War of Alien Aggression 2 Kamikaze Read Online Free

enough speed pushing off struts along the way that if he hadn't called out for a hand, then he'd have shot right by. "Catch," he called out on the local comms suit channel. The damage control team standing by under the Hab module's tube were perched on struts, inverted above him. "G'day, Mr. Devlin," one said as he caught hold of Ram's extended hands and swung him up the tube's mouth.
    Six weeks ago, before the war started, if a company officer had called out like that, then the crewmen would have feigned butterfingers and let him sail right past and had a good laugh about it.
    The midships mess was two decks up the tube, through a pair of hatches and a closet-sized interspace now functioning as an airlock. It was in a compartment without any external bulkheads and with Hardway having been under constant attack for six days, that meant it was one of the few places on the carrier where they hadn't blown out the atmo. Ram could take off his helmet and eat and drink and maybe even get a crack at using the head. He could even change suit-liners if they had any left. They wouldn't.  
    When Hardway was a mining carrier, the miners and pilots had practically lived in their exosuits. Company officers like Ram hadn't. He could fight just fine in one now. The gesture-based interface and the projections in his helmet's visor let him command systems and even manage elements of Hardway 's defense with ease, maybe even better than when he wore a regular flight suit and used a terminal for interface. It was the smell he still wasn't used to. The suit liners were synthetics, but technically, they were alive and Ram swore he could smell them. After six days, his own smell and the weird smell of the liner had mixed into something he wanted to escape, but couldn't. 
    The midships mess was the smallest mess and Ram didn't see many people there – some redsuits, some reactor engineers, and a pair of warrant officers along with one of the new gun crews. They sat at the tables and benches that had been bolted to the deck, eating what the cooks had been able to manage. The gravity hadn't been down for that long this time, but the boxes of pork and chicken and burger-filled buns the cooks had piled up on the tables had already got knocked into the air. They floated around the mess in a thick constellation.
    The buzzing of the closest autocannon turrets came through the bulkheads. In the brief blackness as he blinked, his mind's eye saw them stitching the sky in front of incoming alien bombs. Then, a rumble passed through the air in there like thunder. In the pressurized atmo, Ram could actually hear the detonations that shook the carrier. Save the sound of his own bones rattling from shock waves coming up through the deck, over the last six days, Ram had only briefly heard the actual sounds of battle.
    He ate mindlessly and pretended to study a chart on his matchbox computer while he mostly just blinked at it. Seconds after he got his helmet on and went back through the two hatches and back into the tube, the tone of the radio chatter on bridge comms changed to alarm. As he swung the second hatch shut, the hum of the closest defensive guns picked up again and Ram heard Bergano over the ship-wide channel advise, "Vampire inbound. Brace for close det." The wheel on the hatch vibrated Ram's hand with the auto-cannons six decks up, outside the hull. They desperately spat shells to stop the flying warhead.
    He turned and made eye contact with a crewman coming up the tube slow. In nearly the same instant, the Squidy warhead detonated and breached the hull. He saw the first licks of the firestorm above her only an infinitesimal moment before a river of plasma surged down the tube. It was so bright, so brilliant that even before it swept her away, the radiance seemed to burn the edges off her.
    The firestorm blew him back into the hatch and blasted her down to the spine. It shot out to the bow and stern for hundreds of yards. It burned and blasted