War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway Read online

  From Moriah's dusty surface Harry Cozen had transmitted details of their encounter on an open frequency. The other mining carriers and Staas Company ships would have heard it. The story of aliens attacking miners would have a similar effect on the crews of the other ships as it had on Hardway.

  After years in zero-gee, Ram had gotten pretty good at keeping the contents of his stomach from floating up into his throat, but he tasted his own bile when he thought about every mining carrier transitioning smoothly to being a ship of war with crews thinking of nothing but revenge on the Squidies – all of it made possible with Cozen's lie.

  The AT controller display still projected the same diagrams of Ram's attack plan over the console. The projection of Hardway floated 1/3 of a meter long, out of scale against Jupiter, set in an orbit so low that the figure of the carrier appeared to blur where it co-located with the gas giant. If Hardway's junks had been drawn to scale, then they'd have been less than 3mm long. In the diagram they were a third the size of Hardway herself just so they could be seen. The approaching alien ship was an abstract red dot with an arrow indicating current direction of travel. Smack on top of the gas giant's pole was a lone junk labeled Mohegan.

  Ram said, "Tell me someone came up with a better plan than this while I was in the launch bays."

  Cozen spoke without looking at Ram. "You said it yourself when you presented this plan, Commander Devlin. And you were right. Unless we plan to ram it, besides six Dingoes, we've only got two things on Hardway we can use to kill an enemy ship: mining junks and rocks. Chief Terrazzi ran the equations with Lt. Commander Sellis and they both came up with numbers that say this plan can work."

  "The redsuits replaced almost every system in that junk, but someone's still got to fly Mohegan," Ram said, "and that junk isn't coming back."

  "Why can't we use a remote link?"

  "Can't trust it," Cozen said. "It's probable the enemy has electronic warfare capabilities sufficient to disrupt any remote command and control."

  "What we have already is a workable plan," Biko said, "We can do this."

  Ram said. "Lt. Commander Biko, under the new chart, you're the Air Group Commander. The AGC is the one assigning the pilots. Who are you going to order to fly Mohegan on a suicide mission?" Ram knew who Asa Biko thought he was and who he wanted to be, so he knew the answer to that question before he asked.

  Biko leaned into the projections above the AT Controller display and said, "I'm going to fly it. I can eject the cockpit and survive. Maybe."

  Ram almost laughed and Cozen sighed as if Asa Biko had suddenly bored him. Cozen said, "You can't do that, Mr. Biko. You're too valuable as my Air Group Commander."

  Biko said, "I'm not ordering someone to their death."

  "I thought you said you'd survive..."

  "Maybe."

  "But now, you're not so sure?" Cozen said, "Give the order, Mr. Biko. Sending people on missions like this is part of the job."

  "Then I don't want the job."

  "You do if you give a damn about all those lives down there." Harry Cozen pointed out the front of the bridge, out the meter-thick windows and down at the launch bay module below. "Hardway's going to need an Air Group Commander and none of the other pilots are going to give her half as good a chance at survival as you are. You've got the job. So assign someone."

  "And if they refuse the order?" Biko said it like it was a real possibility and maybe it was.

  "If they refuse," Ram said, "then I've got to shoot them." Those were the wartime regulations, even on a Privateer.

  "Actually, you just give the order," Cozen told him. "You're a company officer, Mr. Devlin. You're management, remember? You order someone else to pull the trigger." It wasn't a joke.

  Biko said, "None of us asked to do this, Mr. Cozen. This isn't what they signed on for."

  "It most certainly is what they signed on for," Cozen reminded him. "It's in the contract."

  "We're miners and junk pilots..."

  "Our people have more experience than anyone flying small craft and operating in zero-gee. That's the reason this provision was negotiated into the contract, Mr. Biko. In case of war, the mining fleet and all its personnel can be drafted and militarized and all your experience can be leveraged. They did sign on for this and they're up to the task."

  "Personnel transfer with Arbitrage is complete," Dana said.

  "I'm clearing their longboat to launch."

  Arbitrage fled for the inner solar system and Hardway set a course to intercept the alien warship. Once Harry Cozen finally left the bridge and went down to Doc Ibora in Medical to have the wound Horan gave him properly tended to, Ram confronted him there. It was the most privacy they'd get and this had to be private.

  Ram found him on a table with a half-meter-thick, insectile bot wrapped around his thigh doing surgery under its shell. They'd stopped the bleeding in the tube with filler, but Cozen still looked pale from the mud he'd lost out the hole Horan put in him. Without an exosuit or a flight suit he was old and ghostly and wrinkled. He looked fragile even. Doc Ibora stood over him where he lay on an operating table and supervised the bot's progress as it repaired veins and arteries and pumped Cozen full of synthetic plasma.

  Cozen lifted his head when he saw Ram. His eyes were dull from anesthesia. Ram said, "Doctor Ibora, I need a few minutes alone with Mr. Cozen."

  "The bots do a good job, Mr. Devlin, but I should stay to make sure there are no problems." When Ram didn't reply, Ibora looked up and read the gravity of his stare.

  "Leave us alone. It's an order," Ram said. In three years, he'd never given Ibora one of those. Not like that. The doctor didn't look as if he liked it much. He exited without another word and left Ram alone with Cozen in the trauma section.

  Cozen said, "I think I know why you're here, Devlin. You have that look about you."

  "What look is that?"

  "Desperation." He was closer to the truth than Ram wanted to admit.

  "Mr. Cozen, I know the truth."

  Harry Cozen laughed and waved his hand like Ram had made a bad joke. It was the anesthesia, Ram thought. "What do you think you know?"

  "There was never any alien attack on Mohegan or on Gold Coast for that matter. You fooled us. You made it all happen, Mr. Cozen. You used the company's remote links and a some set of undocumented master command codes to sabotage both ships and make Dana Sellis' scanners see what you wanted them to. You killed ten men and women. Then you lied to us, Mr. Cozen, and you used us to start a war with an alien species."

  "And you helped me," Cozen said.

  "That's right." Ram wasn't proud of it, but it was truth.

  "And now," Cozen said, "you're having second thoughts. You know you can't prove anything and you know nobody will ever prosecute me and you think I deserve to die for the ten deaths I caused." Cozen sighed like he found all of this tiresome. "On Moriah, you made your decision. You could have exposed the truth as you call it, but you didn't. Now, you don't like the weight of our lie."

  "Your lie," Devlin said, but only because he wanted to disagree with this man so badly that it made him say things he knew weren't true.

  "Our lie, Commander Devlin. It's our lie. That includes dead Mickey Wells. The lie ceased to become only mine and hers the moment you decided to keep the secret of what really happened to Mohegan. You thought you could bear it, but now, you've decided you can't. That sort of reversal is dangerous. It can lead to terrible mistakes. Like the one that killed Mickey." Ram felt the blood rushing to his face. Cozen's was stone. "I saw what happened," he said. "You saw the last one. You saw the last Squidy before anyone else saw it, but you didn't raise that weapon in your hand."

  "I did." Ram protested through bared teeth. "I couldn't get it to fire fast enough. It was an alien weapon. I'm lucky I got it to discharge at all."

  "Bull dust, Mr. Devlin. I saw you hesitate. What... Did you think you could talk to the Squidy? Make peace with it? Avert a war? Or maybe it was because you didn't have the righteo
us anger in your belly to raise that weapon and pull the trigger when you needed to and when she needed you to. That would have kept Mickey Wells alive and she'd be here – all of her, not just the parts that didn't get turned to ash."

  Ram though Cozen must be pushing him, daring Ram to drill a hole between his eyes just to call his bluff. He became acutely aware of the suction nozzles built into the walls of the operating room to remove blood from the air if the gravity failed. He could do it, he thought. This would be a neat place for it - easy clean-up. But this was Mickey's plan, too... She believed in this war. And Ram owed her.

  "Mickey's death was my fault," Ram said. "But it wasn't because I hesitated. It was my fault for not exposing your lie when I saw through it. Now, I'm responsible for her death and Oboto's and Lapuis' and D'Ambrosse's. I'm responsible for all of them and all the ones after that. Just like you."

  Cozen added butter then. "We're also responsible for all the rest of it," he said, "for how well Hardway is managing her transition to a Privateer warship and how motivated her officers and crew are to fight. They're the ones that took the ship back from Captain Horan, not me. Morale is high. I imagine it is on all the conscripted company ships right now. They've heard the story about how innocent miners were attacked by alien fiends, but then they fought back and won and avenged their dead. Now, the fleet has the righteous fury they'll need to win this war. They won't be asking questions like you are about what's right and what's wrong and what's their fault. They won't have the burden that stayed your hand and got Mickey killed. Thanks to us they won't. That's a good thing."

  Ram began to say how that rationalization had been made a thousand times in human history and mankind's best thinkers in any given century had all come to the agreement that a) it was not, actually, a good thing, that b) the ends never justify the means, and that c) what is lost when the ends are interpreted to justify the means is always greater than what we sought to preserve with our unjustifiable actions.

  Ram tried to insist that the truth Cozen called a 'burden' wasn't just every man's right to carry but also his responsibility to bear, but Cozen cut him off with a wave of his hand. "In war, believing you're righteous is a good thing, Devlin. Period."

  "The men and women who fight your war deserve to know the truth of it."

  Cozen's eyes chilled twenty degrees. "Our story of what happened is the truth now. Your version of events must never come out. Never. Everyone would be filled with questions and self-doubt like you. Without the righteousness we've given them, they might stand there like you did in the middle of that alien ship, waiting to get shot. I saw your face, Devlin. I dove out of the goddamn way, but I saw your face when you realized that last Squidy was going to shoot. You knew he already had the drop on you. You knew you'd never shoot it before it shot you and you were alright with that because you thought you deserved it. Tell me I'm mistaken, Mr. Devlin. That's how you lose a fight. That's how you lose a war. And that's what it'll do to all of them if you open your mouth."

  "The Squidies were waiting for you on Moriah, weren't they? It was a meeting. Negotiations... something. That's why they didn't send a warship and neither did you. That's why we only found a couple of weapons on board. That was some kind of diplomatic delegation we killed. The alien warships appeared in our system only after that – after we attacked first. We slaughtered their delegates and they've come for revenge. Why? Why did we do it, Mr. Cozen?"

  "We'd end up going to war with them no matter what."

  "Why? Why do you say that? Why did Mickey say that?"

  "They're more technologically advanced than we are."

  "So?"

  "So I ask you: Did it end well for the indigenous peoples of North and South America when the Europeans came? I could give you a thousand such examples from human history. I imagine Squidy history isn't much different. Space is not civilized, Ram. It's no more civilized than Earth." He chuckled darkly. "As it is on Earth, so it is in the heavens."

  "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

  "It means war is the way of the stars, Ram. It means the very real and unpleasant truth is that the inter-species struggle for survival and dominance makes the stars as brutal and savage an arena of competition as any terrestrial jungle or Serengeti plain our ancestors faced in the earlier stages of our evolution. Maybe you wanted us to step out to the stars as a peaceful, civilized race, Mr. Devlin, but space is not civilized. Far from it. This is the most important war mankind has ever fought and if we survive it, then it won't be the last. Not by a long-shot. But I like our chances, Ram. I like our chances just fine. I'd bet it all on us. Humanity is made for this."

  "For what?"

  "Mankind has always had a prodigal talent for war and I tell you, Devlin, it's that talent that's going to secure humanity's future among the savage stars."

  "You lied to Mickey just like you're lying to me now."

  "Mickey Wells made the choice to help me because she was good people, Devlin. Like you. And good people have the most trouble doing what needs to be done because it's often something a good person just wouldn't do. But in the end, you can count on them doing it. That describes both of you."

  "I'll keep your secret," Ram said. "But I want something."

  Harry Cozen laughed again, this time like it really was a joke. "Blackmail? Please..."

  Ram said, "I want you to fly Mohegan, Mr. Cozen. You're going to fly the junk that isn't coming back. If you don't, then I'll reveal the truth about what you've done. The consequences will likely be as disastrous as you say. Everything you've done, everything we've done will be undone."

  "You wouldn't do that," he scoffed. "It would destroy this crew and it wouldn't do a damn thing to prevent the war that's already begun."

  "I don't want to do it, but I will. Like you said, it's something a good man wouldn't want to do, but I'll do it."

  "You're learning personal sacrifice, Commander Devlin. Mickey would be proud."

  "Some personality simulation you ran from the data in my file may have told you that Ram Devlin won't murder you, but don't make the mistake of thinking I'm the same man I was this morning. I'm not. I think I could do it now."

  "Maybe."

  "You're the one that's going to fly that mining junk, Mr. Cozen. You're coming to the mission briefing and when Biko asks for volunteers, you're going to be the one to stand up. You're going to volunteer and be a hero, Harry Cozen. You're going to save us all." Cozen laughed and then winced and reached for the bot over his wound. Ram said, "You don't think I'll let the truth out?"

  "On the contrary. I think you might. And I have no doubts that you've hidden a message away somewhere for Asa Biko or Dana or someone else that will be delivered to them should you suddenly die in an improbable accident." It was Ram's turn to hold his face like stone. Cozen said, "But if I fly Mohegan, then who's going to command Hardway after I save the day? Who's going to lead them into battle? And make no mistake, Commander Devlin. If she survives today, this ship and her crew will see a hundred battles in as many star systems before this war ends. Who's going to captain Hardway if not me?" That's when Cozen really began to chuckle.

  "Captain Horan," Ram said. "He's captained this ship for a decade."

  "No. Besides his not being up to the job and the crew despising him, I already had Horan put aboard Arbitrage before she got underway. Stale Augustus Horan's not available for the job, but I know someone that is – someone the whole ship respects." Cozen grinned with a perverse satisfaction that turned Ram's stomach.

  "No."

  "Yes, Mr. Devlin. Yes," Cozen said. "Good men don't like doing what they have to do, but you can count on them to do it."

  Chapter Ten

  SCS Hardway wasn't built with a mission briefing room, but all the pilots fit in one maintenance bay. It was supposed to be a closed briefing, but anyone not on duty packed in. Harry Cozen said not to lock them out and they filled up most of the space behind the pilots.

  Ram Devlin, Asa Biko, Dana Sellis, an
d Harry Cozen stood in front of Mohegan. The redsuits had worked miracles to bring that dead hull back to life. Now, that junk was a symbol of defiance. Ten had died already on her decks.

  Harry Cozen quieted the bay with a wrench. "There's something I'd like to say to you all – something I want you all to remember. Remember it today and remember it every day you stay alive. Some people are going to say that we should have turned the other cheek. They will say we should have tried to make peace with the alien invaders. They're going to say we don't even know why the aliens, the Squidies, attacked." He said the name with hatred. "These people live in denial. I say that the absence of apparent motive behind their attack does not leave us without explanation for their actions. On the contrary. It provides an exceedingly simple explanation to all who are willing to apprehend the unpleasant truth of it. Remember this: War is the way of the stars. The heavens are a savage field of inter-species competition. If we shrink from this truth or the sacrifices it demands, then we who fight today will perish and Humanity may perish with us. The captured alien craft aboard Arbitrage holds their secrets, secrets we need to win this war. Someone must slow the Squidies' warship so Arbitrage can escape and we are the only ones here to fight this battle. We have to win it. That's all I've got to say. Your Air Group Commander, Asa Biko and your XO, Mr. Devlin, will brief you now."

  Asa Biko set his matchbox computer on the deck and let it project upwards so that the image of banded, turbulent Jupiter and her moons floated over his head, out of scale, along with representations of the alien warship, Hardway, and her mining junks. Biko said, "Hardway is currently the only ship between a destroyer-sized alien vessel and SCS Arbitrage. The alien vessel is superior in speed. They have increased their rate of acceleration and at current projections, the aliens will overtake Arbitrage before she's under cover of the UNS fleet. Unless we engage the Squidies and delay them, Arbitrage will not escape. So. We will force an engagement near Jupiter. We will deploy our six QF-111 Dingoes and at the last moment, Hardway will move to put the planet between us and the Squidies' ship."