War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway (13 page)

"That one turned us even more," Dana said. "And bow thrusters are gone. Using forward midships and stern thrusters, but they're not going to be enough. I can't rotate this carrier fast enough."

Ram wanted to be closer before they scrambled the junks so they could avoid fire, but if the Squidies' main guns tore down any side of the launch bays, then the carrier could lose a quarter of its junks in seconds. "Biko," Ram said, "launch them. Launch them now."

"
Hardway
AGC
to all mining junks: launch now, scramble, scramble! Go!" 

Below, on the topside of the launch bay module, five of the six bays opened and the junks inside blasted up and out hard so they filled the insides of the bays with a flash-burning plasma storm. As they shot out of the flames and up past the bridge, the rest of them came out of the bays on the port and starboard sides and up from keel-side, from the launch bays underneath.

That's when Biko pointed to the last two Dingo 111s still desperately chasing the second, alien warhead, now at
Hardway
's 3 o'clock low. The drones spiraled and spun to keep up with the bomb's wild flightpath. The Dingoes' storm of burning sabot found their target a hundred meters from
Hardway
's bays, but the warhead still cooked off. 

There's no atmosphere to make a shock wave in space, but the alien warhead's casing turned to plasma in the explosion, and it kept moving and hurled itself down into the open launch bays with enough speed and force to blow out the airlock doors on the starboard-side. 

The next particle beams from the Squidies' destroyer cut into the midships Hab module at its lowest point and took a slice of the crew quarters. That shot could have crippled the engineering section.

While
Hardway
shook and tried to absorb the tremendous energy being thrown at it, Biko barked at the junk squadron, trying to bring them in on a vector that would let them trap the alien and leave it nowhere to run. 

Each of the 22 junks carried a pair of ore containers filled with a mining nuke, high-density iron ore, and a proximity-fused detonator – a simple mine to hurl at the alien ship. As they closed the distance to the Squidies' vessel, they came under fire. Cockpits flared and burned where the streams ripped across them and tore junks in half. On comms the sound of the dying, cut-off cries burned away any remaining romance the crew might have harbored in their hearts for war.

Ram could see the horror on Asa Biko's face too. This was the first time any of them had seen people die in combat and up on the bridge, they were the ones that had sent them. "We're loosing them too fast!" Bergano shouted. "Pull them out of formation! Send then in on different vectors so they'll have a chance!"

"No! They'll get picked off! This is the only way!" It should be us dying out there. That's what Biko's face said he was thinking, but now, there was only time to focus on the living and do what they could to keep them alive. Ram said, "Help them, Mr. Biko."

"All junks hold formation," he said. "
Low Card
, take up the space between
Bandito
and
Showgirl
."  

"Lt. Commander Sellis, keep closing range and bearing on the enemy. Make that alien ship keep turning if it doesn't want to get rammed."

Two more junks flared up bright as particle beams ran them through.
Gongxi
got speared in the cockpit and fell tumbling before a second beam found her reactor. The alien decided to concentrate all its fire on the junks now instead of
Hardway
. The particle streams slashed two more. They spun off into the black, venting, out of control. Biko scrambled to get the holes in their formation tightened-up as the junks closed the last bloody kilometers to their target.  

"The alien ship is holding its turn to avoid collision with
Hardway
. I think we'll get a shot!" 

"
Hardway
AT to all junks: Follow
Bandito's
lead. Hand-off, hand-off, you have the trigger,
Bandito. Bandito
has the trigger." 

"Roger, AT," Garreau said, "
Bandito
has the trigger."  

The Squidies' warship kept turning out of
Hardway's
path and that limited the number of directions it could go from there. Now was the chance to trap it. It was probably the only chance the junks were going to get and it took every bit of restraint Ram had not to scream that into comms. 

Hardway
's junks all followed
Bandito
into the hard, 270 degree turn. On comms, you could hear them grunting to suck up all the gees their junks' inertial negation systems couldn't compensate for, but when they came out of that turn, the ad hoc bomber formation was less than 5Ks from the Squidies and set on a collision course. 

The Squidies' particle streams drew last vengeful lines through the junks' formation and ripped two more of them apart, but it wasn't enough to stop them. As the flaming debris fell behind, the rest of them rocketed towards the alien hull, full of fury and spite. Garreau in
Bandito
waited so long to give the command, it looked like he wanted to ram the alien. "Now! Now! NOW! Bombs away! Now! Now! Now!" 

Ten junks released their payloads into the alien's path and veered away in all directions. Their mines shot together through space at the alien ship's bow, and it couldn't elude them no matter how it maneuvered.

The first mine to detonate blew close off the port side of the Squidies' hull, next to one of the ship's towers. There was no significant shock-wave, but the nuclear mining explosives made a tremendous amount of fast-moving plasma and gas out of half the rocks they'd been packed with. That's what drove the remaining belt iron ore slamming into the Squidies' hull at hyper-velocity speeds. Everywhere the high-density ore impacted it hammered the alien hull. Gas vented in places. The invader flew like there was no hand at the helm. Then, the other nine mines detonated.

They blossomed bright and brief and brilliant all around the warship's hull. They beat the Squidies with hyper-velocity impacts up and down. Not a meter of that ship escaped the pounding and the entire hull glowed mottled and half-molten. Instantly, the streams disappeared from its guns and the plasma sputtered from its engines and then ceased completely. The alien drifted.

On comms: silence. Then, wild cheering screams from all junks and all decks and every voice on
Hardway
. Discipline went to hell, and they all whooped victory on the squack at once. The bridge almost drowned them out with their own noise as it turned into a hooting and hollering mob. With the yelling on all channels Ram almost didn't hear Cozen's voice.  

"Commander Devlin," he said, "
Acting Captain
Devlin. Open the barn door." 

"It's Harry Cozen," Bergano said. "And
Mohegan
." 

"Open bay 1."
Mohegan
came in from starboard and aft, from 4 o'clock high. Cozen had finally caught up with them from where they'd left him perched over Jupiter's pole. He brought the junk in front of the tower where he turned the four nacelles and hit the jets and came to a stop fifty yards in front of the bridge. Ram could see him in the cockpit. He said, "Mr. Devlin, if you're done cheering, then meet
Mohegan
in bay 2 with three plasma cutters, six miners, and one other bridge officer. Bring 10 armed crew. That alien ship isn't dead. You've got to go and finish it off." 

"Biko," Ram said.

"You don't need me just to fly a junk. I'm staying here to coordinate Search and Rescue. We might be able to save some of those pilots from the junks that got hit."

He was right. Ram knew he wasn't much of a pilot, but he could fly that far himself.

"I'm going, too," Dana said as she made for the sealed tube hatch.

"Lt. Commander Sellis, I want you to coordinate
Hardway's
part of the SAR operation with Biko." Calling her 'Lt. Commander Sellis' instead of Dana didn't make her glare at him any less. 

"Mr. Bergano," Ram said. "You're with me."

Ram looked for bodies the whole way to bay 2. All the figures he saw were moving, but before Bergano and Ram got ten meters down the spine, the medical crew and casualties began to come in from the tubes on the spine's starboard side. At first, they all looked like fractures. There weren't that many injured so far, all redsuits. After them came the bodies. Ram didn't stay to count them as they passed, but there were dozens and dozens of dead. Too many. Some looked bashed and burned, too. One of the bodies was bent in all the wrong places like the person inside the suit was boneless now like a Squidy.

Hollis met Ram at the airlock along with at least seventy miners. They all wanted to go because they knew it was their pilots in their junks that had gotten hit and they wanted to be the ones to go on what they'd assumed was a boarding party to finish off the enemy crew and take the ship like on Moriah.

Mohegan
had landed in bay 2, but Cozen was nowhere in sight. Once he cycled through
Mohegan's
own airlocks, Ram went up the tube to the cockpit before anyone else. Cozen was still in the chair, and Ram sealed the hatch so nobody could get in. He established a private line-of-sight comms channel with just the two of them on it.  

Cozen said, "Next time, Mr. Devlin, I expect you'll know that battle plans rarely hold together once the enemy is engaged." Ram thought Cozen was trying to tell him that he knew this would happen. Taking
Mohegan
out might have been a risk for him, but he was sure that Ram's plan would fall apart and nobody would ever ask him to blow himself up in that junk. "I knew you'd find another way. And on a more personal note, now that you've done what your burdensome and tedious conscience required and have attempted to punish me for my crimes, I'm hoping, Mr. Devlin, that we can call a truce between us and get on with the business of winning this war. You need me. This ship needs me. This bloody war needs me." He added, "More than it needs you, Ram Devlin." 

Bergano pounded on the hatch.

Cozen said, "We can settle this little debt of justice on which you've fixated when the war with the Squidies is won, agreed?"

Ram's mouth wouldn't open.

"Agreed?"

He nodded.

"That's good, Mr. Devlin. That's smart." He killed the comms channel, got up, and pushed past Ram to spin the hatch and let Bergano in.

"Why the hell did you lock the hatch?" he said. "And why were you off comms?"

"Mr. Bergano!" Cozen said. "Nice to see that alien particle stream didn't sweep you off the bridge like a fire hose."

"I'm happy to see you're still with us too, Mr. Cozen."

Ram said, "There's significant casualties on
Hardway
. Biko and Dana are coordinating the search and rescue operation with the remaining junks. We lost a lot of people." 

"I'm sure
Hardway's
AGC will fill me in. Good luck and good hunting," Cozen said, and with that, he was gone down the tube to the personnel module and the junk's airlock.  

"I'm driving," Ram told Bergano.

"Let me," Bergano said. "You know I'm a better pilot." Once Cozen was clear, he fired the maneuvering nacelles gently and got them up and out of the bay. The damage to the carrier looked bad from the bridge, but it was worse close up.

"
Hardway
took it like a champ," Bergano said. She was torn, gashed down one side of her ore containers in a ragged wound that went on for 300 yards. Inside its jagged edges, where the metal had bloomed outwards, the containers and their contents had been melted and fused together. "That gash is at least twenty meters deep." 

Dana had put
Hardway
on a course to parallel the alien ship's forward drift and when they got halfway down the top side of the carrier's truly mangled bow, the disabled alien ship sat less than three Ks off, low at 2 o'clock.  

Bergano said, "You think those things are still alive in there?"

"Some. Yeah. Just can't get away from us."

Biko's voice came over comms without a lick of calm in it. "
Hardway
AT to
Mohegan!
Abort! Abort! Get the hell away from that thing! RTB now, now, now! We're showing an energy buildup in that alien ship. It could be an intentional overload – some kind of self-destruct mechani-"  

His voice was lost in a wave of deafening static and all Ram saw was blackness because the visor of his exosuit helmet went opaque to prevent him from being blinded. When the detonation's flash dimmed enough that his helmet let him see again, the alien vessel wasn't much more than a cloud of hot gas and a few pieces of rent hull spinning away into space.

"They never tried to save a single crewman. No lifeboats. No pods. Nothing," Bergano said as he stared at the receding debris. "They don't value life, Ram...not like we do."

Chapter Twelve

It had only been hours, but the word had spread to every soul on Earth. Alien life exists and it hates us. Before the Moriah survivors even returned to
Hardway
, it had become an established matter of record, a piece of written history, that Humanity had been attacked without cause. 

There were still those on Earth who pleaded that we must not meet the aliens with the same malevolence, that we must turn the other cheek and attempt to communicate. The Secretary General of the United Nations insisted that communication had already taken place. She said, "The aliens' acts of violence
are
a communication in the only common language we share: the language of actions. No matter how much our species desires peace, if war is the way of the stars, then we will show the heavens how we excel."  

Ram nearly vomited when he heard her say the very same words Mickey had spoken – the very same words Harry Cozen had spoken – the very same phrase.
War is the way of the stars.
Hearing it from the Secretary General confirmed for Ram that whatever Mickey had been mixed up in involved more conspirators than her and Harry Cozen.