War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan by A.D. Bloom Read Free Book Online

course I was," he said from the command chair.
    "Don't get up." The suit draped her gracefully, but as she stepped to the side of the command chair, Ram still thought she moved like a bulldog. She didn't look at Cozen. Her eyes went to the tactical display hovering over the bridge, projected from the AT controller's console and the NAV.
    While Morrisey stepped to the side and lurked by a terminal near the starboard bulkhead, Matilda Witt raised her voice a few decibels and looked at each one of them as she spoke. "I'll be commanding from the deck of Hardway today. I'm here to make sure this engagement goes the way it's supposed to. I won every battle I fought behind the Sirius Line and I never had to put in to port for repairs. I couldn't, of course. So I baselined a methodology for assaulting small to medium-sized alien warships using squadrons of Staas Company F-151 fighters as the sole means of delivering destruction to the enemy. This has the obvious advantage of sparing larger ships like Hardway damage that has proven costly in lives, downtime, materials and man-hours required for repair."
    Those are the costs of battle, Ram thought. She can't make them go away. She just transferred them from the largest ships to the smallest ones.
    "And while destruction of enemy materiel no doubt contributes to the war-effort," she said, "the real gains that will propel humanity to victory are to be made in the acquisition of alien technologies. That is why we are here. Today, we will board and seize another alien vessel."
    Witt glanced over her shoulder to her aide, and he nodded. She punched at the buttons on the arm of the command chair where Cozen sat. "Excuse me, Harry." He moved his arm but still didn't get up. When she'd given herself a voice on the battlegroup's general comms, she thumbed the button and said, "All vessels, this is Matilda Witt. Begin the operation, please."
    Taipan 's carriers, Witt's command ship, Hardway, and the two breaching ships steamed together to the point on the far side of the Groomsbridge system where Dr. Noondie's calculations and stolen alien charts said they could breach space and open a transit to Pollux.
    From the windows of Hardway' s bridge, Ram had a fine view of the breaching ship Malibu where she'd moved to hold station 2Ks out over the starboard bow. Lightning danced up and down the spokes of her fragile, wonder-wheel frame as her capacitors came to charge. "This is Malibu . Discharge is imminent. All ships, standby." Fifteen seconds later, using technology stolen from the enemy, she fired crude, converging particle streams from five emitters. They crossed precisely over the charted location of the transit, and the continual release of energy from the colliding nuclei moving near lightspeed tore an already weakened spatial fabric. Over the next seconds, Malibu ripped a kilometer-wide hole in regular space and opened the interstellar passage.
    Hardway sailed into the burning breach first. Then, the box carriers. Then, Taipan and the breaching ships followed the others through the plasma-covered membrane and into the transit for the roughly seven-minute, faster-than-light trip from Groomsbridge 1618 to Pollux.
    *****
    Hardway entered the Pollux system trailing fire – plasma and exotics picked up off the mouth of the breach. Matilda Witt watched the last of it lick at the diamond-pane windows of Hardway's bridge and then stepped forward to squint out into enemy space as if she could find the Squidies with her naked eyes.
    She'd already found an appropriate target to try her new methodology on – armed, but not to the teeth – armored, but not a dreadnought – and, most importantly, alone. It could be attacked and boarded before its calls for help were heard.
    Matilda Witt leaned into the comms button on the arm of Cozen's command chair. "Commander Dahl," she said, "you have your orders. Execute them."
    As Hardway continued forward, Ram glanced out the rear windows of the bridge. Beyond