War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway (16 page)

It gave the tiniest bursts off suit nozzles and flew slowly with its boneless limbs waving. The alien flew towards Harry Cozen's tower, towards Harry Cozen's window.

Ram thought it must have seen him because it tried to bring a weapon to bear when he sacrificed his cover behind the strut to get a well-aimed shot. They were only fifteen meters apart, Ram on the side of the tower next to Cozen's, the alien drifting past on his way there. This time, Ram had the drop. This time, he didn't think about what he was doing. He put the front and rear sights of Mickey's gun over the Squidy's center body mass and cored smoking, fat holes right through it.

It twisted and crumpled as it vented gas and blue liquid. It did an impression of a pile of old hoses when it drifted into the window above Harry Cozen's and glomed onto the artificial gees. It stuck there. The man who came to the window to see what was outside was old and dark-skinned with wild, gray hair like the Aborigines that Ram used to see in Australia when he was at Staas Academy.

Ram was sure the man saw him as well. There was no question because before Ram jumped to another tower and ran like hell back across Sagan, the white-haired figure in the window behind the dead Squidy waved to him and then gave him two thumbs-up and a smile.

*****

Biko woke Ram by kicking the hatch. It didn't really work, but Ram only pretended to sleep. Once inside, Biko said, "We have to talk," and flopped in the chair while Ram threw up. When he came back, Biko was still there.

"What's so urgent?"

"Scuttlebutt going around is that the Squidies sent an assassin to Sagan and he almost got through. The only reason he didn't get to use the explosives he'd been carrying to blow out the side of a tower was that someone shot him – drilled him right through with something big." Biko said Staas Intelligence and UN Special Forces and Secret Service and even the Staas Guard Shore Patrol goons who'd been poking the alien body so far had no idea
who
carried the unusual weapon that had bored such obscenely large holes right through the alien assassin. "Only a Honma & Voss
Itar
makes a hole like that," he said. "Goddamn it, Ram, I want to know what you were doing out there." 

"Training?"

Biko shook his head. "I know what you were doing there. You never got a chance to do it. And I don't want you to try again. Not for now. Not until we win this war."

"I don't know wha-"

"Some kind of remote link," Biko said. "Some kind of Staas Company remote command protocol for the junks we don't know about. That's how he did it. I figured it out and I'm betting you did too. I'm betting you got drunk and went to serve up some justice and that's why you were there. You went there to kill him. For
Mohegan
. I understand. I want to do it, too. But Ram, I'm telling you, we need him. For now. Until this is over." 

"So what? We just let him stay in place? Let him do what he wants? How many more people are going to die because of him?"

"Lots of us are going to have to die to win this war. Maybe it'll be less with Cozen on our side."

"Ten, Biko. Ten men and women he killed."

"And he'll pay for that. But the only way to make sure the rest of our people come through this is if we keep him alive."

"We started it, Biko. What do we tell them to fight for? I mean... when we know we're not in the right – when we're
not
righteous and we goddamn know it?" 

"You fight to keep the person next to you alive. That's what you tell them to fight for. That's what we've all gotta do now because this war has already started. People are already dying. I know it feels dirty when you know the truth, but if good people stay out of the dirty fights, then a lot more people die, Ram. This war has already started. It can't be stopped. We're going to keep Cozen's secrets and we're going to fight Cozen's war with him. And when it's over, when we don't need monsters like him anymore, then you and I are going to kill him. Together."

*****

At the next day's senior officers' briefing, Ram was late because as he got off the lift and rounded the corner, he saw the man he'd seen in the window above Cozen's last night – the one that reminded him of an Aborigine. His suit looked expensive. He strolled into Cozen's office whistling a tune Ram had never heard. Ram waited two minutes to see if he'd leave, but was forced to follow him inside.

Inside, sitting on the couches, were the rest of
Hardway's
senior officers. The man Ram had seen last night sat on Cozen's desk. "Alright, Devlin," Cozen said, "You're the last one. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and shutter the glass." Ram tapped the surface of the diamond-pane to make the window opaque while Cozen set a number of small, unidentified devices on the bulkheads, deck, and ceiling of the compartment. He gave no explanation as to what they were, but one of them rippled the surface of Ram's coffee when he held his cup close to it, so he was betting they were multispectral white-noise generators or jammers maybe – a set of counter-surveillance devices.  

Cozen set a projection playing over the table showing the Squidies' dreadnought as it fired its colliding particle streams and breached space to open the passage to Procyon, 11.46 light years away. At the scale he projected it, the human skull painted on the alien ship's side was three times the size of Ram's head.

Harry Cozen gestured to the coarse-haired man sitting on his desk. "This is Dr. Noondie," he said. "Last night, an alien assassin, most likely some kind of alien special forces, attempted to take Dr. Noodie's life. One theory of how it penetrated so many layers of security is that it hitched a ride here with
Hardway
. It could have been left behind in
Khan's
debris field to attach itself to the hull of any ships that came for search and rescue operations. Given the way the Squidies sliced up
Khan
and left obvious survivors, that makes sense. Now, mind you, once it was here, it waited for a week, and after all that effort, Squidy Spec Ops could have gone for the Staas CEO or the Secretary General in the VIP towers on the other side of Sagan Station. All the juicy targets are here at once, but it didn't go for any of them. Not a one. Instead, it died trying to kill
this
man.
That's
how important he is. So when he speaks, I expect you to listen." 

Noondie inhaled, held it, and after a few seconds, he spoke. "I'm Banyan Noondie. Before they kicked me out of Adelaide University, they called me 'Crazy Mass-Hole Noondie' for my theories of hypermass distortions and dimensional tunneling. I've known the math of how to open an faster-than-light inter-spatial passage for thirty-seven years, but nobody wanted to listen to Crazy Mass-Hole Noondie. In the last week, though, they can't get enough of me."

The projection of the ET ship breaching space looped over and over. Dana said, "So? How did they do it? Can
we
do it?" 

"The simple answer is: yes. The actual mechanics are pretty simple," Noondie said, "The presence of mass/energy distorts space. The best known of these effects in three-dimensional space is gravity, but it has other effects in other dimensions and sub-dimensions. Imagine sub-dimensional space without any mass around as the mirror-smooth surface of a pond. Now to visualize the effect of hypermassive objects like stars, picture a thunderstorm splashing on the pond's surface. Freeze the image in your mind. Slow it all down, a million, billion times. The splashes and the ripples, those are the inter-dimensional effects of mass. Bigger mass, bigger splash, only this splash never goes away. As long as the mass is present, the 'splash', the sub-dimensional warp, is present. Where two of these splashes, these persistent distortions from adjacent stars meet, one can easily breach normal space and travel far faster than light to the next system. I estimate 7 minutes to Procyon." 

"But why don't we see these distortions all the time?"

"We do. Little ones are actually everywhere on a sub-atomic scale. The Squidies picked just the right spot and then threw energy at it equivalent to the mass required to make two nearby hyper-mass distortions intersect with our space. They opened a passage to a star light years away. They opened a transit – a mass-hole – what they're now calling a
Noondie
FTL Passage, thank you very much."

Cozen said, "It has taken 90% of the company's computing power, but we've decoded much of what we found in the alien scout ship captured on Moriah. There are numerical data sets containing coordinates at which the dreadnought left our system and coordinates at which it first entered. From that, we now understand we have captured a map...a map containing the locations of over a thousand such passages between adjoining star systems."

Biko said, "It's a trap, Mr. Cozen. They know we captured that map from their scout."

"What Biko's saying makes sense." Dana nodded. "If they know exactly where we'll pop out in the Procyon system, then they'll be waiting on the other side to massacre us."

"As they are undoubtedly waiting to do right now," Cozen said. "The UN Fleet is already preparing to imitate the aliens' protocol for opening the transit to Procyon so they can send the heavy cruiser
Dauntless
. The new UN Admirals won't listen to reason. They need to appear aggressive after Yantok's glorious 'strategic retreat'." 

"They'll get hammered," Biko said.

"Obviously, we need a way to appear where the Squidies don't expect us," Cozen said. "That's why it's so important that we have Dr. Noondie.
That's
why the Squidies want him dead." 

"Trap or not, from the alien map," Noondie said, "I've been able to refine my own predicative mathematics to identify potential locations for interstellar transits not on the Squidies' charts."

"But don't they know about them? The Squidies are sure to know more than we do."

Noondie said, "They know. Either they don't think
we
know about the smaller, less viable transits or they don't think we're willing to take the extra risk to use them. Either way," Noondie said, "I'm going to send
Hardway
to Procyon so you appear where the Squidies don't expect you." 

"That's right," Cozen said. "And once we're at Procyon, we're going to show the Squidies they made a mistake. They picked a fight with the wrong, bloody species."

The War of Alien Aggression
 

Books 01-05 (Complete) 

All five books in
The War of Alien Aggression
in a single volume - the war with the Squidies from the first engagement to the final detonations. 

640 pages, 192K words 

amazon.com/author/a.d.bloom
 

Hardway
 

Intelligent life reaches out to Humanity using particle beam weapons and masers. The pilots and crew of the carrier
Hardway
are first to fight in the conflict that quickly escalates from a bloody first contact to a full-scale, interstellar war. Ram Devlin knows he and the rest of Humanity may have been tricked into engaging in a war that didn't have to happen. The verity of the history being written is in doubt, but the survival of his crew and the very future of mankind is at stake.

41K words, 137 pages

Kamikaze
 

The privateer attack carrier
Hardway
invades Procyon to destroy an alien blockade gun meant to keep the human race confined.
Hardway
and her pilots meet their match in the Squidies' massive gun and the alien aces that protect it until they discover why the aliens are beating them.
Hardway's
officers must commit to paying for victory in war's only true currency.

28K words, 96 pages

Lancer
 

Privateer Admiral Harry Cozen needs pilots for an experimental fighter squadron, so he offers the inmates of Bailey Prison a deal. Colt is serving 5-7 and he knows the deal is too good to be true, but he still takes it. He and the rest of the C-Block nuggets learn to fly the new F-151 Bitzer and prepare to sortie against alien aces on a mission far more dangerous than anyone's telling them.

35K words, 117 pages

Taipan
 

The privateer attack carrier
Hardway
is drafted into a force group commanded by Harry Cozen's bitter rival from Staas Company. She stole his fighter program and his thousand new pilots. Now, she's determined to use them as cannon fodder. Nobody can argue with her battle record, but the officers and crew of
Hardway
and the Lancers of the 133rd Fighter Test Squadron may be all that can keep her pilots alive in a knife-fight deep behind enemy lines. 

61K words, 203 pages 

Cozen's War

The Staas Privateers and the UN fleet have brought the fight to the Squidies' home system. The massive Earth invasion fleet faces off against every ship the Squidies' can muster. Harry Cozen is in command and this is his greatest gambit, but alien propaganda threatens to reveal the war's greatest secret on the very day the broadest and bloodiest battle of the conflict unfolds. Knowing how thin the margin is between victory and defeat, Ram Devlin races to the Squidies' homeworld moon with a weapon of mass destruction that could end the war in seconds. Humanity must win, but the price of victory may be a thousand more years of war.

39K words, 131 pages 

About the Author 

A.D. Bloom types loudly on a 1998 IBM M13 mechanical keyboard (13H6705), prefers writing on vertical monitors, and claims he’ll make portable aerial radar from a $12 usb radio dongle when he’s done with his current project.
amazon.com/author/a.d.bloom
 

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three