War of Alien Aggression 2 Kamikaze by A.D. Bloom

Author:A.D. Bloom
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

By the time Ram passed through the open airlock doors, most of the junks had already spilled their crews into the passageways. If there had been pressurized atmo to carry their cheers, then the steel bulkheads would have rung, vibrated and sung with them. Since there was only vacuum, the sound of victory roared through transducers in Ram's helmet. It was just one red bandit they'd captured, but taking one of them like this was like counting coup.

The crowd of pilots and gunners and redsuits on deck 3 moved like a single beast, like a river of laughing victory. As Ram and Dana and Biko and Lapuis got swept up and carried down the passageway towards the tube, Ram saw into Biko's helmet where concern twisted his face. His mind was already on the next battle.

"Reconfigure the junks for defensive gunnery!" Biko barked into the cheering on comms. He gave orders to Chief Lee next, but there was no reply. Then he shouted over local suit comms at the redsuits he saw around around him. Biko was acting like the Air Group Commander even if he said he didn't want the job.

The knuckledragger mechs set the red bandit down in the most forward bay, in #16. The rest of the starboard side bays on that module were already damaged. During the pounding Hardway had taken over the last week of hell, the bulkheads and doors had been blasted and torn by near-miss detonations. They'd been slammed with hyper-velocity plasma from the vaporized casings of alien fusion warheads. Most of the doors were already unserviceable, locked open. If that red bandit they brought home suddenly awoke and fired its engines and raked its particle stream across the bays, it wouldn't matter. If, god forbid, its alien reactor detonated like a warhead, then since it happened in the most forward bay, the damage to Hardway would be bad, but it wouldn't derail the plan to ram the blockade gun.

The most pressing task was making sure it was really dead. Hardway couldn't afford to wait to tear down the alien drone. It just wasn't safe to leave it whole. For all they knew, it was just playing dead.

Given the chance of something going wrong, Cozen ordered the crew off that deck of the forward launch bay module entirely. Everyone wanted a close up and personal look at one of the alien machines, but Harry Cozen insisted they only risk the people they had to. Chief Horcheese and her redsuits would be the ones to crack the drone open and make sure it never woke up.

Ram watched them on camera from a maintenance bay in the midships module, where the projectors had been set up to mirror what was happening in bay 16 with ghostly, three-dimensional images. Full scale projections of the ten-meter-long red bandit and the crewmen made it seem as if he were standing there with them, but they were all translucent, like phantoms, like they were already dead.

The captured alien

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