by A. D. Bloom
"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.
&nb
sp; "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."
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.