War of Alien Aggression 5 Cozen's War (13 page)

Beams vaporized the smoke particles above Tig and Parker’s heads as they dove behind the fire control consoles with the Chief. He peeked around the lip of it and saw the thermal ghosts of the three remaining crew fall back and take cover, disappearing behind the immense bombs and their thick hulls some 30 meters down towards the far end of the bay.

There was no easy way to do this, but then, as he felt his stomach flip and his organs ascend, he had to grin like it was his lucky day. "They killed the artificial gravity."

Parker grinned back at him as they all lifted a millimeter off the deck. "
That
was a bloody mistake," she said.

The Chief said, "
It wasn’t."
 

"
But nobody’s better in zero-gee than redsuits."
 

"
The
Boomslang’s
crew are redsuits, too. They’re Harry Cozen’s personal reds...from his old ship,
Arbitrage
. Them killing the artificial gees wasn’t a mistake. It was a challenge."
 

"So what are we going to do?"
 

It only took a few seconds to get the three of them in position. If Harry Cozen’s reds wanted to play chicken, then the Chief wouldn’t disappoint them. She hovered low over the deck, in the shelter of a console, with her legs bent and the soles of her boots almost touching the forward bulkhead. She held Tig under one artificial arm and Parker under the other, the one without any skin.

The two cherries faced forward with both their arms extended. A pair of targeting reticules in the visor of his helmet moved with the guns built into the backs of his hands.

The Chief said, "
You two, don’t worry about anything but shooting. I’ll handle the maneuvers and I won’t drop you, no matter what happens." The chief tightened her grip and he lost half his breath. The trick to doing this wouldn’t be holding on, it would be not crushing their ribs with all her strength. "Okay. We’re centered enough," she said. "See your target, aim, and fire. Slow is fast. We do this on my 'bingo' in 3...2...1...bingo."
 

She pushed off the deck surprisingly fast with her fingertips and toes, and she kicked hard off the forward bulkhead at a shallow, upward angle. The three of them flew together, barely missing the tops of the consoles as they emerged from the forward control section to shoot down the length of the ordnance bay, down between the rows of enormous bombs. The 5m-wide bombs on either side of the center aisle blurred and flickered past as he tried to see ahead and between them and everywhere at once, searching for the three salty reds that were out there waiting to kill them.

Comms clicked in his ear as the
Boomslang’s
crew cracked into their frequency. It was Clarke’s hoarse voice he heard next. "You come any closer we’ll kill you."

"
You don’t have to," the Chief told him. "You've got a choice."
 

Clarke said, "
I just watched 100,000 people die to ensure the success of this mission. I will shoot you twelve times over before I let you take a chance of wasting the opportunity they died for."
 

"
We can’t do it like this, Clarke. Not like this."
 

Tig searched deep within the darkness between the bombs they passed. No thermal silhouettes lurked in the shadows. He looked behind them, too, while they sailed on down the center aisle of the bay...

"
We gotta kill all of 'em so they don’t come back at us," Clarke said. "It’s obvious. But you and your cherries think you know better. Stupid, bloody, Squidy-lovers."
 

"
You got it all wrong, Clarke." The Chief said, "It ain’t the Squidies I lo-"
 

Tig saw them in his peripheral vision when Clarke and his two crewmen dove from above, flying in formation, pointed right at them to minimize their profile. They led with their helmets, the part of those suits his non-lethal, narcotic flechettes couldn’t penetrate. That was all there was time to see before the air around them lit up with azure shafts of burning smoke so bright that his helmet dimmed to protect his eyes. The targeting reticules glowed brighter as his arms finally moved into position to fire on the
Boomslang's
crew as they crossed the midpoint of their flight across the bay.
 

They held their weapons out in front of them, waiting on the capacitor cycle time, and in thermal, it looked like their ungloved hands were burning. They fired again, and this time, the Chief inhaled sharply on comms as the rays ripped by. One of the crewmen above them danced and jerked from a spread of Parker's darts. In almost the same moment, Tig put one of the red boxes with the Xs in them over each of the other two targets and mimed squeezing the triggers. There was no recoil, only a tingling, a buzzing in the back of his hand from the rapidly pulsing capacitors and the hundred or more flechettes he fired in his one second, screaming burst of unchecked auto fire.

He never saw the darts, only a vague, streaking glint of a line like a piece of perfectly straight spider's web connecting each of the barrels to the targets he'd hit. The two, remaining
Boomslang
crewmen momentarily jerked from the impact of the darts before they went limp.

They drifted until they’d crossed the center aisle completely and bounced off one of the bombs. The Chief sailed past with Tig and Parker still under her arms. "Nice shooting, cherries," the Chief said through grit teeth. "Redsuits get it done." A moment later, her grip loosened, and Tig and Parker floated free.

"
Chief!" He could see the burn hole high in her chest, near her collarbone, leaking purple mud in a string of globules that trailed behind them as they flew. More spurted out with each heartbeat, like a fountain. It got weak before he could clamp his hand over it. The Chief coughed red all over the inside of her helmet as Tig and Parker spun to grab her.
 

"
Through the subclavian artery and into the lung," Parker said, as coldly as if she’d been talking about some wounded drone they’d been told to fix. Parker clamped her hand down on top of Tig's, trying to help hold the Chief’s blood inside her.
 

At the end of the flight down the length of the 80-meter bay, Tig and Parker landed the Chief on the aft bulkhead and got her down to the deck near the fire control consoles. He brought a medkit as fast as he could, but by the time he got the can of sealant to her wound and filled it, her milky, artificial eyes stared open, unfocused. Chief Horcheese was already gone.

Her face wasn’t contorted, but she looked like she was shouting. Tig closed her mouth.

"
No. She’s not dead," Parker said. "No." Parker’s fists hammered at the Chief’s chest trying to restart her heart until the blood coming off her suit with every blow misted up into little droplets and stippled Parker's helmet so thick with pinprick dots, he was surprised she could still see.
 

They set the Chief flat on the deck and straightened out her limbs, but in a few seconds, the prosthetics all began to contract to factory default position like they always did when there was no input. In death, the Chief’s machine limbs posed her like a fetus.

He wasn’t sure how many seconds passed then before he could take his eyes from Chief Horcheese. "We should call up to Commander Devlin," he said. "He’ll want to know we have control of the bombs and the ordnance bay."

Parker made for one of the consoles behind him. "Make sure you’re on the deck," she said and turned the artificial gravity back on before he could tell her not to. All of the globules of the Chief’s blood hanging in the air now fell. Halfway down the center aisle, the three, unconscious
Boomslang
crewmen were still floating inverted, more than 7 meters over the belt-iron-steel deck. They fell, too, impacting with a rapid series of dull thuds and sharp, unnerving cracks.

Not a lick of emotion showed on Parker's face.
"
Sorry, boys." She said it without humor or remorse. "That was all my fault."
 

Chapter Eighteen

The damage control teams abandoned attempts to put out the fires that had engulfed the bow, the forward hab and the secondary bays. The forward 20% of the ship burned mostly unchecked now, and Cozen hurled her at the Squidies like a burning lance.
Araby
and
Pont Neuf
steamed with her as they broke from the main Privateer force in the only desperate attack that might give them a chance of survival.

 "Be on the spot with those bay doors, Mr. Bergano. Surprise only works once, as a general rule..."

"Yes, Mr. Cozen."

While their combined squadrons of torpedo junks launched salvos, the three attack carriers dove into the Squidies’ line. Warspites found their mark and flashed with fission. As the alien ships burned,
Hardway
and her sister ships dove deeper into the enemy fleet. When all four sides of the primary bays finally looked out on the hull of an enemy ship, Cozen didn’t make any effort to contain his emotions. "Open the bays!" he shouted. "Fire! Fire! Fire! Give them
a fucking
broadside
!"
 

The darkness down inside the bays erupted with plasma and flame as all the warspite torpedoes placed there lit and fired their engines. Hundred-meter geysers of fire shot from each bay before 25 warspite torpedoes ripped out of each of them. Over 300 torpedoes launched from
Hardway’s
now melted bays. In four directions, they crossed the meager space between the carrier and the Squidy ships and detonated against the enemy hulls.
 

The windows of the bridge turned opaque, but the flaring, strobing flashes from the tactical projections showed Dana that
Araby
and
Pont Neuf
had launched as well. After that stunt, the three attack carriers barely had three functional launch bays between them, but together, they'd unleashed almost 1200 torpedoes in that one, surprise salvo. Launched so close, the Squidies defensive guns didn’t have time to cut them from the black before the swarm of warspites found them.

The hulls of the Squidy warships on all sides of them vaped away and their decks filled with firestorms. The vertical hulls of the Squidies’ warships fell backwards with the blasts like bodies in a crowd. They cracked and jetted flame before they cooked off on all bearings.

"
Brace for impact!" Dana saw the hull fragment from the ruined warship tumbling at them in the instant before it hit and there was nothing she could do. It struck the command tower and slammed the bridge's diamond-pane window so hard that fragments of it shot across the bridge like shrapnel. When she looked again, there was a gaping hole in the starboard forward quarter of the bridge two-meters wide. There was nothing between them and the vacuum.
 

"That's why we wear exosuits," Cozen said as he tore off a strip of patching from his kit and applied it to a trio of small tears in his suit. "Only flesh wounds,"  he said.

"Where's Bergano?"

Cozen turned in the command chair to look behind him and paused before he spoke. "Mr. Bergano was hit by a piece of debris. He did not survive. His console is destroyed. I'm taking over from here."

"
We destroyed fifteen ships with that salvo," Biko said. "And disabled a handful more." Squidy warships broke up and cooked off all around the three carriers. "
Pont Neuf
and
Araby
can claim 16 and 13 apiece." One glance at the tactical projections over the bridge was all it took to see they’d just delivered a massive blow to the Squidy fleet. The Squidies still had their dreadnought, but the Privateers and the two, remaining UN battle-cruisers weren’t outnumbered anymore.
 

Harry Cozen let them cheer on comms until the carriers had steamed clear of the debris field. That's when the remaining Squidies on the other side of their formation opened up with their particle streams like a legion of long-distance archers. "Evasive maneuvers if you please, Ms. Sellis."

The salvo from the dreadnought hulled the carrier through the primary bays. They spilled molten metal into space like
Hardway’s
blood.

They’d just halved the enemy fleet, but if the aliens’ dreadnought was still out there, they would lose this battle no matter what they did. Nothing had ever penetrated that armor. Even if it was the only ship the Squidies had left, that would be enough to turn every Privateer and UN ship to hot gas and scrap. After it killed them, it would breach space and head for Earth.

The script that would put
Hardway
on a collision course with the alien dreadnought to ram her at maximum speed was already written. It was just three taps away on Dana's console.

Alien warheads making for the carriers cooked off under defensive fire all around them. The ones that detonated too close slammed the twisted hull and shook the bridge.