War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway (6 page)

But that's not the way it works, Ram thought. You can make right from wrong. It was Mickey who taught him that. It was Mickey who slapped the words out his mouth when he'd said different once. "Harry Cozen murdered ten innocent miners," Ram said. "He wants us to start a war."

"I'm not defending him. I can't. I won't."

"But
why
, Mickey?" Even though there were only two of them on the secure comms channel, she whispered her next words.  

"Listen to me. This war is coming and nothing will change that." 

"You've met them before, haven't you...Where? How?"

"Listen," she hissed. "Remember these words, Ram: 'War is the way of the stars'."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Just remember it. Look, if this war doesn't start
today
, like
this
on
Moriah
, then when it does happen, we will lose. We will lose, Ram. Don't ask me how I know because I won't tell you, but this war has got to start now. It's got to start as soon as possible and it's got to start in a way that leaves humanity with no second thoughts about fighting it. You get it? You understand why we're here now?"  

Black propaganda. Cozen was creating a narrative - just the right historical narrative to accomplish his goals. That's why he didn't bring a gunship and assault troops. He was writing the story of the war's first shots: unarmed humans attacked in our own space. It was a story written to drive a righteous war.  

Ram said, "Did you tell him to use
Hardway
because you thought I'd lie for you?" 

"I don't want you to lie for me. I want you to lie for all of them – for Dana and Biko and his crew and
Hardway
and 12 billion people on Earth you don't know who are never going to thank you or know what the hell you did to save their miserable skins. You were a good kid and you're a good man and I know you don't
want
to do any of this. So far, Ram Devlin has been mostly the person he's
wanted
to be. For that guy, doing the right thing is easy. I need you to do the hard thing now, Ram. Like I did for you. I need you to do it for an even better reason than saving one kid. I need you to lie so that a
billion
kids like the one I found in the rubble can go on living and grow up." 

"This... this isn't who I want to be, Mickey."

"I know, Ram. And just for the record, I didn't get to be who I wanted to be either." She laughed once as she got up. She said, "Maybe next time."

She stood up straight then. He remembered the pictures of Mickey Wells, the ones taken when she fought for the 2nd Marine Division. She stuck her chest out with so much pride in those pictures. She looked that way when he'd first seen her again on
Hardway
. Despite everything, she still looked proud now. Ram Devlin was really asking a different question, but the one that came out of his mouth was: "Is this...is this something you're proud to be part of, Mickey?" 

Mickey Wells looked Ram in the eye and said it without a hint of doubt in her voice. "This is the most important thing I've ever done in my life."

Chapter Seven

"We've got 1.7 kilometers to cover," Cozen said. "I don't know anyone better in this environment than belt miners so I know we're going to make good time. Mickey, I want you scouting fifty meters ahead. D'Ambrosse, keep an eye on that knuckledragger and try to remember you're four meters tall. Don't get us spotted. Mr. Devlin, you have the rear."

They bounded low and single file over the dim and dusty flats with ten meters between them. D'Ambrosse and the knuckledragger carried Biko's breaching charge. It was a 2x3 meter piece of high-density hull plating ripped from
Gold Coast
. D'Ambrosse and her mech suit bent it before they packed the concave side with mining charges.

At first, the procession followed the gouges and scrapes the junk had left when she went down, but soon, Mickey began to lead them on a less direct route, following the backsides of the jagged hills and the bottoms of ravines that might hide them. Ram remembered seeing the shape of the alien hull and the tower mounted on the 'top'. It had to be 30 meters high. And it was set at least five or ten meters up. If they weren't careful or if Mickey picked a careless path for them, then the ETs would see the boarding party coming. 

Dana hung back with Ram. When he saw an outcropping of rock he could pull her behind to get a few seconds of privacy, he didn't hesitate. He ran in long bounds to close the space between them and pulled her behind the jut of the rock out of sight (and comms) from the others. He didn't want to say what he said then. "Dana, let me and the others go in first." He thought maybe she understood why he said it, but she still looked angry.

"Are you kidding me? You'd never say that to Biko." She was right, of course. Then she said something unlike anything he'd ever heard come out of her mouth. "This was a crime against every human and it's every human's duty to deliver the payback." She'd never said the word 'duty' before.

"I just wish you were back on
Hardway
. I wish you never had to be part of this... " His voice trailed off when he remembered it was Cozen that put her here. Cozen had asked for her
specifically
. Now, Ram knew why: to make sure he had something to lose. "Just don't..." He couldn't even say it. 

"Don't what?"

"Just stay alive," he said.

Minutes later, Mickey led them through a maze of sharp outcrops and jagged rock until she took up a position leaning into the slope of one of Moriah's fractured hills. She waved them all to her. One by one, they assembled on the side of the hill. "Target's on the other side," she said. "You'll see the tower when you're halfway up."

"First wave, fifty meters to the right," Cozen told them. "Second wave, fifty to the left. Third wave, hold where you are." Ram held his position with Biko and Cozen while Hollis and Lapuis went right with Mickey. Dana shot Ram a glance and a smile, and then she was gone with Oboto, Tse, and D'Ambrosse in the lumbering mech suit.

They could all hear Cozen's confidence in their helmets. "We will approach the vessel in three teams like we drilled. We will breach its hull, and we will kill whatever we find inside. We will find a way to disable the ETs' jamming, and we will call for extraction. Once we're inside, do
not
damage the interior of the alien ship. I want her as intact as possible." He paused then, maybe for effect. "I know none of us asked to be here, but this has to happen and you're the only ones that can do it. It's time to step up, people."  

"First wave!" Mickey called out.

"Aye aye!"

"Over the top! Make for the tower. Go, Go! GO!" Mickey leaned forward into the hill and dug in, driving herself up over the crest with Hollis and Lapuis behind her in echelon on her four and eight o'clock. They screamed and kicked up dust as they ran to the top and then jumped – Mickey with her x-ray laser, Lapuis with the bulky, meter-long plasma cutter, and Hollis with one of the pig-sticker swords. Ram lost sight of them after that and since they were using IR comms, their battle cries went silent. If Mickey and the first wave had been burned to a crisp by some alien weapon a second after that, then Ram wouldn't know until he went over the top himself.

Cozen called out, "Second wave!"

"Aye aye!"

"Go, Go! GO!" The second wave went over the hill with D'Ambrosse and her mech-suit in front, carrying the massive, improvised breaching charge. It would make the jump in a single bound. As it took off, Dana ran behind the 4-meter mech, screaming the foreign battle cry Ram heard from her before. She held her pig-sticker up above her head as she jumped with the others and flew out of sight and into silence.

"Third wave!"

Ram and Biko shouted, "Aye aye!"

"Go, Go! GO!" Cozen charged up over the top, and Ram and Biko followed, carrying the same pig-stickers as everyone else. Ram did his best to yell out the most terrifying cry he could make. The ETs couldn't hear him, but the battle cry wasn't for them.

Just like Mickey said, the ship's tower rose up out of the crest of the hill when Ram was halfway up. At the top, he could see it was only fifty meters to the long, wing-like section of the alien hull. The vertical tower went straight through the 'wing' and protruded out the bottom along with three sets of what could only be landing gear. From hundreds of meters up it hadn't looked so big, but the vertical tower section of the alien ship looked more menacing now, like they were charging a fortress instead of a ship. That's all Ram could take in before he took the first, long, bounding jump from the top of the hill. It took so long to come down that he felt like nothing but a target hanging meters up in the air, just waiting to be ripped apart by some kind of alien projectiles or burned to a crisp by an unimagined ET weapon.

Mickey and the 1st wave crossed the distance and made the bounding jump up to the wing-shaped section of the hull, almost 10 meters above them. When they landed, 2nd wave wasn't far behind. 

3rd wave touched down and bounded forward, skipping across the open rock as the first wave completed their clean landing by decelerating against the side of the tower. Mickey led her team a little further around the base of it while the second wave with the knuckledragger and the breaching charge made their ascent jump. Once they were up, Mickey pointed to tell D'Ambrosse where she wanted the charge.  

By the time Ram and the 3rd wave did the last high jump that brought them up on the wing, D'Ambrosse was already standing in front of the spot Mickey had picked, her knuckledragger towering over the rest of the team and flashing blue lightning as she held the breaching charge to the alien hull with one mechanical arm and began to weld it on with the integrated welder in the other.  

D'Ambrosse was a pilot and usually maintained a degree of calm in her voice even if her junk was making an uncontrolled descent into the sun. That calm was all gone now. She breathed hard and fast as she spoke. "Composition of the alien hull is unknown. But it's a metal. Whatever it's made of has a high melting temp, but I can do this. This is going to work."

As Ram got his back against the tower, he saw the movement. "Above!"

The flashes from the welder lit the aliens blue, but they were reddish when his helmet lights hit them. The three of them wore some kind of mechanized suits, but not open-framed, blocky mechs like the knuckledraggers. The alien suits were sleek, sealed and armored, five-meters-tall. Ram didn't know if what he saw of the suits' anatomy matched that of the alien things inside it, but they way they came down vertically with one gangle of armored alien appendages pointed at the hull suggested they intended to land on them like legs.  Another set of five just like them protruded from the top of a central body mass. In the middle of it, an armored nub with a porthole visor like a helmet suggested a head underneath.

He didn't even realize they'd fired until D'Ambrosse lit up inside her knuckledragger. She burned in an aura of clinging flame. Her screams filled comms as the falling attackers each extended an 'arm' at D'Ambrosse. The skeleton of the knuckledragger sparked around her and arced with charge as she burned up inside her suit. Flame filled her helmet as they landed silently.

Dana was the first to shout, "Kill them!"

Mickey pushed her out of her way and discharged her sidearm into the center body mass of the alien battle suit that had landed closest. Ram saw the weapon's x-rays vaporize the dust they'd kicked up and draw a ruby line like a spear that stabbed at the alien armor. Scattering rays and whiffs of smoke came off. The beam cut the surface, but it didn't punch through. Without even looking in her direction, a pair of armored fire hose limbs knocked her against the tower so hard she bounced off it and didn't move.

"Mickey!" Ram had nothing but a pig-sticker and when he stabbed at the nubby thing in the center of its body, at the thing that might have been a helmet, it swept one of those limbs into his belly and sent him flying backwards into the tower like Mickey.

There was nothing Ram could see in D'Ambrosse's helmet but flame and he thought she was already dead, but the knuckledragger turned and lit its integrated cutter. A 12,000 degree, magnetically shaped plasma blade extended a meter from the knuckledragger's left arm. D'Ambrosse reached out from hell and drove it into the alien battle suit, right into the nubby helmet in the center. Whatever that thing was made of sparked and spat bits of molten armor as the plasma cutter plunged in deep. It emerged glowing bright as it came out the back. Blue and yellow flames and pressurized gas and boiling fluids jetted fog and snow out the wound on both sides. D'Ambrosse's visor blew outwards, and then, the knuckledragger was still as the holed, alien battle suit fell to the hull.

Oboto caught fire in his suit and burned inside it until he vented flame like D'Ambrosse. Ram saw the weapons clearly that time. The aliens had mounted them at the terminus of the 'arms' of the suit, like pieces of pipe over an armored hose.

Lapuis managed to get his bulky, meter-long, plasma cutter lit up so he could use it as a weapon, but he only cut off one of those armored appendages before others snaked behind the 50cm blade and knocked him against the tower so hard he vented atmo. The cutter went flying.

A wide-bore shaft of ruby light so solid and bright he could have climbed it bisected the melee, and Ram knew Mickey was back in the fight. She demonstrated why guns with an adjustable rate of discharge like her H&V
Itar
had been banned on earth. She must have gone to full power and let out half the battery. That beam would have pierced a hull. Ruby light flared and burning green flame erupted, and Mickey's gun vaporized a hole ringed with molten metal in the middle of the alien's twisting body mass. She held the trigger down and with a flick of her wrist, she almost cut it in half. It erupted with venting gas and what Ram guessed was some kind of bluish blood that made a fountain of off-color snow as it boiled then froze.