War of Alien Aggression 2 Kamikaze (9 page)

Biko actually tried to sell it to him. "You're planning on ramming the blockade gun with
Hardway
. We'll be launching the junks right after we pass the gas giant, right? They'll have all the speed that they got from the carrier – way more than than their inertial negation systems are designed to handle if they need to maneuver. Even if
Hardway
impacts on target, destroying the blockade gun and the entire airbase they carved out of that rock, then the junks and lifeboats carrying all of
Hardway
's crew and the stolen enemy fighter will still have to run a whole gauntlet of red bandits. Sure, we'll be going too fast for them to follow easily, but they'll still get one good shot as we pass and evasive maneuvers will be difficult at best. We'll all be sitting ducks. But. With a stripped-down junk configured with a crude version of the alien pulse-pinch and the element of surprise, I can take out those red bandits before they even figure out what's happening. After
Hardway
impacts the rock and the blockade gun is destroyed, then the junks can decelerate safely and wait for the UN task force to arrive. Mission accomplished. One casualty in the last engagement. It's a good deal." 

Harry Cozen grinned at Biko and then at Ram. "Our Mr. Biko's got quite a mind for tactics."

"Yes, he does. He'd make a fine Air Group Commander, but..."

Biko looked as if he knew they were setting him up and he resented it. Cozen said, "Mr. Devlin, remind me why Biko is no longer Hardway's AGC."

"Mr. Biko failed to see the necessity of ordering our squadrons to close range on approaching enemy warheads because they were guarded by alien fighters. The junks would have taken very heavy casualties, but giving that order might have prevented three direct hits to
Hardway
and saved 146 lives." 

"I've already acknowledged that," Biko said. "I didn't give the order because I didn't think of it and I didn't think of it because I'm not the man you want for the bloody job."

"I don't believe him, Mr. Devlin."

"No, Mr. Cozen. Neither do I." Ram said it to Biko straight out. "You didn't make a junk into a suicide fighter because you were planning to fly it yourself. That's just how it looks from where you're sitting. From where we are it looks different."

Harry Cozen sighed. "The advantage you've given us can be leveraged to do more than protect the junks and ensure the survival of this ship's crew. The only reason you can't see what you've enabled is because you don't
like
it. You've put it squarely in your blind spot just like when you claimed that ordering the junks to close range didn't occur to you. You saw it. You knew what had to be done. You just didn't like it." 

Biko's eyes narrowed like it was suddenly too bright in there and he didn't like it.

"Mr. Devlin," Cozen said. "What is a
better
plan to leverage the tactical advantage that Mr. Biko's initiative has given us?" 

Ram told Biko what he already knew. "Instead of making only one of Biko's death machines, we make six of them. If
Hardway
gets them up to speed, makes the attack run with them, and directs the bulk of her batteries' fire to help disrupt the defenses, then six of Biko's suicide fighters
should
be able to evade the blockade gun's particle stream, destroy the intercepting red bandits on the way, and fly right down the barrel of the aliens' weapon." 

"You're talking about kamikazes!" Biko's face contorted. "That's not why I made that thing."

Cozen said, "We respectfully disagree, Mr. Biko. You're capable of thinking a couple of steps ahead. You knew that's what I'd want to do with the advantage you've given us."

Biko looked at Ram. "You're the AGC now, Ram. Are you going to give that order that puts six of my pilots on a guaranteed one-way trip?"

"No, I'm not. You are."

Cozen didn't give him another chance to protest, "Mr. Biko, you're going to supervise the modification of five more junks. I want each one configured with your best, alien-inspired, pulse-pinch mod just like the first one. As the redsuits are making it happen, you're going to select the six pilots and you're going to order them on this mission."

"Five," Biko said, still trying to bargain like any of this was negotiable. "Five pilots. I'm going to fly one of the junks."

"Six," Cozen said. "Six pilots. You can't go. You're the AGC. The fact that you've done what you did today proves to me that you're actually ready for the job. Get over the fact that you don't want it."

Asa Biko didn't look convinced.

When Harry Cozen had wanted Ram to become a person he'd never wanted to be, Cozen had pointed out how sometimes dark deeds need to be done. Cozen had told Ram how Ram was a good man and that good men never want to do those things, but good men always end up doing them. It made Ram sick to his stomach to look Asa Biko in the eye and say to a person he called his friend words that sounded so much like Harry Cozen's. "I know you don't want the job, Asa. But you're going to take it because having you as Air Group Commander gives these men and women a better chance of survival. You're going to take the job and you're going to keep it until you're killed, fired, or promoted. This is what you'll do if you
really
put the lives of this crew above your own." 

"Officers send people to die," Biko said. "Like management, but more dangerous."

Ram said, "We make the calls even when there isn't a good one to make. You remember what you told me once when I wanted out of all this? You told me if good people stay out of the dirty fights then a lot more people die."

Biko laughed without humor because he remembered the context and
exactly
what they were talking about when he'd said that to Ram. "Keep the AGC job, Ram. You'll be better at it than I was." To Cozen, Biko said, "Demote me. I don't want to be a Lt. Commander or a bridge officer or anything but a pilot again."  

*****

Seven hours after the carrier put out from the gas giant on her tour of the outer system, they began the turning maneuver.
Hardway's
five, massive Staas Company Novalifter engines had already got the battered carrier up to 16,000 K/s. She could have got going even faster by that point, but then the gees would have been worse once she began the turn. They did it as gently as they could, over a curve roughly 20 million Ks wide, but even with
Hardway's
inertial negation system working overtime, the crew would still have to suck up prolonged gees. 

Most of the carrier's personnel had been out in the black, living in a standard .3 artificial gees for long time. Ram hadn't been down to Earth in six years. After that much low-gee/no-gee living, even half an earth gravity didn't feel great. After Dana fed
Hardway's
NAV the simple maneuvering script she'd written (just in case they lost consciousness) the gees increased to one full earth gravity. It would have been a sustained thirty-five gees without the inertial negation system. As it was, it peaked at a sustained force of just less than 2.6 Earth gravities. Doesn't sound like much, but there's a big difference between taking fifteen gees for a couple of seconds and hours and hours of sustained force bearing down on the body.  

The crewmen that still had bunks were all laid-out in their racks when the invisible, two-ton beast came and sat on their chests. The bridge officers on Ram's watch toughed it out pressed flat on the deck as the force increased. Breathing got hard right off the bat and soon, Ram was only able to inflate his lungs by such an infinitesimal fraction of a full breath that his consciousness was the only real evidence he had that he was still breathing at all.

In the old days, when there were no gene-tweaks and pills to keep human bones from growing brittle and inertial negation systems barely worked above a couple of gees, maneuvers like this one would have turned spacers to rag-dolls. That's what used to happen sometimes, a couple hundred years ago. Ram had seen pictures. The bodies looked boneless like Squidies.

*****

After the turn, Ram decided they could spare the reactor power so he kept the artificial gravity on. It speed up the work. The maintenance crews had already stripped off all the major modules from the junks being converted into Biko's death machines. All that remained now was for Chief Horcheese's redsuits to finish modding the inertial negation systems to run in deadly pulses.

Turning on the artificial gravity wasn't just to help the crew. Ram had to do Biko's job now and assign pilots to this mission. He wanted them to have the dignity of standing on two feet as it happened.

Nobody had told the pilots what the modifications to the six junks were for, but it was obvious. Redsuit scuttlebutt had gotten 'round about the pulse pinch and once they went to work on the junks inertial negation systems, everyone put two and two together.

Ram scheduled the mission briefing about three hours before they'd engage the Squidies. On the way, he passed a squad of redsuits in the spine talking about how the junk pilots would get to be real rocket jockeys now – real fighter pilots– zoomies. The fact that their careers as fighter pilots would last less than five minutes didn't seem to take a bit of the shine off the idea, not for the maintenance crew. They almost sounded like they wished they could volunteer.

For the briefing in bay 23, under Biko's fighter-junk, he only summoned the pilots he'd picked. He chose the 223rd, the squadron put together from the orphaned junks of flights depleted beyond combat effectiveness. Sojic, Dolan, and Campbell. Zucker, Mohan, and Lu. They weren't the best and they weren't the worst. They were capable of flying well enough to complete the mission, but there was nothing about them
Hardway
couldn't afford to lose. Ram told them they were the best because it was the least he could do. From their faces, he thought maybe they knew it wasn't true. 

They'd all seen enough of their friends killed in combat to know it could happen to them at any time. The Kamikazes had flown missions like this, but for
these
pilots, being ordered to certain death was a sentence. They needed to believe they had a chance, Ram thought. Or maybe he just couldn't take the way they'd look at him as he closed the lids on their coffins. He made a last-minute change to the plan.  

He'd done the calculations and decided they could add the mass of one warspite torpedo warhead to each of the fighter junks without impairing their ability to perform the extreme exo-atmospheric combat maneuvers required for this mission.

Ram told the 223rd they would hurl the warspites down the blockade gun's throat like dive bombers and they'd have a decent chance to pull their junks away at the last moment. It wasn't a lie. It was possible to do that. But their brain tissue would still be scrambled from the jury-rigged pulse-pinch. 

The pilots nodded the whole time he spoke and Ram was distracted because he couldn't figure out if they were nodding in agreement as if they believed surviving this mission was a real possibility or if they were nodding for an entirely different reason. Perhaps they nodded because being ordered on a suicide mission in a craft guaranteed to kill them in under five minutes was consistent with their expectations.

Whether or not the six pilots standing in bay 23, under the stripped-down, fish-bone frame of Biko's death machine actually believed there was a chance in hell they were coming back, they acted like they did. He didn't think they did that for his sake, but he was still grateful.

Chapter Eleven

As acting Air Group Commander, Ram manned the bridge's Air Traffic Controller's console, where Biko should have been. Biko wanted to fly with
Hardway's
junks, so Ram let him. Harry Cozen didn't say anything about his absence. 

"Now hear this." From the command chair, Harry Cozen put his voice in every helmet. "We are closing on the gas giant and the Squidies' blockade gun, 1.2 million Ks beyond it, at a speed of just under 21,000 K/s. All gunnery crews stand by for immediate fire missions on your designated targets.
Hardway
, what we do in the next two minutes and how well we do it will determine the fate of the UN task force. Plenty of good men and women have died already to get us to this moment. Make them proud,
Hardway
. Make sure they didn't die in vain. That is all." 

"
Hardway
AT to the 223rd Fighter Squadron... bay doors open, scramble, scramble, scramble. Good hunting, Sojic." 

"Thank you,
Hardway
." 

Biko's death machines rose out of the topside bays like a school of half-skeletal sharks. Together, they plummeted with the carrier towards the blockade gun at 21,000 K/s, but from the bridge it looked as if the 223rd flew slowly up into an echelon formation outside the windows. Ram could just make out Sojic inside the unarmored cockpit module of stripped-down
Trifecta.
There wasn't much else to that junk now besides its tensegrity frame, an unshielded reactor, her bare, caseless nacelles and the pulse-pinch.  

Sojic's voice spoke on the squadron channel. "Alright 223rd, flip the switch. Engage the pulse-pinch." Their comms went dead quiet except for a hum that made Ram's skin crawl. "Sojic to
Hardway
, this thing...it...it feels bizarre...like I'm shaking inside. Everywhere...ants under the skin. It's gonna take a long time to get used to this." That was a joke. 

"Roger that, Sojic. Can you fly?"

"Let's find out." With the rest of the flight behind her, she gave the bridge a thumbs up and said, "223rd, let's take these birds for a test drive on my bingo in 3...2...1...bingo." One by one, they quarter-rolled and then peeled off to starboard in ten gee wing-overs before they rocketed ahead of the carrier, diving at the blockade gun at phenomenal speed. From their positions in their dizzying forward spiral, they all broke outwards in sustained cutbacks that would have caused immediate blackout and then death for the pilot if they'd been flying any other craft. It was utterly amazing to see a 50-meter junk maneuver like that, even if half of it had been stripped off. Sojic's voice had some static to it now. "
Hardway
, tell Biko I'm in love with his new pulse-pinch and I'm not giving it back. None of us are."