by A. D. Bloom
"Taipan used to be Matilda's bloody yacht," Cozen said.
The armed Staas Guards on the far side of the airlock didn't care for Ram's sidearm. He didn't want to give it up. Any other gun and he wouldn't have minded, but not that gun. Not because it was one of only eighteen know to exist and a famous historical artifact worth more than a decade of his salary, but because it had been Mickey Wells' gun. After the War of the Americas made him an orphan, she'd taken care of him like he was family. The Honma & Voss x-ray laser was the gun she'd carried until a Squidy murdered her on the first day of the war.
The Staas Guards recognized the antique H&V Itar even in the holster. Everyone recognized a gun that had been banned on Earth. "No way you're coming on board this ship with that gun," they told him. "That thing goes off at full discharge, it could slice right through the hull." Their eyes coveted.
Cozen showed them some Staas VP outrage and then some one-star admiral's outrage, but they wouldn't back down. If you have a two-star admiral of your own upstairs, the one-star variety isn't as compelling. After a good three minutes of arguing, Ram was about to give in and leave the Itar with Pardue in the longboat just so they could get out of the airlock, but then, the lift doors behind the guards parted to reveal the queen bee herself. Matilda Witt had arrived.
The Staas Guards stepped out from in front of the lift doors and stood to the sides and straightened up at attention. Ram hadn't ever seen Staas Guards stand like that before no matter how much anyone paid them. Their eyes didn't move as she stepped out of the lift. She looked them up and down. "Thank you gentlemen, but Mr. Devlin can keep his sidearm. I trust him."
"Aye aye, Ms. Witt."
She wore a sari – a single, long piece of fabric wrapped around her to form a dress of sorts. It was a traditional Indian garment and even with the lines of some distant Asian ancestors around her eyes, to see a block-jawed, ruddy-cheeked Australian woman of Germanic descent with silver blonde hair wearing a sari called up images in Ram's mind of Colonial India under the British Empire.
There had been a squarish bulk to Witt's frame before, when Ram seen her in contemporary business suits. She had a confrontational shape. Matilda Witt couldn't face you without squaring off. The soft lines of the fabric wrapped around her didn't do a thing to mask it. Matilda Witt was a bulldozer draped in silk.
"Harry Cozen." She smiled with no attempt to feign warmth. "It's been ages since we've actually been face to face – not since before the war began."
"Not since Istanbul," he said.
Her eyes narrowed a tenth of a millimeter while her thin lips stayed tense across her mouth. "We won't have any repeat of what happened there because I'm clearly in charge now, Harry."
"Yes," Cozen said. "I can see that second star you've got pinned to the neck of your...dress."
She sighed. "Uniforms look fine on some of us – men like you, for instance, who've worn them on and off over the decades, but it seemed an affectation for me to wear one. Even to a war." She laughed. "I'm not a naval officer and I never have been. I'm a businesswoman, Harry. You know that."
"You had no problems asking the board for command rank."
"Oh... I have oodles of proper, military advisers. And... well... you know the Board of Directors, Harry – they're always willing to back a proven winner in a new venture." She turned away from him without waiting for a response while Cozen quietly simmered. "You must be Lt. Commander Dana Sellis," Witt said.
Dana's full mouth somehow mimicked the thin-lipped chill of Witt's smile in a way Ram found distinctly unsettling.
"And Asa Biko," Witt said. "Hardway's Air Group Commander." Biko didn't move a muscle. He held himself still as if he'd been locked in a cage with a dangerous animal and didn't want to spook it. Witt grinned at him and showed her teeth.
"Mr. Devlin," she said. "The Privateer Fleet's saltiest XO. You should have given him his own ship by now, Harry."
Above the launch bay deck, Taipan's passageways were paneled in real wood. "Spoils of the Amazon campaign," Witt explained as she led them through the command deck. "A gift from my ex-husband." The ironwood panels were all intact and uncracked and Ram realized the decks of that ship had probably never been vented for battle or exposed to a vacuum.
There was even carpeting underfoot. The softness of it confused Ram's feet. He hadn't walked on anything but fast-printed metal decks for as long as he could remember – even at Sagan Station. For the first ten yards out of the lift, the heavy gravity and the soft surface underneath his feet made Ram feel as if he lurched to one side and the next whenever he took a step.
Witt was the only one Ram saw in civilian dress. The rest of her officers and crew wore the standard jumpsuits. The way they stood at attention for her as she passed told Ram she'd hired her new crew directly from someone's military. They were Staas Privateers now.
"And where is SCS Arbitrage these days?" Witt asked Cozen without looking back at him.
"Arbitrage is on a tour of the Squidies' finest vacation destinations," he said.
She chuckled. "Alien IP... That's where the profit is, alright."
Witt didn't bother to show them her bridge. Ram got a glimpse of it at the end of the passage, through an open hatch, but before they got too close, Staas Guards outside a different hatch snapped to attention and opened it for Matilda Witt to enter. She led her guests into her office.
It was nothing like Harry Cozen's office. Granted, Hardway was a very different ship built for a very different purpose, but the contrast was stark. Cozen's office was a bare and minimal stage. It contained nothing but objects useful for accomplishing tasks at hand. Witt's office looked like both a museum and a vault filled with treasure.
It was no secret Matilda Witt made her first millions stealing and selling looted art. Ram knew very little about art, but he recognized a carved Olmec head 2-meters-tall and a sprawling, 16th century triptych populated with creatures and demons that made the Squidies look friendly. "That's a Bosch," she said. "I got that one from Harry." She didn't say whether it was gift or acquisition. The drypoint landscapes had a calligraphic quality to the marks that even Ram couldn't mistake as anyone's but Rembrandt's. He looked down to note how the rug under his feet was a Sarouk – historic and irreplaceable since much of Iran had been vaped just like the Revolutionary Guard for whom the famous Honma & Voss Itar x-ray lasers had once been made.
Ram said, "Shouldn't all these things be on Earth where they're safer?"
"My dear, Mr. Devlin," Witt said, "if I go down, then my entire collection is going down with me." She pointed her finger at something Ram first took for a sculpture before he saw the crystal and the decanters and realized it was a wet bar. "Harry, would you mind?" Ram thought he might have heard the man groan as Cozen crossed the oriental carpet's geometries to fix drinks like a cabin boy.
"Oddly enough," she said, "having these treasures here with me in the middle of a war makes me feel safer. I can't imagine fate being so cruel as to snuff out all these masterpieces at once. Beauty is my hostage, as is truth. Maybe I should use my Brancusi as a ship's figurehead. What do you think, Harry?" She nodded at the sculpture in the corner. It was a sweeping arc of polished and gleaming metal that tapered smoothly along its length. It was a piece of metal that didn't look anything like a bird in the literal sense, but shared all of its qualities. "Should I put Brancusi's 'Bird in Space' on the bow?"
Cozen opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. Ram didn't see him hesitate like that very often. "I was first going to say that the Brancusi would confuse the Squidies if they ever saw it because it's a completely abstract sculpture. But after giving it a moment of thought, if the aliens' eyes work like ours do, and I can say with confidence that mostly they do, then a piece like that Brancusi might actually make an impression on them. Look at it. It doesn't look like a bird, but it's fast and sleek and even glints like things seem to in flight. Its shape even describes the line a swooping bird would fly. Maybe the Squidies have something like birds that swoop and
soar in the atmo where they're from. They wouldn't recognize a picture of one of our birds, but they'd recognize that sculpture's qualities and might even associate it with their alien, Squidy bird-things. That Brancusi could be used to express flight or freedom in a common, visual language."
Matilda Witt grinned at Harry Cozen. "And one could so easily get the impression that art doesn't matter to you, Harry." There was genuine affection in her voice and Cozen half-sneered with disdain as if he found any display of sentiment from Witt somehow doubly inappropriate for being genuine.
"Even if you welded the Brancusi to the hull," he said, "it would probably remain safe. From the reports I've read, you never give the Squidies a chance to shoot at you anyway. Even our longboat pilot marveled at how there's no battle damage on any of the four carriers or Taipan. That's amazing to say the least. Almost as amazing as the story of Taipan and a single box carrier full of Bitzers surviving on the run behind the Sirius Line for three months after your escorts were lost." Cozen handed her a crystal highball. She smiled and nodded and took the drink along with his compliment. Then, he said, "You left with 300. How many fighter pilots did you come back with?"
She now held the highball with her thumb and middle finger as if she didn't want it anymore. "Shame on you, Harry. There's no arguing with my success. For the last few months, my force group has done more damage to the Squidies and cost the company less to do it than any ship or group of ships in the whole Privateer fleet – including Hardway."
"With all due respect," Dana said, "You can't poss-"
"How many times have they had to rebuild Hardway? She comes home from action under her own power, but in the year since the war began, they've sunk enough repair work into her to build three new attack carriers. The way you do battle is heroic, but it's expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary... a dated way to fight from another time. I'm a businesswoman and since Staas Company is very much in the business of battle right now, I looked for a way to operate with a more attractive cost-benefit ratio."
And she found it in the fighter program that Harry Cozen built, Ram thought, enabled by alien technologies Hardway's crew and pilots shed blood to steal from the Squidies on more than one occasion. Ram felt almost the very same indignation he could see barely concealed on Cozen's face as Matilda Witt went on and on as if the alien pulse-pinch and the F-151 development program were solutions she'd come up with to break out of the "dated paradigms" dominating human battle tactics vs. the Squidies. Every ten seconds or so as she spoke, Ram would catch her flashing a glance and an almost imperceptible smile at Cozen. They both knew he was the one responsible for the development of the Bitzers and the flight school. She'd simply swooped in and stolen them. Now, she was just rubbing his face in it.
Biko finally asked her what Ram wanted to know. "So if you can take on the Squidies' warships without your carriers or your command ship going anywhere near the battle, then what do you need Hardway for?"
She smiled thinly at him. "My squadrons have gotten damn good at pulling the teeth off alien cruisers by strafing and dive-bombing the guns themselves. After that, they're easy kills. But I called Hardway in because not only do I want to destroy alien warships, I also want to board and capture them. For that, I'll need your boarding parties and your junks configured for the task."
Biko said, "Nobody has captured a single, alien hull since we brought home a red bandit from the Procyon system. Not since the first months of the war. The Squidies are clearly afraid of being taken alive. They're afraid of what we'll do to them." Before he stopped himself, Ram involuntarily nodded, thinking of how many times he'd seen the Squidies detonate their own reactors on disabled ships.
Matilda Witt paid the comment no mind. "I've picked a suitable target for tomorrow and we will capture it intact. The 55th Fighter Squadron will launch off Hardway. I trust you've had no problems with the Hellcats coming aboard for the operation."
"No," Ram said. "No problems so far. The Hellcats came aboard just before we left. I put them on the same deck as the Lancers. I imagine the two squadrons are probably meeting and greeting at this very moment."
Chapter Three
Jordo heard the lusty shouts long before he got to the Pit. Money was on the line. Lots, from the volume of the din.
The windowless compartment where the company's one-armed bandits had been welded to the deck smelled of rank exosuit liners and lost wages. The Pit was 10 meters on one side and 20 on the other. Tonight, it was a steel alley packed with redsuit maintenance crew and junk pilots and gunners.
"Yer an effing cheat is what you are!" Jordo pushed through the crowd and saw Gusher had himself a poker game. He had some railgun loader's money, too.
"I'm not cheating," Gush said. "I'm just playing with the gifts god gave me." Gush was no card shark, but he could calculate odds like a machine. On top of all that, he'd won a lot already and now, had too much money, enough to out bet almost anyone and effectively buy the pot. Jordo agreed with the angry railgunner. It wasn't a fair game.
Gusher reached for the money in the middle of the table, and the goon stood up. He clenched his big mitts into hams and towered over Gush who appeared to be doing his best to ignore him. Lancer 1-3 wasn't ignoring anything. He was trying to breathe deeply and not do what he probably wanted to do more than anything in the world right now – to reach out faster that the big lug could see and grab his windpipe like it was a ladder rung.
Dirty and Bad Dog stepped forward from the back of the crowd. Paladin came in from Jordo's side and pushed his way through to get closer. Jordo closed on the table from a different direction. If the crew were going to be stupid enough to try a Lancer over some lost money, then Jordo wanted them to know they'd get to tango with all of the Lancers.
The enraged railgun loader still towered over Gush. Dirty tapped the ape on the shoulder and said, "There a problem, Squidy-lover?"
He looked down at her from what seemed like half-a-meter above. "Oh... It's the little one."
Jordo put himself two-meters to the left of the lug glaring at Dirty and watched the moose's fingers twitch. It was like his brain wanted to move his hands, but his body knew better. It was afraid. That loader wanted the fight, but all it took was one look in Dirty's eyes to see she wanted it more. Look into her eyes or Gusher's even – any of the Lancers – and inside them, you'd see a monster looking back at you, trying to find a way out.
That railgun loader got an eyeful. He saw what he saw, and it scared him because deep down, he was a rational man who liked his bones unbroken. "Bleedin' freaks..." He stomped away without his money, and when Gush looked up, the other players withdrew from the table, too. Gush just put his arms around the cash and pulled it to him as everyone in the crowd suddenly found themselves standing too close to the Lancers for comfort.
Paladin stood in front of Jordo now, facing him, but he didn't look at his face as he talked. Instead, he looked over his shoulder and watched his back while Jordo did the same. Just like back in Bailey Prison...
"They're scared of us," Paladin said.
"They should be. We're dangerous." After the battles at Kruger 60 and Van Maanen's Star and the duck hunt at Altair, the Lancers were all aces six times over, but that wasn't what Jordo meant.
"What the?" The nine pilots who entered the Pit through the bow-end hatch didn't belong on Hardway. Everyone could see that right off.
"Hey, those pilots are from the Taipan Air Group," Gush said. "Those are F-151 pilots like us."
"Maybe they fly the same planes," Holdout said, "but they're nothing like us."
Jordo watched them carefully because he knew exactly which pilots they were. "That's the 55th, the Hellcats. They're launching from Hardway for this op."
Paladin said, "How the hell do you know that?"
"Because I read the damn briefing," Jordo said. None of the other Lancers had.
The way the crowd parted for the Hellcats suggested Hardway's crew could already tell the 55th were spoiling for a fight. "Hey, th
ey can't push our crew around like that," Dirty said. She threw her psycho around on Hardway plenty, but this was her ship, not the Hellcats'. "What are they doing here?"
"On our ship."
"On our deck."
The Hellcats had left their flight helmets with their fighters, but they still hadn't changed out of their exosuits. The suits were new and they looked like there was some personal armor built in. Jordo made a note of where he saw it. Hit them there and you'd better not be using your fist.
The one out in front had to be Hellcat 1-1. She was shorter than Jordo thought she'd be. Bustier, too. Jordo thought it made her look off balance when she was coming right at you, like she was falling forward, but maybe it was just the way she leaned as she walked. Her hair poked out at the very edges of the black watch-cap she wore. It shagged over her ears like she hadn't shaved her head for a couple of months.
Hellcat 1-1 had brought eight of her pilots with her. They wore watch caps just like hers and when they all got closer, Jordo saw the flashy unit patches on the shoulders and high on the chest over their rebreather panels. Winged skulls diving at the enemy. Some of the junk pilots painted angels of death and reapers on the sides of their boats as if taking the form of the thing they feared would stave it off or keep it away. But if the diving Death's heads the Hellcats wore were any sort of superstitious charm meant to protect them, they didn't work for shit because he'd heard scuttlebutt from the redsuits about the 55th Squadron's casualty rates...75%. That was almost as bad as the Lancers'.
Holdout said, "Can you believe all those idiots volunteered for this?"
"Not a single conscript or convict among them..." Dirty's little fists clenched.
Gusher said. "What kinda' moron would do that?"
"They wanted to be heroes." Paladin snorted with derision. "And look what it got 'em... Idiots...now they're just as screwed as we are."
"Nah..." Dirty said. "That ain't why they joined. Those suckers volunteered 'cause old man Cozen sent J. Jordo Colt recruiting with his flashy fighter jet and his pretty face."
