War of Alien Aggression 5 Cozen's War Page 5

  Chapter Nine

  Jordo flew inverted with the Lancers in close formation and looked up through the F-223’s cockpit canopy at the largest armada of human warships ever assembled in space. The cruisers, the battleships, and destroyers flew like armored peaks and Tamerlane led boldly, inviting the enemy’s flying bombs to detonate against her sides, daring their particle beams to cut her. Earth’s dreadnought and the battleships on the line, the carriers, the destroyers and frigates, all the ships there, all the ships lost, they represented the combined efforts of billions. When Harry Cozen gave the word, all that sweat and sacrifice and hate hurled itself at the enemy line…

  The Squidies' cruisers and pocket carriers didn’t budge. Their half-kilometer vertical hulls canted a few degrees forward and in the moment they accelerated, their pinkish exhaust plumes silhouetted them. Up and down their line, alien capital ships and carriers that had remained spread out to match the invasion fleet’s threat symmetrically now scrambled with rosy fire under their asses to converge and meet the incoming threat.

  The final battle for their home system had begun. Already the ports in their cliff-face hulls had opened. Jordo's flight helmet showed him the heat pouring out the warhead hatches. They’d launch the flying bombs any second. The alien fighters hung high and low around them, waiting to escort the Squidies' warheads in past the defensive screen. He couldn’t yet make out the bandits’ spiked hulls, but they'd be closer soon enough.

  "Lancers and Hellcats, this is Po’ Boy. We’re gonna send Squidy our regards now." The squadron of junks flew between the capital ships, racing from the rear. Across the top panes of his canopy, the junks blasted off, hell-bent and full of hate with torpedo modules slung under their frames. Each of the 96 junks streaked plasma from four nacelles and their rear engines, leaving the vacuum hatched with thin, parallel trails like glowing 10,000K threads drawn in hot gas.

  "Roger, Po’ Boy," he said, "Have eyes on you. Lancers and Hellcats will keep the bandits at bay." He spun a quarter turn on his maneuvering thrusters and blasted off to intercept the Squidies already making for the junks. Paladin rolled in close on his wing. "Stay close and in Fluid 5...Lancer 1-6...Burn," he said.

  "Way ahead of you, Jordo." Her Sky Jack ripped across the black in front of him, spiraling down on the lead trio of incoming enemy fighters. "First one is mine."

  The Hellcats were closer to the incoming bandits than the Lancers. Not even Burn’s jacked-up 223 could beat them in the race to get within weapons range. Each of the Hellcats’ 39 fighters sported six, long-barreled autocannon, and they opened up together, stitching eye-searing fire across the black like a net, chasing the lead Squidies, firing in front and behind and everywhere around them until there was no choice for the aliens but to brave their chances hotdogging through the Hellcats’ fire.

  Once, the Hellcats had been nuggets and the aliens could have spun and jinked and leveraged the superiority of their inertial negation systems to dance through the space between the human pilots’ shells, but not anymore. Now, the 55th were mostly crackshot aces and if the Squidies wanted to get at the junks below, they’d have to bleed for it.

  When they were close enough they knew the Bitzers couldn’t dodge them, one flight of alien bandits and then the next opened up with their particle streams. The hyper-accelerated heavy nuclei shot out of their emitters in razor-edged beams that sliced across the Hellcats’ formation, flaring up bright where they hit the Privateer fighters. Two cooked off quick.

  The alien flight leader managed to get through, but the maneuvers it chose doomed the two Squidies on its wing. The net of fire closed around them, and after the sparking milliseconds when the 140mm sabot burrowed in, both of the bandits must have cracked a reactor because they jetted fire out the holes blown in their hulls as they spun out of control.

  Jordo and the Lancers swung in on a spiraling vector, planning to cut across the enemy squadrons as they engaged the Hellcats. He caught a glimpse of the UN capital ships loosing their warspites in a fearsome salvo. The torpedoes streaked straight across the black, drawing five-hundred glowing trails between the warships of the invasion fleet and the alien defenders.

  On his next set of maneuvers before he and the Lancers engaged the alien aces, he saw the trails from the Squidies’ flying bombs heading for the fleet. They corkscrewed towards the warspite torpedoes like they were on a collision course, but the two swarms passed through each other leaving the space behind them woven with a dizzying fabric of hot exhaust.

  At the speed they came, the enemy fighters grew from glittering specks to furious bundles of spiked hull and rosy fire in heartbeats. Some of them ignored the incoming Lancers and the shells chasing them just to get a shot at the torpedo junks. Just before the Lancers' Sky Jack 223s tore through the Squidies’ formation, the desperate alien aces stabbed in rapier bursts. They hulled three junks. Wounded boats spun and spewed molten metal before they cooked off.

  The gun towers that bristled up and down the alien ships of the line fired on the junks together like a thousand searchlights, slashing and waving, groping in the blackness for them.

  "Release! Away! Away! Fox! Fox! Fox!" Pardue’s lunar drawl made it sound casual when over five hundred more torpedoes launched from the bellies of the junks and joined the other five-hundred loosed from Tamerlane and Minh and Pretorius and all the fat UN capital ships. The combined swarm flew into the interlacing enemy particle streams, a patchwork of small-bore, fast-moving defensive fire, now slicing furiously to thin the dense school of fusion-tipped warspite torpedoes bearing down on them.

  Jordo pulled up and away with the junks and glanced to the rear to see the enemy warheads spiraling at the UN ships almost as if they were out of control. They were doing their best to avoid the shells thrown up by the gunnery junks and the pack of QF-111 Dingo drones joyously chasing them across the vacuum with their cannon.

  He never actually saw the UN battleships and the Privateer attack carriers behind them open up with the railguns. The combined alpha strike they threw at the Squidies ripped across the diminishing space between the opposing fleets in less than a second, but all Jordo saw in the exact moment the fleet fired was the first of the alien warheads detonating. His helmet’s visor darkened to protect his eyes. He thought he’d seen three UN ships blown open in that flash, all gutted like mined-out mountains and on fire inside.

  It only took a fraction of a second for his visor to clear, but by that time, he’d turned his head just in time to see hundreds of osmium-tungsten railgun sabot rip through the waving streams and find the Squidies’ hulls like a hard-falling rain. Each of the impact flashes was bright enough that it bloomed and bled into the next so that all of the Squidies’ front line ships seemed to fade to white, dimming only enough for him to discern the lines of broken hulls and note how the aliens' defensive fire had stopped just before the cloud of warspite torpedoes detonated against their hulls.

  *****

  Hardway’s kilometer-long spine still shook from the enemy particle stream that had ripped a 170m, molten-edged wound up the port side of the secondary launch bays. Pieces of the outer hull that spattered off impacted against the bridge’s windows. "Damage report, Mr. Bergano."

  "Coming in now, Mr. Cozen… Redsuits have the fires under control. The warhead we took lit up a full deck of the primary bays. Emergency bulkheads prevented the damage from being any worse." People always got trapped behind those, Dana thought. "Fifty-two," he said before Cozen asked. "Fifty-two casualties reported so far."

  "In the first enemy salvo, we lost the Kirov and the Roosevelt. And three destroyers," Biko reported. "Moderate casualties for the torpedo junks. They’re currently RTB for rearming and the fighters have the alien bandits occupied. Squidy lost more than we did in the alpha strike," he said, pointing to the burning husks of alien battleships, molten inside like cracked worlds, tumbling from the dozens of detonations that killed them.

  Tamerlane and the remaining ships of the flying wedge bore down on
the thinned out vessels of the Squidy line as alien reinforcements poured in behind them. "They can hold us here only so long," Cozen said. "They’re taking it worse than we are."

  "There’s a new set of contacts emerging from behind the 5th planet," Biko said. "Multiple, large contacts, Mr. Cozen. One is over 800 meters."

  Bergano visibly paled. "There aren’t supposed to be any significant Squidy reserves left in this system," he said. His voice rose in pitch. "We made sure! They aren’t supposed to have any reserves! This whole plan is based on that! Once those vessels arrive, the Squidies will outnumber us. We’re overextended on the offensive, Mr. Cozen. They’ve lured us into a trap!"

  "Remain calm, Mr. Bergano," Cozen said.

  Dana was calm, but she'd been briefed on this part. Harry Cozen had only pretended ignorance of the alien reserves. Bergano didn't know any of this was part of the plan and his reaction to seeing the enemy's unexpected reinforcements was understandable. This would turn the tide of battle solidly against Earth's invasion fleet.

  Planned or not, they were still in a bad spot. Smart money wouldn’t bet on them now, but this was what it was going to take to get the enemy to believe the combined Privateer and UN invasion fleet was really on the ropes. Allowing the enemy to have the advantage was a dangerous gambit, but it was the only way Matilda Witt’s variant of the Trojan Horse could actually work.

  Biko gestured over his console to enlarge and enhance the image projected over the bridge so they could see the largest of the incoming alien reserve ships more clearly. Once the tallest and widest of them grew as big as her fist, Dana knew it from across the bridge. Biko continued to enlarge it and once it was the size of her head, it suddenly looked like it was bearing down on them. At one meter-tall, hovering over the deck of Hardway’s bridge, the human skull painted on its side by alien hands still chilled Dana as much as it had the first time she’d seen it...right before this alien dreadnought clad in well-nigh impenetrable armor had savaged humanity’s two most powerful ships, UNS Khan and UNS Hannibal, obliterating both on the first day of the war.

  "It’s over." Bergano had been defeated just by the sight of it. "Once that thing gets here," he said, "we’ve lost this battle."

  Chapter Ten

  Arbitrage kept station at the rear, waiting to play her role at just the right moment. Matilda Witt drank while she watched that bloody battle and didn’t walk so much as slowly waltz herself through the projections of the burning ships over the deck.

  Ram said, "I presume you’ve got all the clearzine you need to clean the alcohol from your system…"

  "My dear, Mr. Devlin, if you would send me to my death sober, you’re a far crueler man than I took you for."

  The battle had taken a turn for the worse, as Cozen had planned. After the alien reinforcements from the 5th planet arrived with their dreadnought, the Squidies’ line recovered from the disruption. It wrapped itself all the way around the flying wedge at the front of the invasion fleet’s formation.

  To the Squidies, it appeared that Cozen had gambled to break the stalemate and was now overextended in the face of a superior force.

  It appeared that way to most of the invasion fleet, too. Even UN Admiral Ming didn’t know what Harry Cozen knew. He and so many others would die not knowing it. Ram and Matilda Witt heard their calls on command comms from the UN ships. Ming said there was still time to maneuver out of the engagement under cover of the fighters and junks. They could run for home if they gave up the battle. It was bad, but it was better than losing everything.

  Harry Cozen had the last word. This was his fleet. His voice spoke over theirs with the gravel and weight of a millstone. "It’s too late to run. We are committed. There’s only one way we can go now, and it’s forward, through the bloody heart of our enemy. We succeed today or we perish."

  The fleet was overextended and under fire from three sides. Even when the ships were only projections over the deck, meter high at the largest, it was hard to watch. Each of the detonations that flashed across the little ships here meant the deaths of hundreds and thousands.

  Ram could only wonder what the Commanders and Captains of those ships would have said if they’d known this disaster, perhaps the greatest apparent blunder in human military history, was a rouse and the deaths of the crews and ships they'd sworn oaths to protect were all part of it. He liked to think the Captains of those ships were good men and they’d never have gone along with Cozen's plan in a million years.

  Tamerlane died ramming three alien warships with her armored bulk during a last, desperate attempt to relieve the withering fire that pounded her battleship escorts. She fell after the alien dreadnought and its escorts stabbed her with so many particle streams that she looked frozen on the shafts. Alien bombs filled her decks with firestorms until her reactors cooked off and threw one, burning half of her spinning into the Squidy fleet while the other half of her broke up and sparkled with internal detonations between two dying cruisers.

  Ram could feel his face pale.

  "This is the plan," Witt reminded him.

  "All of those men and women who are out there dying today... They don’t know this is the plan. They don’t know this is the way it’s supposed to go."

  "Do you really think it would help if they knew?" Disdain soured her voice, but it wasn't for them. "Knowing you're going to die doesn't help. Let me tell you. I know. I’m going to die today. It’s part of the plan. It’s in the bloody script. Trust me, Mr. Devlin. Knowing doesn’t make it any easier."

  There was, at least theoretically, a chance that Ram Devlin might survive the events of the next hours. But Matilda Witt, he admitted, didn’t have that to cling to.

  "Don’t think me too much the narcissist," she said. "I agree it’s all quite tragic." She stood in the middle of the projections of mighty warships, scaled like some Olympian god. "But remember, these aren’t the first to die in this war. And on the push inward, we gave up a lot of advantages and opportunities to keep the secrets we had to keep. For example, we knew that skull-painted, alien bastard of a ship was keeping a shadow orbit around the 5th planet and we had to let other info from the same spysat mission go unaddressed so as not to tip our hand. We let three convoys get massacred to hide what we knew. Don’t think me cold. I just don’t have tears left for all the people we have to kill today. And even you, the high-minded Ram Devlin, agreed that this has to look like a real blunder Harry’s made or the Squidies won’t believe what comes next. And they have to believe it or we really are done for."

  Ram’s mouth tasted like iron. He wasn’t sure when in the last few minutes he’d bitten his tongue.

  A spread of a dozen warspite torpedoes blossomed across the alien dreadnought’s hull leaving nothing but faint pockmarks and blast streaks. She said, "They won’t get through that way. I know what that ship's armor is made of, you know. It took them centuries to grow that armor. The magnetite is deposited in melded layers by microorganisms. The Squidies live much longer than we do, of course. At least solar 200 years..."

  "I’ve never heard that before," Ram said, "How do you know that?"

  "I’ve had the pleasure of knowing endless fascinating things. So many things that will be lost. I know, for example, why we’ve taken no prisoners in this war since day one, seen no lifeboats launched, and recovered no escape pods from any Squidy ship."

  "Because they're more afraid of us than death."

  "No, Mr. Devlin. That's what I thought at first. Until I met them. Irrational as it may seem, the Squidies believe in an afterlife. In fact, they believe that once all their comrades have gone there, the afterlife is preferable to this existence. Do you think there’s an afterlife dimension, Mr. Devlin?"

  Matilda Witt's death would come in just a few hours if all went according to plan, so Ram gave her question the dignity of an answer. "I don’t know."

  "Fair enough," she said. "There’s something else about the Squidies. And it's not a matter of conjecture. This is a fact, Mr. Devlin and I need y
ou to understand it." She looked not just into his eyes then, but right down them as if she was projecting herself behind his eyes to better convince him of the truth she told him next. "The Squidies do not follow their own will," she said. "They do not follow their own course. They are a colonized species, subjugated many centuries ago by an order that now spreads across this arm of the galaxy. They exist to serve that order and maintain the power of their Imperial masters over developing species like us."

  "Why didn't you tell me this before? Why are you telling me all this now?"

  "Once the Squidies are well and truly gone, there’s going to be a job opening, I should think."

  "A job opening?"

  "Yes. And an interview. With whomever or whatever it was that pulled the Squidies' strings." She raised her eyebrows as understanding of what she meant visibly crossed his face. "Yes, Mr. Devlin...This what Harry wanted out of the war. This is why he started it. This is what he’s been gunning for. A job. For us. For all of us. For the species... He'd like us to be the new enforcers, the new soldiers of a galactic Imperium. They need a replacement species. Or they will...after we kill all the Squidies." She raised her glass to him. "You’re going to be there for the negotiation that will undoubtedly follow our victory. I’m telling you all this because I don’t want dear Harry to be the only one that knows what’s really happening. Perhaps, Mr. Devlin, you might agree that centuries of unbroken war as a soldier or a slave species may not be the optimal future for humanity. It seems I’m not going to be in a position to steer us away from that when the time comes, but if you succeed in your mission and survive, then you might just be."

  Ram said, "My mission is to make sure the crew of the Boomslang follow their orders and kill 70 billion Squidies."

  "That’s my fault, I’m afraid. I expressed a certain disdain for the idea of exterminating an entire species without giving them a chance to surrender. It’s certainly not cricket, but I won’t bore you with a debate. I insisted that before we drop all the bombs, we drop one, just to show them we had a knife to their throats. After that, we’d give them one chance. If they didn’t take it, then so be it."