DREADNOUGHT 2165 by A.D. Bloom

assault and counted
the dead on the hull, J. Jordo Colt's words echoed in his ears. He
wasn't sure if the Lancers' rookie squadron leader was right when
he said Ram wasn't doing much better himself. Ram wanted to tell
that pilot to blame the damn war and not him, but those were
Cozen's words.
    Lucy Elan made her way around the whole
perimeter. Ram watched her go from position to position, checking
in with her remaining Marines. They'd taken heavy casualties.
    In the abstract, his plan to detonate the
Ticks' reactors and drive to the edge of the hull sounded solid.
When he came up with it, it seemed sensible, but now, looking at
all the corpses on the hull, he felt like he had no right to ask
his people to take this chance. Even if the plan worked, it was
practically suicide.
    " Hardway got another one," Hollis said. He
pointed straight up at the carrier, still leading the alien battlegroup in a running fight. The
Dreadnought had steamed close enough to the battle for them to see
the hulls in low orbit clearly. The ship falling towards the planet
was one of the big ones, an alien heavy cruiser probably. The dying
ship stabbed at Hardway one
more time before its guns went dark. It trailed smoke against the
rings, on fire.
    Hardway blasted to a higher orbit to put the innermost moon between
her and the pack of warships hounding her. It was harder now. She
had to avoid the pack of Squidies chasing her as well as the
Dreadnought since it had limped close. On one engine, the Squidies'
battleship wasn't going to run Hardway down, but the attack carrier had to
maneuver to keep out of effective range of its guns.
    Buzzing points of light and flashes around
the carrier told Ram the Dingoes were still intercepting alien
torpedoes, but there weren't many left and she'd already taken
heavy damage. Every module looked to have taken a hit of some kind.
She'd probably lost a lot of crew.
    Lucy Elan ran to Ram's position from behind.
She dove into the shallow, vape crater with him and Hollis. She
said, "It's almost time to pull this stunt of yours."
    Ram nodded. "Hollis, go make sure the drill
crew are good to go." After he was gone, Ram opened a private comms
channel to Lucy. "We can fit our survivors on three Ticks and
detonate the last one."
    Lucy shook her head. "That doesn't
give us nearly as good a
chance of killing this battleship. We have to detonate all four
remaining Ticks, Ram."
    "This plan is rot. Jordo Colt was right
about us, Lucy. About Cozen and me. We ask more than they can give.
We do it over and over like we've got some right to. I half-expect
them to finally mutiny out of self-preservation. I wouldn't blame
them. My people never signed on for this. Not like your people
did."
    "You this whiny a bridge officer
before the war?" she said. "Don't underestimate Hardway 's crew," she said. "They've proven
tougher than anything you've ever asked them to do."
    "If we're going to make it to the other side
of this ship's hull, then this is going to be a running firefight
with limited cover. First, we'll take fire from two sides and then
three as we charge right at them. This isn't what they trained
for."
    Lucy Elan said, "Mr. Devlin, you came to
this ship straight out of Staas Aerospace Academy, right?" He
nodded in his helmet. "They run you there?"
    "What do you mean?"
    "They ran us Marines a lot. God,
I hate running. Before I
learned to keep my mouth shut, I asked my DI why we run for Ks and
Ks when we have a million different ways to get around. That day,
he just sat at the end of the two-mile loop and ordered me around
it for eight hours straight. That was way more than I could run. I
hit the wall around three hours. And I kept going. Spent two days
getting my blood cleaned and my kidneys fixed and destroyed half
the muscle fiber in my legs, but I figured out the answer to my
question. We run, but it's not our legs
we're training. It's not your legs that save you. It's
heart. It's whatever they say is at your center, above