War of Alien Aggression 2 Kamikaze (8 page)

To build up that kind of speed, they'd accelerate away from target and then, turn wide so that the inertial g-forces didn't overcome the inertial negation system and kill the crew. Then, they'd speed back on a collision course. The maneuvers would take twenty hours – twenty hours in which
Hardway
was unlikely to be attacked. Even knowing what kind of action they faced when they reentered the inner system, after seven days of non-stop combat, those twenty hours were a gift.  

Ram ordered most personnel off duty. With the exception of a few critical watches,
Hardway
's crew slept without fear of being vaporized or flash-burned in a plasma storm. He kept the pilots and gunnery crews in their junks and ready to scramble, but they didn't mind. They got to pressurize their compartments and take off their helmets to sleep. The carrier pressurized what it could risk, but most of it was still a vacuum. Artificial environmental gravity remained off; the inertial negation system was under too heavy a strain combating inertial gees to produce gravity for anything else. 

The officers' quarters had been lost the first day along with the sub-tower. That meant a lot of displaced officers. Now that so many were suddenly off duty at once, the observation deck under the bridge where they'd all been sleeping was crowded.

When Harry Cozen and Bergano took the bridge back and Ram finally went below to rest, he noticed that Dana and Wei and Chelitsky were floating in front of the window on the observation deck, snoring in their helmets, but Asa Biko was nowhere in sight. Asa Biko was one of the people Ram sent to get some rest. For a guy who didn't want to give orders, Biko was lousy at following them.

The first call came from Doc Ibora in Medical. He woke Ram to ask exactly what he'd done to the prisoner. "Come again?"

"The alien pilot, Commander Devlin. What did you
do
to him?" 

He assumed Ibora meant what happened in the spine. "I told you: the crew lost control while we were bringing the body to Medical. It was bad."

"I'm going to have to file a report. Official charges will probably be brought."

"Against who? What for?"

"Against
you
, Mr. Devlin. You were the senior officer on-scene during the incident. Whatever happened, it's on you." 

"You didn't say
anything
about this when I told you what happened before. And that thing was long dead before we brought it down the spine." 

"It had severe brain damage, Mr. Devlin."

"Yeah, I expect so. Maybe from the 12.7mm bullets they put in its brai-"

"Not that kind of damage, Mr. Devlin.
Cellular
stress. Its tissue was torn from the inside out at the cellular level. Tidal stresses. I'm no exobiologist, but it's clear from what I'm seeing that these injuries occurred when the alien pilot was still
alive
. The evidence says you tortured this prisoner. My report will include details uncovered during my examination of the body and center around the ante-mortuary trauma inflicted on the enemy pilot's brain." 

"Doc, I was there. There was no torture. Nothing like that happened. Ask Mr. Biko if you don't believe me."

"I already did. I called Asa Biko first since I didn't want to call Mr. Cozen and I knew you were asleep. I told Biko about it four hours ago. Didn't he wake you?"

"No."

"After I told him about the damage to the alien's brain tissue, he said he was going to wake you and that you'd be able to explain to me what happened that caused it."

"Uh-huh," Ram said, still not understanding.

"Did you torture it with some kind of a variable gravity field? Did you stick its bloody alien head inside an inertial negation system before you killed it?"

*****

Tidal stresses. Doc Ibora called the thirteen holes in the Squidy's body the primary cause of death, but he was very clear about how the tidal stresses that had damaged the alien pilot's brain tissue before death had come from rapid flux gravity shifts.

Asa Biko was in Bay 24 and Ram went to find him, but before he even got down the command tower's tube to the spine, he got a private channel call from one of Chief Horcheese's redsuits. Innes said, "I didn't want to call you, Mr. Devlin, but I didn't want to call Harry Cozen either. Since... you know... since Biko just got demoted and all."

"What did he do?" Ram thought he already knew.

"It's the alien inertial negation system, the alien pinch we took out of the red bandit. I know you wanted it stowed to keep it secure, but he came and he took it. He's not AGC anymore, but he's still a Lt. Commander. We couldn't stop him."

"I'm on my way to his location now," Ram said. "I think he just wanted to run a test on it – check a theory he had." Ram hoped that was all. On his trip down the 150 yards to where the tube led up to bay 24, he had plenty of time to imagine what else Asa Biko might have done.

The alien field coils had a coating of the yellow waxy stuff on them. It gave Ram the willies. The inertial negation assembly from the Squidy interceptor floated in bay 24, hooked up to battery piles and power conditioners and cables. Asa Biko and a dozen redsuits floated around it in a sphere, holding gravimetric sensors – the kind the crews used to measure artificial gravity output. When Ram came through the lock into the bay, they looked at him with the little fear he'd learned to recognize as XO. They had guilt in their eyes. They glanced at Biko and back to Ram.

"Doc Ibora thinks we've been torturing prisoners," he said to Biko. "And I got a report that you commandeered some alien tech."

"All we had to do was run current into this alien POS at the same frequency the red bandit's panel bolts responded to. Vary the amperage and you vary the field strength... I know what screwed up that alien pilot's brain. We've got data that confirms it now." He looked up from the PSG handheld sensor and his eyes were wilder than when Ram had seen him last. From the tick in his left eye, Ram was sure Biko had a couple of 'go patches' slapped on under his suit liner. Biko said, "I know how they're beating us, Ram. You know how? They're more committed to victory than we are."

He wasn't making sense. Ram thought about just slapping a tranq patch on his neck and forcing him to sleep. "That piece of alien hardware you took belongs in a crate in engineering, Biko. And you need rest. Don't make me order you t-"

"The alien pilot from the red bandit..."

"What about it?"

He jittered his leg as he floated and it tilted him a half degree a second. "Gimme a minute with Mr. Devlin," he told the redsuits. "Let me explain this to him." The maintenance crew took a break on the other side of the bay. "The Squidies' superior inertial negation system is just a pulse-pinch, Ram. That's how they make it work and stuff it in a fighter. Instead of using stable, continually applied artificial gravity to counter inertia, they pulse it in rapid waves."

"That tears tissues apart."

Biko nodded. "The field collapses completely in just over 2ms every time the power cuts out, but they juice it up again before the effect is all gone. It uses a hell of a lot less power that way. It's how they put an inertial negation system on a fighter and it's how they put a pilot in the cockpit. It's how they're kicking our asses."

"It kills them," he said. "Their own inertial negation system kills them."

"But slowly. It takes a long time. The inertia and the gees would kill 'em fast, but this piece of gear lets 'em fly for a while. Long enough to kill lots of us before they die."

"Doc Ibora thinks we stuck that Squidy pilot's head in a pinch and flipped it on an off until we ripped his brain apart at the cellular level."

Biko said, "That's pretty much what happens. It's a death machine. They get in those fighters, Ram – they get in them and they know it's killing them. They have to know. I can't tell how many flight hours it takes, but still..." He snorted out his nose. "Alien aces fly fast and die young."

"Disconnect the power from it," Ram told him.

"Even if they win, they're screwed, but until then, they're king of the Squidy rocket jocks and there isn't a craft in the sky that can out-fly them. Hell, we can't hit them without using forty AA turrets or twenty torpedoes per target." Biko was talking fast now – so fast it scared him.

"Biko, I need you to order your crew to disconnect the powe-"

"Their technology isn't why they're winning, Ram. Their tech is better, sure, but they're beating us because they're more committed to victory than we are. That's what it is. Follow me."

"What? Where? Why?" Biko had more to show him and Ram was almost afraid to see it.

Biko took him to bay 23 where he'd managed to persuade nearly thirty men and women from the maintenance crews to forgo rest to help him. Even before Ram got through the airlock doors, he saw it. Even before Biko told him word one about it, Ram knew exactly what it was.

The redsuits had built Biko a death machine of his own.

They kept one gun and fixed it to the cockpit module along with its exposed innards and ammo box, but it wasn't a gunnery junk anymore. First, the redsuits stripped off the gunnery module that rode under the bow and held the 4x140s. Then, they stripped off every other piece they could (including the reactor shielding and armor and engine cowlings and panels everywhere) to improve the craft's thrust to mass ratio. They stripped it and skinned it and there wasn't much left when they were done except a raft-like tensegrity frame, a cockpit module, a poisonous reactor module, the engines, the nacelles, and the top-mounted, clearly jury-rigged field coil of what had to be Biko's hastily reverse engineered, pilot-killing inertial negation pulse-pinch.

"I know she doesn't look like much of a fighter, but we got enough data off the alien inertial negation system and their field coils that Chief Horcheese was able to give me the equations I needed and a script that will make ours run on the same principle."

Ram had serous doubts, but he had to ask. "Does it work?"

"Hell, yeah, it works. Sort of. But... There's materials in
their
coil we don't have, things Horcheese couldn't identify. Running our copy on the same principle as theirs works...sort of..."

"What's the difference?"

"It's way more dangerous."

"
More
dangerous? You already said their inertial negation system was lethal to the pilot. How much
more
dangerous can you get?"  

"Theirs takes a long time to kill them; ours is lethal in less than five minutes."

Ram couldn't have heard him correctly. "Did you say it kills a human pilot in
five minutes
of flight?" 

Biko protested like Ram didn't get it, like he simply hadn't thought it through. "But until then you can take turns harder than the alien bandits and accelerate even faster. This is a craft that can take on the enemy fighters."

"It can take them on for
five minutes
," Ram said. "And Chief Horcheese actually
helped
you make this?"  

"Nope," she said as she came out the stripped reactor section's secondary hatch. "I was never here. I'm in Hab2, deck 4. I'm sleeping right now." That's where Ram thought she was.

He said, "Do you know exactly what you helped Biko make?"

"This is the only thing that's going to save us," Biko said. "Don't you get it? Once
Hardway
rams the blockade gun and she's gone,
this
craft will be able to beat the alien fighters back.
This thing is fast enough and agile enough to hold off the bandits until the UN task force can breach space and flood the system. This plane can fly the same maneuvers the aliens do and take 60-gee turns. It can take them on, Ram. It can fight them and it can
win
." Biko put his hand on the reactor module. "Ram, I need your executive codes to disable the power regulation safety mechanisms the company put in place at the factory." Ram looked from him to the Chief. 

"Chief or not," she said, "my company codes won't do it. I'm a bit put out they don't work on this to be honest."

"Please, Ram." Biko said, "Give me what I need to get the job done." At first, Ram Devlin thought it was a hell of a change from the guy who said he didn't have what it took to be Air Group Commander because he couldn't send his pilots into certain death. Then Ram realized Biko was planning on flying his death machine himself. That's what
he
thought he was doing, but from where Ram stood, it looked a little different.  

Whether Asa Biko knew it or not, he made that suicide plane for someone else to fly. And whether he knew it or not,
that
wasn't the act of a man who didn't have what it took to order men and women to their deaths. Ram had been right about Biko. What his initiative had accomplished today showed it. If they wanted
Hardway
to have the best possible AGC she could have, then he'd have to get Asa Biko to realize he had what it took to do the job.  

So Ram lied. "My Staas Company command codes won't do it either." Ram told him the only person on
Hardway
with command codes that would disable the safety locks was Harry Cozen. "Let's go wake him," Ram said. "He needs to hear about this immediately. And bring him coffee." 

Chapter Ten

Harry Cozen listened to Biko from behind his desk. "Chilean smugglers," Cozen said when Biko was done. "They had a death machine. Used a kind of redneck pulse-pinch like your copy of the alien pinch. Used it to run the blockades making flights into North America on ballistic gliders. Almost all of them died."

Ram knew the answer, but he asked the question anyhow. "What's the point in smuggling if you're not alive to spend what you earned?" There was a reason Cozen had mentioned that bit of aviation history to Biko. "Why make the run if you're guaranteed to die and can't enjoy the money?"

"The pilots didn't do it to get rich, Mr. Devlin. They did it because the cartels kidnapped their families and it was the only way to save them. That's the same reason our Mr. Biko here thinks he's going to be the one to fly
his
death machine – because he wants to save us – the pilots, the maintenance crews – all of us. Even me. Apparently he'd rather die than see us die. I'm touched."