War of Alien Aggression 5 Cozen's War

  Cozen's War

  A.D. Bloom

  © 2014

  Many thanks to Tom Robidoux for his editorial input.

  Thanks to 'Blue Scar' D. for his consulting role.

  Thank you to Jimmy Robidoux and the 182nd Airborne.

  Cover images and custom models by Whayler.

  The author would like to express his appreciation to the New England Air Museum, USS Nautilus (SSN-571), and USS Massachusetts (BB-59), F-15.net, /r/WarshipPorn and her sister subreddit, /r/Warships.

  Cozen's War

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  2166

  The Squidies came and attacked without warning. Two years later, Humanity's sacrifices and martial brilliance have won major victories against the alien aggressors. Now, the fight is in the Squidies home system. Now, comes the final drive across Beta Draconis to the Squidies' homeworld moon.

  Chapter One

  Dying alien appendages curled up around their boots as Colletier began to set the breaching charge on the wall of the nest. "Mr. Devlin... How much farther until the prisoners?"

  "Twenty-two meters. This should be the last wall we have to breach."

  The alien installation where the Squidies took the prisoners had been dug under the surface of an outer planet’s moon. The curving walls of every compartment were covered in a foot of something like hard wax with a kind of metal inside it. The whole structure was an endless series of flattened, ovoid chambers like ants made. Only a boneless Squidy could fit through most of the doors here, but the company marines Ram Devlin brought were well-practiced at making new doors where they needed them.

  This was a hand-picked squad. He couldn't ask for any better, but blowing their way 300 meters into an alien installation, rescuing the prisoners from the captured Atocha, and exfiltrating them wasn't a mission he thought he'd be assigned.

  "Still glad to stretch your legs and get off the ship's bridge, Ram?" Lucy Elan crouched next to him with her rifle leveled at the smoking hole they'd blown to enter that chamber.

  "I go where Harry Cozen sends me."

  "Hardway XO leads mission to rescue Atocha prisoners. It’s a good headline," she said, swapping out her MA-48’s boxy clip. "He's trying to make you look like a hero, I think. For after the war."

  Detonations rumbled up through the floor. Across the chamber, Choto loosed a trio of railgun rounds through the melted and blasted threshold and down the narrow passage outside. "They tripped the beet mines we left. Still got the cutters and claymores." Another set of detonations rocked the nest. "Claymores," he said. In the alien atmo the mines had an unexpected, high-end ring to their detonation that vibrated its way right through their helmets.

  "How much longer with that breaching charge?"

  "We’ll have your door for you in just a moment, Mr. Devlin," Colletier said as he finished drawing the shape of it by mashing the explosive into a groove he'd dug in the curving, waxy wall.

  A piece of a Squidy, that is to say, an almost intact trio of arms began to wind itself around Ram's ankle like some blind mass of animal vines. He burned it with the MA-48's top barrel laser until it smoked and shriveled.

  "Thirty seconds to det," Colletier said. "Everyone get clear!"

  "Squidies got brains all over them, Mr. Devlin," Mitty said as he crouched down next to Ram. "That’s my theory." Mitty prodded a squirming piece of one with his MA-48’s bottom barrel. The grenades had torn the Squidies in this chamber to shreds. "See…Squidy got brains everywhere on his body. Got a little brain in every one of those ten arms. Makes him hard to kill. Brains in every limb, not just in their heads."

  "They got no heads," Colletier insisted.

  "They do too got heads." Mitty pointed to a charred, alien corpse. He gestured at the main body mass, at the part halfway between the two, symmetrical bundles of appendages at either end. In the middle there was a raised lump with multiple ocular elements, oral appendages, and a slack-mouthed orifice that had screamed as it burned. "What do you call that, right there?"

  "I call it a bullseye, Squidy-lover. The hell you call it?"

  Colletier's breaching charge shook the chamber and filled it with smoke. Only a second later, Ram, Lucy, and the company marines stormed through the molten-edged hole, and on the other side of the smoke there was nothing. The new chamber appeared empty.

  "Where are they?"

  "Where are the prisoners?"

  It appeared empty at first, but then, when he looked down, he saw the floor was wet and thick with ragged-edged hunks of red meat and bone, all sliced up with a micro-bore particle stream.

  The atmo in that room seemed to dim the beams from Colletier’s exosuit as he panned them over the bloody mince underfoot. "This is where you said they kept the prisoners. Where are the prisoners?"

  *****

  Gunnery junks from Hardway’s air group pounded the alien defenders to cover the extraction and flew them out over the detonating nukes. Inside Gold Coast’s belly, once he got his helmet off, Ram discovered the sulfur stink of the Squidies' nest was still on his exosuit. It burned his nostrils and made the muscles under his face twitch.

  "Forgot about that part didn’t you," Lucy said. "When we land, we’ll get the pilots to dump some plasma out of the nacelles and give ourselves a nice bath."

  "You couldn’t take that plasma bath before you came aboard?" The junk’s crew chief had his exosuit sealed and his helmet on just to avoid the stench.

  Across the relatively small personnel compartment in the gunnery junk, the faces hung slack. Out of focus eyes leaned to one side or another. Nobody had been in more knife fights with the Squidies that Lucy and her company marines. They’d seen it all, but what they’d seen today shook them.

  "The hell the Squidies have to cut up all the bodies for?" Colletier still couldn't accept it.

  "The dismemberment… they like to negate things," Choto said. "Like when we left that graffiti on Humpback 26 and they cut the whole rock up in pieces."

  Mitty snorted. "Don’t care why Squidy McJangles does what he does. He ain’t gonna be doing it for much longer. We’ll finish ‘em off now. We’re finally in their home system and once we get to that homeworld moon of theirs we’re gonna kill off the whole sulfur stinking species."

  Choto said, "Lot of nests on that moon. All those Squidies ain’t about to let us sail up and drop warspites on their heads. We been fighting here for two months and so far, we still haven't made it to the aliens' homeworld moon. They got just enough ships to hold us off. What we got here is a stalemate."

  "Screw that," Mitty said. "Squidy’s days are numbered."

  Ram didn’t say what he was thinking...what he knew Lucy Elan was thinking when she met his eye. They're both right. The Squidies' days are numbered, but finishing them off is going to cost lives. And lots of them.

  He followed her up the tube to the junk’s cockpit. Pardue and Ernst smelled them coming. "Warn us on local comms or shout up or something so we can put our helmets on."

  "Good god, Mr. Devlin. I wish we’d had time to give you two a bath." Pardue didn’t turn around. She kept her attention
focused on the starry black on the other side of the canopy. Her co-pilot Ernst sat next to her and pointed across the Squidies home system to the location of the combined Privateer and UNS fleet. Fat, Beta Draconis bathed the system in a rich IR glow. It looked blood red to a human eye.

  "Gold Coast, this is Hardway AT,"

  "Let me tell them," Ram said. "Hardway AT, this is Devlin. Black Sail. Say again: Black Sail."

  "Roger, Gold Coast." Behind each transmission from Hardway he heard the sound of alien jamming strong enough they needed comms relays to overpower it. Usually the Squidies’ jamming sounded like 10,000 cicadas warbling on comms, but this time, it was different. It was an alien propaganda broadcast in spoken English and after the communication with Hardway was over, Ernst let the sound of it fill the cockpit. "....-f alien aggression is a lie."

  The flat, monotone of the voice trembled in a way that made Ram think all feeling had been tortured out of it. "Is that even a real voice?" said Lucy.

  "When did this start?"

  "When you were down there under the surface," Pardue said. "Hold on, it loops."

  The voice was back in moments, raspy and bruised. "My name is Chief Jericho Bilt of the Staas Company Privateers AT65 886 912. I am a war criminal, but I have not been mistreated."

  Ram said. "Turn that crap off." Ernst didn’t. He turned it up.

  "Before this war started, the aliens offered Earth a peace treaty. Harry Cozen attacked them." It sounded like Bilt spoke through grit teeth now, like he didn't believe it. "We… We attacked the Squidies first. The war of alien aggression is a lie."

  Ernst turned in his seat to look up at Ram. Pardue did too. Ram said, "The hell you both looking at me for?" but he knew why. He was on Moriah with Harry Cozen for that first engagement of the war.

  Those two pilots weren’t the only ones who were going to have questions. Best to get the answers out there. "Something you need to ask me about, Pardue? Go ahead and speak freely." She hesitated. He said, "I was on Moriah with Harry Cozen on the first day of the war. I was there. I can tell you for sure what happened. There was no treaty offered. They attacked us. It's that simple."

  "So it's not true what he said? I mean it's not true what the Squidies made that Chief say about Harry Cozen starting the war?" Ernst didn't sound like he wanted to believe it.

  "Think about what you're saying. You're talking about Harry Cozen, the man who sits in Hardway’s chair. He’s a senior Staas Company VP and when the UN brass have a measuring contest, he swings the rank of a 3-star Admiral. Harry Cozen built Staas Company's military contracting wing. He's been behind nearly every major victory in this conflict. Without him, we’d have lost this war by now. Think about what you’re saying real hard, Ernie, and then don't ever fucking say it again. They attacked us first. Get it straight. Squidy came to our system and he attacked us first."

  Chapter Two

  The Lancers' flight of Sky Jack 223s matched Jordo's maneuvers and turned like one plane, maneuvering on directed thrust from their four nacelles. Seen from the front, the nose mounted cannon barrels, the rounded hull, and the identical and massive IF119 thruster nacelles at the ends of their four arms made the Sky Jacks looked like grinning, pirate skulls and crossbones jetting fire from their tips.

  The attack carrier’s launch bays and gun batteries blurred across his cockpit canopy on his port side. Hardway was a kilometer long from bow to stern, but at the speed he was going, the ship was gone in a fraction of a heartbeat, replaced by flashes of UN capital ships and destroyers, fat-hulled haulers and breaching ships...all the vessels it took to get them here and keep them supplied and in the fight. You could fly down the battle lines here for 100 million Ks before reaching their end.

  Squidy wasn’t rolling over and giving up his home system. The aliens had deployed every remaining ship to meet the invasion fleet. Now, even though the Earth forces were firmly entrenched, neither side had a clear advantage. The two armadas skirmished and waited for the enemy to make the first mistake.

  The redsuits in the bays said it would be over in another two months, but after fighting in this system for that long, they hadn’t gotten any closer to the Squidies' homeworld moon than here, just inside the 6th planet's orbit, where the invasion battlegroup now held station.

  Below the Lancers, torpedo junks from Hardway and two other Privateer carriers veered away as burning, 600-meter, tusk-shaped alien cruisers broke up and fell like shattered teeth. The alien carrier that had come with them to probe the invasion fleet now drifted with dark engines and silent guns. No more searchlight particle beams waved from its towers and its remaining fighters had abandoned it.

  "Those red bandits they launched are angling for the fleet," Jordo said over comms. "Looks like they’re going to try for one of the breaching ships maybe."

  "An even dozen," Paladin said. "Four fights of 3."

  Through his helmet visor and the frosty canopy, a constellation of 17 pale blue stars ripping across the black suddenly turned together to intercept the bandits. His flight helmet labeled them the 55th, the Hellcats.

  "Lancer, 1-1, you see what I see?" Dirty’s voice caressed the ear like velvet, but he knew in the cockpit she was clenching those little, rock-hard fists of hers just thinking about the 55th getting there first.

  "Lancers, on me." When Jordo laid on the thrust and sent most of the fighter’s power to the engines in the rear, the inertial gees pushed him into his flight couch. The kilometer-long carriers and gun-studded capital ships of the invasion battlegroup turned to streaks, but the lines of the other four Sky Jacks in his squadron stayed so crisp and sharp as to sting the eye.

  "Lay it out, baby," Dirty said. "That’s right. Just like that." Until the last two months of combat, the Hellcats had the superior planes. They’d been the ones that got the newest inertial negation systems so they could accelerate their F-151s faster, turn harder, and take more inertial gees than the Lancers could. Now that the Lancers had traded their Bitzers for the new Sky Jack F-223s, it was the Hellcats' turn to eat dust.

  "Hellcat 1-1, this is Lancer 1-1, we’ll be sure to leave you a few kills so the redsuits don’t make fun of you."

  The Hellcat squadron leader wouldn’t let him get away with that. "Lancer, 1-1," Pooch said, "You got any money to back up that mouth? ‘Cause I got a fistful of 1000 Ameros and it says man for man, we bag more bandits than you."

  It only took a quick glance at the projection in the visor of his flight helmet to see the Lancers would reach the bandits first. "Roger that, Hellcat 1-1. Easy money," he said. "Thanks for playing."

  As the Lancers closed range, Jordo zoomed in with his flight helmet and made out the thrusters jutting from the alien fighters like spines and the deep red, windowless hulls that hid the alien aces inside. They were all curled up and folded over themselves in wet cockpits no bigger than garbage cans. He visualized the shells from his fighter’s six cannon burrowing in through the armor to blow them apart.

  His mind embraced the vision of what it wanted so strongly that he was lost in a reverie of destruction for the first half-second that Asa Biko spoke on comms. Hardway's Air Group Commander said, "Lancer, 1-1, this is Hardway AT, break current intercept and come to new vector. Sending it to you now." The arrow projected in his visor pointed away from the approaching bandits and towards the other side of the fleet. "A friendly ship is approaching from the Denebola transit. She’s got a Squidy problem for you to sort. Come to new vectors and acknowledge."

  Biko was pulling them off the incoming alien fighters and there was nothing he could do about it. The Lancers were going to owe the Hellcats some money. Out across the black, the burning pinpricks of the Hellcats’ hot exhaust spiraled on their way to engage the enemy like they were doing victory rolls. Hellcat 1-1 opened the line to Lancer 1-1 just long enough for Jordo to hear her laughter.

  Pounding the canopy didn’t help, but he did it anyway. "Dammit!" He thumbed comms to Hardway, "Acknowledged, Hardway. Lancer 1-1 says wilco. Will comply." r />
  Paladin stayed on his 4 o'clock, a half-second back. Holdout and Gush would be sixty degrees off Paladin’s tail just a couple of seconds behind him. Dirty would be flying the wildcard slot, watching their collective backs.

  "There’s our hostile at 317, 026. Looks more like a flying bomb than a ship," Paladin was right. It was about 10 meters, the size of an alien fighter, but stripped of most of the spikes that radiated outward from the hull. "Fast as hell."

  "Not trying to evade yet. It’s making for the friendly 60,000Ks out."

  "Right. Stay tight. Squidy is coming in so hot, we’re only going to get one shot at this. Me and Paladin will box him. Holdup and Gush, you tighten the net. Dirty gets to dust ‘em."

  It knew the range of a privateer cannon, and it went evasive once they got close, using its superior inertial negation system to out turn and out accelerate even the Sky Jacks. The Lancers’ range-det shells took away its advantage, blowing up in its path and hurling shock and shell and hyper-velocity shrapnel that forced it to change course again and again until it could only find one, single path to fly that wasn’t filled with flying metal.

  "This is from the heart, you Squidy piece of shit." Dirty let fly a salvo of shells that streaked into the alien craft’s port side, sparking bright. Jordo expected the armor piercing rounds to burrow deep and detonate inside, but the impacts only knocked the alien out of its flight path for a moment and then, it was back on collision course with the approaching friendly.

  "Fuck! It’s got some armor!" Jordo and Paladin had time to loose one more burst, but then, the intruder was out of effective range. They were so far away that it now dodged their shells with insulting ease.

  The Squidy craft closed on the approaching Privateer ship. It never fired. Jordo thought it had to be an armored bomb of some kind. And it had just got through.

  The approaching ship's transponder didn't giver her name. "Vampire, Vampire, approaching Privateer ship, you have an inbound enemy warhead! It got past us." He accelerated as hard as he could and fired and fired, but his shells just couldn’t catch up with the alien. It was too fast.