War of Alien Aggression 3 Lancer (11 page)

Cleeg was probably right. They'd probably die. Jordo knew he had no right to do what he'd done and get them sent in again, but it was the only way. It was the only way that it wouldn't all be in vain. Live or die, it was the only way they'd be anything but a bunch of stupid convicts who got suckered into thinking they were heroes.

His head whipped left because in the corner of his eye he thought he saw Snooze there, to port, as if he'd only been momentarily lost and now he was back. Jordo said, "I'm not stupid and neither are you. I say we knew what we were getting into." They were Snooze's words and Jordo gave them to Cleeg and to the Lancers. "We all knew what this was." Their eyes stared, open wide like they were all looking into the darkness. "We made this choice," he said, "but not because they bamboozled us – not because they promised us freedom or even because they landed in front of C-block and sold us all the bullshit – all the pilot bullshit, the nicknames and the flash. No. Screw that. We didn't do it because they fooled us. We did this because
this
is who we wanted to be. I say you
knew
this shit was coming, Cleeg. Just like I did. So did you, Holdout. And Poppy and Spit. Snooze knew what was up. I say we
all
saw through the bullshit like he did and signed on anyway. I didn't get suckered into doing this. I'm the numbskull who
decided
to do it. I'm Jordo and I'm gonna
be
Jordo for as long as it lasts. Cleeg, you can stay here and let the Staas Guards shoot you if you want, but you volunteered for this shit no matter what you think. Shafter and Burn and Topper and Dig are out there. I'm gonna go and get 'em. I'm gonna go out there now and I'm gonna last a lot longer with a wingman. Snooze is dead, so, Cleeg, you piss-ass, it'd be real helpful if you quit your bitchin' and got up and helped me." 

It was up to Cleeg to decide who he was. It was up to all of them. John Cleeg shook his head like he was saying no, but he stood up with his helmet. "I'll go. But you owe me something."

"What the hell do I o-"

"A
name
."

"A what?"

Cleeg said, "I never got a nickname like 'Jordo' or 'Poppy' or even a shite one like 'Gusher'."

Gusher said, "What's wrong with my name?"

"Everybody else in the whole squadron got one but me. It's not right.
Real
pilots get names. I want mine," Cleeg said, "and I'm not goin' back out there without one." He put the flight helmet down on a table and crossed his arms. 

"Alright..." Jordo pulled the wax marker out from the sleeve pocket of his exosuit. "Gimme that." He took the flight helmet from Cleeg's hands. The reason Cleeg never got a name is because nobody wanted to say 'Asshole' all the time over comms. Jordo said, "You're gonna get a name you like, Cleeg. It's gonna be a hero name. But the deal is, you gotta live it. Until you die. That's the deal."

Cleeg swallowed and nodded. Above the visor Jordo wrote 'Paladin'.

Chapter Twelve

Through the multispectral display in his flight helmet, the planet looked angrier now. The shafts of radiant heat breaking through the clouds from the planet's high-pressure core stabbed at its moons and the ships in high orbit.

From his fighter, waiting outside the carrier, Jordo saw three figures in the junk's cockpit below him. Two of them had the heat signatures you'd expect from a living human in an exosuit. The third looked slightly different, but Jordo had to look closely at the lack of variation across the false color image of the figure being strapped into the pilot's seat in order to discern that the suit was actually empty. There was no pilot inside. It was just a pressurized exosuit with the heater turned on.

There would be no pilot inside the junk
Marquis
when she flew. Dana Sellis said the boat would aviate and navigate by a simple script running on the flight computer. It would fly towards the 4th moon and achieve orbit, deaf dumb and blind to everything around it. All it had to do was fly at the fourth moon along with the Dingoes and make this look like a real attempt to land. 

Hardway
came over the North Polar Region of the planet with all her junks flying. The torpedo bombers made a cone out in front of the carrier like the point of a spear and the gunnery junks deployed to defend them. It was the formation the Squidies would expect. The carrier and its junks steamed straight at the Squidies' cruisers on the other side of the gas giant.  

Over the limb of the planet and through the shafts, the alien ships rose. There were five of them now. The Squidies had reinforced with a pair of ships not quite the size of the two cruisers, but they had the same towers and on top of them were even bigger main guns.

Jordo and Paladin and the rest of the Lancers flew with the QF-111 drones. They hid among the Dingoes, at the back of the pack. Only Lancer 2-1 and 2-2, Jordo and Paladin, rode at the front, leading the drones in. F-151s were really just Dingoes with cockpits so if the Squidies didn't look too closely, then it might work. The pack Jordo and Paladin led at the fourth moon was supposed to look like 2 Lancers and 75 Dingoes. 

After catching the first junk and the fighters trying to get to the fourth moon, the Squidies had guessed why
Hardway
was here and they wouldn't leave that moon unguarded, but just as Ram Devlin and Asa Biko had predicted, once the Squidies saw the Dingoes and the junk making for the fourth moon, they pressed their superiority again. 

"
Hardway
AT to Lancer 2-1, you have the reins, 2-1. Make your move." 

"Lancer 2-1 to
Hardway
AT." Jordo's voice cracked. "Roger." He thumbed into squadron comms. "You all know how to do this. Hold with the Dingoes until I give the signal. If you break away before it's time...if you loose your nerve, it won't just be you that's screwed." 

"This was a shite idea," Paladin said.

"And you're still here. I guess your dumb ass got the right name. Alright, Lancers," Jordo said. "You're going comms dark because you're Dingoes and Dingoes don't talk. Thrusters on my mark. And... mark." He blasted forward with Paladin on his eight o'clock and the eager Dingo pack concealing the Lancers on his six.

The decoy junk without a pilot was already on its way, and he adjusted his course so the Dingoes would more closely escort it on its scripted flight. Two minutes later, as the flashes from
Hardway's
battle with the cruisers lit up the starry blackness far off to port, the cloud of alien fighters rose over the cratered 4th moon. 

The red bandits came barreling in bold and fast over the polar cap. They came in flights of three like before and already they were forming up into what Jordo
now
recognized as an intermediary stage between their regular flying formation and the one they'd used to massacre the drones a couple of hours ago – the one like a saw-blade.

The Squidies' formation strung out into a line of three-plane elements, and then, like before, the front-most elements dove at the Dingoes. Jordo and Paladin were still out front and he could see the bandits lining up behind the ones diving at him. They were all preparing to attack, one after the other. It was like looking up into a serial firing squad that planned to shoot them one bunch at a time.

They'd be inside effective range any second. Jordo thumbed comms to Paladin, "Lancer 2-2, hit the brakes." He and Paladin tapped reverse thrusters so they slowed. This close to the enemy, the Dingoes didn't slow with Jordo and Paladin. Dingo after Dingo shot past their Bitzers and tore across the black to sink their teeth in the Squidies.

"Time to go." Jordo and Paladin turned and bugged out, making it appear as if they were letting the drones fight the red bandits without them. Moments after they blasted away, the carnage began.

The aliens' lead element tore across the front edge of the Dingo pack and ran them through. The particle beams shot out the backs of three drones' hulls. It was happening just like before. This was how the Squidy aces had chewed the hell out of the drones the last time.

The red bandits' spinning saw-blade formation cut halfway through the Dingo pack in just seconds. In a few seconds more, the rolling front of destruction would reach the F-151s and the Lancers hiding in the rear. When Jordo saw the first alien fighters to strike at the drones had flown all the way back to the top of the formation and the Squidies were now fully locked in their a spinning saw-blade formation, he called: "Geronimo, Geronimo. Break! Break! Break!"

Comms filled with war-cries as the Lancers dropped out the bottom of the Dingo pack. The Squidy pilots never saw the Lancers until the 133rd were inside the aliens' formation. 

Jordo and Paladin and the Lancers launched a mass of fire so thick and wide that by the time the enemy saw it coming, it was too late. Three of the bandits shuddered and spun, hammered hard by the Lancers' shells. They cooked off in quick flashes that warned the rest of the alien squadron, but the Lancers were already inside the Squidies' circle. Jordo pulled his nose up to follow its curve. Just beyond the enemy fighter in his targeting reticule was another enemy fighter and beyond that one was another. All around the circle, they were all lined up for the kill.

The Lancers raked fire across three Squidies and three more after that. Jordo thought they had to be stunned because only at this point did the alien pilots show any response to what was happening. The bandits closest to the remaining two-dozen Dingo 111s tried to spin on their jets and blast out to the side to engage the Bitzers instead, but the Dingoes followed them, autocannon blazing. It kept the Squidies from putting their streams on the Lancers for a few more seconds.

Three more alien fighters turned into flashes of hot gas and debris before the bandits could break and reform. Now, Jordo liked the odds better: 12 red bandits vs. 19 Lancers and almost two dozen drones. The Lancers had the advantage. "Follow me in, Paladin."

"I'm on your 4 o'clock, a half-second back," he said.

Jordo threw fire at three bandits he saw coming around the outside of the furball trying to get on the tails of Lancer Flight Five. Two of the aliens broke away to port and the other shot off to starboard. A three-bandit-element dusted Monty and Pick before six drones closed on the alien flight leader together and wiped him from the sky. The other two Squidies dodged fire from Holdout and Dirty, rolled, and then rotated on their jets to face Jordo and Paladin. Lancers 2-1 and 2-2 spun on their jets and spat tongues of fire from 12 cannon. Their shells ripped down the waving alien streams that groped for them.

Jordo fired and screamed and fired until an alien particle stream stabbed its way through his canopy. The kinetic force of the nuclei hitting it shattered the diamond-pane and punched a hole through the back of the cockpit. His visor darkened, but not before he saw his enemy cook off under a hail of fire. In that microsecond of blindness, Jordo cried out, "Dusted!" Then, in almost the same moment, it felt like
Hardway
had smacked into his port-side. The battle spun around him in all directions, but he never saw the bandit that ran his fighter through from starboard to port, right through the reactor.  

The shaking and buzzing in every cell was suddenly gone. The inertial negation system had failed along with the reactor. Unprotected from the effects of inertia and the g-forces produced by his fighter's high-speed maneuvers, Jordo's hands and feet lost the sticks and pedals as he got thrown wildly about the cockpit. All he could see was streams and tracers flying crossways and reactor flashes and all of it spun past in a streaking blur. His 151 was wildly out of control. Then, it blasted the main thrusters and threw Jordo back into the flight couch, fully paralyzing him with g-forces. If it had accelerated any harder without inertial negation, it would have turned him to spam.

He couldn't reach the controls, so Jordo tried to get control of the fighter through the neural interface in his helmet, but the artificial intelligence wouldn't accept his control anymore. It wouldn't listen to him. It only had one thought it repeated over and over and flashed in his visor: 'Eject! Eject! Eject.'

Jordo eyeballed the latches that would open the cockpit manually, but he couldn't move a millimeter. A half-second later, a bomb went off behind him. The entire coffin-shaped, vertical cockpit blew off the front of his Bitzer. The shock of the ejection charges hit his back and spine like a wall and he thought it had killed him. He came back from the dim a second later, tumbling through the furball in his severed cockpit. This time, when the black vacuum washed out white and his flight helmet's visor darkened to protect his eyes, he knew it was his own plane's reactor that had cooked off.

Jordo fell towards the planet, spinning across the furball in a coffin while they shouted on comms. "Somebody get them
off
me!"

"Lancer 5-1, jink, jink!"

"I
am
jinking!" 

"Lancer 4-2, go port. No!
Port
!" 

Jordo saw Dip's 151 get pinned by a particle stream like it was a mounted butterfly. Lancer 4-2's engines got blown off, and the remains of the fighter spun dead in space. Jordo got a look into the half-shattered cockpit. Sammy, the pilot inside, was misshapen and bent wrong.

The single bandit that waxed 4-2 shot past him and then veered hard to pick up Holdout. Gusher shouted, "3-1, Squidy on your 5 o'clock!" Gusher turned on his jets and pointed his cannon towards the Squidy ace. Then, Jordo's cockpit spun, and he couldn't see them through the back of the coffin.

He knew he'd be safer from shrapnel and radiation in the coffin, but as he saw one Lancer after another flash and wink out, spent, lost and dusted forever, the helplessness drove him to find the pair of manual latches that opened the cockpit. He pushed off from the box and floated free, naked in his prison-issue exosuit with shells and streams ripping past and fighters flying all around him.

Jordo tried to discern who was winning. There were fewer bandits now and a lot fewer Lancers. The drones were almost gone. Only a single flight of six remained. It was almost a fair fight now and that was the last thing Jordo wanted to see.