War of Alien Aggression 2 Kamikaze (10 page)

The battered attack-carrier
Hardway
barreled into the gas giant's system and adjusted her course to bring the enemy's blockade gun into sight just off the outward limb of the planet as the 223rd formed up. "1.2 million Ks to target." 

"The second moon is coming in range," Harry Cozen said. "Mr Devlin, if you please..."

Ram thumbed the comms. "Midships battery, midships battery. Fire mission: Predesignated target, Hotel Bravo. Fire at will."

"We commend these souls unto the deep," said Harry Cozen.

A little shudder came up the ship's spine, and less than a second later, the railguns' sabot flashed bright when they hit
Hardway's
severed forward batteries, still in a degrading orbit around the icy second moon. Most of them vaporized. What wasn't obliterated rained down as debris and impacted on the ice. 

"Line of sight to primary target in three seconds."

"Here it comes," Dana said from NAV. "Engaging lateral thrusters for evasive action. I'm going to give you barrel rolls this time, Mr. Cozen."

"Just keep us safe, Lt. Commander Sellis."

Four seconds ago, the Squidies fired. The blockade gun reached out and sliced through the black with a five-second stream of heavy atomic nuclei moving close to the speed of light. It finally arrived like a ghostly sword slashing over the bridge as Dana jinked
Hardway
to port.  

Not counting the command tower, the carrier was less than 200m in girth from port side to starboard. No matter how long she was, when she was pointed right at you, shifting back and forth in her path like that, it was hard to hit her at over a million Ks out.

The next, five-second beam came only seconds after the first and fanned under
Hardway's
keel as six points of light accelerated hard and pulled away from
Hardway
to starboard. The 223rd would get to the end of the line before the carrier did, but hopefully not until the guns had softened the defenses up for them. "Midships batteries," Ram said into comms. "Commence bombardment on selected targets, fire at will."  

The carrier shuddered again. "First impacts in 1 minute 46 seconds," they reported.

"All batteries," Ram called, "Predesignated targets, fire at will. Repeat: fire at will." Every autocannon, every defense turret, and every railgun had been tasked with a fire mission to destroy the Squidies' defensive cannon and the alien airbase cut into the enemy's asteroid.
Hardway
targeted anything that might stop the 223rd from ramming themselves down the barrel of the Squidies' blockade gun. The salvo made the deck shake under Ram's feet like the ship had thunder trapped in its bulkheads. 

The ordnance ripped through space ahead of the carrier like a hailing storm front of kinetic and high-explosive hell. Before it fell on its targets, a dozen more salvos like it would leave
Hardway's
guns. Small particle streams fired from turrets around the blockade gun's eye would burn much of it up. Already Ram thought he'd seen a few outgoing rounds vaporized by Squidy gunners. 

After the next pass of the blockade gun's slashing, five-second beam, Ram called out, "
Hardway
AT to all remaining junks, scramble, scramble, scramble!" Three squadrons flew out the launch bays fast and accelerated. They couldn't maneuver very much at this speed, but for now, all they had to do was fly straight at the Squidies' defenses and add their firepower to
Hardway's
.  

"Launch the remaining warspites," Cozen said. "The more incoming targets the better."

"All junks, launch torpedoes at will." The new contacts blinked red in the air in front of Ram. "I have multiple returns from the airbase on the blockade gun's rock. They're scrambling small craft." Zoomed in, he could see them coming out of holes in the side of the asteroid.

Dana slid
Hardway
to high-side port to put them out of the blockade gun's next broadsword slash, but they were closer to target now. The enemy got lucky. As the particle beam cut close down past the port side of the command tower and cast the whole bridge in golden light, it chopped into the wrecked bays on the bow, ripping a line from where it had sliced off
Hardway's
nose to the aft end of the module, tearing the edges of the wound apart. The shock waves rippled the launch bays, and the carrier shook all down her length from the head-on impact of the hypervelocity matter-stream. It hacked into them deep and the ghostly beam burst out the back side of the forward bays and sliced through the port-side of the primary launch bays behind them. Before the five-second burst was over, severed, molten edged pieces of
Hardway
spun and tumbled next to the rest of the carrier in its descent. Burnt exosuits fell past the windows of the bridge. 

Dana focused on the NAV projection and her face didn't show any reaction, any emotion now. She didn't have time for anything but making sure that didn't happen again. All the muscles of her face had gone slack. She leaned to port and shifted
Hardway
starboard. 

The next slice of the alien beam cut to port only a few thousand Ks in front of the junks that had just launched. Two got caught and flared up bright. Their rent and twisted hulls spun off to port. "We lost
Terre Haute
and
3-Card
." That was Biko's voice. He was out there in
Gold Coast
. 

"The 223rd are at 600,000 Ks to target," Ram said. "They're starting their run." 

Sojic led the 223rd spiraling down an imaginary pipe towards the blockade gun. On the AT Controller's display, a dozen red bandits rose up to meet them. He hoped the Squidies inside those fighters could feel surprise and maybe even terror. "Sojic to all 223 junks, follow me in and lay it down thick." 

The 223rd waited to break until they saw the incoming bandits' fire. Then, they banked and spiraled down around it with Sojic in the lead, teasing the alien aces. When they opened up with their autocannon turrets, the 223rd had imparted so much speed to those shells that their fire was nearly impossible to avoid. 

The alien bandits tried to run, but the shells fell on them like a dense hail, a deluge of sabot and high explosives, ripping through hulls and spraying molten bandit into the blackness. In tiny compartments Squidy pilots screamed alien curses and died.

"Splash twelve red bandits! Count 'em and confirm!"

"
Hardway
AT confirms a dozen red bandits down!" 

Sojic said, "Payback is sweet,
Hardway
. Put that on my bloody tombstone." 

The carrier shook from another stabbing through the bays. Debris hit the windows of the bridge – half molten globs of hull.

In front of the 223rd, the black lit up with all the crossing particle streams. Nearly every weapon the Squidies had on that rock now reached out groping, waving looking for the 223rd. Not even they could dodge all those beams. 

"Mr. Devlin?" Cozen said. "Where's my salvo?"

"...2...1...impact."
Hardway's
first railgun salvo slammed into the enemy's defensive guns on the surface of the asteroid. The sabot from the main railgun batteries impacted right in the middle of them, and as molten ejecta shot up and out from the craters they made, the shock of the impacts rolled through the rock like an earthquake. Whole chunks of the Squidies' defensive grid went off-line at once.  

Some alien inside that rock must have seen the 223rd coming for them in Biko's death machines. Some Squidy-in-charge must have seen that
Hardway
wasn't the real threat because the blockade gun's slashing golden sword didn't reach out for the carrier anymore. It changed its shape to hunt the 223rd. It fanned wide so it could swat at the spiraling, impossibly elusive mosquitoes bearing down on it. 

The golden fan waved, and the 223rd all pulled away from the impossibly wide beam in cutback turns that Ram knew had to produce more inertial gees than even
they
could handle. The half-crushed groans and grunts that came over comms made Ram think maybe the pulse-pinch was killing them faster than anyone thought it would. They couldn't handle many more turns like that. Dolan maneuvered with the others, but halfway through the turn, his voice went quiet and as the rest of the 223rd banked and yanked around the edges of the stream to escape it, Dolan flew straight in. 

Bricklayer
hit the wall of accelerated nuclei on the starboard side low and it was like she'd hit a wall of rock. The impact shaved off half the junk and it spun once before it fell into the beam and tumbled down it and shredded.

Seconds later, the golden fan appeared again and chased them in the other direction. They were so close to target that it only had to lead them by less than half-a-second. This time, it was Zucker who leveled out without explanation and flew straight into the beam. After a bright flash and series of little ones from the debris, there were only four left.

"25 seconds to target," Dana said.

Twenty-five seconds meant at least four more sweeps of that beam. They'd never make it unless Ram gave the blockade gun something else to kill. He heard Biko's voice in his head.
'All we do is send them to die.'
There was a way to do this – a way to get the 223rd where they needed to go, but it would be bloody. Ram reached for comms to give the order before it was too late, but a voice came through the speakers in his helmet before he could open his mouth.   

"This is the AGC, Lt. Commander Asa Biko. All remaining
Hardway
junks form up on me and keep it loose. We're going in with the 223rd. We're going to give that thing something else to shoot at." 

Harry Cozen only nodded. He knew when to keep his mouth shut.

"Roger, that Biko." Lt. Yanouch said. "
Pole Arm
requests the lead."  

"You can have it if you can catch me, Sammy." Asa Biko swung the main flight of junks into the same line as the Death Machines. He made them all targets for the blockade gun's fanning beam as
Hardway
's sixteen remaining junks hit their engines hard and barreled in right on the 223's seven o'clock, offering the blockade gun a denser field of targets to shoot at. Inside the rock, a Squidy gun commander took the bait. 

The next time the blockade gun fired, 3 junks,
Stale Sally
,
Minerva
, and
Zoot
all turned to shredded metal and a hail of steel and frozen blood and bones. But Sojic's squadron didn't lose another plane. "223rd, jack it back on track!" Sojic cried. The calm was all gone from her voice now. "Form up on me! Keep it tight and follow me in!" 

Sojic dove in with her fighters as the blockade gun swatted away a salvo of sabot and shells
Hardway
threw at it and then came for the junks again.
Pogo
and
Topper Six
got hit directly. The pilot of
Glory B
almost pulled hard enough to escape, but she lost consciousness and flew straight into the beam. The junks that escaped the Squidies had to roll and fly out of their attack vector to do it. Half of them flew off to nowhere because the pilots were out cold from the gees. "That's all we can do, Sojic," Biko told her. "The rest is up to you. Make it count." 

With
Hardway's
optics Ram could see right down the blockade gun's muzzle now, down the aperture in the rock from which its beam sprung like a golden, hellmouth geyser. It lunged up and out and when it pierced the final toroid ring, magnets flattened the beam into a fan shape so wide it had breaks and gaps in it. It must have been a last ditch effort to save themselves. 

Sojic and Campbell grunted and screamed into comms as they spiraled down the rays of that last golden burst. Mohan and Lu peeled off and corkscrewed around the broken beams in the other direction. Once the 223rd were on vector,
Hardway
didn't hear any last words. Ram had no idea if any of them launched the warheads they carried slung under their bows or if any of them tried to pull away and discovered it was impossible. No matter what happened, Sojic, Campbell, Mohan, and Lu all finished on target at nearly the same instant. 

The windows of the bridge darkened, and when they cleared, it looked like the sun was coming up out of a hole in the rock. The force of the explosions must have impacted an outgoing stream of nuclei because debris and burning gas shot out cracks splitting the surface of the asteroid as it began to fracture.

As
Hardway
ripped through space closing the last 150,000 Ks, they watched the Squidies' engineered asteroid come apart in three pieces to reveal an anthill inside. Ram shouted into comms for all
Hardway
batteries to fire, but the railguns already had. They spat hell into their enemies' shattered nest. 

37 minutes later, as the victorious carrier and her junks were still cutting a wide, deceleration turn in the outer Procyon system, they saw the Sol-Procyon Transit opened from the other side. The UN Task Force breached space, and the tear in space expanded, spitting exotic particles and anti-protons in a fireworks display that continued until the passage stabilized.

Hardway's
arrays looked right down its throat to see the distorted bow silhouettes of Staas Privateer carriers leading the way.
Araby
and
Pont Neuf
burst into the Procyon system trailing plasma from their towers and guns, launching their junks. When they saw the alien blockade gun had been reduced to rubble, they cheered loud enough to be heard from
Hardway
. 

Epilogue

 Goma Shipyards

Two months after the battle for Procyon, Asa Biko still blamed himself for sending so many to die. He was sure the surviving pilots and crew blamed him as well. He said they thought of him as an officer now. 

Ram told him that was bull dust and the crew liked him as much now as they ever did, but Biko didn't believe him. So Biko put distance between himself and
Hardway's
pilots. Maybe so it would be easier the next time he had to send them in. They didn't get it. They just thought the AGC had become an unapproachable ass since he took the job back.