War of Alien Aggression 2 Kamikaze (5 page)

"That's a terrible plan," Biko said. "The junks will have to survive on their own until reinforcements transit and arrive. And we can't afford to sacrifice even one carrier. There's only ten in the whole Privateer fleet."

"Losing one carrier is better than losing two along with the UNS force group," Ram said. "And don't tell me you want to assault the blockade gun with junks. It would be a waste of men and ships."

"We've got to stop the UNS task force from coming," Biko said.

"There's no stopping them," Ram said. "They're coming."

"But why?"

"Arrogance," Cozen said. "And stupidity. Political pressure played a big role in the decision. The UN admiralty still looks weak since 'Yellow-stain' Yantok pulled the fleet out of the Dreadnought's path to save it. The reasons for
this
bad decision are numerous and unfortunate and irrelevant. The only fact that matters is that the UNS task force is coming here. They cannot be stopped and when they arrive and enter the system from the main Sol-Procyon transit, they will be in the cross-hairs of that alien gun. It'll savage each and every one of them like it did to UNS
Dauntless
. For the record, I'm not eager to ram my ship into anything, Mr. Biko. But I don't have much choice." 

Biko said, "Even if we succeed and the blockade gun is destroyed... I mean... If what's left of
Hardway's
Air Group has to hold out against the remaining alien fighters until the carriers and the UNS arrive, then they'll never survive."  

Cozen let his silence answer Biko's protests and turned to Ram. "I want my red bandit, Mr. Devlin. I want to see a working plan in an hour. Nobody knows the flight characteristics, capabilities, and limitations of our Staas Company junks better than Mr. Biko, here, so ask him to help you and get him out of my sight."

Chapter Six

The last of the alien microsats eyeballing
Hardway's
operations dodged the junk,
Bricklayer,
for an hour. The crew finally found the little alien spybird with the prospecting array. It was good at picking out metals and they were well-practiced at using it. From the cockpit, Dolan gave the kill to the gunner lucky enough to be on the right side of the boat at the right time. "Starboard turret, this last one's all yours. Good shootin', Horty." 

"Roger that and thank you very much."

"Fifty Ameros says it takes Horty more than 50 shells." Timms in the port turret had taken that many to get the last sitting duck and he was still embarrassed.

"I'll take that action," Horty said.

"I was joking."

"Too late." He let off a single burst from the 4x140mm cannon and sent a stream of fire down into the uppermost reaches of the gas giant's atmo where the alien microsat hid. Thin streaks of heated gas burned in false color against the banded, blue clouds. Then, the first of the range-det shells blew and the point of the stream blossomed into a growing fireball.

The alien spybirds that
Bricklayer
and the rest of the junks assigned to the 223rd were hunting were smaller than the shells themselves. That made them tough targets to hit unless you blanketed the area with fire, but as the 36 shells Horty had fired off at the contact bloomed vermillion and orange against the chlorine atmo, the shrapnel must have found its target because seconds later, the enemy contact no longer registered on the prospecting array. "That's a kill." 

"You gonna paint a really tiny satellite on your turret now, Horty?"

"Stifle, Timms. And pay up."

"
Bricklayer
to
Hardway
, we have zero remaining alien contacts. This gasbag is as clean of Squidy hardware as it's gonna get." 

"Roger your last,
Bricklayer
, 223rd is cleared to lay an egg." 

1000Ks above
Bricklayer
, the junk
Trifecta
ceased accelerating, opened the doors of the single ore container slung under her bow, and pulsed the blast from her four, outboard nacelles forward to decelerate herself by only a meter per second. As the junk slowed, the third and final Special Boat Service commando team's stealth incursion craft slipped out the open doors of the ore container slung under the junk and launched on its mission to destroy the aliens' blockade gun.  

"Good hunting," was the only call on comms to mark their departure

*****

Inside the boat Major Healey prayed silently. This was the third attempt. It had to work. He'd scrapped their original approach plan. The incursion craft's reactor was now dead cold. Sergeant Chuckta's electronic warfare systems now ran on jury-rigged, cold-state batteries from one of the mining junks, courtesy of
Hardway's
redsuits. In an effort to keep their IR signature down, the incursion craft wouldn't run a reactor or even tap their thrusters this time. The entire approach to the blockade gun would be made using the energy they got from launching off the speeding junk, the gravity of the gas giant, and the tug of its four largest moons. 

Once they broke the limb of the planet, the aliens' blockade gun had line of sight on them.

The imagers on the incursion craft were good enough to show them the Squidies' asteroid staring back as the SBS team screamed towards it at over 10000K/sec. Lentiform. It was bean-shaped. And smooth. Less than 5 kilometers on its longest line. Defensive batteries studded the surface, but the blockade gun itself and the alien reactors that powered it had been buried deep in the rock. This was the longest, closest look anyone had got at it and Healey could see now that even if a dozen capital ships faced off against it and lasted long enough for them all to fire, no bombardment could touch the aliens' gun itself. All that was exposed on the surface were the apertures, the holes dug out of the rock for the gun's particle beam to fire out of. Healey could make out the rings set into the rock starting just ten meters down the 'barrel'. From the briefings he'd read, he was convinced they had to be magnetic vectoring rings. They probably lined the 'barrels' up and down, accelerating the particle stream. Since they hadn't been rotating the rock to aim the gun, Healey assumed the last rings lining the barrel, the largest ones near the surface were most likely used to aim the stream.

Those outer rings were the best place to attack it with the demolition charges. The gun had three 'barrels' cut into the rock facing in three directions. All three sets of the vectoring rings used for aiming would have to be demolished. After that, the Squidies' wouldn't be able to hit a thing. Their super-gun's particle beam would stab out into space harmlessly. It wouldn't be any threat to the approaching UN task force and the mercenary Privateers. Healey even believed that if his team did the job just right, then with a heaping bit of luck, they might even make it off that rock alive.

*****

At just under 300,000 Ks to target, Sgt. Chuckta wiped the frost off his screen and called out the spike on the incursion craft's electronic warfare terminal. "We're being painted. Active, alien emissions from an array on the blockade gun's rock. Six different bands." He felt the twinge of alarm that passed through the men and women in the boat. They'd been spotted.

"Phase-shift the returns," the Major ordered.

Chuckta lifted his head from the terminal to explain to the Major that they were out in the open, 300,000 Ks close to target and no matter what the boat's designers had said, once you were spotted with an active beam, the jig was clearly up. Chuckta was about to say that, but one glance at Major Healey was all it took for him to realize Healey knew that already. He knew their goose was cooked. He was just trying to give the team in that boat some hope. "Phase-shifting and sending it back," Chuckta said. "Engaging spoof. Locking down all remaining systems. Turn those suits off, people."

The commandos turned off their suits even though it wouldn't do a thing to help hide them now. Chuckta imagined there was a pretty good chance everyone knew that, but the last thing anyone ever wants to hear is that there's nothing more they can do.

"Turn out the suit lights, as well," Chuckta told them. "Everything."

"You're making that one up," Wheelan said. She actually chuckled before she put out her suit light, and that was the last he saw of her ruddy cheeks.
Goodnight, Wheelan.
"Bloody Chuckta," she said from the dark. One by one, their faces disappeared until the only light was starlight. Chuckta felt all his muscles relax as an entirely unexpected wave of relief washed over him.

*****

Hardway's
microsats saw it when the blockade gun fired. The broad beam of hyper-accelerated heavy nuclei waved across a huge swath of space and impacted a previously unseen target 283,000 Ks out. Bergano pulled a spectral analysis of the light resulting from the beam's impact and the target's destruction to determine the elemental composition of whatever the blockade gun had hit. "Mr. Cozen..." 

"Was that flash of light from the third SBS team?" Bergano nodded. "They got close," Cozen said.  "Begin to prep
Hardway
for a high-speed, run, Mr. Bergano. And tell Chief Terrazzi we'll need more inertial negation gees from the pinch if we're going to get up to speed." 

"She's going to ask me how fast we plan to go."

"Tell her 20,000K/sec," Cozen said. "That's our ramming speed."

Chapter Seven

"No sign of alien bandits yet." Asa Biko flew
Gold Coast
as low over the gas giant's pole as he could without hitting the atmo. The junk's cockpit jutted out in front of the frame and as Biko flew them over the South polar vortex and the eye of the persistent storm, Ram looked down between the pilot's and co-pilot's consoles, down through the transparent, diamond-pane section of the cockpit's deck, down into the storm's rotating eye. He could see between the vertical cloud walls for thousands of Ks into strobing blackness where lightning flashed. 

Biko said, "Wind speeds at the pole and the center of the eye are actually low – not even 100 kph. With the planet's heat rising up through the eye of the storm, the temp outside is up to about -122 Celsius. Good weather to hide a junk."

"Can you see anything hiding down below us right now?"

"Not a thing on IR, radar, or LiDAR," Biko told him. "But ask Dana; she's your electronic warfare specialist. At short range, that prospecting array she's monitoring can see better than anything else we've got."

"Dana," Ram called on internal comms, "anything showing up in the clouds below?"

"Looks all clear," she said from below. "How long until we round the gas giant and the blockade gun has line of sight on us?"

"From their perspective," Biko said, "we'll break the limb of the planet in 37 seconds. It'll take roughly five seconds for the photons bouncing off us to reach them. 42 seconds, relativistically speaking. After that, they'll be able to see us."

42 seconds doesn't sound like a long time, but in the last two hours, Ram and Biko and Dana had planned this mission, gotten Cozen's approval, and briefed the pilots while nearly every warrant officer, chief, and redsuit on the ship had worked to make all the modifications required. After that frenzy of action, 42 seconds to sit and breathe seemed like forever.

Ram established a private channel with Biko. When Biko heard the double beep in his helmet, he must have known what Ram was going to say because he spoke first. "I know you don't want my job, Ram."

"I really don't." Ram told him, "I want you to take it back."

"I got fired," Biko said. "Besides, I'm better at
this
. I'm better at flying and getting a job done and taking care of my people. That's what I'm good at. Someone else can send them out to die." Biko made a gesture in front of his helmet like he was shoeing a fly with the back of his hand, and Ram heard a quick, triple beep in his helmet that told him Biko had closed the private channel.

Over the junk's internal comms, he called out to
Gold Coast
's crew, "Fifteen seconds to enemy exposure, people. Sing out loud for me." Ready calls came in from the turrets and the torpedo deck.  

"All quiet across the spectrum," Dana said. "Nothing but the same background fuzz we sampled on arrival and what's coming off the gas giant. No active radar or LiDAR emissions."

"This is where the second SBS team got it," Ram said. The second of the Special Boat Service teams had run smack into a flight of red bandits.

"They managed to hide their fancy boat in those polar cloud fronts for a while," Biko said, "But a little boat like that doesn't have the power to linger low without getting pulled down the gravity well. Not like a junk."

Seconds after
Gold Coast
broke the limb of the planet and had direct line of sight to the blockade gun, the junk would get bathed in alien search emissions. Biko counted down. "Exposure in 3...2...1... Mark."  

Dana informed them that in spectra invisible to the human eye the whole planetary system now flashed bright with beams pointed right at them. "Everybody wave at the Squidies."

Ram used his helmet to zoom in. The enemy's hollowed out asteroid looked back at him like a misshapen eyeball.

"Picking up the expected beams from the blockade gun," she said.

Biko gave it another five seconds of hiding against the planet and then pulled
Gold Coast
away, gaining distance from the gas giant as he made the break across open space to the icy, second moon. That's where the pieces sliced off
Hardway
had ended up.  

The bottom half of the sub-tower had already augured in, but the forward railgun batteries had fallen into a slowly degrading orbit. If the Squidies knew anything about humans, they knew humans didn't like to abandon their dead. Ram thought they'd probably expect
Hardway
to send a junk to collect the bodies. Maybe the Squidies wouldn't smell the trap. 

Biko flew an evasive course to ensure they wouldn't be an easy target, changing direction at least every few seconds just in case the Squidies' super-gun let off a shot hoping to get lucky. Dana called out, "We're lit up
extra
bright! I've got K-band direct and hot from the blockade gun and theta-band from the fourth moon, the little one."