War of Alien Aggression 5 Cozen's War Read online

  "Mr. Biko, do all of our fighter squadrons appear to be where they’re supposed to be?"

  "At maximum acceleration, with no engagement delay, estimated time to strike range is 63 seconds. But they’ll take the shot further out. For bragging rights."

  "Not much chance for evasive maneuvering at that rate of acceleration."

  Biko said, "None, actually. But that’s what it’ll take to get there fast enough."

  Once the alien ambassadorial ship had closed to within 10Ks of Arbitrage, both vessels turned and burned to halt their forward motion. Then, Arbitrage spun to turn her starboard side and her bay door away from the hellish low-end glow of Beta Draconis, placing that entire side of the ship in shadow.

  "Matilda is opening the bay door," Cozen said. She launched in the longboat when the door was only open a fraction of its width. They saw it continue to cycle fully open as the pale blue flare of her longboat’s exhaust lit the starboard side of the ship before she radically changed vector and came on a slow, but direct course for the alien ambassadorial ship. All eyes were on her.

  Cozen ground his next words out with the grit of his voice. "Give the order to the squadrons."

  *****

  The ninety-six F-151s and the Lancers’ six, hulking Sky Jack 223s blazed hell-bent, straight at their target, formed up in echelon. There was no way to pull off evasive maneuvers blasting themselves forward this hard, accelerating this fast. And Squidy was already on the way.

  The squadrons of alien interceptors that had formed up to match the Hardway Air Group’s fighter threat as best they could now hurtled up through the Squidy battle-lines and came screaming at them.

  Thirty-six, Pooch counted.

  "This is Lancer 1-1. We go right through this and we keep going, you understand me? There will not be a furball here." Lancer 1-1 got to give the final bingo...lucky mutherfucker. At T-minus three seconds to range, he gave the command, "Cut rear thrust and pivot on your thrusters to face them for the pass. Open fire at will. Do the dirty on my Bingo in 3…2…1…"

  After she rotated, she saw the lead elements of the Squidy formation coming right at her. All three of them flew with small-bore particle streams slicing in two-second bursts, gunning for her by slashing them across her path. She couldn’t change direction now. The only thing she could do now is what all of them did. They screamed rage and hate and threw it at the enemy with their cannon shells. High-explosives blossomed and sabot sparked and burrowed into the alien fighters as the alien guns cut across the Privateer formation.

  The Squidies expected them to flinch, to pull away and evade, but they couldn’t, not even if they’d wanted to. Their inertial negation systems weren’t powerful enough to allow maneuvers at that speed without the pilots getting turned to a mass of crushed cells and bone chips and fluid by the inertial gees.

  With reactor detonations flashing and all their guns firing, the two formations met in a conflagration of expanding fireballs whose edges grew and met and overlapped until a bright and brief, burning nebula had formed that obscured all vision, LiDAR and radar. Pooch flew blind and screaming with hellfire clinging to the vertical cockpit canopy of her Bitzer like she was in a glass coffin and someone had set the lid afire.

  Forty-one Privateer fighters emerged from that cloud. Jarvis. Lancer 1-5 and 1-6. Dodge. Lancer 1-1. She didn't want to look and see who else was still alive, but her eye picked them out and her helmet flashed the names in her face. So many names were missing.

  Almost as a single fighter, the remaining interceptors rotated to point their noses back on target and slammed themselves again with thrust and didn't look back.

  The smaller, faster-targeting defensive guns of the enemy line ships opened up and took their toll. The Privateer pilots flew through the streams with grit teeth and set jaws until they’d gone beyond the range where the alien gunners would try to hit them.

  The shock of Pooch's own survival flashed through her like a tingle that left her body floating. Her helmet now highlighted the target in wireframe. Matilda Witt’s longboat was between Arbitrage and the small, alien ship, just a few Ks out from the bay now, going so slowly it was almost a stationary target.

  As they bore down on it with savage war-cries on comms, whomever was at the longboat's helm must have realized it was too late to turn around and make for their bay, but its engines plumed pale and blue and bright as it tried.

  Each of the fighter pilots now bearing down on Matilda Witt's longboat had cursed her at one point or another. They’d all asked for this moment...revenge for using them like fodder...revenge for 75% casualties and all the friends they lost under her command. The only one to shed a tear was Pooch. Inside her flight helmet Hellcat 1-1 cried because she knew if Staas VPs like Witt were dying today, then there wasn’t much chance any of them would make it. She’d known that before. She'd stood tall in the face of it for her pilots' sake. Now, alone in the cockpit, she wept, but her voice never wavered. This command was her pleasure to give. "This is Hellcat 1-1. Open fire. Send that woman to hell."

  The 151s and the 223s fired from outside what was considered their maximum effective range. Normally the time it took the shells to arrive would be enough for the target to maneuver out of their path. But that was when a single fighter fired its six autocannon. When the forty-one remaining fighters of the Hardway Air Group all opened up together, their combined fire fell across such a wide area, there was literally nowhere for Matilda Witt’s longboat to go to escape the vengeful rain.

  *****

  SCS Boomslang slipped out the open bay doors of Arbitrage when all eyes were on Witt's longboat and the hail of shells. From inside the stealthed ship's cockpit, Ram witnessed the death of Matilda Witt. Just before the sabot ripped through it and the high-explosive shells blew it apart, she spoke on comms one last time. She said, "I’ll see you all soon." Then, her boat cooked off in a strangely extended flash of uncontrolled fusion.

  The fighters that had ended her then rotated to fire on the alien diplomatic ship next. Its thin beams tried to slice at them, but it didn't stand a chance.

  Some of those fighters should be from the 38th SD, Ram thought. "Special Delivery," he said as they launched warspite torpedoes too close to the enemy hull for its few defensive guns to find them and save it.

  "Now. Get us out of here while they’re all looking the other way," Ram said. "Hit the main engines. "

  "Lighting ‘em up," Medoc said. "Watch our endo emissions."

  "Got it."

  The alien ambassadorial ship seemed to shudder as the warheads detonated against its hull. It was small enough to get lost in the detonation flash and when they could see it again, burning fragments were all that remained.

  "Go, go, go!"

  "Full thrust."

  Ram thought he had enough of a grip on the handhold, but he was wrong. Boomslang had less inertial negation now than the one test run he’d been on and since he’d only been using one hand to hold on, when the ship blasted out of there towards the fat and bloody gas giant and the aliens' homeworld moon, he was thrown backwards with the Chief. They impacted on the bulkhead together.

  "That was fast." Medoc said before they managed to get up.

  "What?"

  Medoc's co-pilot, Max, tapped at his console to project a display over the OMNI NAV set between their seats. The scale of the ships in the projection was minute, but they were big enough to discern the enemy particle streams slicing at UNS and Privateer hulls. "The fleet is outnumbered two to one and the Squidies still have that dreadnought. I saw what that thing can do at Sirius. I saw it slice over twenty ships apart before the rest of them could escape."

  "Get us to the enemy’s homeworld moon" Ram said. "We have to end this war."

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Squidies’ gas giant loomed over the Lancers and the forty-one, remaining fighters, filling Jordo's cockpit with blood red, monochrome light. The reflection of Beta Draconis off the clouds was bright enough that he could see Paladin’s face in his helmet. And Dirty’s. Neither of them rotated their heads or looked around now. They kept their eyes fixed on the aliens’ homeworld moon.

  The thin atmo of that rock had an elusive green tint that could only be seen at the edges. Even from this far out, the muddy yellow ridges and blue-green valleys made it clear why they called it the 'moldy pea'. The Squidy population lived almost entirely underground in cities carved out of the soft rock. Besides the glittering places their mega-nests broke the surface, yellow, crusty, volcanic hills and cyan lowlands dominated.

  The last fighters of the Hardway Air Group ripped across the vacuum towards it. Lancer 1-1 looked for Boomslang on LiDAR and radar and saw nothing, not even faint IR emissions from her exhaust. For a single, fearful instant, he thought maybe that wasn’t because of her stealth, but because she actually hadn’t successfully launched from Arbitrage before the enemy turned that ship to debris and gas. With any luck, Boomslang had slipped out of the bay while all eyes were on the death of Matilda Witt and they had been a hundred Ks away by the time the first of the alien warheads and the vengeful salvos from the Squidies’ fleet found Arbitrage.

  "Take a peek to our 3 o'clock," Burn said.

  "Nothin’ there. Not that I can see." But then, the glimmer of an intermittent heat reading 100,005Ks to starboard flashed in his helmet visor. It was gone in an instant, but he knew it was them. All at once he felt relief and fear flash through him. That ship’s stealth wasn’t perfect. If he could see them, even for an instant, then so could Squidy.

  "Network of planetary defense stations coming up," Burn said. "And then the defense satellites around the homeworld moon itself."

  The coded message from Hardway came as text. Every one of them got it and Jordo was thankful for that. Of the forty-one pilots, only four of the remaining squadron leaders knew the real reason for this extended and suicidal breakaway incursion all the way to the aliens’ homeworld moon. Killing Matilda Witt was just sugar on the pill and not telling his pilots their real mission still felt like a betrayal, but none of them could risk talking about it now.

  The order from Hardway said to bypass the blockade guns and the orbital defense strongholds and use the 38th SD and the remaining warspite torpedoes on the Lancers' Sky Jacks to attack the city-sized alien fleet headquarters in orbit around the homeworld moon. It looked to be three times the size of Sagan Station and the main Staas Yards. They might damage it, maybe, but the real mission was to make a path for SCS Boomslang by ensuring that nobody was looking her way while she crept up on the homeworld moon to deliver the war’s final blow. Disruption and distraction was their real mission.

  "We're going all the way to Squidy Town," Paladin said. "Like Hardway could stop us now that we’re through the lines."

  Dirty said, "We've only got six torps left between us and the 38th. Do they really think that’s enough for a battlestation?"

  "We’ll hit it in the sweet spot," Burn lied. "Spybirds discovered a critical vulnerability." She made that up and Jordo couldn’t tell if they believed her.

  The battlestations in orbit around the aliens' sulfur and cyanobacteria covered moon all glittered at once. The exhaust flares looked like a thousand sparks breaking away from the alien defenses and swarming. "They're launching a lot of something. Multiple contacts from multiple points. Small," Dirty said, "Fast. Faster than fighters."

  "Here come the warheads," Paladin said.

  "How many?" It took their flight computers time to count them.

  "1323?!" Dirty laughed in disbelief.

  In their heads all his pilots were probably asking how 41 fighters were supposed to survive that. "We blast our way through them," he said. "All the way to Squidy Town." He made sure he said it like he believed it himself and glanced once again to starboard. He couldn’t see Boomslang now, but they were out there somewhere, riding the chaos the suicidal fighter squadrons created...hiding in it. Hope you bloody appreciate it, Boomslang. We’re paying for your passage.

  *****

  Alien warheads cooked off only a few Ks out, but the way the energy sloughed off Boomslang and fell into N-space, the blinding nuclear flashes didn’t even make a glow inside the cockpit. It made the whole scene uncanny and eerie and wrong somehow, as if they were even more detached than spectators.

  "Most of those pilots don’t even know we’re here," the Chief said. "They don’t know the real reason they’re dying."

  "The squadron leaders know." Ram couldn’t tear his eyes from the fighters and the detonations to port, but Medoc and his copilot concentrated on maintaining Boomslang’s stealth.

  "Not too close," Medoc advised as the flying bombs that made it past the fighters’ first salvos separated and blossomed into multiple missiles. They cooked off under 140mm cannon fire in a rolling front of detonations. "Put a little more distance between us and our escorts." Medoc told his copilot.

  "You thinking the fast neutron emissions from those warhead detonations might give us away?"

  "I'm thinking I think I don’t want some hell-bent zoomie slamming his fighter into our hull because he can't see us. Besides, they’ll be in range of the big guns on the alien battlestations real soon. Don’t want to be too close when one of those things slashes across the sky like a bloody scythe."

  Ram said, "Give me an updated ETA."

  Medoc answered without taking his eyes from his console. "If the remaining fighters fly the path I think they’ll fly to get through the inner defenses and don’t get entangled in any engagements on the way… forty-two minutes. We’ll be in position to deliver our payload seconds after that if we’re not seen."

  Forty-two minutes. He would've rather had more time for the redsuits’ sake, but maybe being forced to act quickly would make it easier for them. It would have been easier for Ram if he could have briefed them before they left, but Harry Cozen was always listening. The old man had ears everywhere. "Chief Horcheese," Ram said, "go make sure your cherries are squared and not getting underfoot."

  Her eyes flicked down to Medoc, now turning in his seat. "Not so fast, Chief," he said, suddenly speaking even more softly than before. The barrel of the little snub-nosed TUK hand-cannon he held gaped at them. Each of the six chambers in the hexagonal cylinder held a crude shell filled with micro shot that would cut both him and Horcheese in two at this range. It would dissipate into a cloud quickly after that...probably wouldn't do more than dent the bulkhead. "Nobody is going anywhere," Medoc said. "Lock the ship down, Max."

  "The ordnance bay is now isolated," the copilot reported. "No comms. No access. They have orders to fire when we get there."

  Medoc reached over and lifted the gun out of Ram’s holster. "A Honma & Voss Itar. I thought that’s what it was," he said, risking almost a second-long glance at it. "That’s quite a valuable artifact. It’s worth a fortune and it’s an illegal carry to boot. I’m impressed, Mr. Devlin."

  "I don't want to argue with a man holding a gun, but exactly what do think you’re doing?"

  "I don’t trust you, Mr. Devlin. I have reason to believe you may attempt to interfere with this mission. So I’m taking precautions."

  Ram didn't hold out much hope of convincing him, but he tried. "We can't kill 70 billion without giving the Squidies a proper chance to surrender."

  "Matilda Witt got to you, didn’t she... How the hell did Harry Cozen not see it?"

  "Nobody got to me," Ram said. "This is my decision. I made it weeks ago. I can’t let this happen. Too many people died to get humanity to this moment for us to meet it like this...with humanity’s single greatest act of barbarity. I’m begging you, Medoc. Let me drop one bomb and give them a chance to surrender first. Before we put the lights out on 70 billion… before we try to exterminate an entire species."

  Medoc shook his head slowly left and right. "War is the way of the stars. The galaxy isn’t civilized. We’re just pretending to be that way on Earth and we’ve always been pretending, Mr. Devlin. And badly. Civilization has always been hypocrisy with us."

  "How can Humanity ever become anything better if we don’t at least try?"

  "If we get one chance to end this…one chance to hit Squidy so hard he never gets up again, then we have to take it without hesitation or mercy."

  "And you’d kill all of them. Even if we started it?"

  Medoc snorted air out his nose. "I don’t know the secrets you know about how this war started, Mr. Devlin, and I don’t want to. In the end, it doesn’t matter who started this war. It only matter which of us lives on after it's over. I’d like it if we could be what you want us to be, Mr. Devlin, but we can't. We’re going ahead with the original mission. There will be no deviations from Mr. Cozen's plan. With any luck, my crew already has your two redsuits stowed safely in a hold."

  Chief Horcheese stepped from the rear of the cockpit towards Medoc and the front. "Isn’t it a little dangerous firing that thing in here?"

  "Not a step closer, please, Chief. I will shoot you."

  "Of course you will," she said.

  Once Ram saw her moving on those artificial limbs, it was as if she changed from a solid to a blurred streak of motion. He tried to get out of the way and push himself against the bulkhead to give her more room, but by the time he even twitched, she’d already covered the distance between her and Medoc and grasped his weapon firmly in the vice of her right hand with her palm right over the TUK’s gaping barrel. Medoc’s face was so surprised in the moment before the gun discharged that Ram wasn’t even sure he’d meant to fire.

  The sound was a wet pop and he didn’t see any flash, only the Chief’s arm recoiling as if she was the one that had fired a weapon. The artificial skin exploded bloodlessly off her hand and arm in an instant, exposing surreal pink ‘muscle’ and cable tendons and titanium-alloy bone. The micro shot from Medoc’s weapon couldn’t penetrate the metal out of which the skeletal palm plate of her artificial hand had been made. It blew all of the fake ‘flesh’ off, but the projectiles stopped there, embedded in her palm in a smoking lump. The Chief only winced as she pivoted and snatched the gun from him with her other hand without exclaiming even so much as an ‘ouch’.