Free War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway by A.D. Bloom

Hardway , Doc Ibora made one up. The exosuits would stand 7500 degrees, so the Moriah survivors flash-bathed themselves and their dead at 3500 for half a second using zero-pressure exhaust from a mining junk's nacelles. Ram knew that cold plasma bath wasn't hot enough to be sure. He hoped the aliens' body chemistry was simply too different from humans' to pass diseases or bacterial infections between the two species. 
    On the flight up from the surface, the longboat pilots said Captain Horan was already preparing Hardway to run for cover. That's when Cozen whispered in Biko's ear and then, Biko slipped away to the reactor compartment. Ram saw him talking to someone in his helmet on a private channel. 
    Harry Cozen's ship, Arbitrage, arrived at Moriah with Hardway , of course. She kept station off the carrier's starboard side. When the longboat made a flyby coming into the launch bays, Ram saw every face on both ships glued to a porthole. They weren't watching the longboat and they weren't watching the knuckledragger crews that brought crippled Gold Coast back into the barn. Every eyeball was on the captured alien ship.   
    As Arbitrage's recovery vehicles and crewmen brought it up from Moriah and maneuvered it into her gaping salvage bay, all the miners and pilots and redsuit maintenance crews, all the engineers and cooks on Hardway crowded and pushed their noses against the transparent diamond-pane portholes to gawk at the first ship ever seen that hadn't been built by human hands. Every mind behind every pair of eyes on Hardway now apprehended for true how Humanity was not alone. 
    Ram wondered if the crewmen watching that alien ship saw the sections like exhaust ports on one edge of the 'wing' like he did. The engineers would have to be blind to miss the bulge on the side of the 'tower' section of the alien hull that looked as if it matched the geometry of a field coil for an inertial negation system. It was smaller, no doubt more advanced and more efficient, but it was the same shape.
    Maybe the eyeballs watching from Hardway saw other commonalities in design between the alien craft and ours. Maybe they were even imagining commonalities between us and the Squidies. But that would change. If that's what Hardway 's crew were thinking about now, then it would change when they saw the bodies. 
    Cozen made sure Hardway's crew saw their dead just like he made sure they saw the alien ship. The longboat that picked up Gold Coast's crew docked in the most forward section of the launch bay module. That meant they had to carry the bodies aft, past all the hundreds waiting in the spine with thousands of questions about the alien ship and what had happened on this uncharted rock.  
    The carrier's gravity was off when they landed. That meant reactor problems. Ram hoped the issues weren't real and that this was what Cozen had spoken to Biko about on the ride up before the union leader slipped away and called someone on Hardway using a secure comms channel. He hoped that this was all Asa Biko's doing. It was probably Chief Terrazzi who'd made it happen. If Captain Horan wanted to run, then he was out of luck because this ship wasn't going anywhere unless the reactor engineers said so. 
    In zero-gee, the Moriah survivors floated the dead down the narrow tube to where the forward launch bays met the spine. The open people-movers in the spine still worked. They could have rode the dead aft in the cars, but they didn't use them. The returning company officers and the crew of Gold Coast did what spacers used to do before big carriers had any artificial gravity – they shot the spine. The survivors and their dead pushed off and flew down the kilometer-long passage, accelerated and guided by hundreds of pairs of hands.  
    Anyone not on-duty was there waiting. As the returning crew of Gold Coast floated down the center of the spine, aft towards the tower module, all the men and women hanging all along the struts reached out and touched