War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway

by A. D. Bloom

  "All junks hold formation," he said. "Low Card, take up the space between Bandito and Showgirl."

  "Lt. Commander Sellis, keep closing range and bearing on the enemy. Make that alien ship keep turning if it doesn't want to get rammed."

  Two more junks flared up bright as particle beams ran them through. Gongxi got speared in the cockpit and fell tumbling before a second beam found her reactor. The alien decided to concentrate all its fire on the junks now instead of Hardway. The particle streams slashed two more. They spun off into the black, venting, out of control. Biko scrambled to get the holes in their formation tightened-up as the junks closed the last bloody kilometers to their target.

  "The alien ship is holding its turn to avoid collision with Hardway. I think we'll get a shot!"

  "Hardway AT to all junks: Follow Bandito's lead. Hand-off, hand-off, you have the trigger, Bandito. Bandito has the trigger."

  "Roger, AT," Garreau said, "Bandito has the trigger."

  The Squidies' warship kept turning out of Hardway's path and that limited the number of directions it could go from there. Now was the chance to trap it. It was probably the only chance the junks were going to get and it took every bit of restraint Ram had not to scream that into comms.

  Hardway's junks all followed Bandito into the hard, 270 degree turn. On comms, you could hear them grunting to suck up all the gees their junks' inertial negation systems couldn't compensate for, but when they came out of that turn, the ad hoc bomber formation was less than 5Ks from the Squidies and set on a collision course.

  The Squidies' particle streams drew last vengeful lines through the junks' formation and ripped two more of them apart, but it wasn't enough to stop them. As the flaming debris fell behind, the rest of them rocketed towards the alien hull, full of fury and spite. Garreau in Bandito waited so long to give the command, it looked like he wanted to ram the alien. "Now! Now! NOW! Bombs away! Now! Now! Now!"

  Ten junks released their payloads into the alien's path and veered away in all directions. Their mines shot together through space at the alien ship's bow, and it couldn't elude them no matter how it maneuvered.

  The first mine to detonate blew close off the port side of the Squidies' hull, next to one of the ship's towers. There was no significant shock-wave, but the nuclear mining explosives made a tremendous amount of fast-moving plasma and gas out of half the rocks they'd been packed with. That's what drove the remaining belt iron ore slamming into the Squidies' hull at hyper-velocity speeds. Everywhere the high-density ore impacted it hammered the alien hull. Gas vented in places. The invader flew like there was no hand at the helm. Then, the other nine mines detonated.

  They blossomed bright and brief and brilliant all around the warship's hull. They beat the Squidies with hyper-velocity impacts up and down. Not a meter of that ship escaped the pounding and the entire hull glowed mottled and half-molten. Instantly, the streams disappeared from its guns and the plasma sputtered from its engines and then ceased completely. The alien drifted.

  On comms: silence. Then, wild cheering screams from all junks and all decks and every voice on Hardway. Discipline went to hell, and they all whooped victory on the squack at once. The bridge almost drowned them out with their own noise as it turned into a hooting and hollering mob. With the yelling on all channels Ram almost didn't hear Cozen's voice.

  "Commander Devlin," he said, "Acting Captain Devlin. Open the barn door."

  "It's Harry Cozen," Bergano said. "And Mohegan."

  "Open bay 1." Mohegan came in from starboard and aft, from 4 o'clock high. Cozen had finally caught up with them from where they'd left him perched over Jupiter's pole. He brought the junk in front of the tower where he turned the four nacelles and hit the jets and came to a stop fifty yards in front of the bridge. Ram could see him in the cockpit. He said, "Mr. Devlin, if you're done cheering, then meet Mohegan in bay 2 with three plasma cutters, six miners, and one other bridge officer. Bring 10 armed crew. That alien ship isn't dead. You've got to go and finish it off."

  "Biko," Ram said.

  "You don't need me just to fly a junk. I'm staying here to coordinate Search and Rescue. We might be able to save some of those pilots from the junks that got hit."

  He was right. Ram knew he wasn't much of a pilot, but he could fly that far himself.

  "I'm going, too," Dana said as she made for the sealed tube hatch.

  "Lt. Commander Sellis, I want you to coordinate Hardway's part of the SAR operation with Biko." Calling her 'Lt. Commander Sellis' instead of Dana didn't make her glare at him any less.

  "Mr. Bergano," Ram said. "You're with me."

  Ram looked for bodies the whole way to bay 2. All the figures he saw were moving, but before Bergano and Ram got ten meters down the spine, the medical crew and casualties began to come in from the tubes on the spine's starboard side. At first, they all looked like fractures. There weren't that many injured so far, all redsuits. After them came the bodies. Ram didn't stay to count them as they passed, but there were dozens and dozens of dead. Too many. Some looked bashed and burned, too. One of the bodies was bent in all the wrong places like the person inside the suit was boneless now like a Squidy.

  Hollis met Ram at the airlock along with at least seventy miners. They all wanted to go because they knew it was their pilots in their junks that had gotten hit and they wanted to be the ones to go on what they'd assumed was a boarding party to finish off the enemy crew and take the ship like on Moriah.

  Mohegan had landed in bay 2, but Cozen was nowhere in sight. Once he cycled through Mohegan's own airlocks, Ram went up the tube to the cockpit before anyone else. Cozen was still in the chair, and Ram sealed the hatch so nobody could get in. He established a private line-of-sight comms channel with just the two of them on it.

  Cozen said, "Next time, Mr. Devlin, I expect you'll know that battle plans rarely hold together once the enemy is engaged." Ram thought Cozen was trying to tell him that he knew this would happen. Taking Mohegan out might have been a risk for him, but he was sure that Ram's plan would fall apart and nobody would ever ask him to blow himself up in that junk. "I knew you'd find another way. And on a more personal note, now that you've done what your burdensome and tedious conscience required and have attempted to punish me for my crimes, I'm hoping, Mr. Devlin, that we can call a truce between us and get on with the business of winning this war. You need me. This ship needs me. This bloody war needs me." He added, "More than it needs you, Ram Devlin."

  Bergano pounded on the hatch.

  Cozen said, "We can settle this little debt of justice on which you've fixated when the war with the Squidies is won, agreed?"

  Ram's mouth wouldn't open.

  "Agreed?"

  He nodded.

  "That's good, Mr. Devlin. That's smart." He killed the comms channel, got up, and pushed past Ram to spin the hatch and let Bergano in.

  "Why the hell did you lock the hatch?" he said. "And why were you off comms?"

  "Mr. Bergano!" Cozen said. "Nice to see that alien particle stream didn't sweep you off the bridge like a fire hose."

  "I'm happy to see you're still with us too, Mr. Cozen."

  Ram said, "There's significant casualties on Hardway. Biko and Dana are coordinating the search and rescue operation with the remaining junks. We lost a lot of people."

  "I'm sure Hardway's AGC will fill me in. Good luck and good hunting," Cozen said, and with that, he was gone down the tube to the personnel module and the junk's airlock.

  "I'm driving," Ram told Bergano.

  "Let me," Bergano said. "You know I'm a better pilot." Once Cozen was clear, he fired the maneuvering nacelles gently and got them up and out of the bay. The damage to the carrier looked bad from the bridge, but it was worse close up.

  "Hardway took it like a champ," Bergano said. She was torn, gashed down one side of her ore containers in a ragged wound that went on for 300 yards. Inside its jagged edges, where the metal had bloomed outwards, the containers and their contents had been
melted and fused together. "That gash is at least twenty meters deep."

  Dana had put Hardway on a course to parallel the alien ship's forward drift and when they got halfway down the top side of the carrier's truly mangled bow, the disabled alien ship sat less than three Ks off, low at 2 o'clock.

  Bergano said, "You think those things are still alive in there?"

  "Some. Yeah. Just can't get away from us."

  Biko's voice came over comms without a lick of calm in it. "Hardway AT to Mohegan! Abort! Abort! Get the hell away from that thing! RTB now, now, now! We're showing an energy buildup in that alien ship. It could be an intentional overload – some kind of self-destruct mechani-"

  His voice was lost in a wave of deafening static and all Ram saw was blackness because the visor of his exosuit helmet went opaque to prevent him from being blinded. When the detonation's flash dimmed enough that his helmet let him see again, the alien vessel wasn't much more than a cloud of hot gas and a few pieces of rent hull spinning away into space.

  "They never tried to save a single crewman. No lifeboats. No pods. Nothing," Bergano said as he stared at the receding debris. "They don't value life, Ram...not like we do."

  Chapter Twelve

  It had only been hours, but the word had spread to every soul on Earth. Alien life exists and it hates us. Before the Moriah survivors even returned to Hardway, it had become an established matter of record, a piece of written history, that Humanity had been attacked without cause.

  There were still those on Earth who pleaded that we must not meet the aliens with the same malevolence, that we must turn the other cheek and attempt to communicate. The Secretary General of the United Nations insisted that communication had already taken place. She said, "The aliens' acts of violence are a communication in the only common language we share: the language of actions. No matter how much our species desires peace, if war is the way of the stars, then we will show the heavens how we excel."

  Ram nearly vomited when he heard her say the very same words Mickey had spoken – the very same words Harry Cozen had spoken – the very same phrase. War is the way of the stars. Hearing it from the Secretary General confirmed for Ram that whatever Mickey had been mixed up in involved more conspirators than her and Harry Cozen.

  There would be no attempt to negotiate peace.

  *****

  The two biggest capital ships of the underdeveloped UN fleet met the alien aggressor near Mars, just outside the orbit of Deimos. Humanity watched from the view of satellites and radar telescopes and camera drones. They all had front row seats.

  UNS Hannibal and Khan each carried five, massive railguns capable of accelerating a tungsten and osmium alloy sabot down its magnetic barrels and spitting it at the enemy at up to 69% the speed of light. The inertial gees, some 80,000 times more powerful than standard Earth gravity, compressed the tiny sabot during launch to a density rivaled by neutron stars. Between their railguns, the twin battleships each sported secondary batteries of fast-tracking pulse lasers to protect them from smaller threats. These were the ships that crushed the South American fleet and won the single war Humanity had fought with itself in space some twenty years ago.

  The approaching alien dreadnought dwarfed Hannibal and Khan. The fat, forward edge of its vertical hull was 200 meters in berth. It was nearly eight-hundred meters down its longest line. Unlike the other Squidy ships they'd seen, on this one, the guns that bristled off it looked recessed into the tops of low, stubby towers, effectively protected against surface dets on the hull around them. Dozens of ports up and down its leading edge opened as its alien engines fountained a half-kilometer-wide river of rosy plasma behind it.

  The millimeter radar microsats painted detailed pictures, but they couldn't show the thin layer of white lead on the starboard side. Once the alien came closer to the Staas Shipyards at Deimos, the telescopes and optical arrays showed images shot in visible light. What they saw painted on that ship was a human skull, 500 meters across. The aliens came to war wearing the image of a dead human on the side of their ship. It was crude with broken lines as if queer, all-finger, alien hands had painted it on. It was a rough cartoon, hastily applied, but it was unmistakable.

  The first shots of that battle were fired from the battleship Khan. She launched her first salvo of warspite torpedoes out her three dozen tubes and Hannibal launched three dozen more. Pale, blue plasma tails from torpedo engines streaked away from the UN capital ships, and in moments, the alien dreadnought fired its own cloud of warheads out of the great, gaping ports on its bow edge.

  Hannibal and Khan loosed their Dingoes for protection. 60 of the QF-111 drones peeled away from the bays of the two UN ships and charged for the incoming alien warheads, digging in as hard as they could to get inside effective gun-range where the flying bombs couldn't dodge their shells.

  The warspite torpedoes and the alien warheads corkscrewed and evaded each other as they passed and then barreled on towards their targets.

  As the swarm of warheads came for the UN ships, the Dingoes chased them down, firing until the space in front of Hannibal and Khan was stitched solid with 140mm shells and the brief and flaring blossoms where alien bombs cooked off.

  The dreadnought let the warspite torpedoes come. They detonated amidships on both sides of the gargantuan and seconds later, while the plasma blooms were still fading from its entirely unbreached hull, the alien fired all of its tower guns on Hannibal. The ghostly rays from the alien particle beams stabbed out and lanced, firing in long, bright, three-second searchlight streams. Fifty particle beams bored into Hannibal's armor. The streams of atomic nuclei impacted and ripped the gaping wounds they made open so wide that Hannibal looked like she'd been raked up and down her teardrop hull by 300-meter bear claws. She bled atmo and ice and debris and crewmen out her clearly mortal wounds.

  Khan fired a salvo from her railguns. Five sabot impacted the dreadnought with tight grouping, and a whole section of alien hull splashed sparks and glowed like it had turned molten for a moment, but no gasses vented from its wound.

  Hannibal never recovered from the dreadnought's alpha-strike. The Dingo fighter drones did what they could to protect her, but when the alien warheads they couldn't catch reached her, none of Hannibal's defensive lasers had power. Her defensive cannon were somehow still on-line and they spat a curtain of burning flak that connected with five of the alien warheads, but seven hit Hannibal's bow and midships. Her armor vaped away in the first few flashes. When they could see her again, there was only a mangled and melted frame past Hannibal's midsection. The rest of her was bent and twisted with shock – broken and venting from all sides, all decks.

  Hannibal's broken hull pitched forward and tumbled slowly as Khan's defensive batteries fired a furious hail. Only 3 of the alien warheads made it past and detonated against her flanks. They struck her near the engines. Khan lurched and shuddered, and her main engines went out. With only maneuvering thrusters to move her, the battleship tried to hide behind its burning twin.

  Khan put what was left of Hannibal between her and the alien dreadnought's particle streams and on the way, she let loose another grouped volley from her railguns. The sabot all landed together within meters. It was commendable marksmanship from the gun crews and they'd all get post-humus medals, but even their concentrated fire didn't punch through that hull.

  The dreadnought paused then. It let Khan take one more shot at it, one more volley with railguns and warspite torpedoes and everything she had just to show how it could shrug off Khan's worst. Then, wearing the blooming spots of molten metal from the impotent attack like flowers on its lapel, the dreadnought speared the battleship two-dozen times and left her drifting, tumbling, and venting gas out the holes it drilled through her.

  The QF-111 Dingoes turned their autocannon on the alien dreadnought, gnats against an armored mountain. They flew straight at it and strafed it. Squidy snuffed them out ten at a time with small-bore streams that cut the Dingoes up, and they cooked off quick or
impacted on the impenetrable hull in pieces.

  Hannibal bled molten metal out all her wounds. Her reactors melted down slow and there were no survivors in that hell, but Khan died differently. The beams ran her through instead of ripping her. There would be survivors.

  Ram could only imagine the terror of looking out the porthole of disabled Khan as the Squidies' dreadnought approached slowly and matched the course and speed of the ship's helpless, spinning drift. He sometimes had nightmares after that of looking out at the stars and seeing that 500-meter skull, pock-marked with blast craters, sailing towards his own ship as Hardway drifted helpless, dead in the dark. He'd dream that the Squidies' dreadnought would hold position and sail alongside them and then, as men and women screamed over the din, it would cut them up with the particle beams, slicing ragged edged wounds across wounds until every compartment was breached and laid bare and open to the cold of space – until bodies and halves of bodies floated free in the black. That's what it did to UNS Khan.

  Chapter Thirteen

  As the alien Dreadnought savaged the Staas Company shipyards, Hardway could have made a break for it, but from the way Cozen sat high in the captain's chair and peered into the AT controller's tactical projection, Ram knew they weren't going home yet.

  Nobody held out any hope for Hannibal's crew, but Khan hadn't died the same way. Biko was the first to say it. "There's survivors from Khan. I know there are. We've still got thirteen junks to use for search and rescue operations."

  "Khan's debris cloud hasn't drifted that far," Dana said. "It's still pretty close to the site of the battle and that's practically within effective weapons range. That alien battleship could almost hit us without leaving orbit."

  "I'm feeling lucky," Cozen said. "What about you, Mr. Devlin?"

  "I'm feeling very lucky, Mr. Cozen. But I think we should make this fast."

  Hardway turned to run parallel to Khan's debris cloud and seeing it out the window of Hardway's bridge was downright chilling. A ship is a body, a vessel, a thing that holds life. Khan's debris field was a display of that body dismembered, that life negated by slicing and dicing until mince was all that was left.