War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway Read online

  It's not as if Ram ever consciously forgave her for sending him away, but even eight-year-old Ram knew it was easier for her without him. He remembered the things he knew Mickey did to get money – things she wasn't proud of and tried to hide. When he climbed up and found her guns one day up where she'd hid them at the top of the apartment's rattling HVAC unit, he guessed what she did with them. When she came home, he told her he'd found them and how he knew what they were for and that it was okay. He told her he was grown up now and he understood and she didn't have to hide things like that from him. She slapped those words right out of his mouth.

  Ram looked for Mickey for years. He searched public records, company records, military databases – nothing. He even wrote a daemon program to lurk in the Staas network just to keep an eye out for her in any and all database entries it could access, but it never found any info on her. She'd vanished. Now that he knew who she'd been working for, it all made sense. Anyone standing close to Harry Cozen would be cloaked in the shadow of secrecy he cast.

  Ram had to force himself to look away from her. It took him a few seconds to register what Biko was saying. "I've already filed a formal ISTSB complaint."

  Captain Horan said, "There's proof it was operator error. Ask Mr. Devlin. His report said Mohegan's systems couldn't have failed that way unless someone had ordered them to. Isn't that right, Mr. Devlin?"

  No. That wasn't right at all, Ram thought. His report even said nobody on board had the user authority to make it happen. It was obvious his words were being twisted.

  That's when Harry Cozen opened his mouth and spoke for the first time. His voice was smoothed gravel. "Captain Horan, your records will be examined by UNOSHA and ISTSB. But your other records aren't in order, are they." It wasn't a question. Cozen already knew Horan would adjust the numbers at the end of the run to allow for a little skimming. His second set of books weren't ready yet. "Since Mohegan's unfortunate return, you've been scrambling to fudge the numbers in case there was an investigation, but you haven't had a chance to finish." Horan's face went beet red and the vein in his neck throbbed. A certain amount of corruption had always been tolerated, but apparently Horan's license to steal had just been revoked at the worst possible moment. Without company support, an investigation would find him out for sure.

  "Mr. Cozen..."

  "Go see to your ledgers, Captain Horan." Cozen said, "Now, please." His eyes flicked to the hatch. "Go. Now. Before you disgrace us all."

  Captain Horan remained seated for an extra second before he did the only thing he could do. He said, "Yes, Mr. Cozen," and went to cook his books as fast as he could. He looked back just once before he left, taking Bergano with him.

  After they were gone, Cozen walked across the compartment and closed the hatch. "Did you ever find out where they were working? Mohegan, I mean. Do you know where the incident actually happened?"

  "No," Ram said. "They were supposed to be working a rock on the far side of the Jupiter Trojans, but the path Biko and I extrapolated from their return trajectory didn't intersect with the orbits of any known bodies. They probably deviated from their flight plan."

  "Mr Biko," Cozen said. "I get the impression you give a damn about the lives of the people around you. I'm going out there to get some answers and I want you flying my junk. You're coming too, Mr. Devlin."

  "Mr. Cozen?"

  "We leave in eight hours," Cozen said. "Ten men and women died aboard Mohegan. We owe it to them to find out why." Biko asked about the flight plan, and Cozen said, "No flight plans." That worried Ram. If you don't say where you're going, then nobody knows where to look to find you when you don't come back. "Bring Hardway's geologist, as well," Cozen said. "Bring Dana Sellis."

  Ram put all the questions about Harry Cozen out of his mind mostly just because Mickey Wells was there with him. He had no idea what Cozen was getting them into, but seeing that Mickey looked so proud to be a part of it made him think that whatever it was, it was something he'd be proud of too.

  Chapter Four

  Asa Biko used the four, outboard vectoring nacelles to slip Gold Coast out of her bay and then lit up the two fixed engines in the stern. He and D'Ambrosse piloted the mining junk down the carrier's length, passing between Hardway and Arbitrage.

  Hollis, Tse, Lapuis, and Oboto floated in the personnel compartment with Dana and Mickey Wells. A Staas mining junk couldn't spare the power to produce constant artificial gravity like a carrier could. If you worked off a mining junk, you had to get good in zero-gee. Ram Devlin hung behind the pilots in the cockpit with Cozen because he wanted to know where they were going as soon as Cozen told them.

  "Make for the far side of the Trojans," Cozen said. He meant the Jupiter Trojans – the sizable group of asteroids that rode Jupiter's L4 Lagrange point. The L4 was one of five places in Jupiter's orbit where the gravitational fields of Jupiter and the Sun effectively balanced out and the rocks there got what amounted to a free ride through space, proceeding ahead of Jupiter in its orbit. That was where Mohegan had been working.

  Ram didn't tell anyone else about how he and Mickey went way back. It wasn't hard to hide the fact that they knew each other. Every time it looked like he was about to say something to her, she glared at him like he was about to blow everything and then turned away. She went out of her way to ignore him. She spent most of her time double-checking her exosuit and adjusting the carry on that gun of hers. When she drew it from the holster, the gold inlays and the engraved ivory caught everyone's attention. "That's a Honma & Voss Itar," Dana said. "Wide-bore X-ray laser. User-regulated rate of discharge. Illegal carry on Earth. Only two-hundred were ever made."

  "And only 18 are known to still exist. This is #087," Mickey said. "You a collector?"

  "My father is. He'd trade his whole collection for that. Where did you get it? Those were only made for the Revolutionary Guard. They were all killed in the Battle of Istanbul."

  "Uh-huh. That's where it came from."

  In the eyes of the miners, the fact that Mickey was armed said she wasn't management. It said she did the dirty work. That made her labor, like them, so they weren't afraid to ask her questions. "Never seen a company ship with a railgun on it," Hollis asked her. "What kinda wallop does it pack?"

  Mickey said, "Don't know. Never seen it fired."

  Lapuis said, "Then how'd Arbitrage get those scars on the hull?"

  Instead of answering that, Mickey asked how far out they'd been.

  "What about you?" Tse asked her. "How far you been out?"

  "I was out past Sedna once. Before we turned around and came back, I went up and stood on the bow so I could be the farthest man from home for ten minutes." That got a laugh, but it didn't last.

  "You his security guard or something?" Mickey's whole face hardened when Lapuis said that and the air in the compartment rang with tension.

  "What did you ask me?"

  "You heard him," Hollis said. "Are you with Staas Security?" They thought the gun she carried was to point at them if Cozen told her to. They hated the Staas Security goons.

  Maybe Mickey could feel Ram's eyes on her, wanting to know what she'd say next, but he knew the answer. Mickey Wells had been a hired thug before and she'd hated herself for it. She said, "I work for Harry Cozen. I held the rank of Lt. Major in the Corps and now I'm a registered Staas military contractor. Next person to ask me if I'm a security guard gets a free lesson in zero-gee bone-breaking."

  Harry Cozen had Biko and D'Ambrosse turn and fly the junk down, out of the ecliptic, out of the Trojans and into the empty solar medium below, where there was nothing on the charts but magnetic storms. Then he said to keep going. Ram knew Biko and he were thinking the same thing. They hadn't been able to figure exactly where Mohegan had been when her accident happened, but Cozen was directing them towards a region her reconstructed course said she'd probably passed through.

  It was another hour before Cozen came down to the personnel compartment and produced an orbital data set for an app
arently unmapped body, several kilometers long. "That's where we're going," he said. Ram looked at the data set on a terminal. The extrapolated orbit for the mystery rock said that was actually part of the L4 group, but due to some complicated mechanics, it rode an eccentric and twisted figure eight orbit around the group, almost as if it were orbiting a large body. It spent most of its time out of the ecliptic. It didn't even appear on company charts yet. Harry Cozen had just named it. "It's called Moriah 2164-14474," he told them.

  Even if he didn't realize it then, Ram must have already been suspicious of Moriah and Harry Cozen and the whole trip because he made an excuse about checking on the reactor so he could duck away and test his theory in private.

  Inside the reactor room, Ram unzipped the breast pocket of his exosuit, found his matchbox computer, and pressed it to the terminal. The handshake with the junk's NAV system was immediate. He called up the orbit of Cozen's rock and layered Mohegan's reconstructed path over Moriah's orbit. They crossed.

  There was no way to prove it, but as far as Ram was concerned, Mohegan's last stop before catastrophe had probably been Cozen's rock. On the way to the cockpit, Ram pushed the files to the terminal Dana was working. He didn't have to explain. He just told her to look at them and went to show the cockpit what he'd found.

  "So Mohegan went to Moriah," Biko said when he saw it. "Makes sense. They might have got lucky... caught it on a radar ping and deviated from their flight plan."

  "That's the same conclusion I came to, Mr. Devlin," said Cozen. "If we're right about Mohegan visiting Moriah, then when we get there, we may find out what happened to her."

  Biko and D'Ambrosse didn't say anything, but Ram saw them glance at each other. Cozen knew more than he was saying. Ram really wanted to hear what Mickey had to say about all this, but she'd floated up in the corner of the personnel module and closed her eyes and pretended to sleep.

  Active radar pings bounced off Moriah, but LiDAR missed her. It was the kind of rock you never saw until you flew into it. 3.4 km-long, dented Moriah's albedo was so low that she reflected less than a tenth of a percent of the visible sunlight to reach her.

  On approach, Ram went up to the cockpit to get a view of it with his naked eyes, and as he pushed himself off the deck and up the tube to the cockpit, he was vaguely aware that Mickey had followed him into the tube.

  About halfway up the first section, when Ram heard her push off below him, he realized it was the first time he'd actually been alone with her since she'd arrived and he was compelled to say something – he didn't know what. Something... Anything... She must have pushed off hard and fast because by the time Ram looked down, she was already within arm's reach of him. Ram decided she didn't feel like having a big, sappy reunion just then because when he started to open his mouth, she grabbed his ankle and pulled on it hard so he flew backwards down the tube and she shot up past him twice as fast. After that, Mickey tucked and ducked and spun herself with a half-twist so that when she got to the top of the tube's first section, where it turned towards the cockpit doors, she landed on her feet, bent her knees, and pushed off again in the direction of the cockpit module.

  It was crowded with three people up behind the pilot's seats, but there was plenty of room to see out the canopy. At ten Ks out, Cozen's mystery rock looked like a jagged piece of the black that had ripped loose from behind the stars. "It's turning on its major axis," D'Ambrosse said.

  "I see it. Looks like it rotates once an hour or so. Coming in with the spin."

  At one kilometer Moriah's surface poked at the eyes. Sharp hills and ravines covered her. She was big enough to have very weak gravity. The dust she'd collected on her travels was what gave every plane a flat, low-albedo finish.

  At 100 meters from the surface, Cozen said, "Give us a full orbit and then find us a spot to set down. And come in riding a shallow down angle so we don't have to hit the thrusters too hard."

  Biko said, "I know how to land a dusty rock, Mr. Cozen." He flew around Moriah's 'equator' going lower and lower so that by the time they'd gone halfway around, her dusty, matte surface was close enough that it blurred past through the bottom of the canopy.

  D'Ambrosse saw it first. "What the hell is that?" It came up fast on the port side, nestled in a set jagged, broken hillocks less than 500 meters off their line of travel.

  Dana shouted over comms from the prospecting terminals below. "Alloys! Heavy metals! It reads like a damn ship!" It was shiny with straight lines and engineered curves and it wasn't natural. It was a obviously a product of intentioned design and building. Ram searched Cozen's face for any sign of foreknowledge. So did Biko and D'Ambrosse. The man's face was inscrutable.

  The vessel they discovered on the surface was bigger than a mining junk. Its dark hull was shaped like a flying wing or a thick knife-blade about 60 meters long with a fat leading edge ten meters thick and a thinner trailing edge. A single, elliptical tower rose up almost 30 meters at ninety degrees to the rest of the hull.

  "I know every human ship that ever put to space and that's not one of them." They all fought to come to terms with the only possibility that remained. Harry Cozen delivered his next words with conviction. "That ship wasn't made by human hands."

  Whatever made it, Ram saw what looked like exhaust ports along the thin, presumably trailing edge of the blade-shaped part of the hull. "No heat signature or other indication of an active power source," Dana said over comms. If that ship was functional, then it was powered down, but considering what happened to Mohegan, Ram felt less than safe with Gold Coast flying past like a big, slow target.

  "Circle slowly," Cozen said. "But don't get too close. Maintain this distance."

  "Is it a wreck? A derelict that maybe glomed onto Moriah's gravity?"

  "Could have been here for a long time," Biko said. "Maybe millions of years..."

  "No," Cozen said. "Look; there's no dust on it." He was right.

  Ram got a sinking feeling like they'd already gawked too long – like something was already happening and he was missing it. Biko must have got the same feeling because he broke off the circle to fly Gold Coast in a more evasive line.

  Cozen said, "What are you doing?"

  Dana shouted over comms so loud, she drowned him out. "IR spike! That ship's got a signature like a reactor firing up! Got X-rays! Big gamma!" Biko yanked the junk port and starboard, up and down, but it was already too late for that. Gold Coast's frame hummed with a new, high-pitched vibration. "It's painting us with EM! High-band, broad spectrum emi-" Static fuzzed her voice and drowned her out and then Gold Coast physically shuddered with the power that surged through her. In that second, the consoles and the lights flared. The internal comms screamed and died along with everything else – lights, consoles, control interfaces, terminals... everything.

  The hum from the reactor was gone and the air coming up the tube smelled burnt.

  Dana's voice called up from the dark below: "I'm pretty sure our main battery just discharged up-line into the reactor. Power conditioner unit down here looks melted. I think that alien ship just zapped our systems!"

  With only his suit lights to see by, Biko flipped circuits and tapped at the console, but without power, it was futile. "Where the hell are my emergency batteries?"

  "They should have kicked in already." But he knew that. Ram didn't say what he was thinking – that the batteries would all be dead. They'd spontaneously discharged like they had on Mohegan.

  Biko tried to initiate an emergency reactor restart with a single, dedicated switch and it failed. "No reactor power to charge batteries and no emergency batteries to restart the dead reactor. We've got no maneuvering thrusters, no engine. Nothing."

  "Life support?"

  "Nothing means nothing." Biko turned and glanced at Ram. He was thinking it too: This is what happened to Mohegan. Biko didn't cuss or swear. In fact he had an extra dose of pilot's calm in his voice. "We don't have any thrusters and Gold Coast is now coming in at an angle that's going to end this ri
de real soon. I'd say less than ninety seconds. You folks might want to secure those exosuits, get your helmets on, and brace for impact."

  Chapter Five

  "Impact in three...two...one..."

  The ore containers slung under the bow hit first. Gold Coast was lucky not to flip end over end.

  The second impact threw them against their straps again and bled off a lot of speed with violent scraping of belt-iron steel on stone. The vibrations came up through the clamps and couplings and frame, right into the personnel module. The sound of it filled Ram's helmet. Then, it was gone.

  Ram realized they'd bounced just before Gold Coast came down again, this time, ass first. She ground against the rock and that slowed them down until the ore containers on the bow hit again. After more sliding and skidding and scraping, she finally ground to a stop.

  Over the ringing silence, Biko's voice came through Ram's helmet speakers. He was out of breath. He said, "Welcome to Moriah. The heat's out like everything else. It's going to get pretty cold in here soon."

  The personnel module looked smaller now. Light came through the portholes in thin shafts, but it was barely enough to cut the dim. Mostly, all Ram could see was the narrow cone his suit lights showed him.

  "I tried to call home with my suit comms plugged into Gold Coast's antenna, but there's some kind of active jamming," D'Ambrosse said. "Sounds like bugs. Like crickets and cicadas. I can't cut through it."

  "Maybe I can get a charge and prime the reactor," Ram said. Cozen told him he was welcome to try, but without a battery to power the reactor's lasers, he'd never get fusion going. Cozen was right. Too bad Mickey's gun didn't have enough charge in it.

  Biko and Dana considered building a separate dry pile of some kind, a chemical or nuclear heap made of scavenged materials, but when they inventoried what was available and calculated the time it would take to build enough charge for a reactor restart, it came to 15 days.