War of Alien Aggression 5 Cozen's War Page 6

  Ram said, "I don't understand. You’re bloodier-minded than a Borgia."

  "Thank you, Mr. Devlin. That’s quite a distinction. Why would I give the Squidies one chance to surrender before exterminating them? Because this is our coming out party. This is Humanity’s introduction to the other species that travel the stars. Will they know us as murderers, Mr. Devlin? Will they know us as assassins that should be feared and hated? Will they understand us to be the kind of species who will exterminate another without mercy? That is how they will know us if this mission should go exactly as Harry plans."

  "You got to the crew of the Boomslang, didn’t you," he said. "You got to them somehow. That's why Cozen sent me, too."

  "Actually, no," she said. "They’re really quite an incorruptible crew. I tried to turn them my way and failed. Harry never actually caught me, but he suspects. He erroneously decided months ago that I succeeded based mostly on a single, bad guess."

  "That’s when he told me I was going along," Ram said.

  "That’s right. To make sure it all goes off Harry’s way...to make sure we drop those bombs without even a warning peep and exterminate 70 billion Squidies in one fell swoop. To make sure we demonstrate for any other species watching just what sort of a species Humanity is and precisely what we’re capable of."

  Ram tried to wrap his head around it. He knew there would be more than the Squidies waiting for Humanity out there. He knew that. The universe was too big to be a lonely place, but he’d never imagined the Squidies were part of anyone's Imperium.

  Goddamn her and Cozen both, he thought. Damn them and their secrets. "What is the name of the empire that subjugated the Squidies? How many other species do they dominate? I need you to tell me everything before I go."

  "You know enough to make the right choice when the time comes."

  "Do you expect me to compromise this mission for your...agenda."

  "It’s not my agenda. I’ll be dead by the time all this happens. Frankly, I don’t know what you’ll do. But I know you’re a good man. It’s time for you to go down to the bay and the Boomslang. It’s time to end the war, now, so this will have to be our final goodbye, I think." He nodded. "If the Squidies are right, if there’s an afterlife, do you think we’ll be all be friends there?"

  Ram didn’t have a real answer for her, but he nodded once more anyway. Before he turned and made for the hatch and the launch bay, she raised that crystal of scotch and melting ice in her hand and toasted him. "You’re nothing like Harry Cozen and me, you know. You’re a good man, Mr. Devlin. You should know I’ve always counted on that. We’re all counting on it."

  Chapter Eleven

  After the call to withdraw the squadrons, the Lancers had to fly through the edges of a debris field that stretched for thousands of Ks. "Lancers, this is 1-1. Stay tight on me. Do not blaze your own path."

  "Lancer 1-1, this is 1-6," Burn said. "From back here I can see 'em all lined up, about one second apart. Choose that path wisely, 1-1, we got the 38th and the Hellcats falling in, too."

  "Roger, 1-6. Steering clear of the rough stuff."

  The bodies in there didn’t reflect radar like the pieces of bulkhead and hull. That meant they weren’t projected in Lancer 1-1’s flight helmet as wireframes to avoid. He had to spot the bodies from their faint IR fuzz or pick out the cooling exosuits with his own eyes as they tumbled end over end, limbs splayed. One, he saw too late to steer away.

  It was a dead, UN swabbie. His exosuit was white, but the fires lit him orange. His arms were open. The hellish light shone in through his helmet visor to illuminate his face, and in the moment before he impacted against Jordo’s canopy and careened away spinning, he looked as surprised to be there as Jordo was to see him.

  The hulls of the largest ships in the fleet's offensive wedge burned like ruined fortresses, like smashed and toppled castles. What UN cruisers and destroyers had survived now scrambled to reposition themselves as the enemy pressed on the Privateer carriers and forced the remnants of the invasion fleet back into a defensive formation.

  The alien dreadnought pulled away from its escorts and made for the smaller UN vessels that had escorted the capital ships in the wedge. They looked to be easy pickings, overextended and well-nigh abandoned by the rest of the fleet. It steamed straight through burning fragments of fallen ships, knocking them aside without turning a degree from the impact. The leviathan’s hull and the crude human skull painted there were both undamaged. Hundreds of those wiggly fucks had crawled over the hull like knotted worms in suits to paint that.

  The alien dreadnought shrugged off concentrated fire from railgun batteries and wore torpedo detonations like a hundred buttonhole carnations until it finally rammed UNS Fitz and clawed at UNS Donegal and Soju so fiercely and so deeply that the destroyers came apart in only seconds. Exosuits and molten metal flew out the wounds in their hulls, and the alien dreadnought plowed through it all.

  "Harry Cozen fucked up," Paladin said. "He fucked up big time."

  "It sure isn't good." That’s all Jordo trusted himself to say. "Burn, Dirty, keep high and low guard. I can see a whole bunch of red bandits putting the eye on us right now." The alien aces were already jockeying for an intercept.

  "Squidy has us outnumbered," Dirty said. "I ain’t no admiral, but even I can see it."

  Burn said, "It would appear that the great Harry Cozen has screwed up on a legendary scale."

  "They won’t be able to hold on for long once the Squidy fleet closes and engages."

  The Squidies could have pressed the final engagement sooner, but they took their time and made sure there was no escape. They pushed along the flanks of the invasion fleet and partially encircled it.

  That’s when Harry Cozen spoke over general comms again. "All ships and all craft of the Invasion Fleet. This is Harry Cozen. It is my duty to inform you that I have been relieved of command by Staas Company's Board of Directors. Effective immediately, I no longer command the Invasion Fleet. The Board of Directors has placed reinstated Staas VP and two-star Admiral, Matilda Witt in command. Matilda Witt now commands the invasion fleet. Obey her orders. God save us all."

  That's when Matilda Witt's voice filled their helmets. "All Staas Company Privateer and UN vessels, this is Matilda Witt aboard SCS Arbitrage. By the authority of the Staas Company’s Board of Directors and on behalf of its shareholders, I am now taking command. All Privateer and UN forces in this system are to fall back to new positions being transmitted now."

  "What the hell?" Paladin said.

  "You fuck up this bad and they don’t let you keep command."

  "Yeah, but they gave it to her? After she conspired with the enemy?"

  "That woman should be in prison," Hellcat 1-1 said as she and her flight streaked across his canopy in echelon. Even if this was part of the plan, nobody hated Matilda Witt more than Pooch.

  They heard Witt on comms again. This time, her voice was paired with a signal that sounded like ten-thousand bugs all rubbing their legs together. At first, they thought it must be alien jamming. After they discerned her words from the noise, they knew the strange transmission was more likely to be a translation. It was her words in Squidy, a message meant for the enemy. "This is Matilda Witt," she said. "On behalf of the Staas Company Privateers, the United Nations Fleet, and the planet Earth, I hereby request an immediate cessation of hostilities so that we may negotiate terms for peace."

  Within seconds, the aliens' guns went dark.

  Chapter Twelve

  Boomslang hid in Arbitrage's belly as Matilda Witt steamed ahead through the invasion fleet with her bay doors closed. Boomslang nearly filled that massive launch bay, but if anyone could see inside, it would have appeared dark and empty save the shadows and the single longboat docked against the forward bulkhead.

  The cockpit was lit with soft red light from bulkhead panels and the NAV console's projections. The stealth ship's two pilots spoke in whispers as if they were already worried the Squidies could hear them. "The hull charge is holding at 79% power."

  "Variance?"

  "None."

  "N-dimensional slippage?"

  "No evidence of it."

  "We don’t want to slide out into regular space right in front of the bad guys."

  "I said we’re negative slippage."

  "Endogenous radiation?"

  "All going into N-space so far. We’ll see when we hit the engines."

  Chief Horcheese asked, "How stealthy are we?"

  They clammed up. "It’s good stealth," Ram told her. "It’s not perfect. Any number of things could give us away."

  "Hot background..."

  "Passive LiDAR arrays seeing us from two sides…"

  "Freakin’ alien eyeballs..."

  "Opening the doors to launch the bombs…"

  Medoc said, "Shoot, Chief, if it was perfect, you wouldn’t need superstar pilots like us. If it was perfect, we’d just have some nugget fly through the enemy lines. Hell, we’d just make a missile and fire it."

  "She knows no stealth is perfect," Ram said. "Stealth is all in how you use it. Boomslang will need plenty of distractions to keep the enemy looking the wrong way."

  "But the more we juice up this hull," she said, "the more we slide into N-space and the stealthier we get. How come we’re not running it at 100% all the time?"

  Medoc sighed. "The first prototype is still in a degrading orbit around Neptune. Theoretically, anyway. Nobody can see it. Shit, you could fly right through it. It went all the way in. Never came back."

  "What would they see if the bay door was open?" she asked. "If the Squidies were looking right at us right now..."

  "Passive scan? If the lights were off? They’d see nothing. If we were out in the black vacuum? Nothing. You saw us when you came in
the bay that first time, though. You saw right through us. We’re 79% not here… a ghost. A shadow. A shade. Go active and hit us with energy, and the hull will send most of it into N-space. Most of it."

  Medoc kept his eyes on the console in front of him. "Mr. Devlin, I've been meaning to say this. If Cozen sent you as some kind of backup to put that gun of yours to our heads because he doubts our commitment, then you should know we don’t need you. Attempts were made to compromise our integrity, and we reported them. We remain fully committed to this mission and will execute Mr. Cozen's orders."

  Ram said. "Harry Cozen sent me so I could be the one that gives the order. Cozen wants me in politics after the war." It was a bald lie, but from the way Medoc sneered and nodded it was, apparently, one the pilot was willing to believe.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Arbitrage was deserted. Matilda Witt had already sent the ship’s officers and crew out the hatches and locks to swim for a nearby destroyer. She had the bridge all to herself. She was the only soul aboard, save the crew of the stealthed ship hiding down in Arbitrage’s bay.

  In front of her, the bridge’s windows provided a partial view, but she’d set the projectors to display the illusion of all the ships around her so that standing on that bridge was like standing up on the outer hull with a 360-degree view. The remnants of the invasion fleet slipped to the rear. Ahead, the alien fleet awaited her arrival. Won't they be surprised, she thought.

  Matilda Witt chipped ice with a pick, and it spotted her antique dress. Droplets clung to her breasts and gave her a chill as she poured what might very well be her last drink. What a pity it was that she couldn’t have had a few moments with her collections. At least her drink was a work of art. The makers would blanch to see her diluting it, but every spacer knows that in a low-pressure environment, it tastes better that way.

  It poured like sunshine. This blend had been made of select, rare stocks from 2056, 2099, and 2132. This blend wasn’t just special because of its rarity or because of the peculiar and inimitable sweet umami of such a blend of ancient liquors, but because each of those years were years in which a major world war had been won. Matilda Witt brought the crystal to her lips and listened to the ice as she filled her mouth with the taste of victory.

  The pale blue engines of the haulers and supply ships colored her drink as the autopilot script flew Arbitrage up, around, and past their blocky hulls, out from behind them where she'd been hiding. The support ships of the invasion fleet passed by to port and starboard until Arbitrage steamed through a ring of smaller Privateer gunships and all the junks guarding the very rear flanks of what was once an offensive formation. They flew towards her and banked away on their nacelles like they were miming an attack run. The transponders said they were from the Hardway Air Group.

  Matilda smiled with pressed lips and nodded to them. "Yes, yes. I know you’re loyal to Harry and you think I’m a traitor. I know you’d like to blow me out of the sky. But you won’t get that honor," she said.

  The precious breaching ships and their wagon-wheel hulls fell past to the stern as Arbitrage finally sailed through the heart of the Privateers, right between the great carriers Pont Neuf and Hardway. Pont Neuf had taken a battering to her forward bays and gun batteries, but as Witt’s ship passed close, she could see Hardway had taken it worse. Fires burned in two topside bays on the primary module. She’d already been scored badly by the enemy guns. "My, my, Harry, your ship’s not ship shape anymore, is it." The particle stream that made the hundred-meter gash across the bays on the secondary module looked to have penetrated and maybe thrown a firestorm through a deck or two. Before Arbitrage had steamed past, she saw deep down in the wound where the burning, belt-iron steel still glowed from inside.

  At the top of the 200 meter command tower, in the windows of the bridge, the figure was too small to make out until she zoomed in. Harry didn’t salute. No matter what his background was, it had never been his style. They both knew he was far more like her than he’d ever admit. When Matilda saw it was him up there, alone, she walked to the windows. She smiled as naturally as she could and displayed the dress, spinning once for him before a last smile and a wave. "Goodbye, Harry," she said. "I hope you bloody miss me."

  Arbitrage sailed through what was left of the UN warships. Their torn, gouged, blasted, and burning hulls told a story of how many had died. The plan she and Harry had executed had resulted in the deaths of a hundred-thousand sailors and the destruction of the largest ships of the UN fleet. She said no farewell to the dead Privateers and UN swabbies; she knew they wouldn’t want to hear it...not from the architect of their sacrifice.

  Her ship crossed the gap between the fleets, and the battle-scarred, alien warships rose up around her like dark-hulled cliffs. They towered like monuments, tusk-shaped, cracked and war-blasted, cratered by railgun salvos. Some of them leaked atmo in wet, sulfurous jets.

  Past the first line of Squidy cruisers the enemy’s forward carriers hung like armored wasps’ nests. She’d never wanted to see one this close. The alien fighters flew out of the narrow bays in threes. Their spiky thruster mounts drew black shadows across their crimson hulls.

  The alien dreadnought steamed to meet her, and the human skull painted 500-meters tall on its hull rose like a toothy, grinning moon, pockmarked with futile detonations. That ship towered over Arbitrage, and when she passed into the alien dreadnought's shadow, looking up at that skull was like looking up at her own, impending death. She raised her glass to it and drank deeply.

  After passing through the lines of alien gunboats and cruisers and carriers at the rear of the Squidy battle formation, once she was through their lines, Witt kept going. She steamed boldly towards the fat and bloody gas giant around which the Squidy’s homeworld moon orbited like a moldy pea.

  They wouldn’t let her get too far. Already, she could see the Squidies' ambassadorial ship breaking the limb of the homeworld moon and coming at Arbitrage on an intercept vector. She recognized the wing and single tower design from the last time she’d met with them. That ship was a terrible place. They could pressurize a section with nitrogen-oxygen atmo, but it always smelled like sulfur. Unbearable..hellish, really. Matilda Witt was more committed to peace than any other human, but on a personal level, she was actually quite glad she'd never have to visit with the Squidies ever again.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It looked just like the ship Dana saw on Moriah, on the first day of the war. It was the same long blade of a hull and the single tower. The projection was grainy, but there was no mistake. The ambassadorial ship that Matilda Witt had said would appear at the offer of peace negotiations looked exactly like what Cozen had called an alien scout ship before they’d boarded it and killed the things inside.

  Every new piece of evidence she saw pointed to the fact that Harry Cozen had deceived her and everyone else. Did the aliens even attack that first mining junk to come back with a dead crew? Was Harry Cozen responsible for those deaths, too? She hated herself for even entertaining the idea. She didn’t want to think about it. Not now.

  The projection of SCS Arbitrage made it look like a half-meter, armored tadpole with her tail chopped off, spitting plasma out the wound. The enemy fleet between her and Hardway was an executioner’s ax paused in mid-strike and waiting to fall on what was left of the invasion fleet, but Arbitrage steamed slowly through the lines like there was nothing to fear, carrying Matilda Witt and Ram and the Boomslang. Matilda Witt was their Trojan Horse. Hidden inside Arbitrage was the vessel that would doom the Squidies once it was past the battle-lines and the bulk of the enemy's defenses. All that remained now was to give Boomslang the kind of launch it needed.

  Cozen spoke in low tones without taking his eyes from the unfolding scene. "Be ready to bring this carrier about in a snap, Ms. Sellis."

  "Understood, Mr. Cozen."