War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway Read online

  Cozen said, "How long do we have?"

  "With the heaters running on fully charged suits... Forty hours," Biko estimated. "The suits' chemical rebreathers will work for weeks before the scrubbers needed to be changed. But we'll freeze when the batteries go."

  "We could extend our survival time if we can conserve the heat that's inside Gold Coast right now," Dana said. "And the reactor will give off some residual heat. It could help."

  "Doesn't matter if we could stay warm in here for a week," Cozen said. "They'll never find this rock." He said it with a finality that didn't register with any of them at first, but it should have. "It's not on the charts. And we didn't file a flight plan." Cozen made for the airlock doors on the opposite side of the module and Ram thought he was just going to peer out at the surface, but after Cozen leaned over the door controls, the whole junk rocked sideways with a closely spaced pair of blasts, one right after the other.

  Milliseconds later, the atmo in the personnel module turned to a boiling, freezing gale blowing out the sizable hole where the airlock doors had just been. It took a whole second for Ram to understand that Cozen had lifted the safety cover, flipped the enable switch and detonated the explosive bolts built into the airlock doors. The atmo and most of the junk's residual heat was gone in less then two seconds.

  Biko screamed, "You lunatic! That was our heat! That was an extra forty hours of heat at least!"

  "Uh-huh," Cozen said. "What the hell were you going to do with it? Sit in here on your ass and wait to freeze when your battery runs down? 40 hours...100 hours...it doesn't goddamn matter. There's nothing but death for us in here, Mr. Biko. Our only chance for survival is out there." Cozen pointed out the hole where the airlock doors had been.

  They were all so stunned that for a whole second, they just stood inside the breached module staring out through the hole Cozen had made. Dusty, lost Moriah lay sunlit and matte black against the stars. None of them said anything in that second. Then, Oboto and D'Ambrosse and Lapuis – everyone but Ram and Mickey began shouting.

  "Are you crazy!"

  "Why the hell did you DO that!"

  Ram heard Tse mutter, "Never find the body."

  Biko and Oboto took a step towards Cozen. Ram honestly didn't know what they meant to do, but when they took that one step, Mickey's gloved hand went to the gun on her hip and froze there with her elbow pointing behind her. It was a big, obvious gesture they were all meant to see. She didn't draw it or point it at anyone, but they all saw her hand on it and they all got the message.

  Their faces said they thought she overreacted, but there was an even chance one or two of them might have tried to end Harry Cozen right there. Now, they all understood why he had a bodyguard.

  Ram's suit lights pointed at Cozen's face. "I hate to say it, but Mr. Cozen is right. No point in waiting for rescue," he said. "It's not coming. Even if Hardway was looking for us, they wouldn't know where to start."

  Harry Cozen said, "We've been attacked and there's only one way we're getting off this rock – we fight."

  "Fight who?"

  "Them." Cozen pointed back the way we came. "Them. They're the ones jamming our SOS to Hardway. Once we get inside that alien ship and kill their jamming, then we can call for help."

  "Maybe that wasn't an attack," Ram said. "The emissions they painted us with could have been an attempt at communication."

  "Don't fool yourself, Mr. Devlin. That was an attack," Mickey said. "And I don't know who or what is inside that ship, but I bet what they did to us is exactly what they did to Mohegan. If we let them get away with it, then they'll be back to do it again. Guaranteed. Doesn't matter where they come from or what they are. If they think we're pushovers, then they'll be back for more."

  "Mickey's right," Cozen said. "But we're not going to let them get away with it."

  Two minutes ago they'd wanted Cozen's head for blowing the doors, but as soon as he had them focused on the enemy that had killed their brothers and sister miners and marooned them on this rock, their helmets nodded as he spoke. He focused their outrage.

  Biko was the one who said it first. "We've got to board them."

  Ram asked Cozen exactly what his plan was. Harry Cozen didn't disappoint. "They killed Mohegan and they took their shot at us, but now, it's our turn." Cozen stood in the hole where the airlock doors had blown out, between them and Moriah. "We will approach the hostile craft using the advantage of surprise. We will employ improvised explosive charges to breach her hull, and once we are inside, we will kill whomever... whatever... we find. We will disable the jamming and call Hardway for extraction. Now, get your asses out on the surface."

  A line of shadow swept over Gold Coast as Moriah spun away from the sun. After that, the crew worked in the dark.

  *****

  Cozen sent Biko and Ram to inspect the junk and see what could be salvaged that might confer some sort of tactical advantage like speed or stealth or cover. As Biko and Ram toured the crash damage outside and kicked at the bashed ore containers, Biko listed what they had off the top of his head. "Explosives. Shaped charges of varying size and type. Got one pair of the rock-mover chemical rockets." Those were the same ones Mohegan had used to limp home too slow with a frozen crew. "They'd probably make decent missiles."

  Because of the jamming, they had to use suit to suit infrared comms channels. They were nice and secure, but IR comms needed line of sight. If you couldn't see someone, you couldn't talk or listen to them without someone in between you acting as a relay. Biko and Ram couldn't see anyone else around the front of the bow where they were, so nobody could hear their conversation.

  Biko double-checked to see nobody else was around. "You think Cozen knew it was here?"

  "He had to know. There's no way this is coincidence. He took us right here – right to them. On a rock that wasn't even on the charts. He knew."

  "Agreed," Biko said. "There's no way he stumbled on this. No way. He knew it was here."

  Ram asked why Cozen would bring them instead of company marines or Staas Security? Why not come in his own ship – the one with a railgun?

  "I don't know," Biko said, "Maybe he didn't know they were hostile..."

  "He seems pretty sure about it now. Makes me wonder what he knew about Mohegan."

  Biko said, "He's not telling us everything by a long-shot. I don't trust him and you shouldn't either, Ram, but..."

  "But what?"

  "No matter what he knew about or why he brought us here, it doesn't change the fact that you can't start a junk's fusion reactor without an enormous high-voltage battery to power the lasers and thanks to whatever the hell shot us we don't have one. If we want to stay alive, then Harry Cozen's plan is the only way off this rock. I swear I almost killed him when he blew the doors, but he was right what he said. All we were gonna' do inside Gold Coast was wait for a rescue that's not coming. And what his bodyguard said was right, too. If we don't give the things that shot at us a reason not to do that, then they'll come back here and they'll do it again. I've seen it happen with gangs in Dallas and dog-packs in San Pablo," Biko said. "Alien, human, freakin' cockroach. That's the way things work no matter what you are or where you go. It's universal... like physics."

  Ram's helmet speakers gave a double-beep when another suit came into line of sight and joined the channel. D'Ambrosse jumped off the top of the junk in her open frame, knuckledragger mech-suit, pulsing little bursts from the gas jets to come down extra slow. "I'm going to make the ETs hate this thing." Ram watched her land the 4-meter-tall mech, kicking up dust. She turned the headless, metal gorilla to face them and grinned a big toothy smile from where she sat inside the chest cavity.

  He was stunned that it still worked. Everything but the exosuits had discharged their batteries when they got hit, just like on Mohegan. Even the tools were dead. "Has that battery still got a full charge?"

  "Sure does. And it's got a plasma cutter big enough to slice through a hull. That sounds like something a boarding party
needs. Only thing is, now, with shooting going on, I'm almost sorry about the remote link."

  "What about it?" Ram asked, and D'Ambrosse clammed up.

  "Go on," Biko said, "You might as well tell him now."

  "We disabled it."

  The remote link was clumsy interface with an inexcusable lag, but it let you run the suit from inside the mining junk it was paired with. The fact that the knuckledragger's link to Gold Coast was broken meant that remote commands from the junk couldn't reach it. Maybe that's why it still worked, Ram thought.

  All the junks had protocols allowing them to receive commands remotely, too. It wasn't for the miners. It wasn't supposed to be a user-accessible feature, but you could access it if you knew how. The trick was having user-authority high enough to do what you wanted. Sabotaging a junk's critical systems by using it would be possible, but it would take some pretty high user authority, higher than anyone on Hardway.

  Ram thought the aliens or ETs or whatever the hell they were could have figured out how to crack the Staas Company remote protocols, but that wasn't the simplest explanation. There was a much simpler one. "When did the remote link on the knuckledragger go down? Exactly when?" Neither D'Ambrosse nor Biko said anything for a second like they didn't understand.

  "We disabled it as soon as we got hold of it," Biko said.

  "What?" Ram had never known about this. "Why would you do that?"

  "Almost everyone does it," Biko said. "When we get new knuckledraggers for the junks, the first thing we ask the redsuits to do for us is to yank out the remote links."

  "But why?"

  "Job security," Biko said. "Oboto heard the company was going to use the remote links to replace us."

  "What? Where the... What about Mohegan's knuckledragger?" Ram said, "Do you know if Farad's crew pulled the remote link on theirs?"

  "Yeah," Biko said. "I mean, No. He didn't pull it. He was one of the only pilots that wouldn't. Cautious to a fault. He said he might need it." Biko shook his head. "Wouldn't have saved them. Couldn't use a knuckledragger to get home."

  That wasn't why Ram asked about it. Gold Coast's mech had a disabled remote link and it was fine where Mohegan's had been dead. Only things with working remote links had died. Whomever or whatever had killed Mohegan and brought down Gold Coast had almost certainly used the remote links to sabotage their systems. Exactly how and why were hard to imagine, but Ram couldn't ignore the facts.

  Biko's face changed. In the lights from his helmet, Ram saw the man's eyes narrow and then widen. "What..." Biko said, "You think the things in that ship cracked our remote link protocols? You think they passed a command with that EM burst? You think that's how they snuffed Gold Coast and Mohegan?"

  Ram told Biko he didn't know. He didn't want to tell the man what he was really thinking because already a more probable explanation was forming in Ram Devlin's mind and it was so ugly that he didn't want to believe it. Nobody else would want to believe it either.

  Chapter Six

  When Ram rounded the bow, he saw the lights on a pair of jumping exosuits at the same moment he joined their infrared comms channel. Instantly, their screaming battle cries filled his helmet and shivered his spine. It was Hollis and Lapuis. Neither had ever been in combat.

  The pair made low, bounding thirty-meter hops in formation and then jumped together towards Gold Coast's port side, landing and skipping forward in unison until they hit the hull with their shoulders. They crouched near the junk's blown-out doors.

  Nobody's better in low-gee/no-gee environments than this crew. Despite the first shock of hearing Hollis and Lapuis scream death to their enemies while charging in for a mock assault, it made Ram proud to see how expertly they maneuvered.

  Mickey Wells stood nearby with Cozen, watching and nodding. "Do it just like that, 2nd wave," she said to the three blue exosuits waiting for their order to charge. "Maintain control. When you come down to the surface from your jump, keep moving or you'll be easy pickings." Dana and Oboto and Tse crouched and got set. "2nd wave, go, Go, GO!" They took five steps together and launched themselves into the vacuum over Moriah's dusty rocks. Mickey barked, "1st wave, they're coming in. Look alive. Keep it all secure while 2nd wave approaches."

  Dana's group jumped in like the first group. They kept their arcs lower on the last jump, but still managed to stop without hitting the junk's hull too hard. Ram used his helmet to zoom in on the weapon Dana held point-up in front of her. It looked like something carved from Gold Coast's blown out airlock – something between a slim machete and a pig-sticker. If those were the best weapons they had, then even if they got inside with complete surprise, they'd all be slaughtered in seconds.

  Mickey said, "Okay, 3rd wave commit!" Harry Cozen jumped in to represent the third wave. She said, "2nd wave, set the charges! Do it! Go! Go!" Oboto and Tse mimed fixing imaginary explosives to the imaginary hull where Gold Coast's airlock had been while Cozen landed, ran forward and hit the hull with his shoulder. "2nd wave, the last team has jumped in as planned and are positioned clear of the blast. Make sure you are clear of the blast. Everybody, make sure you're not touching the tower. If the charge goes off and you're in contact with the tower, you're going to have a bad day."

  They knew that, Ram thought. They've got years of experience setting and detting in zero-gee.

  Cozen said, "3...2...1... Boom. No joy. No joy."

  Mickey shouted, "Okay. The charges have detonated. But with your hard luck, they didn't work. Show me what happens next, people! You know what to do!"

  "Cutter up! Cutter up!" Lapuis barked out, and Tse brought the unwieldy, meter-long plasma cutter to bear. He pretended to cut a hatch-sized hole where the door was.

  "Cover the cutter," Mickey said. She bounded forward and pretended to cover Tse. "Eyes open, eyes everywhere." Tse looked up and she smacked the side of his helmet. "Not you. You're the cutter. You cut. Keep cutting, keep cutting..."

  Cozen waited forty seconds and then said, "It worked. You're in."

  "There's a hole in the hull!" She pointed to the airlock. "Get your asses inside! I want to hear battle-cries! Go! Go! GO!"

  Mickey went first. She and that wide-bore weapon of hers led the boarding party as they poured into the airlock, screaming like demons, like pirates. Dana screamed loudest of all of them as she mimed running a defender through with her sword. "That's good; push hard," Mickey said.

  We don't even know what they look like, Ram thought. We don't even know if they bleed.

  "Do it again," Cozen told them. Then he pointed at Ram and pointed to the stern of the ship and walked that way. Harry Cozen wanted to talk in private.

  Around the stern, with Gold Coast's dead engines above them, Cozen stood close and watched over Ram's shoulder for anyone coming from the port side of the ship where Mickey was drilling Dana and the miners again. Biko and D'Ambrosse would still be around the bow working out some kind of shaped charges for hull breaching. That meant Cozen and Ram were alone.

  Moriah's spin turned them to face the sun, but in Gold Coast's shadow, where Cozen and Ram stood, it was still so dark that what he saw of Cozen's face was only what his dim suit lights showed. It made the man even harder to read. "I noticed that a knuckledragger mech-suit survived the attack," Cozen said. "That's going to come in handy. That's a real stroke of luck."

  Cozen didn't ask how it survived. Ram said, "Too bad its battery doesn't have enough juice in it to start our reactor. We've also got plenty of explosives for the breaching charges. We could use the rest as grenades maybe to cover our approach."

  "That's going to be more dangerous than it's worth. Surprise will give us the cover we need."

  Ram wanted to tell Cozen that if he thought they could board an alien ship with one gun and a handful of improvised swords, then he was absolutely mad. "Where did the swords come from?"

  "Those were Dana Sellis' idea – pieces cut from Gold Coast and sharpened with the plasma-cutter."

  "That hand-held plasma cutter still wor
ks?" Ram said. "I thought the tools all..."

  "This one didn't discharge," Cozen said. "Like the knuckledragger."

  "Any idea why?"

  "Does it really matter?"

  Ram waited a few seconds. "Are we really going in there with swords?"

  "Would you rather go in completely unarmed?" That wasn't much of an answer and in the next second, Ram could see Cozen's eyes measuring his face and his knit brow. Cozen must have seen that he needed to hear more of the plan to be convinced they had any chance of success. "When the breaching charge blows through the hull," Cozen said, "it'll create a shock wave in the pressurized atmo inside. That's going to kill or incapacitate anything it hits. It's a small ship. They'll get hit with that wave and right after that, they'll lose atmo fast - too fast to get a suit on. Unless they're already suited up, they're going to be incapacitated."

  "We should lead with explosives," Ram said, "and go compartment to compartment. It's the only safe way to do this."

  Cozen sighed. "Once we get through the hull, I don't want to use any more explosives."

  "What? Mr. Cozen, we only have one gun. Besides Mickey's Itar, swords are all the weaponry we've got."

  "That's all we'll need if we do this right." The tone of Cozen's voice said this wasn't a debate.

  Ram could tell Harry Cozen wasn't a fool. And he didn't have a death-wish. He had too much to live for. If Cozen knew the alien ship was here and came here on purpose without company marines armed for an assault, then clearly he knew a lot more than he was letting on. Ram asked him how he knew the aliens even had a pressurized atmo in their ship.

  "What...,' Cozen said. "You think they evolved in a vacuum, Mr. Devlin? Do you think they evolved in the black of interplanetary space? They probably have exosuits not too different from ours in function."

  He walked towards the far side of the stern and around the corner to Gold Coast' starboard aft section where welded rungs went up the outside of the reactor module's hull. Ram followed him.

  Cozen grabbed the first rung of the ladder before he turned and said, "Chances are, Mr. Devlin, they have bodies and respire and maybe even eat food. It's natural to be curious about them, but don't let your curiosity stay your vengeful hand. Today, we don't care about their language or their customs or even their physiology any more than the knowledge of it can help us kill them. All that matters today is that they are biological entities and they can die. Just like us, Mr. Devlin."