salty company marines, but he picked us."

  "We don’t have time for this, Tig." That’s what the Chief said, but she was going to have to make time. "Fine. Devlin chose you because he knew Cozen would approve it and because you’re cherries, alright? He chose you because you just got here three months back."

  "Everyone keeps rubbing that in my face. What the hell does that have to do with any of this?"

  "It means you’re not like us yet."

  "I am! I’m a redsuit, goddamn it, and I’m salty!"

  "It ain’t about salty. You and Parker...you're not like us. Not yet. And that’s good, Tig. We’ve been at this long enough that we’re not the same people we were when we started. I don’t mean that in the good way. We can’t do anything but hate them now. That’s what it took for us to fight the Squidies and win and once you start hating like that, you can’t just stop and set it aside. Most of us just want to kill them now. All of them. No matter what's right. That’s the hate talking. Devlin decided we can’t let all that hate make a decision like this. That’s why he picked you two cherries for this instead of a pair of Lucy Elan's killer marines. You’re still bright and shiny…"

  "I'm no Squidy-lover. I hate them. They killed Sojic. And Raleigh. DuBois."

  "You want to kill them all, Tig?" The Chief didn’t. "All of them? The baby ones, too...or larval ones or whatever they are? All 70 billion of them?"

  He said, "Yeah. Yeah, I do. But no. I mean...I won’t. I won't to if we don’t have to. If they really surrender."

  "Good," the Chief said. "Now, can we get on with this? Let me show you how to enable the flechette guns built into those suits."

  After a thirty second tour of their weapons systems, Chief Horcheese led and they followed, down the central passage to the ordnance bay where all eighty-eight of the bombs would be lined up like fat idols, like swollen statues set in rows down either side.

  "Put your helmets on," the Chief said. "You’ll need the visor for targeting."

  "You better hope they don’t vent the bay," Parker said as she nodded to the missing glove and shredded forearm on the Chief’s suit where her skeletal arm and hand protruded. That suit couldn’t hold pressure.

  "They won’t vent the atmo on us," she said. "It might give us away to the Squidies."

  Through his visor, the surface of the hatch into the ordnance bay shined a rainbow of colors. "That's a newly melted and reformed surface," he said. "They fused that hatch completely."

  Chief Horcheese was already unspooling something from her thigh pocket. It looked like licorice, and he knew what it must be even before he saw her apply it around the perimeter of the hatch and use it to draw the shape of a new door on the bulkhead.

  "We should stand back," he said.

  "We go in fast," the Chief said as she joined them around the corner. "Weapon enabled. Safety On." She held up her gloved hand and then made the shape of a gun with it. Tig and Parker made the same gestures. "Safety off." She slowly curled her index finger back as if resting it on a trigger. The word 'UNSAFE' blinked in red letters across the top of his visor immediately after he mimicked the Chief's last gesture. "Gently squeeze the imaginary trigger to fire," she said. "And remember who we are. We’re redsuits; we get it done." Then, she detonated the breaching charge. While the shockwave that came up through the deck was still vibrating in his bones, Chief Horcheese rose and rounded the corner and charged, screaming, "Go! Go! Go!"

  The Boomslang's crew had pulse lasers. He knew because of the way the smoke burned in long, perfectly straight, shafts as their beams pierced the cloud. All his naked eye could see was thick clouds of whitish smoke and the stabbing fire from Boomslang’s crew, but his helmet saw through the cloud in five different bands of the spectrum. It drew the two rows of bombs and the bulkheads and the consoles it saw in projected wireframe across his visor. It drew the Boomslang’s three remaining crew and their garish thermal signatures as they fired.

  Beams vaporized the smoke particles above Tig and Parker’s heads as they dove behind the fire control consoles with the Chief. He peeked around the lip of it and saw the thermal ghosts of the three remaining crew fall back and take cover, disappearing behind the immense bombs and their thick hulls some 30 meters down towards the far end of the bay.

  There was no easy way to do this, but then, as he felt his stomach flip and his organs ascend, he had to grin like it was his lucky day. "They killed the artificial gravity."

  Parker grinned back at him as they all lifted a millimeter off the deck. "That was a bloody mistake," she said.

  The Chief said, "It wasn’t."

  "But nobody’s better in zero-gee than redsuits."

  "The Boomslang’s crew are redsuits, too. They’re Harry Cozen’s personal reds...from his old ship, Arbitrage. Them killing the artificial gees wasn’t a mistake. It was a challenge."

  "So what are we going to do?"

  It only took a few seconds to get the three of them in position. If Harry Cozen’s reds wanted to play chicken, then the Chief wouldn’t disappoint them. She hovered low over the deck, in the shelter of a console, with her legs bent and the soles of her boots almost touching the forward bulkhead. She held Tig under one artificial arm and Parker under the other, the one without any skin.

  The two cherries faced forward with both their arms extended. A pair of targeting reticules in the visor of his helmet moved with the guns built into the backs of his hands.

  The Chief said, "You two, don’t worry about anything but shooting. I’ll handle the maneuvers and I won’t drop you, no matter what happens." The chief tightened her grip and he lost half his breath. The trick to doing this wouldn’t be holding on, it would be not crushing their ribs with all her strength. "Okay. We’re centered enough," she said. "See your target, aim, and fire. Slow is fast. We do this on my 'bingo' in 3...2...1...bingo."

  She pushed off the deck surprisingly fast with her fingertips and toes, and she kicked hard off the forward bulkhead at a shallow, upward angle. The three of them flew together, barely missing the tops of the consoles as they emerged from the forward control section to shoot down the length of the ordnance bay, down between the rows of enormous bombs. The 5m-wide bombs on either side of the center aisle blurred and flickered past as he tried to see ahead and between them and everywhere at once, searching for the three salty reds that were out there waiting to kill them.

  Comms clicked in his ear as the Boomslang’s crew cracked into their frequency. It was Clarke’s hoarse voice he heard next. "You come any closer we’ll kill you."

  "You don’t have to," the Chief told him. "You've got a choice."

  Clarke said, "I just watched 100,000 people die to ensure the success of this mission. I will shoot you twelve times over before I let you take a chance of wasting the opportunity they died for."

  "We can’t do it like this, Clarke. Not like this."

  Tig searched deep within the darkness between the bombs they passed. No thermal silhouettes lurked in the shadows. He looked behind them, too, while they sailed on down the center aisle of the bay...

  "We gotta kill all of 'em so they don’t come back at us," Clarke said. "It’s obvious. But you and your cherries think you know better. Stupid, bloody, Squidy-lovers."

  "You got it all wrong, Clarke." The Chief said, "It ain’t the Squidies I lo-"

  Tig saw them in his peripheral vision when Clarke and his two crewmen dove from above, flying in formation, pointed right at them to minimize their profile. They led with their helmets, the part of those suits his non-lethal, narcotic flechettes couldn’t penetrate. That was all there was time to see before the air around them lit up with azure shafts of burning smoke so bright that his helmet dimmed to protect his eyes. The targeting reticules glowed brighter as his arms finally moved into position to fire on the Boomslang's crew as they crossed the midpoint of their flight across the bay.