War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway (14 page)

There would be no attempt to negotiate peace.

*****

The two biggest capital ships of the underdeveloped UN fleet met the alien aggressor near Mars, just outside the orbit of Deimos. Humanity watched from the view of satellites and radar telescopes and camera drones. They all had front row seats.

UNS
Hannibal
and
Khan
each carried five, massive railguns capable of accelerating a tungsten and osmium alloy sabot down its magnetic barrels and spitting it at the enemy at up to 69% the speed of light. The inertial gees, some 80,000 times more powerful than standard Earth gravity, compressed the tiny sabot during launch to a density rivaled by neutron stars. Between their railguns, the twin battleships each sported secondary batteries of fast-tracking pulse lasers to protect them from smaller threats. These were the ships that crushed the South American fleet and won the single war Humanity had fought with itself in space some twenty years ago.  

The approaching alien dreadnought dwarfed
Hannibal
and
Khan
. The fat, forward edge of its vertical hull was 200 meters in berth. It was nearly eight-hundred meters down its longest line. Unlike the other Squidy ships they'd seen, on this one, the guns that bristled off it looked recessed into the tops of low, stubby towers, effectively protected against surface dets on the hull around them. Dozens of ports up and down its leading edge opened as its alien engines fountained a half-kilometer-wide river of rosy plasma behind it. 

The millimeter radar microsats painted detailed pictures, but they couldn't show the thin layer of white lead on the starboard side. Once the alien came closer to the Staas Shipyards at Deimos, the telescopes and optical arrays showed images shot in visible light. What they saw painted on that ship was a human skull, 500 meters across. The aliens came to war wearing the image of a dead human on the side of their ship. It was crude with broken lines as if queer, all-finger, alien hands had painted it on. It was a rough cartoon, hastily applied, but it was unmistakable.

The first shots of that battle were fired from the battleship
Khan
. She launched her first salvo of warspite torpedoes out her three dozen tubes and
Hannibal
launched three dozen more. Pale, blue plasma tails from torpedo engines streaked away from the UN capital ships, and in moments, the alien dreadnought fired its own cloud of warheads out of the great, gaping ports on its bow edge. 

Hannibal
and
Khan
loosed their Dingoes for protection. 60 of the QF-111 drones peeled away from the bays of the two UN ships and charged for the incoming alien warheads, digging in as hard as they could to get inside effective gun-range where the flying bombs couldn't dodge their shells. 

The warspite torpedoes and the alien warheads corkscrewed and evaded each other as they passed and then barreled on towards their targets.

As the swarm of warheads came for the UN ships, the Dingoes chased them down, firing until the space in front of
Hannibal
and
Khan
was stitched solid with 140mm shells and the brief and flaring blossoms where alien bombs cooked off. 

The dreadnought let the warspite torpedoes come. They detonated amidships on both sides of the gargantuan and seconds later, while the plasma blooms were still fading from its entirely unbreached hull, the alien fired all of its tower guns on
Hannibal
. The ghostly rays from the alien particle beams stabbed out and lanced, firing in long, bright, three-second searchlight streams. Fifty particle beams bored into
Hannibal's
armor. The streams of atomic nuclei impacted and ripped the gaping wounds they made open so wide that
Hannibal
looked like she'd been raked up and down her teardrop hull by 300-meter bear claws. She bled atmo and ice and debris and crewmen out her clearly mortal wounds.  

Khan
fired a salvo from her railguns. Five sabot impacted the dreadnought with tight grouping, and a whole section of alien hull splashed sparks and glowed like it had turned molten for a moment, but no gasses vented from its wound.  

Hannibal
never recovered from the dreadnought's alpha-strike. The Dingo fighter drones did what they could to protect her, but when the alien warheads they couldn't catch reached her, none of
Hannibal's
defensive lasers had power. Her defensive cannon were somehow still on-line and they spat a curtain of burning flak that connected with five of the alien warheads, but seven hit
Hannibal's
bow and midships. Her armor vaped away in the first few flashes. When they could see her again, there was only a mangled and melted frame past
Hannibal's
midsection. The rest of her was bent and twisted with shock – broken and venting from all sides, all decks. 

Hannibal's
broken hull pitched forward and tumbled slowly as
Khan's
defensive batteries fired a furious hail. Only 3 of the alien warheads made it past and detonated against her flanks. They struck her near the engines.
Khan
lurched and shuddered, and her main engines went out. With only maneuvering thrusters to move her, the battleship tried to hide behind its burning twin.  

Khan
put what was left of
Hannibal
between her and the alien dreadnought's particle streams and on the way, she let loose another grouped volley from her railguns. The sabot all landed together within meters. It was commendable marksmanship from the gun crews and they'd all get post-humus medals, but even their concentrated fire didn't punch through that hull. 

The dreadnought paused then. It let
Khan
take one more shot at it, one more volley with railguns and warspite torpedoes and everything she had just to show how it could shrug off
Khan's
worst. Then, wearing the blooming spots of molten metal from the impotent attack like flowers on its lapel, the dreadnought speared the battleship two-dozen times and left her drifting, tumbling, and venting gas out the holes it drilled through her.  

The QF-111 Dingoes turned their autocannon on the alien dreadnought, gnats against an armored mountain. They flew straight at it and strafed it. Squidy snuffed them out ten at a time with small-bore streams that cut the Dingoes up, and they cooked off quick or impacted on the impenetrable hull in pieces.

Hannibal
bled molten metal out all her wounds. Her reactors melted down slow and there were no survivors in that hell, but
Khan
died differently. The beams ran her through instead of ripping her. There would be survivors.  

Ram could only imagine the terror of looking out the porthole of disabled
Khan
as the Squidies' dreadnought approached slowly and matched the course and speed of the ship's helpless, spinning drift. He sometimes had nightmares after that of looking out at the stars and seeing that 500-meter skull, pock-marked with blast craters, sailing towards his own ship as
Hardway
drifted helpless, dead in the dark. He'd dream that the Squidies' dreadnought would hold position and sail alongside them and then, as men and women screamed over the din, it would cut them up with the particle beams, slicing ragged edged wounds across wounds until every compartment was breached and laid bare and open to the cold of space – until bodies and halves of bodies floated free in the black. That's what it did to UNS
Khan.
 

Chapter Thirteen

As the alien Dreadnought savaged the Staas Company shipyards,
Hardway
could have made a break for it, but from the way Cozen sat high in the captain's chair and peered into the AT controller's tactical projection, Ram knew they weren't going home yet.  

Nobody held out any hope for
Hannibal's
crew, but
Khan
hadn't died the same way. Biko was the first to say it. "There's survivors from
Khan
. I know there are. We've still got thirteen junks to use for search and rescue operations." 

"
Khan's
debris cloud hasn't drifted that far," Dana said. "It's still pretty close to the site of the battle and that's practically within effective weapons range. That alien battleship could almost hit us without leaving orbit." 

"I'm feeling lucky," Cozen said. "What about you, Mr. Devlin?"

"I'm feeling very lucky, Mr. Cozen. But I think we should make this fast."

Hardway
turned to run parallel to
Khan's
debris cloud and seeing it out the window of
Hardway's
bridge was downright chilling. A ship is a body, a vessel, a thing that holds life.
Khan's
debris field was a display of that body dismembered, that life negated by slicing and dicing until mince was all that was left.  

The debris field was thicker than it looked on radar or LiDAR. Some pieces of
Khan
that drifted next to them had been cut down to just bits of bulkhead, but others were large cross-sections, fragments of several decks that looked practically normal except for some charring and their twisted, melted edges and the fact they were open to space. They looked like cutaway dioramas you'd see in a museum with all the consoles still in place and safety-sealed hatches that led to nothing but vacuum on the other side of the bulkhead.  

"Send in the SAR junks, Mr. Biko," Cozen ordered. "And remind them they're not getting paid by the hour."

Bergano said that
Hardway
heard transmissions on a dozen channels or more. "I've got lots of suit radio chatter. There's definitely some live ones out there, but I can't pin down transmission locations or transponders because of residual radiation from all the warheads and the breached reactor. How the hell are we going to find the survivors?" 

"Can LiDAR pick up their suit lights?" Dana asked.

Bergano let their voices play over comms. Their static-fuzzed cries called for
Hardway
by name. "It's going to take us too damn long to find them all with eyeballs." 

"Contact! Closing fast!"

"What? Where?" Ram almost didn't believe it, but there it was. It blinked red in front of Biko on the AT controller display. It looked like a piece of
Khan
was coming to ram
Hardway
. 

"Closing from 031 degrees. Two o'clock low. Slaloming through the debris. It's so fast!"

By the time Ram got to the bridge's starboard side window to see what was coming up from below and off the starboard bow, it was almost on them. It cut high-g turns around a big piece of
Khan's
showers and then around a thick hull section before it flew down
Hardway
's battered length. Ram recognized it as it buzzed the launch bays and then passed the tower. "It's one of the QF-111s from the battle," Cozen said. "A surviving drone." 

"No IFF. Malfunctioning transponder maybe," Biko said.

"Probably belonged to
Khan
." Bergano said. "Came home after the fight." 

The drone flew all the way to the stern and then flew up the port side and circled
Hardway
's tower twice before coming to a complete stop in front of the bridge. It was kind enough not to point the guns at them. Cozen said, "Open bay 2 for it. Let's see what it does." But then it used maneuvering thrusters to rotate slowly in front of them and point its nose at the debris field. It did it again before spinning a third time to point at
Khan's
remains. 

"I don't think it wants to land." Ram stepped to the windows of the bridge and waved his arms at it. It was thirty meters away on the other side of a meter-thick diamond-pane window stronger than the hull, but when the Dingo pulsed its maneuvering jets and turned to face him so Ram was looking down its cannon-barrels, he regretted getting its attention. The drone watched him through a dozen tiny, spider's eyes he now saw glinting, spread out on the curved front of the hull between the maneuvering jets and guns. Below it, bay doors opened, and the junks
Katmandu
and
Elixir
launched vertical out the topside bays along with
Mohegan.
 

Cozen said, "You've never had a dog, have you, Commander Devlin. It's pointing, can't you tell?"

The fighter drone turned and pulsed its engines and flew into the wreckage slowly enough to be followed. "Biko..," he said.

"Got it." Biko thumbed comms to his pilots. "
Hardway
AT to all SAR junks, we've got a single Dingo 111 drone out here. Keep eyes on him to find
Khan's
survivors." 

Cozen said, "Call down to Dr. Ibora and tell him he's going to have more casualties coming his way."

Hardway
's junks pulled almost a hundred men and women back from the vacuum. Some five-hundred more had been killed by the warheads or particle beams or burning storms of plasma. Bodies drifted along with the rest of the debris. As it happened,
Hardway
had all the time it needed to recover them because after the Squidies' revenge ship savaged the Staas Yards at Deimos, it bombarded the domes of the Martian poles and continued on towards Earth.  

UN Admiral Yantok's career-ending withdrawal of remaining forces from the path of the alien dreadnought saved what was left of the UN's fleet, but the battleship advanced unopposed. It bombarded the H3 extraction facilities on the moon's far side, blasted its way through the satellite defense network, and steamed into low earth orbit. It hung a human skull in the pale blue sky for an hour before breaking orbit and making for the outer system.  

At an apparently unremarkable point in space just beyond the orbit of Saturn, a few million kilometers above the ecliptic, the line of brilliant, rosy plasma the alien dreadnought spit out its engines went dark. It stabbed out at empty space with three different particle streams, and the three streams of fast-moving, high-energy nuclei collided in front of it. The release of energy at the intersection of the streams was so great that it blinded nearby arrays for the next seconds. When they could see again, they were stunned to witness the beams still firing and even more stunned at how the radius of the reaction at their intersection grew brighter and hotter and blossomed and bloomed hellish until all at once, it ceased to grow, no matter how much more energy they threw at it. Then, it looked as if the ball of hellfire they'd made fell into a hole at its center, leaving only a thin, spherical membrane across which never-before seen exotic particles danced in spiral arabesques. Radar and LiDAR and IR couldn't make sense of it. It was as if the Squidies had ripped a hole in space.