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

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