War of Alien Aggression 3 Lancer (2 page)

"You mean those blue exhaust flares weren't from drones? You mean to tell me there were living
,
human pilots in that fight?" He remembered what happened to all of them and how fast they all died. "You guys lost that fight."

"No shit," Shafter said. "Is that all you saw?"

Maybe Shafter wasn't just here for warm bodies after all. "I saw one flight of three enemy fighters approach the moon first. They were a lure – a worm on a hook. I know because after a dozen of your fighter pilots showed up to dust them, in came an alien pocket carrier with a dozen more bandits. It was a trap. They were hunting you."

"Me and Burn and two other pilots were on our way back from spanking the Squidies near Mercury," Shafter said.

"We're all that's left of the Lancers now. It's just us," Burn said. "And you."

This was all some kind of sucker deal. It had to be.

*****

Two hours later, he and Marchett and the 49 selected convicts of Bailey Prison's C-block sat on the floor of the 3rd sub-level basement. Bailey's lowest sub-level was cut below the one that housed the massive HVAC units and all the moistest air sank down there. He sat in 5cm of water.

The ceilings in the vaults were high enough he could peer up into the space between the lamps and see nothing at all. The lunar rock under him was like the yard – a smooth and polished piece of the moon itself. The water made it slippery.

"What's that?" Marchett pointed his chin at the 3m-tall set of field coils in the middle of the vault.

"That's a pinch. Makes artificial gravity."

Marchett asked, "What's it doing in here...with us?"

Pilk, the guards' shift supervisor, stomped in, and his goons fell in behind. "The two fighter pilots that were here had to fly off and
personally
secure transport for your no-good, convict asses. We told 'em we'd be happy to administer the physical test and save 'em some time." Pilk grinned with beady, little teeth. It was like he'd worn them down to half length. "See the red light over the door? When it goes on, all you gotta do is get up and walk out. That's it. That's all you gotta do. The ones that make it get to be pilots. The ones that don't make it get what they deserve."

"Why you gotta' do this, Pilk?" It was Hortez that asked it, but it's what they all wanted to know. "We never did nothing to you."

Pilk said, "After what some of you people have done, I don't like the idea of you walking out of here so easy. So call this my idea of justice." The guards left after that.

Most of the convicts probably didn't know what the set of field coils in the middle of the vault was for, let alone what was about to happen. "Lay down," he said loud enough for them all to hear. "If you know what's good for you, then lay your ass down on the floor." Nobody moved. He took off his shirt, balled it up, and lay down in the wet with it between his head and the stone. After seeing that, Marchett did the same.

The red light went on and so did the hard gravity. Ten-thousand drops of water that had been collecting on the vault's ceiling fell at once. Knees buckled and people got pulled down fast by their own weight. They all fell at once, splashing into the stone together. More than one skull hit hard, and bloodstains spread in the water.

Going from a standard, .3 gees of artificial gravity to a full two Earth gees in seconds pressed the wind out of his lungs. He fought to expand them, pushing against the weight of his own chest. The only breath he was able to draw was a shallow wheeze.

Blood ran from Marchett's nostrils as he tried to rise. He tried to lift his head, too, but it felt like someone was sitting on it. He managed to roll onto his side, but he couldn't get up from there. The living rock cracked under him and sucked in water.

Marchett made it up first, grunting as he managed to go from kneeling to crouching. His eyelids blinked too fast, fluttering randomly, weirdly out of control. Something was definitely wrong and it wasn't just the gees. Marchett pulled him up. "Door! Go!"

Nobody else had made it to their feet so far. Their gaping mouths and desperate eyes made them look like dying fishes. It was getting harder and harder for them to breathe. If they didn't get up soon, they weren't going to last.

Halfway to the door, he stopped. He bent carefully, squatting over his knees and pushed Jeana Bic on her side. He got his hands under her arms. "Help me lift her." The two of them lifted and grunted and until they got Jeana's feet under her. Together, the three of them lifted up Telly Lyons and then Howe and Hortez. They raised up convicts until over half of the 49 were staggering and lifting other bodies from the floor even under their own, hellish weight.

That's when Marchett's big jaw locked up and his eyes glazed and rolled back in his head. He crumpled and fell flat. Jeana hissed, "He's messed up." It took eight people to drag Marchett in those gees.

In the corridor outside, a meter past the door, they crossed the pinch's area of effect and gravity returned to normal. His stomach flipped over and tried to climb up his throat. "What about them?" Jeana pointed back through the doorway. The convicts left in there now were the ones who'd cracked their heads. Two bled out the ears. Skull fractures, maybe. None of them moved.

"Leave 'em," Telly said. "Probably dead."

"No. Everyone makes it out.
Screw
Pilk and the guards. Pilk isn't going to get the pleasure of finding any of us in there." He staggered back into the artificial gees, but it was suddenly worse than it had been only seconds ago. It felt like his flesh was being pulled from his bones and all his organs were trying to plummet down to his feet. His vision began to dim and he didn't even know he'd lost consciousness until he came to and saw Telly, Jeana, Otto, and Howe carrying him out.

"We got them all," Telly told him. "Even the stupid ones like you."

Chapter Four

Five got sealed up in heavy black bags. Pilk and his goons put the remaining, 44 pilot trainees out Bailey's main locks in their orange, prison-issue exosuits and helmets. When the airlock doors opened, none of the prisoners hesitated to exit, but once they were outside on the lunar surface, they only got a few steps down the four-lane orgocrete highway before all the open space stopped them in their tracks. It pressed in on them from all sides. He heard Telly Lyons breathing fast and hard into her helmet mic, hyperventilating as her rebreather struggled to adjust the mix faster.  

He'd fantasied about how far he'd run and how fast he'd go if he ever got a chance like this and here he was, standing on the lunar surface in a fully charged exosuit with not a guard in sight. And like the rest of them, he couldn't move.

Marchett's voice came over local suit comms. "What the
hell
are you all looking at? Ain't you seen enough of this rock?"

Telly said, "Thinking of making a break for it?"

"Yeah. Right," he said. "Where are we gonna go?"

"We got enough battery charge on these suits to hoof it to the far side of the complex and jack an automated hauler. There's enough of us. We even got our own pilot."

Jeana said, "Where's Colt gonna fly us to they can't find us? Don't be an idiot, Telly."

"You want to run, you run," Colt said. "I'm going to the landing pads and I'm meeting Shafter and Burn for our our ride out of here."

Marchett shoved him forward down the road. "We've got less than five minutes, so if you want a ride, then you better move."

When C-block got there, the 44 stood on the gray, orgocrete slabs for only a few seconds before they spotted the formation flying towards them – three cold stars that silently zipped across the sky. From far out, they were just backlit specks, but when they got closer, he could make out how they were blocky and crude – the opposite of a fighter. You couldn't miss the four, outboard nacelles and the offset cockpit. These were Staas Company junks.

They looked like they'd been cobbled out of spare parts. In a way, they were. They'd been the workhorses of the mining fleet before the war and their 50-meter-long, tensegrity frames were like rafts onto which everything had been mounted. It was all modular and swappable. Everything from the cockpit module on the starboard topside bow to the reactor module slung underneath could be removed from the frame and replaced. They used to mine the Belt and the Jupiter Trojans, but he could see these junks didn't have ore containers or drills anymore. Gunnery modules had replaced them and clusters of gape-mouthed cannon barrels surveyed the sky from turrets on all sides.

They weren't pretty, but everyone knew the war caught the UN fleet with its pants down. If it wasn't for Staas Company and the newly militarized Privateers, then Earth wouldn't have had enough warships to last six months.

The three junks banked and rolled in on a low approach. He heard some grumbles and nervous snickers on local comms from people who were out in the yards when the Squidies came and bombed them. The junks' flightpath looked a lot like the path of the Squidies' bombing run. Once you've been bombed, anything flying at you low looks like its about to drop something bad on your head.

When the junks were almost over the pads, they rotated their outboard nacelles forward and fired them just long enough to bring themselves to an almost complete stop.

C-Block stayed on the edge of the pads until the junks set down and the airlock doors opened on the forward gunnery modules of all three boats. Two figures in Staas exosuits and flight helmets stepped out of the first junk and into the raw sun. Shafter spoke over local comms: "Nice to see 44 of you made it. Where's J. Colt?" He raised his hand and felt the eyes on him. "You're in charge of your fellow nuggets. Split them up in three flights and get 'em on the junks. Anyone gets left behind, it's on your head."

He boarded
Kiwi
with Marchett and Jeana and Hortez. Burn and Shafter got on board
Kiwi
, too, but instead of riding in the gunnery module with everyone else, Shafter went up a tube, presumably to the cockpit. The junks that came were configured to kill Squidies, not ferry personnel, so everyone else rode in the cramped gunnery modules with the crew chief and the backsides of the turrets and the centralized armored magazine that held all the shells and fed the guns.
Kiwi's
gunners stayed in their turrets, but with guns on four sides, there was less space in there than he thought. It was standing room only and he got pushed up near
Kiwi's
Chief who gave him the evil eye.

"Don't mind grumpy here," Burn said when she saw the Chief glaring at him. "Because of us he's pulling an extra shift." To the Chief, she said, "You got some problem doing your duty in the war against alien aggression, Crew Chief? Or do you got a problem with orange, prison-issue exosuits maybe?"

"I didn't sign up to ferry around a bunch of convicts," the Chief said. He was at least fifty.

"You didn't
sign up
at all." She pointed her thumb at him and said, "Just like the rest of his mining carrier, the Chief here got contract-drafted when the war broke out. Used to be a miner on SCS
Hardway,
out lookin' for the mother-lode. Now, get a load of this mother. Couple of heroic victories... couple of medals...suddenly he's too good for a transport mission." He noticed the Chief hadn't bothered with the
sir
or
ma’am
even though Burn had rank insignia on her suit that said she was a 1st Lieutenant. No sir or ma'am in the Staas Privateers.

The junk's gravity pinch sucked up so much power from the reactor that they only used the artificial gees to counter inertia from maneuvers. There wasn't enough power available to leave it on all the time to make constant artificial gravity, so once they took off and passed primary lunar orbit, the orange suits that had packed into the gunnery module floated free in zero-gee, gripping the few available handholds.

Kiwi's
pilots and crew were on their own internal comms channel, and fifteen minutes into the flight, he could tell the Crew Chief was listening to it and hearing something he didn't like because his eyes shifted to each of the auto-loaders and he began to push through the crowded orange suits as he went from turret to turret and loader to loader to double-check systems. "Move it, people. Get the hell out of the way."

Burn said, "What's going on, Chief?"

"Making sure none of your convicts screwed up my loaders."

Before he could ask if they were going to need the guns, Burn must have patched the junk's internal comms into the local channel because now, he could hear them and the crew in his helmet. "Gunners, clear your throats."

When the turrets' autocannon fired, they vibrated the atmo inside the gunnery module so the sound of it drowned out everything else even with a suit and helmet on. "All guns and loading systems green-lit and GTG."

"Don't worry," Burn told the orange suits, "These junks all have four, quad-barrel, 140mm autocannon turrets. Together, they can throw up a hell of a lot of fire."

The voice of
Kiwi's
pilot sounded calm enough. "
Hardway
has just advised us of another enemy incursion and some Squidies coming our way. All gunners stay sharp, all hands brace for ACM."

"What's that mean?" Jeana said. She didn't look like she liked the sound of that. In fact, she'd looked pretty green since the junk lifted off. She looked motion sick.

"What's ACM?" Burn laughed. "Really?" It was a hell of a question from a fighter pilot in training. "Aerial Combat Maneuvers," Burn said. "Grab something and hold on or when the pilot rolls this bird, it's going to roll around you." There were handholds on the bulkheads and ceiling, but not enough, so there wasn't much for anyone in the middle of the module to hold on to except each other. Burn said, "C-block, if you've got a handhold, then grab it, if you don't, then hold onto the guy that does."

He was stuck in the middle of the compartment with Marchett and Burn and Jeana. Cleeg called out on local comms when he saw the enemy from the starboard side porthole. "They're here!"