War of Alien Aggression 2 Kamikaze (3 page)

"Watch out,
Mohegan
, they're spinning on their jets for another shot!" They continued forward in their line of travel, but spun around in unison to fire again. They rotated an extra few degrees and raked their fire across
Double Down's
flanks and her reactor section at the rear.  

"
Double Down
is hit. We're spiking. Cutting to half-power." On the bridge, the tactical displays showed the wildly uncontrolled X-rays coming off the junk's wounded reactor. The containment vessel was breached somewhere. 

"Ten o'clock! Ten high!"

"Comin' in again! They split! Ten and two high!"

"Second element on my six!"

"High or low?"

"High! High! Hig-!" That transmission ended with a static burst – emissions from
Double Down
's reactor cooking-off. Her signature faded from the AT Controller's display.  

Less than ten seconds later, Lee called 'mayday' just before the projection of
Bandito
vanished from the air over the bridge. Ram had known Lee for six years. Biko had known him even longer and when he looked up at Cozen in horror, the accusation in his eyes said it wasn't the Squidies who'd killed his friend.  

It was too late, but Biko shouted new orders to
Mohegan,
trying to save what he could. "Enemy is superior!
Mohegan
, get out of there!" Burroughs couldn't hear him over his own cries for vengeance. 

After the Squidies silenced
Mohegan
, they flew straight at the fleeing SBS incursion craft and the King's commandos like they'd seen them the whole time. Less than three minutes later, they picked the stealth craft out from the stars with small-bore particle beams and cut it up into pieces. 

Chapter Four

Ram slept in his exo-suit to the sound of his rebreather and the ceaseless comms chatter of a six-day battle. Since the enemy never gave them an hour without an attack, either you learned to sleep during the assaults or you didn't sleep. Most of the bridge officers' quarters had been lost with the bottom half of
Hardway
's sub-tower module so they'd been hot-bunking the couches on the observation deck under the bridge. As soon as the officers sleeping there got up, the next set would be in there trying to rest, keeping these bunks hot. 

The artificial gravity went out again while Ram was asleep, and he woke up to the sound of Asa Biko's screaming on local, line of sight comms. He looked across the small compartment to see the Air Group Commander in his suit and helmet, flailing his arms in a nightmare panic, grasping for something to catch himself.

Three seconds later, Biko woke. He didn't apologize. He just pushed off the bulkhead for the hatch. When the body sleeps, sometimes it mistakes the feeling of free fall for actually falling. In whatever dream you dream, the ground disappears and you fall and fall into the endless blackness until you wake, usually in cold sweat and shivers. 

It only happened to people their first few weeks up the gravity well, people who'd never been to space before. Asa Biko had been out in the black fifteen years, but since they'd come to the Procyon System, Biko had the geebies like a shanghaied spacer on his first run. The company psych manual said people who couldn't get over the geebies or got a sudden-onset case after years without them had loss of control issues. The manual said they had fear of letting go – fear of death. Seemed like bull dust to Ram. He bet if the Psychs that wrote that part of the manual had been promoted from junk pilot to bridge officer and Air Group Commander in a day like Asa Biko had, then they might have written something different.

Twenty minutes later, he left Dana Sellis sleeping in Cozen's office alone. While close warhead detonations vibrated the walls of the command tower's aft tube, he pushed off up to the bridge.

Harry Cozen had the chair. When he heard Ram's voice on local suit comms asking Bergano how many incoming and from what vector they came, Cozen didn't even turn around. He just said, "It's not your watch, Mr. Devlin. Get off my bridge because soon it
will
be your watch and I don't want my first officer falling asleep in this chair." 

Before Ram left, he eyeballed the junks hanging up over
Hardway's
three o'clock, off the starboard side, as they chewed up incoming Squidy warheads. Two of the carrier's last remaining forward launch bays on that side spewed some kind of reddish smoke from a new hit they'd taken when Ram was below. The metal itself burned now, feeding the combustion with its own oxygen. The smoke trailed long and thin behind
Hardway
for thousands of kilometers against the gas giant's blue clouds. 

*****

Gravity was still out, and Ram flew the hollow spine running the carrier's length. The spine's lights had gone dark with the power feed to the people-movers, so they'd fixed battery-powered lights to the struts and cables every thirty meters. The ship didn't have enough to light the whole thing properly. It looked like a string of lit islands in a 900-meter chain. As they welded struts near the severed bow's cap, the damage control teams flashed far away lightning. It made the thin, smokey haze appear momentarily milky. 

Ram crouched, aimed himself into the fog on a good center line between the struts and the damage control teams, and then pushed off. In only a hundred meters, he'd picked up enough speed pushing off struts along the way that if he hadn't called out for a hand, then he'd have shot right by. "Catch," he called out on the local comms suit channel. The damage control team standing by under the Hab module's tube were perched on struts, inverted above him. "G'day, Mr. Devlin," one said as he caught hold of Ram's extended hands and swung him up the tube's mouth.

Six weeks ago, before the war started, if a company officer had called out like that, then the crewmen would have feigned butterfingers and let him sail right past and had a good laugh about it.

The midships mess was two decks up the tube, through a pair of hatches and a closet-sized interspace now functioning as an airlock. It was in a compartment without any external bulkheads and with
Hardway
having been under constant attack for six days, that meant it was one of the few places on the carrier where they hadn't blown out the atmo. Ram could take off his helmet and eat and drink and maybe even get a crack at using the head. He could even change suit-liners if they had any left. They wouldn't.  

When
Hardway
was a mining carrier, the miners and pilots had practically lived in their exosuits. Company officers like Ram hadn't. He could fight just fine in one now. The gesture-based interface and the projections in his helmet's visor let him command systems and even manage elements of
Hardway
's defense with ease, maybe even better than when he wore a regular flight suit and used a terminal for interface. It was the smell he still wasn't used to. The suit liners were synthetics, but technically, they were alive and Ram swore he could smell them. After six days, his own smell and the weird smell of the liner had mixed into something he wanted to escape, but couldn't. 

The midships mess was the smallest mess and Ram didn't see many people there – some redsuits, some reactor engineers, and a pair of warrant officers along with one of the new gun crews. They sat at the tables and benches that had been bolted to the deck, eating what the cooks had been able to manage. The gravity hadn't been down for that long this time, but the boxes of pork and chicken and burger-filled buns the cooks had piled up on the tables had already got knocked into the air. They floated around the mess in a thick constellation.

The buzzing of the closest autocannon turrets came through the bulkheads. In the brief blackness as he blinked, his mind's eye saw them stitching the sky in front of incoming alien bombs. Then, a rumble passed through the air in there like thunder. In the pressurized atmo, Ram could actually hear the detonations that shook the carrier. Save the sound of his own bones rattling from shock waves coming up through the deck, over the last six days, Ram had only briefly heard the actual sounds of battle.

He ate mindlessly and pretended to study a chart on his matchbox computer while he mostly just blinked at it. Seconds after he got his helmet on and went back through the two hatches and back into the tube, the tone of the radio chatter on bridge comms changed to alarm. As he swung the second hatch shut, the hum of the closest defensive guns picked up again and Ram heard Bergano over the ship-wide channel advise, "Vampire inbound. Brace for close det." The wheel on the hatch vibrated Ram's hand with the auto-cannons six decks up, outside the hull. They desperately spat shells to stop the flying warhead.

He turned and made eye contact with a crewman coming up the tube slow. In nearly the same instant, the Squidy warhead detonated and breached the hull. He saw the first licks of the firestorm above her only an infinitesimal moment before a river of plasma surged down the tube. It was so bright, so brilliant that even before it swept her away, the radiance seemed to burn the edges off her.

The firestorm blew him back into the hatch and blasted her down to the spine. It shot out to the bow and stern for hundreds of yards. It burned and blasted everything in its path and shook the whole carrier.  

It was over less than two-seconds. When Ram realized the full force of the blast had missed him and he was only bruised and singed, he inched to the blackened edge and looked up through the smoke coming off the burnt walls. Up at the top of the Hab module's tube, bulkheads had been mangled and hatches had been blasted open and a hole two meters wide now led out to open space.

That last alien warhead had breached the armored outer hull and the inner hull, too, but it hadn't been a direct hit. If it had, a much larger section of the Hab module's hull and multiple decks would have been vaporized. If it was a direct hit, then he'd be dead, Ram thought.

"This is Commander Devlin. I need redsuits and medical teams to midships Hab. External hull-breech at the top of the forward tube. Medical teams are advised to expect major casualties."

There would be burns, Ram thought, and anyone actually touching a bulkhead up there when the shock wave passed through might have got spammed if the vibrations transferred to the fluids in their bodies. That kind of energy could burst a man. And those were crew quarters up there – men and women in their racks resting before their next watch. If the same plasma that burned and blasted a crewman in front of him had flooded those compartments, then they might all be as dead as she was.

In the first days of the battle,
Hardway
had been able to stop the endless salvos. But they were getting through now. Where the carrier hid herself behind the gas giant, the Squidies couldn't blow her from the sky with the blockade gun. The alien gunboat cruisers sent to destroy them had been bested. But the ceaseless salvos of flying bombs that came round the planet were wearing
Hardway
's crew to the point where they were beginning to fall apart. 

Ram Devlin looked down the tube for the crewman and the damage control team that had helped pitch him up the tube from the spine, but they were gone.

Hardway
's XO pushed off up the charred tube and into the dark. There had to be survivors up there. Below him, everyone who'd been in the midships mess was now suited up again and coming out the hatches. When Burke saw Ram up the tube and saw the burned and rent bulkheads, the first thing he said was: "How the hell you keep from getting cooked, Mr. Devlin?"  

"Shut up, Burke," Salinas said. "The XO wasn't
in
the tube when it hit." 

"This is Commander Devlin. I called for medical teams to midships Hab. Where the hell are you?" Already, he was high enough up the tube to see through some of the rent bulkheads and into the compartments where dozens of blackened rag-dolls drifted, bent and broken backwards. It was worse than he thought it would be.

"We can do it faster ourselves, Ram." That was Asa Biko's voice and the blinking icon in Ram's visor told him that he'd heard it on local comms, the local suit channel. That meant Biko was close. Ram looked down through his feet, and saw him outside the mess hatch on the ledge before the tube, floating close to one of
Hardway's
pilots, Delilah Pardue.  

 Biko launched out into the tube. In flight, he turned and pointed at crewmen on the ledge. "You. You. And you. And you three. You're with me and Mr. Devlin. We're going up tube to identify the living and get them to Medical. We can get half of them to Doc Ibora before the stretcher teams or the Staas Guards on paramedic duty even get here. Move!" Biko pushed off and up the charred and smoking tube towards Ram, and they followed him.

*****

Harry Cozen had given Asa Biko a Privateer commission and the rank of Lt. Commander. He assigned Biko to command the Hardway Air Group partly because the man had been
Hardway's
Teamster union rep. For years, Biko had pushed back against the company to protect the interests of the men and women on
Hardway
. They trusted him. If anyone was watching out for their well-being, it was him. Even
Hardway's
new, non-union personnel liked him. When they were on liberty, Biko still drank in the enlisted bars after he left the officers' clubs.  

Ram envied him for being liked. Ram had always been management and nobody ever liked him for it. Ram was sure Biko knew that he envied him because once, at the back end of a bottle, he told Ram how the enlisted crew talked smack about the company officers plenty, but he'd heard more than a few of them say Ram was, 'one of the good ones'. Ram smiled. It felt good for a few seconds anyway. Then, Biko knocked back a shot and told him about how his 92-year-old white-power grandma used to use the same damn phrase when she talked about her Nigerian doctor.

Chapter Five

Asa Biko called out the new contacts. "Multiple bogies coming around the limb of the gas giant. Bearing 148 by 035, 52,000 Ks out and closing fast."