War of Alien Aggression 3 Lancer (7 page)

"You could have told
me
we were signing up for some suicide shit." 

Snooze looked as if he thought there was something funny about this. "You knew, Jordo.
You're
the one who should have warned everyone else. You're the damn pilot – you could see through this bunk better than any of us. You knew they couldn't possibly train us up for combat in four weeks – not even with some dingo-dango artificial intelligence doing half the flying. You knew it was all bullshit and you still came along. Nobody tricked
me
. Nobody tricked you either, dumbass. So don't act like a victim," Snooze said. "You're no victim. You're a volunteer." 

*****

They pushed the orders to everyone's matchbox computers before reveille. He was still awake when they came in. The Lancers had been transferred to the
Hardway
Air Group. Forty-eight Bitzers and a pack of
Arbitrage
's drones would rendezvous with the privateer attack carrier SCS
Hardway
at 0930.  

Even inside Bailey Prison they'd heard plenty about the carrier
Hardway
. If that was the ship the Lancers were flying off, then there was no question about it – they were going right into battle. 

Chapter Nine

The redsuits he'd taken down like bowling pins when he'd flown into the airlock stood against the bulkhead of the landing bay and flipped him off as the unidentified voice of
Arbitrage's
bridge wished them 'good hunting'. He'd heard that woman's voice on the air traffic control channel for weeks and she'd never once said her name.

Arbitrage's
drones tore ass out of the bay and ran in circles around the ship, chasing Burn. He saw them rip across the starry black framed in the bay doors just before all the Lancers launched together with Major Eugene Shaffer in the lead. Shafter turned the flight on vector, and the Lancers followed.

"Keep it in restricted mode," Burn told them. "Hands off the big red buttons until we're in combat."

"Still got mostly cherries here," Shafter said. "They deserve a taste."

"Whatever you say, Lancer 1-1. You are Honcho. Nuggets, you heard the man. Punch the buttons and try to keep up."

Once they enabled the pulsing inertial negation systems, half of the 133rd blasted off screaming with the thrill or fright of feeling their Bitzer's unrestricted acceleration for the very first time. The others screamed from the way the new inertial negation system vibrated every cell in their bodies with what felt like rapid gravitational flux. Jordo whooped as they all followed Shafter's lead and spiraled around the Dingo pack on their way to the rendezvous with
Hardway
. If they were on their way to die, at least Shafter made it fun.

Near one of the Lagrange points of Mars' second moon, Jordo's knot puckered when his fighter's LiDAR picked out two flights of what had to be a hundred bogies apiece. "What the hell?"

"We're cooked," Cleeg said over local comms.

Jordo's helmet drew a reticule around a set of warning beacons, buoys around the area. The message they broadcast flashed in his visor and tinted the region of space in front of them with red and white stripes: "Navigation Hazard. Do not enter."

Burn came over squadron comms: "Just in case there's a few nervous nuggets out there, you should know those aren't enemy contacts. That's the debris clouds from the Battle of Deimos Lagrange you're reading on passive LiDAR. That's the wreckage of
Khan
and
Hannibal
. They drifted into the L-4 Lagrange point and now the debris cloud follows Deimos around Mars – probably will for a while."

Even in prison, he'd seen that battle happen from the view of camera drones and radar telescopes. They'd all watched Humanity lose that encounter. The Squidies' 800-meter dreadnought burned
Hannibal
from the inside and sliced
Khan's
hull and her bulkheads until there wasn't a piece left over 5-meters. The ships that met it had been the UNS flagships. They had the thickest armor and the biggest guns. And they didn't put a single hole in the alien dreadnought's armor.

At the recently savaged, but quickly rebuilding Staas Company Yards at Deimos, they sighted SCS
Hardway
and two other carriers –
Pont Neuf
and
Araby.
As the Lancers and their pack of Dingoes closed on
Hardway
, Jordo's helmet highlighted the 50-meter junks on patrol around her. At least six flights protected the carrier.

"
Hardway
CAP,
Hardway
CAP. This is Lancer 1-1. The 133rd are approaching off the carrier's bow."

"Roger, Lancer 1-1, this is Flight 3 and
Kiwi
. My, my, my... Will you look at all those flyin' nuggets? Seems like just yesterday we sprung all y'all from prison. Welcome to the party, Lancers. You are cleared to approach the barn. Contact
Hardway
AT for bay assignments."

Jordo knew she was big, but when he realized the specks he saw in one of her 70-meter bays were QF-111 Dingoes like theirs, the real scale of the carrier fell into place. It was five times
Arbitrage's
length.

Shafter took them on a flyby.
Hardway
was 950-meters long and mounted on her spine in discrete sections were railgun batteries on the bow, twin launch bay modules (48 bays), and another battery of railguns set between them that looked like they belonged on a battleship. Light poured out from a hundred portholes in what looked like habitat modules.

The command tower and its antenna spires rose a couple hundred meters above and below the spine. At the top he saw the light from the larger windows that looked down on every part of the ship. He zoomed in with his flight helmet. A figure...a dark-haired woman standing there pointed at the squadron as it flew past. That was the bridge.

"Lancer 1-1, this is
Hardway
Air Group Commander, Asa Biko. The 133rd are now officially under my command. You and your pack of QF-111s are cleared to land in forward bays 33-39, starboard side. Doors opening now."

Some of the open bays they passed contained 50-meter mining junks, but the bays where Biko sent the Lancers had been launching QF-111 Dingoes. There weren't any drones actually in there at the time, but he recognized the maintenance gear from
Arbitrage
. It was the same gear they used on the F-151s.

A crew of
Hardway's
redsuits watched his flight land. They all leaned against the bulkheads with their matchbox computers projecting one part of the Bitzer or another in the air in front of them.

The first one to approach seemed friendly enough. "I'm Raleigh," he said. First thing he did after Jordo climbed down the ladder from the cockpit was ask if he could climb up and take a look inside.

"Sure." What else was he going to say?

The redsuit was up the ladder on the starboard side in half a second and he seemed to know where the release latches were. "We just got cleared for the manuals on these 151s twenty minutes before you arrived," he said. Jordo felt pretty possessive, but these guys were going to be crawling all over his plane as soon as he turned his back and he was going to be trusting them with his life, so he tried hard not to say anything stupid like, 'don't break anything'.

Snooze shouted up to the redsuit in Jordo's cockpit, "Hey, don't break anything up there!" He didn't stick his head out, just his gloved hand with finger extended.

Jordo said, "You guys never seen one of these before?"

"Nope," another one said. Suddenly, they were everywhere around his plane...touching it. "
Nobody's
seen these up close. We've been lookin' forward to this."

The maintenance crews had themselves a party while Jordo and the pilots went through the airlocks. In the passageway he found about half the Lancers' pilots. The other half were one deck down, outside the bays where they'd landed, he figured. He'd just got his helmet off and taken his first whiff of
Hardway's
metallic tasting air when he heard a shrill tone like a whistle that rose and then fell. It came out of his helmet and also from a low-tech transducer set in a box, mounted high up the bulkhead. "That's the squack," a redsuit told him.

"The what?"

The crewman pointed at the box. "That's the ship-wide comms if you ain't wearing any. If we got atmo." It had wires coming off it leading to the next one down the passageway. Technologically speaking that was only one step above shouting down a tube.

"Now hear this. Now hear this. All Lancer squadron flight personnel, report to forward bay 40. All Lancers, 133rd to bay four-zero, bay four-zero. That is all."

Arbitrage
hadn't been that fancy, but Jordo and the rest of them quickly realized it had been a luxury liner compared to
Hardway
. On
Hardway
the bulkheads were made of the same belt-iron steel they'd mined from the local asteroids.

It rained in bay 40. It was condensate from the bay doors, above, pulled down by the ship's artificial gees. The bulkheads were stained black. That bay smelled like sour milk like the hardy, Martian molds they had in some places back on the moon.

When all the Lancers were in Bay 40, three
Hardway
officers standing near the side of the bay climbed up on a maintenance lift that put them a couple of meters above the crowd. Only Shafter followed them up there. Burn went and stood with the pilots.

"I'm Asa Biko. I'm Commander of the
Hardway
Air Group." He was big – the kind of guy who probably preferred
Hardway's
low gees to full, Earth gees. "The Staas Company Privateers' 133rd Fighter Test Squadron is now assigned to
Hardway
. Shafter reports to me. I report to Admiral Harry Cozen who captains this ship. I'm going to be one of the voices of
Hardway
Control you hear in your helmet giving you orders. If you don't follow them, don't bother to land. Just park your fighter outside and vent your suit. It'll save the XO the trouble of shooting you."

The next man who spoke wore a standard, Staas Company blue exosuit that was singed all over like he'd been on fire. "I'm Commander Ram Devlin,
Hardway's
executive officer. I'm in charge of too many things to count. One of them is discipline. I'm too busy to deal with you, so resolution of discipline issues will be swift. Sir and Ma’am are not required on a privateer ship. And it's a common misconception that I shoot people. I'm an officer. That means I'll order someone else to shoot you." The pilots laughed at that, but he wasn't joking.

The last of the three
Hardway
bridge officers to speak didn't have any rank insignia. He didn't need it. Anyone could guess who he was. He had gray hair and eyes Jordo was afraid to look at too hard. The sound of his voice was like stone grinding stone. "I'm Harry Cozen. I know
four
of the Lancers here are veterans. The rest of you, the ones still wearing orange, prison-issue exosuits, are new pilots. I'm the old man who threw his weight around and sprung you from Bailey. Now, you're going to fly for
me
. It's important that you know
this fact
and never forget it: On this ship, in this war, our successes and our failures will define the course of human history. If we lose this war, then that history may very well come to an end. When this war demands sacrifices, remember that the price of victory is always paid in blood. Sometimes it's ours, sometimes it's theirs, but the price is always blood."

*****

It would take seven interstellar transits to get there. That's what the redsuits told him.
Hardway
would have to breach space seven times and cross as many systems to reach the unnamed target. Looking at charts on a terminal that accessed
Hardway's
OMNI flight computer, Jordo and Snooze and Dirty tried to guess where they'd be going. Everyone knew humanity could barely hold their own system against alien aggression. If the carrier was making seven transits, then wherever
Hardway
was going had to be far behind enemy lines.

When the carrier steamed out past Saturn and approached the location where they'd breach space, Jordo made sure he was near a bow-facing porthole. Holdout and Snooze and Dirty were just meters down the passageway at the next one. The Lancers' orange suits crowded the decks between the bow railgun batteries where they'd been told they'd get the best view. The nuggets had all heard that when they opened a transit it was spectacular sight, but
Hardway's
crew didn't seem to care. They'd probably seen it a hundred times.

Buoys marked the precise location of the Sol-Procyon Transit like a five-K-wide, spherical shell of lighthouses in space. A dozen, fixed-station railguns twice the size of
Hardway's
made a second shell. Jordo guessed they were never meant to move from their position guarding this obviously strategic location. The sun glinted off small craft hanging in a cloud over the sphere of buoys. He squinted, but without his flight helmet's imaging capabilities, he couldn't make them out. He was about to put it on so he could see better until a low, but feminine voice next to him caressed his ear with unlikely words. "Torpedo mines," she said.

She stood close so Jordo smelled the warmth rising off her, coming out the neck of her exosuit. She was slender with dark hair and fine features and a very odd angle to her nose. It had been broken. "Lt. Commander Dana Sellis," she said. He could see she was a Lt. Commander. He reminded himself that in the privateers a Lt. Commander was only one step above a Senior Lieutenant.

"You're a..."

"Bridge officer," she said.

This was the first time he'd ever said it and it felt good. "I'm a fighter pilot."

"I know. You ever breach space before?" Jordo raised his eyebrows and made a brief show of looking down at his orange, prison-issue suit and then back at her. He had to point to the patch that said Property of Bailey Prison before she seemed to understand what he was getting at. "Right," she said. "Got it. You were too busy."