War of Alien Aggression 2 Kamikaze (6 page)

"They see us for sure?"

"They can see us," she said. "
Everyone
can see us. Hell, we're lit up so bright, in 12.43 years, they can see us back home." 

"Wait ten seconds," Ram said, "and then give me active, directional LiDAR pulses at the blockade gun and that moon. I want to know how many bandits they're sending for us."

The blockade gun's gargantuan beam reached out for
Gold Coast
, slicing for a full five seconds, making a wall of atomic nuclei hundreds of meters high that slashed past the junk like a phantom sword. Biko veered away, and after an astonishingly short cycle, the gun reached out for them again from the blackness. The beam waved high over the junk and chased it. As Biko evaded, it tried to corral them and lit the whole cockpit in a queer, polarized, monochrome gold.  

That weapon was made to destroy carriers and puff-chested capital ships, not 50-meter junks at 1.2 million Ks. Since it took over 4 seconds for the fire to arrive, Biko made it look like he could have flown
Gold Coast
all the way down the blockade gun's throat, but Ram knew if they'd been within 200,000 Ks, then the blockade gun would had them with ease. 

Dana called out the bandits, "Return from the active pulse confirms three red bandits departing the airbase on the blockade gun's rock. Three alien fighters and three only, flying echelon. ETA four minutes 15 seconds."

"Go ahead and make the turn," Ram told Biko. "Reverse our course like we're aborting the mission and running for the barn."

Biko pulled them back towards the planet in a loop and put the junk in a half-roll at the top. Even with the inertial negation system working hard, this close to the gas giant they felt the gees from maneuvers like that pull on their guts.

Before
Gold Coast
got behind the limb of the planet again, the blockade gun's beam took one more shot. It missed and the particle stream left a thin, glowing scar of slow-roiling turbulence in the gas giant's upper atmo.  

Ram said, "Okay, Dana. Give us an excuse to slow this junk down. Make us look like a wounded animal." Below, down the angled tube, through the personnel compartment, and in the reactor room, Dana Sellis ran through the sequence of scripts Chief Terrazzi had given her. In moments, the junk's reactor was misaligned and running dirty. She tweaked it so that it spat out x-rays and gammas like it had a serious malfunction, like maybe it had ruptured a fusion mix element in the last high-g maneuver.

"We're trailing blood in the water," she said.

"Slowing our speed to match," Biko said. "If the alien fighters don't accelerate any harder, then they'll now come into gun range when we're just on the far side of the South Polar Vortex, when we're just across the eye of the storm."

Biko kept the forward vector, but used the maneuvering thrusters to spin the junk so
Gold Coast
faced backwards. Under the cockpit, where the two ore containers used to ride the bow, the hatches opened on the torpedo tubes. In a vacuum, without an atmospheric shock wave, four, regular, fission-tipped warspite torpedoes didn't have too much chance of catching and downing three red bandits, but
Gold Coast
had to look desperate, so they played the part.  

As the warspites launched, they rocketed up and away at the fighters, now visible, coming like an angry constellation. Zoomed in with his helmet, Ram could already make out the spikes coming off the 10-meter alien hulls. "Biko, rotate us 180 to run. Dana, execute the last set of Terrazzi's scripts."

Inside the reactor, the scripted sabotage produced a set of shutdown emissions that would make it look as if
Gold Coast
had just experienced an even worse failure.  

Ram called in to
Hardway
: "
Hardway
AT, be advised
Gold Coast
has three bandits in pursuit. Our reactor is failing and we cannot escape. Repeat: we cannot escape. Request junks to cover." No response. "Please,
Hardway
, we're just waiting to get popped out here." 

"Twenty seconds until the Squidies are in range," Biko said. There was nothing left to do but watch them come.

"Tally-ho! Tally-ho!" Lapuis shouted it from the topside turret. The junk was still inverted and from where he was Lapuis had the best view down into the storm's eye. He could see what Ram and Biko couldn't. More importantly, he could see what the aliens coming into range couldn't see.

Biko hit the thrusters and rotated the junk again and when Ram looked down between the swirling cloud walls below, he saw a rough circle of fifteen, new stars glowing bright down there and rocketing up between the clouds. The glowing plasma trails they left behind them all pointed straight up.

The flight of alien bandits saw the fifteen junks as the trap was sprung. The junks shot up at the bandits from between the cloud walls and fired four torpedoes apiece. The Squidy interceptors were smart enough to cut a turn to their high nine o'clock only to see more torpedoes rising up on that side and already closing on them.

The junks had waited low enough in the eye of the South Polar Vortex that they could accelerate up at the bandits and give all that extra speed to their torps when they launched them. They rocketed up out of the eye
everywhere
around the Squidies' fighters, launching a total of 60 torpedoes. The warspites used that speed to get around and above the red bandits before the aliens could evade, forming a tightening, spherical net. 

The red bandits broke formation, jinked, and rocketed in three different directions, hoping to blast their way free. The torpedoes distributed themselves roughly evenly between the three targets and now, each red bandit was on its own and facing about twenty modified mk3 warspites.

The bandits whirled around on their jets and sliced across the black with their streams, trying desperately to cut themselves a hole. The torps they hit flared up and blinked out before they could properly detonate. The ones that got within 300 meters of the aliens and detonated didn't produce a standard fission reaction. They seemed to light-up and flare on the tip like an old style match as the warheads blew in puny reactions that produced barely enough energy to vaporize the casings and make a brief, dull, blue glow in the visible spectrum. It wasn't a malfunction. "We've got
big
X-rays! Big gamma! And neutrons!
Swarms
of fast-penetrating neutrons!" Dana shouted.  

Chief Terrazzi and her engineers had turned 60 fusion torpedoes from explosive warheads into fizzlers – a kind of dud where the reaction never goes off properly and the material fizzles to produce almost no explosion, just a bunch of radiation. The Squidies fighter drones were shielded against radiation and the first torpedoes to silently flare blue next to a red bandit didn't appear to do a thing to it. The alien drone continued to evade and spin around and shoot down torpedoes as the warspites continued to close. Second and third fizzler torpedoes detonated at point-blank range. After Ram had seen one bandit take six hits and keep going, it appeared as if this plan wouldn't work, but Ram knew they didn't just need hits to be successful – they needed to get lucky, too.

Each of those torpedoes and all the radiation they threw was an attempt to get an armor and hull-penetrating neutron to strike some element of whatever the alien drones used for processors or memory and hopefully induce some kind of a fatal error – a soft kill. Ram hoped that a near hit on a bandit would lead to at least some small internal malfunctions that would allow subsequent torps to more easily catch them.

The alien fighter that broke first went to 3 o'clock high and took nine fizzler hits. It wasn't exactly flying straight when it broke free of the engagement, but it got away. Six torpedoes gave chase and nobody saw what happened after it went back over the limb of the gas giant, but before it dropped out of sight, it'd gained enough distance between it and the warspites chasing it to spin on maneuvering thrusters and stab at them. Most likely it got away.

The one that broke towards 10 o'clock high took even more fizzler torpedo hits. Eleven went off around it, and after it briefly tumbled from a maneuvering thruster malfunction, it turned tail and ran with five torps chasing it. They were falling behind when Ram last saw it.

The third bandit jinked and popped to 10 o'clock low. #3 whirled around to blast itself holes in the tightening net, but the holes it made closed up. The first of the fizzlers detonated at 200 meters and didn't phase it. While it bathed in the blue light, it blasted two other incoming torps. Another fizzler winked blue close by, and for just a moment, the alien drone flew perfectly straight like it was stunned and became an easy target. Three more blue flares burned bright around it under 50 meters away and the radiation must have caused some kind of a thruster error then, because the red bandit fired them in opposition so it spun out of control and spiraled down towards the atmo. It looked like a wounded bird falling out of the sky. Seconds later, it seemed to come round and pull up and fly straight again, but then the torpedoes came and lit up blue around it five times fast, frying it with five more heavy doses of X-rays and fast neutrons. It went out of control and fired its particle stream, waving it as it pitched and flipped and twisted in its death throes. After the next two detonations, its engines and guns went dark. While the final, seven fizzlers cooked it, the red bandit didn't even twitch.

"Gold Coast to
Hardway.
We've got that souvenir you wanted." It took twenty-two fizzlers detonated practically against its hull, but they had a red bandit and they had it intact just like Harry Cozen wanted.  

They claimed the prize before the gas giant's gravity could. Two minutes after the bandit was secure,
Hardway
arrived right on schedule. She took her junks into her bays as nervous redsuits jetted out from the carrier inside knuckledragger mechs. Two of them flew out to the dead bandit. Then, as if it was just another longboat with a bum engine, they gripped the 10-meter alien craft in their claws and portaged it into one of the few remaining bays near the ship's already wrecked bow.  

Sixty seconds after the last launch bay door closed,
Hardway
broke orbit. She accelerated hard and blasted away from the planet, keeping the gas giant between her and the blockade gun. They'd turn around, of course, but not until they'd reached the outer system. Harry Cozen had plans to hurl the carrier at the blockade gun and he needed plenty of room to achieve ramming speed. 

Chapter Eight

By the time Ram passed through the open airlock doors, most of the junks had already spilled their crews into the passageways. If there had been pressurized atmo to carry their cheers, then the steel bulkheads would have rung, vibrated and sung with them. Since there was only vacuum, the sound of victory roared through transducers in Ram's helmet. It was just one red bandit they'd captured, but taking one of them like this was like
counting coup
. 

The crowd of pilots and gunners and redsuits on deck 3 moved like a single beast, like a river of laughing victory. As Ram and Dana and Biko and Lapuis got swept up and carried down the passageway towards the tube, Ram saw into Biko's helmet where concern twisted his face. His mind was already on the next battle.

"Reconfigure the junks for defensive gunnery!" Biko barked into the cheering on comms. He gave orders to Chief Lee next, but there was no reply. Then he shouted over local suit comms at the redsuits he saw around around him. Biko was acting like the Air Group Commander even if he said he didn't want the job.  

The knuckledragger mechs set the red bandit down in the most forward bay, in #16. The rest of the starboard side bays on that module were already damaged. During the pounding
Hardway
had taken over the last week of hell, the bulkheads and doors had been blasted and torn by near-miss detonations. They'd been slammed with hyper-velocity plasma from the vaporized casings of alien fusion warheads. Most of the doors were already unserviceable, locked open. If that red bandit they brought home suddenly awoke and fired its engines and raked its particle stream across the bays, it wouldn't matter. If, god forbid, its alien reactor detonated like a warhead, then since it happened in the most forward bay, the damage to
Hardway
would be bad, but it wouldn't derail the plan to ram the blockade gun. 

The most pressing task was making sure it was really dead.
Hardway
couldn't afford to wait to tear down the alien drone. It just wasn't safe to leave it whole. For all they knew, it was just playing dead. 

Given the chance of something going wrong, Cozen ordered the crew off that deck of the forward launch bay module entirely. Everyone wanted a close up and personal look at one of the alien machines, but Harry Cozen insisted they only risk the people they had to. Chief Horcheese and her redsuits would be the ones to crack the drone open and make sure it never woke up.

Ram watched them on camera from a maintenance bay in the midships module, where the projectors had been set up to mirror what was happening in bay 16 with ghostly, three-dimensional images. Full scale projections of the ten-meter-long red bandit and the crewmen made it seem as if he were standing there with them, but they were all translucent, like phantoms, like they were already dead.

The captured alien craft lay on its side like a fallen cactus, its main spikes shooting off in eight directions and smaller ones pointing off in twice again as many. What looked like the vectored exhaust vents of its maneuvering jets were there on the ends of those spikes just like he'd thought. Little ports very much like them dotted the sub-spikes. The red bandit's single, small-bore particle stream accelerator was a stubby cannon not unlike a smaller version of what he'd seen on their warships. It was set midships on the spiny, outer hull.

The markings didn't show up properly in bright light. Ram took them for letters or whole words made of sharp-edged marks like cuneiform, but scripted with a fluidity by an alien hand and set inside thin-walled, triangular boxes, sometime paired to join sections of 'text'. The lines of the handwritten script went outside the boxes almost every time as if it was expected.