War of Alien Aggression 2 Kamikaze (11 page)

Hardway's
repairs were almost complete when Harry Cozen told Ram the situation was unacceptable. An air group commander that was so alienated from the crew was no good to anyone. 

That night, Biko drank in the Goma Shipyards' one officers' club. That's where the Staas Guards came for him. Staas Guards worked for whomever paid them and these Staas Guards were the hired Shore Patrol, paid by the station to keep Privateers and UN sailors in line. They marched right into the OC and shined a light in Asa Biko's face. A dozen of them. The Goma Station shore patrol had authority over anyone visiting their station, even Staas Company Officers.

What would happen next had been scripted by Harry Cozen. When Ram had talked to the Staas Guards' watch supervisor and delivered the bribe that made it all happen, she'd told him they didn't get much action out here at Goma. She said
Hardway
was still famous from the first day of the war and if her men couldn't get at the Squidies themselves, then at least a donnybrook with the 'heroes of
Hardway
' would give them something to brag about when they went back down to Earth on leave. She'd sent an even dozen goons tonight like Cozen had wanted. Ram had told Cozen that sending a dozen SPs to harass one man seemed implausible, and Cozen told Ram to acquire a sense of theater. 

The Shore Patrol goon had a fractured voice like someone had recently punched him in the throat. "Asa Biko, come with us."

"Why?"

"Security check. ID verification. Contraband search. Cavity investigation. Maybe more."

"There's more?"

"There's lots more."

"What if I don't want to go with you?"

"That's not an option."

"Can you read, SP?" Dana pointed at the shoulder of Biko's flight suit. "That's
Hardway's
Air Group Commander
you're talking to." 

"You know your rank doesn't matter to us and we're authorized to transport you any way we see fit." His hand went to the baton on his hip.

"Who ordered this?" Ram demanded.

Biko said, "It's alright. I'll go."

"We're coming with you," Ram told him. "We'll get this sorted." He stood. So did Dana and Chief Horcheese.

"Save some for me," Horcheese said. She and Dana weren't in on it. They didn't know it was all a setup – pure theater. Ram felt a little bad about that, but he knew he'd get punished for it soon enough.

Biko left the officers' club with a dozen neckless Staas Guard SPs walking around him. Ram and Dana and the Chief followed behind them as they took him towards the launch pads, down the station's mainspoke, past the enlisted bars. They marched him right in front of Pepcock One – not more than five meters from the saloon's open doors. That's when the SP in front of Biko stopped short. When Biko stopped, too, so he didn't run into him, the goon behind him shoved him forward, and after Biko spun around, the first one hit him behind the knee with the club. Another knocked him from his knees to the ground.

"Hey you can't treat Asa Biko like that!" Ram shouted it loudly and hoped it had been loud enough to be heard over the music in the bar. "He's the
Hardway
AGC!" Ram and Dana and Horcheese surged forward, but four of the Staas Guards spun on them and pointed those electrified truncheons in their faces while the rest of them stomped Biko. It looked worse than the Guards had a reputation for, but Ram guessed they didn't mind enhancing their rep some.

There were plenty of
Hardway
personnel in that bar not ten meters away and the Staas Guard shore patrol were doing exactly what they'd been paid to do: beat up Asa Biko right in front of them. Scores of the carrier's pilots and crew saw it. Biko didn't fight back as much as Ram thought he would. The mopey bastard probably thought he deserved a beating just for being an officer, but
Hardway's
crew disagreed, and then, Ram saw the full effect of Cozen's manipulative plan. 

They poured out of the bar and hurled themselves at the shore patrol to save Asa Biko. Ram knew they still loved him as much as ever. Now, Biko knew it, too.

The Staas Guard said rank didn't matter to them, but they lied. Ram couldn't help but notice (as the SP broke his nose) that even with thirty or forty pilots and crewmen coming at them from the bar, they made a special point to beat up all of
Hardway's
officers first.  

*****

The pilots in the longboat that came to pick them up didn't wear any insignia or rank on their black flight suits. They didn't talk much either. "Take a seat. Short flight." Less than two minutes later, Ram, Biko, and Dana lifted off from the mainspoke landing pads with a standing priority clearance that would have left incoming traffic in a holding pattern if there had actually been any.

They flew them out over the station's small yards. Too small for the carrier, he thought. The yards looked like they'd been docked at
Hardway
.  

This time, when they'd come home, there were no heroes' welcomes, no speeches from dignitaries. This time, even though they'd won, the damage to the carrier was so bad that Staas wanted to fix her up somewhere quiet where the press wouldn't see it. And they wanted the casualties kept out of sight.

The longboat flew past
Hardway
and the hundreds of knuckledragger mechs working to fit her with replacement modules hauled in from the main Staas Yards at Sagan. A ship held station a few Ks off. It had no markings other than a name, half-burned away by what could only have been enemy fire received in some engagement that neither Ram nor anyone else would probably ever hear about.
Arbitrage
had been Harry Cozen's personal ship before he took command of
Hardway
and she was still under his hand. 

Arbitrage
cracked the doors for the longboat. Her total length was only 217 meters, but that bay was over 170m long. The pilots brought them in without a word over comms between them and the ship. There were three other longboats in there, but mostly it was full QF-111 Dingoes. Eighteen of the seven-meter-tall autonomous AI fighter drones stood in
Arbitrage
's bay.  

Biko pointed out the porthole. "What the hell are those? Those new vertical elements on the front of the Dingoes..."

Ram saw them, too. They looked like vertical coffins on a neck, welded to the curved, front side of the drone, offset to starboard, since the 6x140mm autocannon occupied the center. While they tried to figure out why the top part of the new section was made of transparent diamond-pane like a canopy, the nameless pilots set the longboat down in the clamps near a docking tube. When the pilots got a green light for atmo in the airlock, they didn't even turn around. They just said, "He's waiting for you."

Harry Cozen stood outside the airlock doors. He'd left Ram to supervise
Hardway's
repairs some twelve days ago, and now, Ram knew where he'd gone. "Seal the doors and pressurize the bay," Cozen told a maintenance crewman. "I want to introduce some of my officers to the new F-151s." 

Even with
heaters blasting the bay, it was still freezing in there without an exosuit. Cozen walked them out among the fighter drones, all standing on their stubby, retractable legs. He said, "Biko, I thought you might appreciate seeing this." 

Biko said, "What did you attach to the front of these Dingo 111s? They look like coffins." Every one of the eighteen drones had been fitted with one of the 2.5 meter, vertical boxes on the front, offset to starboard on a long neck.

Cozen said, "That's a vertical cockpit, Mr. Biko."

"You're kidding."

Cozen said, "This is Staas Company's new, F-151 Exo-Atmospheric Interceptor. It
used to be
a QF-111 drone. Now, it's a manned fighter...the F-151 Bitzer. It's Aussie for 'a bit of this...bit of that'...
Bitzer
." 

"Because you put a cockpit on it?"

Ram said, "The Dingoes are obsolete."

Cozen nodded. "It's their brains that need an upgrade. Putting a pilot inside will do that. Besides, we have thousands of these already, but what we don't have is
time
. It would take a year to develop an entirely new, manned, exo-atmospheric fighter just so that we can leverage the inertial negation system we stole from the Squidies. It would mean new maintenance training, new parts... We can't wait that long. Over the last two months, we've been reverse-engineering the aliens' inertial negation system. We've made a new one and it's almost safe for the pilot, but if we want to use it
now
, we're going to have to use it on craft we're already tooled-up to deploy and maintain. So we made the Bitzer out of the QF-111 drones." 

"But these drones were
autonomous,
closed-system drones." 

"Their computerized minds are modeled on a sheep herding dog, Mr. Biko, but you can ride them like horses if you put reins on them. That's what we did. Learning to fly one of these into combat is easier than learning to fly anything else. It cuts training time by 95%. The Bitzer already knows how to fly, Mr. Biko, just like a horse already knows how to run. You just tell it where to go."

"But will our pilots be in control?"

"The pilot's input goes to the AI – like reins on a horse. Two sticks, two pedals, neural-link with the fighter through the helmet."

"How long?" Ram asked. "Until they're in service."

"Under five months for broad deployment.
Including
pilot training. But these fighters here belong to the Lancers, Staas Company's own 133rd Fighter Test Squadron. They'll see action a little sooner than anyone thinks. This one already has." He pointed at a pair of red bandit silhouettes painted on the hull and then patted it like a prized beast.

Biko said, "Are you sure about the new inertial negation system being safe?"

"I didn't say it was safe," Cozen said. "Not completely safe. We've found a way to run the pulses so the rapid-flux tidal stresses won't damage brain tissue quite as quickly."

"Does it work?" Dana asked. "As well as the alien version works, I mean."

"We still don't have some of the materials we need. So we had to sacrifice almost 40% effectiveness in the new design. The Squidies and their red bandits will be able to take 40% more inertial gees, but if we fly in greater numbers, I'm betting our pilots can take them." Cozen looked to Biko. The AGC's eyes were fixed on the cockpit of the closest, towering fighter. "What do you think, Mr. Biko?"

"I'm not an aerospace designer. I can't really give you much useful input here."

"That's not what I meant. You're the Air Group Commander. To do your job, you need to know exactly what every craft under your command is capable of. So I ask you again:
what do you think?
"

Biko grinned. "I think I'm going to need a ladder to get in."

The War of Alien Aggression
 

(Hardway, Kamikaze, Lancer, Taipan, Cozen's War) 

All five books in
The War of Alien Aggression
in a single volume - the war with the Squidies from the first engagement to the final detonations. 

640 pages, 192K words 

amazon.com/author/a.d.bloom
 

Hardway
 

Intelligent life reaches out to Humanity using particle beam weapons and masers. The pilots and crew of the carrier
Hardway
are first to fight in the conflict that quickly escalates from a bloody first contact to a full-scale, interstellar war. Ram Devlin knows he and the rest of Humanity may have been tricked into engaging in a war that didn't have to happen. The verity of the history being written is in doubt, but the survival of his crew and the very future of mankind is at stake.

41K words, 137 pages

Kamikaze
 

The privateer attack carrier
Hardway
invades Procyon to destroy an alien blockade gun meant to keep the human race confined.
Hardway
and her pilots meet their match in the Squidies' massive gun and the alien aces that protect it until they discover why the aliens are beating them.
Hardway's
officers must commit to paying for victory in war's only true currency.

28K words, 96 pages

Lancer
 

Privateer Admiral Harry Cozen needs pilots for an experimental fighter squadron, so he offers the inmates of Bailey Prison a deal. Colt is serving 5-7 and he knows the deal is too good to be true, but he still takes it. He and the rest of the C-Block nuggets learn to fly the new F-151 Bitzer and prepare to sortie against alien aces on a mission far more dangerous than anyone's telling them.

35K words, 117 pages

Taipan
 

The privateer attack carrier
Hardway
is drafted into a force group commanded by Harry Cozen's bitter rival from Staas Company. She stole his fighter program and his thousand new pilots. Now, she's determined to use them as cannon fodder. Nobody can argue with her battle record, but the officers and crew of
Hardway
and the Lancers of the 133rd Fighter Test Squadron may be all that can keep her pilots alive in a knife-fight deep behind enemy lines. 

61K words, 203 pages 

Cozen's War

The Staas Privateers and the UN fleet have brought the fight to the Squidies' home system. The massive Earth invasion fleet faces off against every ship the Squidies' can muster. Harry Cozen is in command and this is his greatest gambit, but alien propaganda threatens to reveal the war's greatest secret on the very day the broadest and bloodiest battle of the conflict unfolds. Knowing how thin the margin is between victory and defeat, Ram Devlin races to the Squidies' homeworld moon with a weapon of mass destruction that could end the war in seconds. Humanity must win, but the price of victory may be a thousand more years of war.