War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway (3 page)

"You his security guard or something?" Mickey's whole face hardened when Lapuis said that and the air in the compartment rang with tension.

"What did you ask me?"

"You heard him," Hollis said. "Are you with Staas Security?" They thought the gun she carried was to point at
them
if Cozen told her to. They hated the Staas Security goons. 

Maybe Mickey could feel Ram's eyes on her, wanting to know what she'd say next, but he knew the answer. Mickey Wells had been a hired thug before and she'd hated herself for it. She said, "I work for Harry Cozen. I held the rank of Lt. Major in the Corps and now I'm a registered Staas military contractor. Next person to ask me if I'm a security guard gets a free lesson in zero-gee bone-breaking."

Harry Cozen had Biko and D'Ambrosse turn and fly the junk down, out of the ecliptic, out of the Trojans and into the empty solar medium below, where there was nothing on the charts but magnetic storms. Then he said to keep going. Ram knew Biko and he were thinking the same thing. They hadn't been able to figure exactly where
Mohegan
had been when her accident happened, but Cozen was directing them towards a region her reconstructed course said she'd probably passed through.  

It was another hour before Cozen came down to the personnel compartment and produced an orbital data set for an apparently unmapped body, several kilometers long. "That's where we're going," he said. Ram looked at the data set on a terminal. The extrapolated orbit for the mystery rock said that was actually part of the L4 group, but due to some complicated mechanics, it rode an eccentric and twisted figure eight orbit around the group, almost as if it were orbiting a large body. It spent most of its time out of the ecliptic. It didn't even appear on company charts yet. Harry Cozen had just named it. "It's called Moriah 2164-14474," he told them.

Even if he didn't realize it then, Ram must have already been suspicious of Moriah and Harry Cozen and the whole trip because he made an excuse about checking on the reactor so he could duck away and test his theory in private.

 Inside the reactor room, Ram unzipped the breast pocket of his exosuit, found his matchbox computer, and pressed it to the terminal. The handshake with the junk's NAV system was immediate. He called up the orbit of Cozen's rock and layered
Mohegan's
reconstructed path over Moriah's orbit. They crossed.  

There was no way to prove it, but as far as Ram was concerned,
Mohegan's
last stop before catastrophe had probably been Cozen's rock. On the way to the cockpit, Ram pushed the files to the terminal Dana was working. He didn't have to explain. He just told her to look at them and went to show the cockpit what he'd found. 

"So
Mohegan
went to Moriah," Biko said when he saw it. "Makes sense. They might have got lucky... caught it on a radar ping and deviated from their flight plan." 

"That's the same conclusion I came to, Mr. Devlin," said Cozen. "If we're right about
Mohegan
visiting Moriah, then when we get there, we may find out what happened to her."  

Biko and D'Ambrosse didn't say anything, but Ram saw them glance at each other. Cozen knew more than he was saying. Ram really wanted to hear what Mickey had to say about all this, but she'd floated up in the corner of the personnel module and closed her eyes and pretended to sleep.

Active radar pings bounced off Moriah, but LiDAR missed her. It was the kind of rock you never saw until you flew into it. 3.4 km-long, dented Moriah's albedo was so low that she reflected less than a tenth of a percent of the visible sunlight to reach her.

On approach, Ram went up to the cockpit to get a view of it with his naked eyes, and as he pushed himself off the deck and up the tube to the cockpit, he was vaguely aware that Mickey had followed him into the tube.

About halfway up the first section, when Ram heard her push off below him, he realized it was the first time he'd actually been alone with her since she'd arrived and he was compelled to say something – he didn't know what. Something... Anything... She must have pushed off hard and fast because by the time Ram looked down, she was already within arm's reach of him. Ram decided she didn't feel like having a big, sappy reunion just then because when he started to open his mouth, she grabbed his ankle and pulled on it hard so he flew backwards down the tube and she shot up past him twice as fast. After that, Mickey tucked and ducked and spun herself with a half-twist so that when she got to the top of the tube's first section, where it turned towards the cockpit doors, she landed on her feet, bent her knees, and pushed off again in the direction of the cockpit module.

It was crowded with three people up behind the pilot's seats, but there was plenty of room to see out the canopy. At ten Ks out, Cozen's mystery rock looked like a jagged piece of the black that had ripped loose from behind the stars. "It's turning on its major axis," D'Ambrosse said.

"I see it. Looks like it rotates once an hour or so. Coming in with the spin."

At one kilometer Moriah's surface poked at the eyes. Sharp hills and ravines covered her. She was big enough to have very weak gravity. The dust she'd collected on her travels was what gave every plane a flat, low-albedo finish.

At 100 meters from the surface, Cozen said, "Give us a full orbit and then find us a spot to set down. And come in riding a
shallow
down angle so we don't have to hit the thrusters too hard." 

Biko said, "I know how to land a dusty rock, Mr. Cozen." He flew around Moriah's 'equator' going lower and lower so that by the time they'd gone halfway around, her dusty, matte surface was close enough that it blurred past through the bottom of the canopy.

D'Ambrosse saw it first. "What the hell is that?" It came up fast on the port side, nestled in a set jagged, broken hillocks less than 500 meters off their line of travel.  

Dana shouted over comms from the prospecting terminals below. "Alloys! Heavy metals! It reads like a damn ship!" It was shiny with straight lines and engineered curves and it wasn't natural. It was a obviously a product of intentioned design and building. Ram searched Cozen's face for any sign of foreknowledge. So did Biko and D'Ambrosse. The man's face was inscrutable.

The vessel they discovered on the surface was bigger than a mining junk. Its dark hull was shaped like a flying wing or a thick knife-blade about 60 meters long with a fat leading edge ten meters thick and a thinner trailing edge. A single, elliptical tower rose up almost 30 meters at ninety degrees to the rest of the hull.

"I know every human ship that ever put to space and that's not one of them." They all fought to come to terms with the only possibility that remained. Harry Cozen delivered his next words with conviction. "That ship wasn't made by human hands."

Whatever made it, Ram saw what looked like exhaust ports along the thin, presumably trailing edge of the blade-shaped part of the hull. "No heat signature or other indication of an active power source," Dana said over comms. If that ship was functional, then it was powered down, but considering what happened to
Mohegan
, Ram felt less than safe with
Gold Coast
flying past like a big, slow target.  

"Circle slowly," Cozen said. "But don't get too close. Maintain this distance."

"Is it a wreck? A derelict that maybe glomed onto Moriah's gravity?"

"Could have been here for a long time," Biko said. "Maybe millions of years..."

"No," Cozen said. "Look; there's no dust on it." He was right.

Ram got a sinking feeling like they'd already gawked too long – like something was already happening and he was missing it. Biko must have got the same feeling because he broke off the circle to fly
Gold Coast
in a more evasive line. 

Cozen said, "What are you doing?"

Dana shouted over comms so loud, she drowned him out. "IR spike! That ship's got a signature like a reactor firing up! Got X-rays! Big gamma!" Biko yanked the junk port and starboard, up and down, but it was already too late for that.
Gold Coast's
frame hummed with a new, high-pitched vibration. "It's painting us with EM! High-band, broad spectrum emi-" Static fuzzed her voice and drowned her out and then
Gold Coast
physically shuddered with the power that surged through her. In that second, the consoles and the lights flared. The internal comms screamed and died along with everything else – lights, consoles, control interfaces, terminals... everything.  

The hum from the reactor was gone and the air coming up the tube smelled burnt.

Dana's voice called up from the dark below: "I'm pretty sure our main battery just discharged up-line into the reactor. Power conditioner unit down here looks melted. I think that alien ship just zapped our systems!"

With only his suit lights to see by, Biko flipped circuits and tapped at the console, but without power, it was futile. "Where the hell are my emergency batteries?"

"They should have kicked in already." But he knew that. Ram didn't say what he was thinking – that the batteries would all be dead. They'd spontaneously discharged like they had on
Mohegan.
 

Biko tried to initiate an emergency reactor restart with a single, dedicated switch and it failed. "No reactor power to charge batteries and no emergency batteries to restart the dead reactor. We've got no maneuvering thrusters, no engine. Nothing."

"Life support?"

"Nothing means nothing." Biko turned and glanced at Ram. He was thinking it too:
This is what happened to Mohegan.
Biko didn't cuss or swear. In fact he had an extra dose of pilot's calm in his voice. "We don't have any thrusters and
Gold Coast
is now coming in at an angle that's going to end this ride real soon. I'd say less than ninety seconds. You folks might want to secure those exosuits, get your helmets on, and brace for impact." 

Chapter Five

"Impact in three...two...one..."

The ore containers slung under the bow hit first.
Gold Coast
was lucky not to flip end over end. 

The second impact threw them against their straps again and bled off a lot of speed with violent scraping of belt-iron steel on stone. The vibrations came up through the clamps and couplings and frame, right into the personnel module. The sound of it filled Ram's helmet. Then, it was gone.

Ram realized they'd bounced just before
Gold Coast
came down again, this time, ass first. She ground against the rock and that slowed them down until the ore containers on the bow hit again. After more sliding and skidding and scraping, she finally ground to a stop.  

Over the ringing silence, Biko's voice came through Ram's helmet speakers. He was out of breath. He said, "Welcome to Moriah. The heat's out like everything else. It's going to get pretty cold in here soon."

The personnel module looked smaller now. Light came through the portholes in thin shafts, but it was barely enough to cut the dim. Mostly, all Ram could see was the narrow cone his suit lights showed him.

"I tried to call home with my suit comms plugged into
Gold Coast's
antenna, but there's some kind of active jamming," D'Ambrosse said. "Sounds like bugs. Like crickets and cicadas. I can't cut through it." 

"Maybe I can get a charge and prime the reactor," Ram said. Cozen told him he was welcome to try, but without a battery to power the reactor's lasers, he'd never get fusion going. Cozen was right. Too bad Mickey's gun didn't have enough charge in it.

Biko and Dana considered building a separate dry pile of some kind, a chemical or nuclear heap made of scavenged materials, but when they inventoried what was available and calculated the time it would take to build enough charge for a reactor restart, it came to 15 days.

Cozen said, "How long do we have?"

"With the heaters running on fully charged suits... Forty hours," Biko estimated. "The suits' chemical rebreathers will work for weeks before the scrubbers needed to be changed. But we'll freeze when the batteries go."

"We could extend our survival time if we can conserve the heat that's inside
Gold Coast
right now," Dana said. "And the reactor will give off some residual heat. It could help." 

"Doesn't matter if we could stay warm in here for a week," Cozen said. "They'll never find this rock." He said it with a finality that didn't register with any of them at first, but it should have. "It's not on the charts. And we didn't file a flight plan." Cozen made for the airlock doors on the opposite side of the module and Ram thought he was just going to peer out at the surface, but after Cozen leaned over the door controls, the whole junk rocked sideways with a closely spaced pair of blasts, one right after the other.

Milliseconds later, the atmo in the personnel module turned to a boiling, freezing gale blowing out the sizable hole where the airlock doors had just been. It took a whole second for Ram to understand that Cozen had lifted the safety cover, flipped the enable switch and detonated the explosive bolts built into the airlock doors. The atmo and most of the junk's residual heat was gone in less then two seconds.

Biko screamed, "You lunatic! That was our heat! That was an extra forty hours of heat at least!"

"Uh-huh," Cozen said. "What the hell were you going to do with it? Sit in here on your ass and wait to freeze when your battery runs down? 40 hours...100 hours...it doesn't goddamn matter. There's nothing but death for us in here, Mr. Biko. Our only chance for survival is out there." Cozen pointed out the hole where the airlock doors had been.

They were all so stunned that for a whole second, they just stood inside the breached module staring out through the hole Cozen had made. Dusty, lost Moriah lay sunlit and matte black against the stars. None of them said anything in that second. Then, Oboto and D'Ambrosse and Lapuis – everyone but Ram and Mickey began shouting.

"Are you crazy!"

"Why the hell did you DO that!"