War of Alien Aggression 3 Lancer (3 page)

Kiwi's
pilot said, "We have red bandits coming in hot at 1 o'clock high. 1 o'clock high.
Chester
and
Bunco
, go to echelon formation and follow
Kiwi's
lead. Turning to show 'em our good sides on my bingo in 3...2...1...Bingo." The pilot blasted the junk's nose up and rolled. Flashes of light shot through the portholes. A second later, the port, starboard, keel, and bow turrets all opened up and shook the gunnery compartment from four sides.

"Good screen! Good screen!" The gunners shouted on comms. The fire didn't pause for a full five seconds.

"They're changing vector!" He couldn't see anything or do anything from where he was but wait to get dusted and it was killing him.

"Nine high! Nine high!"

He shouted, "What the hell is
happening
out there?"

Burn glanced at the portholes. Blossoming detonations and stars spun past. "They're trying to throw up a wall of range-det shells to keep the Squidies' fighters out past effective range – far enough away that we've got a chance to dodge their fire."

"Topside, look sharp!"

"Throw up the wall at 2 o'clock!"

"They're breaking!"

"Coming back around... rolling in from 4 o'clock low!"

"Roll and screen. Bingo. Bingo." The gunnery module rotated fast around him as the pilot delivered port and starboard thrust from the nacelles in roaring opposition. If he hadn't been holding on to Marchett and Burn then he'd have spun over all the way like Hortez.

Otto Hortez lost his grip on Cleeg and spun off-axis, smashing the side of his helmet against the loader for the port-side turret. Cleeg shouted, "Grab him!" Hortez had already gone limp.

The red bandits came from 3 o'clock. The junks' turrets made a wall of flame in the vacuum like Burn said – a solid cloud of range-detonating shells blooming and fading and blooming again so fast it made a sustained curtain of hyper-velocity flak.

There were gaps in the fiery screen. Through one, he saw an alien fighter bearing down on them. It was the same, deep red, spiked and pointed hulls that he saw over Bailey Prison, but he could see weird alien markings on the side that looked hand-painted. His eye fell into the single, wide-aperture muzzle of the alien fighter's single gun in the same tenth of a second that it reached out for them with a stabbing stream that slashed across the black and left a glowing scar on his retina.

Kiwi
spun and inverted. and he lost sight of the red bandit, but a half second later, the gunnery module got slammed from the side with fire. The outer hull must have been ripped open somewhere because he heard pieces of it ricochet off the inner hull.

He was pretty sure the junks' wall-of-fire tactic wasn't worth a damn against the alien fighters and the pissed-off look on Burn's face seemed to confirm it until her eyes suddenly brightened. Whatever private channel she was on, Colt couldn't hear what she said next, but he read her lips. She said, "What the
fuck
took you so long?"

The gunners all cheered on
Kiwi's
internal comms. Flashes of blue exhaust from dozens of fast-moving craft streaked past on the starboard side just before everything to port got ripped with cannon fire. "It's Topper and Dig and a pack of sixty Dingoes," Burn said. She patched C-block into Lancer squadron comms. "Lancer 1-3, this is 1-2. It's nice of you to finally show up."

"Well, we couldn't let the Squidies dust all our shiny, new nuggets on their first day of school. And the Dingoes needed something to chew on."

Now that the junk's flight path had stabilized, Cleeg let go of Hortez and let him drift face down. Hortez came to just a couple of seconds later and started flailing his arms. The inside of his visor was all deep purple-red. All you could see was blood. He began screaming on local comms: "Aaaaaaaa...Oh, god! Oh god! There's blood everywhere. I'm gonna' die!"

Kiwi's
crew chief was on him right away. He pushed Hortez up against the bulkhead, but the panic wouldn't stop. "Help me hold him down!"

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" Nobody knew why Hortez shouted that; he just did. "I'm sor-ry!"

"Shut the hell up!"

"Oh, god!" Hortez made noises like he was choking on blood, drowning in it. Cleeg and Biggs got hold of him. He couldn't see Hortez's face for all the blood on the inside of the visor. There was so much it made him think maybe a piece of the gunnery module's interior had been blown off in the attack and had hit Hortez like a piece of shrapnel or a bullet. The Chief said, "We still got pressure in here. Pop his top! Get his helmet off!"

They flipped the latches and lifted the helmet off his head. Globs of blood floated out like there was some serious trauma. His face was red and slick. The color came out his mouth in burbles. "I'm gonna die!" he shouted it like a fountain.

"Trauma kit!" the Chief pointed to a half-meter square box on the bulkhead, and the orange suits passed it forward. He grabbed Hortez's shaved head with both gloved hands and turned it left and right, up and down, looking at every part of it twice and running his hands over every millimeter. The man's entire head looked to be covered in blood, but there were no actual wounds. The Chief looked up and down Hortez's suit for holes. He couldn't find any. He stared into Hortez's white eyes and his red face for a good three seconds and then slapped him upside the head. "All you got is a broken nose." The Crew Chief mocked him in falsetto: "Oh, god! I'm hit! I'm sorry! I'm
sor-ry!
" That got a lot of laughs from C-block on local comms.

Burn said, "Gimme his helmet." As they passed Hortez's bloody helmet up to her, she took a wax marker from the pocket of her suit. She wrote '
GUSHER
' on it in big white letters, right above the visor – just like where she'd stenciled '
BURN
' on her own helmet. She handed the helmet back to Hortez with his new name. "Every pilot gets a name. You're Gusher."

*****

When
Kiwi
got close to destination, Colt made sure he got a good look out the porthole. The junks flew them to a ship keeping station a million Ks out in the moon's shadow, surrounded by a dense pack of Dingoes.

She was a 217-meter Staas Company ship fitted with new armor and at least one main gun battery that he could see. This wasn't one of the modular builds from the mining fleet. It looked like she'd been designed and built around her single, enormous bay. The armored doors opened as the junks approached and revealed over fifty F-151 exo-atmospheric fighters inside. The offset vertical cockpits had proportions like coffins.

As
Kiwi's
pilots made the final approach, Shafter's voice came over comms: "Welcome to SCS
Arbitrage
– current home of the Staas Company Privateers' 133rd Fighter Test Squadron, also known as the Lancers. That's you."

Chapter Five

Arbitrage
wasn't what he expected a Staas Privateer would be. None of the crew wore any kind of rank or patches beyond a name on their suits. Their exosuits were all the same and all the visors on their helmets appeared opaque from the outside so nobody could see their faces. When you could see their faces, most of the crew didn't look you in they eye unless they had to. It wasn't like
Arbitrage's
crew were
un
friendly, so much as they didn't want to interact with you if they didn't have to. He didn't know what this ship did before he got here and he got the feeling he wasn't supposed to.

The ship's first officer, Pool reminded him of Pilk from back at Bailey Prison. He put the 44 orange suits in the section at the very lowest point on the bow end. Nobody had any idea what that section had been before, but it looked like they'd just welded four dozen belt-iron shelves on the bulkheads in one big, damp compartment, thrown a thin mattress on each shelf and called them bunks. There weren't even pillows, just a little matchbox computer placed on each. They didn't have any network access and they only projected one thing in the air above them – an illustrated training manual without a ref# entitled,
Manual of Exo-Atmospheric Aerial Combat Maneuvers.
 

"We'll get you all some clothes besides those prison-issue exosuits soon as we can," Pool told them. "You can draw new suit liners on deck B. Need anything else, then talk to Lt. Steinmetz, a.k.a. Burn. She's your den mother. You're her problem, not mine."

The head was one deck up. So was the mess where they got fed. None of them were allowed any higher up than the big launch bay. Gusher found that out the hard way when he went looking for medical attention. Armed Staas Security Guards gave him a first aid kit and escorted him back to the lower decks at gunpoint. That pissed him off. He said nobody on this ship trusted anyone in an orange suit because they were convicts.

"Yup." Marchett said. "You didn't get pardoned. You're doing your time somewhere else. And it beats the hell out of where we were."

"36 months," Gusher said.

That's what all of them were thinking. They were counting down – thinking about how they'd be free after just 36 months. If this was as dangerous as he thought it would be, then 36 months was a bloody eternity. He decided to keep that to himself for a few reasons, but mostly because the half-hour Shafter gave them to get squared away was almost up and now, if the leader of Staas Company Privateers' 133rd Squadron hadn't been lying to them, then they were about to get issued their planes.

*****

The helmet they gave him and the rest of the 44 nuggets had six bug-eyes on it like big lenses, three on either side of the visor. Once it shook hands with his exosuit, he gestured through the menus and options switches on the display projected in his helmet visor. The bug-eyes were transducers, part of a multispectral imaging package. On his trip down the passageway and up one deck to the launch bay, they showed him the body heat signatures of the crewmen he passed.

In front of the C-block pilots and the 151s, Burn had a way of barking out her words that filled up space and made the bay seem crowded. "You are standing in front of Staas Company F-151 manned exo-atmospheric interceptors. Seven meters long. Max acceleration is almost 600ks/s/s. Six, 140mm cannon. Packed with big engines in the back, 140mm cannon on the front, and studded with 96 maneuvering thrusters on four, main blocks. Armored hull. Got a reactor like a bomb waiting to go off."

It looked just like a Dingo...a drone. The only difference he could see right away was the vertical cockpit mounted off center on the starboard bow on a long neck. He said, "It looks like a drone with a cockpit."

"It
was
a QF-111 Dingo unmanned drone.
Now
it's a manned fighter.
Now
, it's an F-151 Bitzer."

None of the cons from C-Block looked like they believed her. She said, "Look. This is the way it is. Maybe you don't know because of where you were, but we weren't ready when this war started. Pilots haven't been in the fighter cockpit in space for a hundred years. Not since the maneuvers required to keep you alive got violent enough that the inertial gees would turn you to spam in your suit. It's no secret we stole a better inertial negation system from the Squidies.
That's
what's in these fighters. That's the only reason we're able to put a pilot in the cockpit again. Developing a new, manned, exo-atmospheric fighter that could be mass-produced on short notice turned out to be too much to ask. It would have taken Staas Company more than a year. Nobody even wanted to talk about how Staas and the UN were going to train all the fighter pilots that would be needed in time to make a difference. So the Staas Company geniuses tasked with giving us a human-piloted fighter plane welded a cockpit section on the front of a QF-111 Dingo and gave us the F-151 Bitzer.
Bitzer
is Aussie slang for a mutt...bit of this...bit of that. Bitzer."

 "But the 111 is an autonomous drone," he said. "It has an AI. Did they take it out?"

"The geeks say we can cut our training time for combat pilots by 95% by leaving the Bitzers' artificially intelligent brains intact and using them to help the novice pilots fly."

"You said we'd be in control. That's not in control."

"You
will
be in control. We put reins on the AI. In precisely the same way that a horse does the running for the cavalry, you say where the Bitzer goes, and it goes. You steer, and the artificial intelligence handles balancing the main thrusters and the 96 maneuvering jets and all the overwhelmingly complex operations required to actually fly the craft.
You
will direct its flight.
You
will tell the Bitzer where to go with your hands and your feet and your thoughts. By leveraging the AI, we will have you combat ready in under twenty-four days."

This was impossible as far as he knew. Nobody learns to fly in under 24 days. Period. This had to be a setup, a sucker-deal of some kind, but he just couldn't guess their game and like everyone else, at this point, he kept his mouth shut because who wants to go back to prison? What worried him most was that Staas Company had lots of 111 drones lying around to convert. Their new Bitzers were cheap to produce. Losing them would cost Staas Company so little they'd barely notice...

"You're the first class of untrained pilots to learn on the Bitzer – the first of thousands of new pilots we will train to win this war. Alright, nuggets," Burn said. "When I give the word, you will put on your helmet, follow the visor-projected navigational arrows, and step to your fighters."

Standing under his own plane for the first time, it finally looked big enough to intimidate him. Four, massive and symmetrical spurs protruded from the aft end of the rounded hull, housing the maneuvering thrusters. Hit those thrusters wrong and you'd spin so fast you'd snap your own neck.

C-block had looks on their faces like kids at Christmas. He'd never seen them look that happy before. It had to be a raw deal, but he didn't want to say it.

Burn said, "You will approach from the starboard side of your one-five-one. You will climb the ladder rungs currently extending from your cockpit. When you are sufficiently high, you will identify the dual release mechanisms that are painted orange and clearly labeled and you will use them to open the cockpit. Go." Nobody moved fast enough. "Go, go, GO!" Burn shouted, and he jumped up the ladder rungs.