by A. D. Bloom
It was half-a-meter long and hollow, shaped like a thick-walled section of pipe with one end wide open. The other end had a narrow opening and what looked like a barrel lined with rings. That was the business end. It looked like a smaller version of the weapon mounted on the alien battle suits - the weapon that burned up D'Ambrosse and Oboto.
There was just enough room inside it for Ram to insert his forearm. He made sure it was pointed at the internal bulkhead and carefully put his gloved hand inside. On a human it came up to the elbow. "My fingers don't really fit right but there's a thing inside to grab in here about halfway up. Feels like a curvy bar with three bumps on it..." The weapon soundlessly bucked as it discharged, and a wide, oval section of the bulkhead shot sparks and flared bright.
The metal was only pitted and smoking. "Doesn't do much to metal," Ram said.
"We know what it does to flesh," Biko said. "Looked like it had recoil. Probably uses an explosive cartridge and a mini-pinch of some kind to generate the energy for the beam. Be careful with that thing, Ram."
Mickey reminded them that they'd only found four aliens on the upper decks and there were five alien exosuits missing. She said it might be outside, but the last one was probably behind that sphincter hatch they were cutting in the main compartment and everyone should get down there.
In the main compartment where they'd breached the hull and entered Cozen stood out in the middle of the deck, bathing in the alien ship's dim red lighting. Tse's plasma cutter flashed pale over him from one side. Cozen waved Ram over. When he got where Cozen was, he saw Tse cutting out the hatch. The full-size plasma cutter they'd brought was almost a half-meter long, like a thin trashcan. It was big and clumsy, but the fifty-centimeter blade could burn through just about anything. Tse had it up on his shoulder now, cutting out the last quarter of the oversized alien hatch.
Ram suddenly saw how many consoles there were in that compartment, all covered in a faintly luminescent red markings. "We're standing in whatever their version of a bridge or command deck is, I think." Ram said, "I haven’t seen anything even vaguely like a reactor or power plant yet. Dana said she saw a signature like a reactor."
"I'm betting it's behind that hatch," Cozen said. He smiled thinly. "Their technology appears to be more advanced, doesn't it, Mr. Devlin." Ram nodded. From the way Harry Cozen said the next words, Ram knew they were meant for the whole boarding party to hear. "They're more advanced than we are... better technology... interstellar capabilities... but their hulls still break and their bodies bleed. They die just like we do."
"This isn't a warship, Mr. Cozen. I didn't see anything that looked like a gun on the outside of the hull and we've only found one sidearm inside. Those three battle suits are almost the only weapons we've seen." He saw Cozen's eyes flick down to the alien maser in his hands. Then, Ram saw movement behind him in the reflections off Cozen's helmet - movement to the right of the tube, on the other side of the compartment. He knew what it was. Ram spun to face it.
It must have come out of some kind of service panel in one of the consoles. They'd never looked in there. They thought it was too small a space to hold one of the 3.5m-tall bodies, but a half-meter high door in the console hung open and in front of it, a boneless, alien thing silently unfolded and uncoiled itself in less than a second.
Dana and Mickey and Hollis were around the corner of the bulkhead with Biko, where Tse was cutting the hatch. It was just Cozen and Ram standing there in front of the alien. They were the only ones it saw.
Ram held the captured alien maser and he knew how to fire it. It's not that he didn't want to kill the alien thing in front of him. He did. Just out of fear he wanted to kill it, but for a quarter second he hesitated. He didn't know why, but he knew because of that, he started moving too late.
Even Ram knew he'd never fire in time. That thing would fire first and kill him. Ram could see it as clearly as he'd ever seen anything in his life and now that his life appeared to be over, the weirdest part was that he was alright with it. Even Ram thought it was crazy. Watching the alien move faster than him in that strange, slowed moment, it struck him that if he'd believed Cozen's lie that we'd been attacked first or if he'd really believed in this fight like Mickey did then he would have moved faster. And he wouldn't have been okay with dying. Righteousness, Ram thought in his last moment. Not having it can get you killed.
Only it wasn't Ram that got killed and it wasn't Harry Cozen either.
Mickey Wells came out around the curve in the bulkhead with the Honma & Voss hand cannon already raised. She drilled easy holes into the narrow chest of the Squidy's unarmored exosuit, and it vented liquid and gas and pale blue blood, but it still discharged its weapon.
Ram hadn't seen the beams from their masers before, but this time, the space between the Squidy and Mickey flared up with a bright cone of vaporizing residual gasses.
Mickey's head. Most of her torso. Her left arm. That's what the burning beam hit. Those are the parts of her Ram looked for and couldn't find because those parts of Mickey got burned away. All Ram could find was a Mickey-shaped shadow the alien maser burned in shallow relief on the bulkhead behind her.
Those impossible, spindle-thin, boneless limbs waved wild like a parody of a thing in pain. It had overloaded its weapon and now, a half-molten lump of metal was fused to the end of its garden hose arm. The gangle of limbs holding it off the deck collapsed.
Mickey was gone and that thing was still alive.
Ram put the alien weapon to the Squidy's face and discharged the maser point blank.
Chapter Eight
An hour after the crew of Gold Coast disabled the alien jamming and called in to Hardway, the carrier told them two unknown ships had appeared inside Saturn's orbit. One alien vessel headed for the inner system. They said it was massive, an alien dreadnought that dwarfed anything in the underdeveloped United Nations fleet. Two capital ships were already moving to intercept it near Deimos and the Staas Company's Martian shipyards.
They said the other alien vessel was smaller and much faster, roughly the size of a UNS destroyer. They said it was making for Moriah.
Decontamination was brief. There was no procedure in place, so before they boarded a longboat for Hardway, Doc Ibora made one up. The exosuits would stand 7500 degrees, so the Moriah survivors flash-bathed themselves and their dead at 3500 for half a second using zero-pressure exhaust from a mining junk's nacelles. Ram knew that cold plasma bath wasn't hot enough to be sure. He hoped the aliens' body chemistry was simply too different from humans' to pass diseases or bacterial infections between the two species.
On the flight up from the surface, the longboat pilots said Captain Horan was already preparing Hardway to run for cover. That's when Cozen whispered in Biko's ear and then, Biko slipped away to the reactor compartment. Ram saw him talking to someone in his helmet on a private channel.
Harry Cozen's ship, Arbitrage, arrived at Moriah with Hardway, of course. She kept station off the carrier's starboard side. When the longboat made a flyby coming into the launch bays, Ram saw every face on both ships glued to a porthole. They weren't watching the longboat and they weren't watching the knuckledragger crews that brought crippled Gold Coast back into the barn. Every eyeball was on the captured alien ship.
As Arbitrage's recovery vehicles and crewmen brought it up from Moriah and maneuvered it into her gaping salvage bay, all the miners and pilots and redsuit maintenance crews, all the engineers and cooks on Hardway crowded and pushed their noses against the transparent diamond-pane portholes to gawk at the first ship ever seen that hadn't been built by human hands. Every mind behind every pair of eyes on Hardway now apprehended for true how Humanity was not alone.
Ram wondered if the crewmen watching that alien ship saw the sections like exhaust ports on one edge of the 'wing' like he did. The engineers would have to be blind to miss the bulge on the side of the 'tower' section of the alien hull that looked as if it matched the geometry of a field coil for an inertial negation
system. It was smaller, no doubt more advanced and more efficient, but it was the same shape.
Maybe the eyeballs watching from Hardway saw other commonalities in design between the alien craft and ours. Maybe they were even imagining commonalities between us and the Squidies. But that would change. If that's what Hardway's crew were thinking about now, then it would change when they saw the bodies.
Cozen made sure Hardway's crew saw their dead just like he made sure they saw the alien ship. The longboat that picked up Gold Coast's crew docked in the most forward section of the launch bay module. That meant they had to carry the bodies aft, past all the hundreds waiting in the spine with thousands of questions about the alien ship and what had happened on this uncharted rock.
The carrier's gravity was off when they landed. That meant reactor problems. Ram hoped the issues weren't real and that this was what Cozen had spoken to Biko about on the ride up before the union leader slipped away and called someone on Hardway using a secure comms channel. He hoped that this was all Asa Biko's doing. It was probably Chief Terrazzi who'd made it happen. If Captain Horan wanted to run, then he was out of luck because this ship wasn't going anywhere unless the reactor engineers said so.
In zero-gee, the Moriah survivors floated the dead down the narrow tube to where the forward launch bays met the spine. The open people-movers in the spine still worked. They could have rode the dead aft in the cars, but they didn't use them. The returning company officers and the crew of Gold Coast did what spacers used to do before big carriers had any artificial gravity – they shot the spine. The survivors and their dead pushed off and flew down the kilometer-long passage, accelerated and guided by hundreds of pairs of hands.
Anyone not on-duty was there waiting. As the returning crew of Gold Coast floated down the center of the spine, aft towards the tower module, all the men and women hanging all along the struts reached out and touched the dead and the living, correcting their courses and propelling them past. Miners had always shot the spine fast, but now, they did it slow, like a funeral procession.
The faces of the crew changed when they touched the thick, black body-bag with Mickey in it. They made the bags thick so when people carried one it was harder to feel what was inside, but nobody could touch the bag with Mickey's body in it and not feel how much of her was missing.
The shock of seeing her ripped from this life forever by an alien hand had left Ram half-numb and it wasn't until they'd shot halfway down the spine to the command tower that he realized this was the first time he'd ever seen anyone in management shoot the spine. It just didn't happen. Shooting the spine was five times faster than any other way of getting around when the artificial gravity was out, but you couldn't do it without a lot of help and the miners and crews and pilots wouldn't reach out to push a company officer along. Shooting the spine wasn't for management. The miners and pilots and maintenance crews had always kept that for themselves. But today was different.
As they neared the command tower's forward tubes, Bergano's voice echoed up and down the spine over the squack. It came out of crude, audio transducers. "Now hear this. Now hear this: Secure all stations and prepare to make way. All hands, prepare to make way."
At the terminal under the command tower module, Cozen called up to the bridge and flat-out ordered Captain Horan to hold his position. "A Staas Company VP outranks a captain," Cozen told him.
"An unknown vessel is making for our position," Captain Horan said. "We're leaving as soon as we can. As you are well-aware, Mr. Cozen, whenever a Captain judges the safety of his ship to be in jeopardy, his word is the final word. We're leaving as soon as we're secured. That is all."
They said Cozen had fought in the War of the Americas and even captained ships himself. He nodded his head grimly like he'd expected to hear Horan's refusal to give up command.
"Chief Terrazzi won't let this ship move a meter until I say so," Biko said.
"Go down there," Cozen told him, "Make sure." Biko nodded. "Tse and Hollis," Cozen said, "take Oboto, Lapuis, and D'Ambrosse's bodies aft with the crew. Ms. Sellis, take Mickey Wells and go with them and see that appropriate storage is found for our dead. Make it cold. And big. They're likely to have some company before the day is out. I'm going to the bridge," he said. "Ms. Sellis, Mr. Biko, report there immediately when you're done with your assigned tasks. Mr. Devlin, you're with me."
Cozen crouched, marked his target with his eyes, and jumped. He got himself a good launch up the command tower's forward tube, but the angle was off. Halfway up the six-story tube to the bridge, his path intersected with the side and he reached out for the handholds and slowed himself to a stop. His hand came out to help decelerate Ram, and they hung between the decks. Cozen said, "Mr. Devlin, I assume you're familiar with Staas Company General Order 1633?"
Ram was. "1633 contains protocols for the emergency wartime militarization of the Staas Company commercial fleet. 1633 says we'll be converted to Staas military contractor vessels – a privateer fleet."
"If I'm right, SCGO-1633 has already gone out and Captain Horan has already received it. I'm taking command of SCS Hardway," Cozen said. "I'm going to captain her and you're going to function as my first officer. If you don't want the job, it doesn't matter. You don't have a choice. If you refuse the order, then under the provisions of SCGO-1633 I can shoot you." Cozen tucked his knees up so he could reach into the cargo pocket on the leg of his flight suit. He pulled out the Honma & Voss Itar wrapped in its holster – Mickey's gun. "Take your sidearm, Mr. Devlin. We're at war now."
After a second of pretending he didn't want to carry Mickey's gun, Ram realized it didn't matter what he wanted. He thought maybe Mickey had tried to tell him that. This is the most important thing I've ever done in my life. That's what she'd said.
"Strap it on," Cozen said. Ram did, but first, he checked the ring that controlled its rate of discharge. It was still set near maximum. He dialed it down to under two percent power - enough to put a small hole in a person, but not a bulkhead. Then, he put in on just like he'd seen Mickey wear it. "Very good, Mr. Devlin," Cozen said, and they pushed off for the bridge.
Bergano, Engle, and Xian manned the NAV, AT controller, and Ops consoles. For once, Captain Horan was actually in the command chair. The back of his beet red neck and scalp both sweat. "What?!" he shouted into comms. "You said it was fixed!"
"Well, we've got more of those reactor fluctuations, Captain Horan." It was Chief Terrazzi's voice on comms, coming from the engineering section. "Don't know what caused the spikes," she said, "but they triggered another safety override. Takes time to clear it. Unless..."
"Unless what?"
"Unless it spikes again. It's been spiking every single time you call down here, Captain Horan. Maybe it's tied to a malfunction in the internal comms system..." Horan slammed his fist down on the arm of the command chair hard enough that if he hadn't been strapped in, then he would have flown out of it. Captain Augustus Horan was many things, but he wasn't an idiot. He knew what was going on. Those same reactor power spikes always happened during contract negotiations.
"Having reactor problems, Captain Horan?" Cozen said it just to let him know he was already running Hardway.
"This idiocy is going to get us all killed," Horan said. "Show them, Mr. Engle."
Engle projected a grainy composite image over his console that had been shot from hundreds of millions of Ks out. It was blurry, but Ram could still make out the basic shape of the hull. It was like a thick, vertical wing, but swollen, like a fat, incisor tooth. "It's 800 meters. They're calling that one the Dreadnought. It dwarfs anything we've got. Here's the little, fast one that broke off to come after us. Show them a recent image, Engle, one from our own array." It was less blurry than the other image. This alien had the same shape as the scout ship from Moriah, but it was much larger and instead of one, it had two towers. "The one coming for us is only 200 meters," Horan said. "Something akin to one of the UNS destroyers or a light cruiser. Much faster than the othe
r." The image was clear enough for Ram to easily make out massive rings stacked on top of the towers. Horan saw him looking at them with concern. "That looks like magnetic vectoring to me... for a beam of some kind. That's a main gun," Horan said. "Don't know what kind, but I know a gun when I see one. That's a warship and it's coming this way. It's faster than we are, but if it doesn't speed up.... if we and Arbitrage go now, then we can steam a course that will put the approaching UN ships between us and the aliens before they can close the distance and intercept us."
Harry Cozen shook his head. "That's only if the alien doesn't speed up. It might. Arbitrage is faster than Hardway, but there's no guarantee she'll make it – not without help. The alien ship we brought back from Moriah is the only piece of their technology we have. It's more valuable than you or me or Hardway or any single asset in Humanity's collective possession. It's aboard Arbitrage and that makes Arbitrage the single most valuable ship in either the Staas Company or UN fleets. I'm taking command of SCS Hardway now, Captain Horan. Hardway will intercept the smaller alien warship and make sure Arbitrage has the time she needs to get home with her precious cargo."
Captain Horan snorted. "Like hell..."
"Did order 1633 come through the company net?" Cozen said it like he knew it had. "General Order 1633?"
"It came through. I never thought I'd see it, but 1633 came through over the company net less than an hour after those warships appeared in the middle of our system."
"Order 1633 officially makes this a Staas Company Private Military Vessel," Cozen said. "A privateer. And it makes me an Admiral. I'm taking command of Hardway."
Captain Horan said, "Until the day they fit this ship with armor and guns, we're a ship of war in name only. We have nothing to throw at them but rocks, Mr. Cozen. I'm not going to let some executive who thinks he's an admiral get this crew killed. Our orders under 1633 are to make for The Staas Yards at Deimos or Lunar Lagrange for refitting and armament. That's what we're going to do."