War of Alien Aggression 5 Cozen's War Read online

  The approaching Privateer was only 217 meters. After a few more seconds of closing on it, every single one of the Lancers knew what ship it was. Even without using their flight helmets to zoom in they could discern the familiar, fat, armored teardrop shape, the patch-welded armor, the (undersized) railgun, and the single, massive launch bay. There was no mistaking it. This was the first ship the Lancers ever flew off. It was Arbitrage.

  He knew for a fact that ship didn’t have enough defensive batteries to guarantee catching the inbound alien bomb. He expected Arbitrage to be hit in less than ten seconds. A screen of blossoming fire went up from her auto-turrets, but he didn’t think it would be enough.

  In the last seconds before impact, it looked like a geyser of 140mm shells came out of Arbitrage's launch bay and met the Squidy head on. Those shells had all the extra energy they needed to burrow through the alien bomb's reinforced bow armor. Those shells didn’t come from any defensive battery. Their point of origin got closer to the alien as it came. It was a Sky Jack 223 and it looked like it was trying to ram the Squidy. It was Burn. Jordo knew she scored good hits because the alien’s damaged power plant cooked off quick like a little fusion bomb and turned it into a glowing cloud of gas and hypervelocity debris.

  Burn’s Sky Jack emerged from the far side of that cloud trailing burning plasma off its four, swept back nacelles and glowing hull. "Now, THAT is a bloody kill!" She whooped on comms.

  Burn flew solo missions now...deep recon for Harry Cozen. She hadn't been aboard Hardway for a week.

  Jordo had never actually seen the bridge of Arbitrage in his time flying off her or even known the name of the man or woman who sat in the command chair. That ship was one big secret. He’s spent weeks training there, but all he and the Lancers ever saw of that ship was the massive launch bay that ran most of her length. That and the lower decks, down below, up against the inner hull where they’d welded belt-iron plates to the bulkheads and called them bunks for a bunch of transfers from Bailey prison destined to become fighter pilots. Only five left now.

  The only thing he’d ever known about Arbitrage for sure was who owned her. She was Harry Cozen’s ship. The day he’d learned that ship’s one, fundamental secret, it explained all others.

  "Arbitrage, this is Lancer 1-2," Paladin said. "Welcome to the party."

  The ship steamed across Jordo’s canopy without any response, with nothing on the comms channel but intermittent jamming and the faint whisper of alien propaganda in his ear. "This is Chief Jericho Bilt. I am a war criminal, but I have not been mistreated. The war of alien aggression is a lie."

  Six hours later, Jordo watched the rest of the Lancers sleep in Hardway's makeshift brig. Dirty still clenched her fists, but not as bad after a fight. They all slept better on the prison bunks the redsuits had welded to the bulkheads.

  It had been a while since the Lancers gave anyone a reason to put them in there, but the railgunners in the Pit had been asking for it. They were stupid enough to insist on giving the Lancers odds for being outnumbered. It felt good to punish them for that. It paid well, too. Damn good thing, he thought. Officers or not, we’re still convicts and it’s not like we’re salaried.

  He heard the metal on metal before the hatch opened. Burn was standing there when it did. She sent the Staas Guards away before she stepped inside smiling like she was there to rescue them. Two steps inside the compartment and she looked confused before her face twisted up. "Smells like a pig farm in here."

  "This brig is really an ordnance storage locker," Jordo said through the bars. "No ventilation. And Paladin likes the bean-filled buns that Cookie served for lunch." Burn punched in her company codes, and they all heard the metal strike the plate when the lock sprung and the cell door opened. "Get up, Lancers!" Jordo barked. "Time to fly."

  They moved like it hurt. "Get to Doc Ibora for a patch job," she told them. "You just volunteered for the most important mission of the war."

  "What is it?"

  "Can't tell you."

  "She’s talking that spooky shit again," Gusher said.

  "My pilots have a right to know."

  "I can’t answer any questions at this time," Burn said. "But this mission that’s coming up. I’m going with you on this one." The Lancers barely nodded as they shuffled out the cell past her, probing themselves for fractures and favoring limbs. They stepped out the hatch into the bright lights of Maintenance Bay 2 and left Jordo standing in the doorway of the cell in front of Burn.

  She said, "They didn’t look like they liked the idea of having me along so much."

  "Can’t say I do either," Jordo said. "You always volunteer for the missions that aren’t supposed to come back. Hell, I just saw you try to get your ass dusted. Isn’t the first time, either."

  "I pulled some serious hero shit to save Arbitrage today."

  "That’s not what you were expecting to happen. You got lucky. You didn’t think you’d penetrate that armor with your cannon. You thought you’d ram that Squidy bomb. That’s what you were trying to do. If we’d ever tried anything like that, you’d have shot us yourself."

  "Yeah, well...if I get myself killed, I’ll have plenty of company," she said.

  "The fuck’s that mean?"

  "I trained how many combat pilots before I left? 1500? How many are alive now?"

  "You didn’t know it would work out like that. You didn't know we'd get used like fodder."

  "I knew it. I mean, nobody ever told me, but I knew. Didn’t I? I had to. Make planes as cheap as drones, train pilots faster than infantry grunts and what do you think will happen? They’ll use ‘em like fodder that’s what. It happened to you. There were 44 of you when we recruited you into the Lancers from prison. Now, there’s only 5."

  "That wasn’t your fault."

  He swung the cell door shut behind him, and it clanged against the welded frame, but swung open again. She snorted as if that meant something to her. "If you say so, Jordo."

  Chapter Three

  They served burger-filled buns in the midships mess again. It’d been BBQ-filled buns the day before and bean-filled buns for lunch. Tig looked up from his tray to ask one of Cookie’s line elves if they had anything else and the moment he did, the beady eyes under the white chef’s hat glared at him, daring him. Ask. Ask, Squidy-lover. Please.

  The only consolation was that even though it had three mess halls, Hardway didn’t have an officer’s mess and from where he sat next to Parker and Wambach and Keele, he could watch the ship’s officers eating the same food. A few tables away Lt. Commander Bergano gagged on it.

  Tig broke the steamed, meat-filled bun open and looked at the processed material inside.

  "Bad idea, cherry." Wambach told him. "Eating one of those buns is all about trust."

  "The hell does this burger-filled bun have to do with trust?"

  "No shit," Keele said. "Opening wide and sinking your teeth into that thing without any reservation is a sign of your trust in the Staas Company to have your best nutritional interests at heart."

  "I didn’t know we made these things."

  "We didn’t," Keele said. "Staas Company's food division did. That’s not the point."

  Tig sniffed it once more and shrugged. He said, "It’s all we’ve got." He bit off a hunk of it and chewed.

  "Unless you want to eat Squidy-chow…" Wambach took a bite too.

  "The heck does Squidy eat?"

  "Hey, Donger...Donger!" Wambach shouted to the next table where a squad of Lucy Elan’s company marines hunched over the same trays. "Donger knows. He’s been inside a nest."

  "Blue-green shit," Donger barked out. "They eat cyanobacteria. And some kind of crabs. But they’re big."

  "Crabs? Really?" Tig said.

  "Fuck, yeah, they eat crabs. In one of those orbital nests I saw broken-up chitin shells strewn all over the place… meat scooped out of ‘em and piled up like in a kitchen, like we busted into Squidy’s mess."

  "I thought chitin was bug stuff."
br />   "Bug, crab, same bloody thing."

  Wambach said, "I'll stick with the meat-filled buns."

  Tig agreed Squidy's food wasn't worth taking, but they'd gotten plenty of other stuff off the aliens. The very first day of the war, they got interstellar transit maps from the Squidies along with the tech to open them. Scuttlebutt said the improved inertial negation systems in the fighters were reverse-engineered from a captured Squidy fighter. "That first day of the war… when Hardway captured that alien ship. Was that luck when you guys stumbled onto it? We wouldn’t have had a chance without all the stuff we got from that ship. I mean...I'm not saying Harry Cozen planned it, but it got us a l-"

  Keele said, "Shut up, cherry."

  "C'mon... You were on board Hardway then, on the first day of the war. You know. There's plenty of evidence that says Cozen must have known the aliens were there on Moriah before it started. So how'd they ambush him? I mean that rock it happened on wasn't even on company charts but he made right for it. How did he even find it?"

  Wambach shouted, "Meester! Shut it! Stifle!"

  "What? What the hell did I say?"

  Wambach just shook his head at him wide-eyed like that was the best he could do to explain. "No matter what...You got no... You got no right to even talk about it."

  "Why the hell is that?"

  "Because you just got here," Keele said.

  "What. Because I wasn’t on board yet when that happened? If Cozen ambushed the Squidies and we started the war, it doesn't matter when I got here. The war has been going on for years now."

  "And what the fuck were you doing about it? You didn’t care. You were rolling around Staten Island City, stealing parts from the spaceport and getting into trouble with the local mob. The war didn’t touch you ‘cept the few times you looked up and saw battle lights in the sky or maybe watched the UN swabbies get their asses kicked on vid.

  The war did touch him those years back home. It meant a lot more people had work. That meant more hoppers to jack so he could strip ‘em and rip ‘em.

  Keele said, "Hell, Tig, you didn’t even sign up with the Privateers. A judge sent you here."

  "Fine, I don’t know anything. So, you tell me. If we started it, if this war didn't really start the way we all think it did, then what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?"

  "What are you supposed to do with it? Do your job. Shut the fuck up."

  "Why do I have to shut the fuck up about it?"

  "I got my reasons, cherry." Keele said, "Here’s yours: Most of the redsuits on this ship didn’t sign up after the war started. At least we didn’t mean to sign up. I mean we all got shanghaied through Staas Company General Order 1633. Contract had some crap in it about ‘time of war’ and ‘extraordinary need’. And that's not just us. That's most Privateers. All the attack carriers, anyway. We didn’t sign up, we got drafted."

  "So you didn't sign up either," Tig said.

  Wambach thumped his own forehead. "No, idiot. That's not the point. What he's saying is: if we got the royal shaft like that and if we can shut the fuck up about it so we can win this war and get it the fuck over with, then you can have the fucking decency to shut your yap about some alien propaganda bullshit story about who started this war and why. That shit does us no good." Wambach stood up so his chair shot out behind him. He ignored the shouts from the company marines behind him as he made for the hatch.

  Tig looked at the mangled meat in the middle of his burger-filled bun. "But..."

  "History," Parker said. "I’ve studied a lot of history. It's who we are. Change the past...change what people know of it, and you can get away with anything."

  "Why does he have to lay into me so hard over it?"

  "You're telling him there's a chance he's not who he thought he was, Tig. He’s pissed."

  "And he’s saying it isn't my past that got changed because I wasn’t signed up then? That's bunk."

  She nodded.

  Chapter Four

  From the bow guns’ observation port, Commander Ram Devlin, XO of the Staas Company attack carrier Hardway looked down railgun barrels so long they appeared to converge. He could just make out the bronze sculpture Harry Cozen had welded to the topside bow plate of the ship. It was priceless and putting it on the bow of a warship had been his message to the crew that their individual lives were just as important. ‘Bird in Space’ by Constantin Brancusi. 1926.

  The sliver of metal still curved elegantly enough, arcing through space with the grace of a bird’s path in flight. That part of the sculpture’s visual metaphor had survived the ordeal of riding welded to the bow of a warship like a figurehead. Other elements hadn’t fared so well. The gleaming, reflective surface that had once made the 1.85m bronze seem to streak like a thing in fast flight was gone, pitted with spatter from particle streams or endless impacts with stray atoms and nuclei of the stellar medium. This 239 year-old bronze got patinaed with an ablative bath of exotic particles every time the carrier pierced the membrane of a hypermass transit to ride the passage to the next system.

  That Brancusi had been beaten up, but it was still glorious. It was, in fact, a different work of art now then when it had been cast. The artist had made many of these, Ram knew, and those polished surfaces all communicated the glory of flight as this one still did, but the surface of this one was scarred and pitted with a different truth of flight, the one only flying things can actually know, the one that makes them envy the restive creatures on the ground.

  He rode the lift down the tube to the ship's spine alongside a crew of railgunners swapping out for the 3rd shift. "Mr. Devlin," two of them muttered in acknowledgment. The other three stayed silent, eyes on their boots of their exosuits. This was the Staas Company Privateers and not some UN fleet ship. They didn’t have to salute or call him sir. But the way none of them met his eyes made Ram think there was something they didn’t want him to see in theirs.

  Before the lift hit the carrier’s spine, he made up a question to ask them regarding the readiness of the bow guns, the answer to which he already knew and imagined would be something they’d be proud to report. The Chief who answered him had heavy-lidded, bruise encircled eyes. At first, Ram thought the light he saw behind those eyes was dim with the same wear the sculpture on the bow had taken. Then he saw he was partially mistaken. That Chief was tired and worn, but her lids weren’t just heavy. As she told him about the improved reloading speeds, her eyes narrowed involuntarily. That wasn’t simple fatigue; it was distrust. Like Pardue and Ernie in Gold Coast’s cockpit, this Chief had believed the Squidy propaganda she’d heard.

  Once they got off, he let the gun crew have the next people-mover that came. It whisked them away zipping them down the ship’s kilometer-long spine more easily perhaps without the weight of him and all those questions. Ram took the next people-mover to cycle up to the platform and rode the 400 meters down the spine to the command tower all alone.

  He was the last to arrive. Cozen’s hatch was still ajar and inside, ‘the cage’ was still open. Harry Cozen’s office below the bridge had never been that large and the operational security measures he’d added made it smaller. He’d built a room within a room, two of them. The interior of the two cages now comprised the entirety of the usable space in the compartment. The two sets of walls and floors and ceilings were simple radiation shielding, belt-iron-steel, patch-welded like Hardway’s armor, but instead of keeping energy and radiation out, the armor kept electromagnetic energy from escaping. It was a cage, meant to keep secrets.

  Right now, it held Harry Cozen, an unnamed figure wearing a full exosuit and helmet with a blackout visor, and fifteen people with a lot of questions. They sat silent around the person in the exosuit. Cozen was the only one who looked relaxed. Ram saw the glasses and full decanter on the desk and was glad he hadn’t missed the scotch. They’d all need a drink after hearing this plan.

  You couldn’t bug this room except with a device based on quantum-paired electrons, but the almost imperceptible shaking
in his teeth once Ram was inside told him that Cozen had already activated a suite of counter-surveillance devices whose function included negation of such technologies’ functional utility. This suite of noisemakers was better than the one Ram owned...different, though Cozen still wouldn’t tell him how. This one made Ram’s mouth taste like metal, like he was being irradiated, though Cozen swore that wasn’t the case.

  "You’re the last one, Mr. Devlin," Harry Cozen growled as he rose from the edge of his desk. "We’re only waiting on you." He looked like he was more than ready to finish this war, but it wasn’t fatigue driving him or an inability to witness any more of the horror. No. Harry Cozen’s eye glinted with all the eagerness of a sharp blade waiting to do the thing for which it had been made.

  As Ram turned to shut them all inside along with humanity’s greatest secret, he ticked the meeting's attendees off as he saw them. The leaders of the F-151 squadrons were here, grim-faced. Chief Horcheese brought the two cherries he'd asked for. They probably wanted to know what the heck they were doing at a command level briefing. Redsuits don’t usually get briefed on anything; they just get told to fix it. Lt. Commanders Medoc, and Max looked almost expressionless. Ram hadn’t seen them since before their ship had been built. They’d looked happier then.

  Finally, after closing the hatch and the two doors and sealing them all in, he turned again, returning a nod from Commander Pai of Arbitrage before letting his eyes fall on the impenetrable helmet visor of the figure in the exosuit. His own warped and tiny reflection looked back at him before gloved hands reached up and flipped the four latches on the helmet. You could tell which of them in that cage already knew who was under that helmet. They were the only ones whose eyes weren’t glued as she lifted the helmet off.

  Disgraced Staas Company VP and former 2-Star Privateer Admiral, Matilda Witt looked the same in an exosuit as in anything else, like she was squaring off to fight with whomever she faced. The helmet mussed her hair and her face displayed some scorn for it. "Regrettable," she said, removing a glove and running fingers through her hair. "But necessary." Cozen poured and put a glass in her hand.