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to not to get in the way of his people by giving orders and micromanaging when they were handling things just fine. Doing that was probably management's #1 failure. Ram had seen plenty of execs screw things up like that. It was usually because they were afraid that if things went well without their direct supervision, then it might imply to people without an understanding of leadership that their management hadn't been necessary.
    Just over halfway across the hundred-meter bay, Ram heard Hollis' voice ringing off the deck and bulkheads as he addressed a huddle of company marines and crewmen. "Plenty of you have fought Squidy McJangles here up close and personal." Hollis pointed up at a projection of an alien, a see-through Squidy and its anatomy, 3.5-m-tall in front of them. Even on a diagram, he still had trouble counting all those limbs above and below the main body mass. "If you ever shot a Squidy, you know this diagram here is shite." The image projected above the deck from a matchbox computer was from Staas Company Consulting and it was labeled ' ONE SHOT KILL-POINTS ON THE ALIEN ENEMY '. The illustration highlighted several 'organs' that could be found inside, through the Squidies' tough exosuits and under their leathery 'skin'. These organs had all been labeled with the word ' KILL '.
    "There are no one-shot kills on the alien enemy," Hollis said. "Not unless you blow half of it off. And if you think piercing their exosuits so that they lose atmo and decompress is gonna kill 'em fast, then you might get a real nasty surprise. On Moriah, I saw one get holed-through with an x-ray laser right here." He pointed to the middle of its elongated ribbon of a torso, to just above the swollen section with the orifice and ocular elements. "It took a wide-bore discharge from a Honma & Voss hand cannon right here... The beam left a 10cm hole in Squidy and punched through the bulkhead behind it. Two more holes like it, and that Squidy still had fight in it. Didn't go down. Not right off. First, it discharged every cap on its hand-maser and turned the woman who shot it into cinders. Lit her up in her suit."
    He's talking about Mickey, Ram thought. Just looking at the ghostly projection of that 3.5-meter-tall, alien monstrosity made Ram sick thinking about it.
    "No such thing as a one-shot-kill," Hollis said. "You shoot it and you keep shooting it until it's down and then you fucking shoot it again."
    The two Staas Guards that came in through the aft hatches were right on schedule. It was time to let the Lancers and the Hellcats out. Ram didn't enjoy having to confine them, but at least he had the Staas Guards to do it so the Lancers wouldn't hate the Hardway crewmen that got assigned the duty.
    He'd gone to a lot of trouble to make sure the Lancers and the Hellcats mixed. He knew they'd just end up in the cooler, but he thought when he put them face to face that they'd team up and rampage together . He'd put the Staas Guards on alert for a small riot and expected lots of bone fractures for Doc Ibora and the Medicals to fuse out because he'd assumed the Lancers and the Hellcats would be fighting as allies and terrorizing the crew, not bashing in each others' skulls.
    Ram was the XO and the XO was in charge of discipline, but where the F-151 pilots were concerned, he'd all but given up on bothering. They might not mind going back to prison now that they'd had a taste of war. The only threat he held over them was to put them up against a bulkhead and shoot them, but he needed them alive and in their cockpits and they all knew that.
    He understood all too well just what the war had asked of those pilots. He knew about the brain damage from the new pulse-pinch. So did they. They were fast-trained killers flying AI-assisted planes sent to swarm the Squidy aces with numbers. They'd become the grunts of this war, but their life-expectancy was shorter than any rifleman in history. The casualties those fighter pilots had seen in their squadrons