COMBAT SALVAGE 2165 Read Online Free PDF Page A

it to hyper-accelerate five streams of heavy nuclei on a collision course.  
    Five, luminous shafts ripped out of the emitters near where the spokes met the ring and lanced out so razor thin, that in the first moments they fired, Tig wasn’t entirely convinced he saw them at all. But he saw where they collided.
    Tipperary’s five particle streams smashed into each other at close to lightspeed, hurling high-energy spray in all directions. It was so bright that it took Tig a whole second to note how, where the streams collided, a ball of white-hot fire had formed out of burning plasma so dense and brilliant as to defy his eyeballs' scrutiny. It appeared as a featureless white opposite of the dim vacuum of space. It was energy; it was mass. As the streams continued to collide, the nascent inferno grew. The ball of hell swelled outwards, feeding off the energy released by the streams as they crashed into each other from five directions without pause.  
    What had begun as a burning point in the black had become a kilometer-wide sphere of swirling destruction until all at once, it was as if the insides of it drained out… like they somehow fell inward and imploded. All that energy…all that mass...it was gone now, leaving only a ghostly, hollow sphere, a thin curtain of fire over a spatial membrane so thin, they said it actually only had one side. The membrane ruptured. It withdrew suddenly from all sides like the skin of a torn balloon to reveal a hell-mouth passage between star systems.  
    Tipperary had breached space.  
    He pressed his fingertips to the porthole. The fire-ringed, unknown constellations Tig saw through the transit, at the other end, were the stars as seen from Procyon, twelve light years away.
    As Hardway boldly led the ships of the battlegroup and the convoy through the threshold and into the transit, her hull pierced a secondary spatial membrane over the threshold where something that looked like fireflies skated, trapped by unseen forces. The exotic particles splashed onto the carrier’s bow and ran down the barrels of the railguns and flowed towards the stern of the carrier like a sparking liquid.  
    The warped and blurred stars shone faintly visible through the waving walls of the hypermass transit as Hardway raged down the narrow passage. That’s when Harry Cozen chose to speak. His voice came over the squack channel, booming out every speaker and filling every helmet.  
    " This is Harry Cozen. As you all know, the battle along the Sirius Front has raged since the first months of the war. What you do not know, is that the third UN battlegroup, charged with holding the Sirius end of the Sirius-Sol Transit, has been routed. The Squidies control that end of the transit now. Task Force 223, the combined Privateer/UNS battlegroup on operations in that sector is now cut off from all reinforcement and logistical support."  
    Parker’s eyes widened in her helmet. The significance of what Cozen had said wasn’t lost on Tig either. They had a lot of ships at Sirius.
    "Without support or a path to retreat," Cozen said, "their position is untenable. The enemy forces now flooding Sirius are superior in number and 223 cannot retake the system. Intel indicates that in order to win the battle at Sirius, Squidy rushed most of his fleet there and left the backfield open, hoping we wouldn’t notice. Knowing he had only a limited time to exploit this weakness before enemy forces could maneuver to counter him, UN Admiral Ming plunged his task force deep into Squidy-occupied space. Task force 223 is currently fighting its way through Regulus, making for the Squidies home system. Admiral Ming's force isn’t large enough or well-supplied enough to drive all the way there. That’s why we're going to rendezvous with the task force and drive to the enemy's home together, like a single dagger into Squidy’s heart." Cozen let that image sink in. "You’re going to hear scuttlebutt saying that without Sirius, Earth