War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan

by A. D. Bloom

  Paladin said, "Nobody signed up to fly with Jordo's face."

  Some crewmen had noted the rapidly diminishing range and bearing between the two groups of fighter pilots and projected a collision course. They watched closely like the show was about to begin. Jordo swore he saw money come out and heard snatches of whispered odds. They were certain enough that a fight would happen that they were already betting on it.

  At seven meters, Paladin said it loud enough to for the Hellcats to hear. "Please, oh, mama, please. Keep on comin'."

  The Hellcats that 1-1 brought with her weren't much bigger than the Lancers, but there were more of them – nine to the Lancers' five. Jordo wasn't exactly counting on Hardway's crew jumping in to even the odds.

  He waited until they got close so he could speak softly. "I'm guessing you're Hellcat 1-1," he said to the short and busty pilot on point.

  "I'm Pooch," Hellcat 1-1 said. Paladin immediately snickered and Dirty burst out laughing, but Pooch ignored them. "And you're Jordo." She laughed then, but it was a conscious, mannered gesture like she'd planned it for so long that it couldn't possibly come out as anything but contrived. "Back at flight school, Burn talked about you a lot, but you don't look like much to me."

  Dirty couldn't hold it in. "The hell you doing here 55th? You get lonely? You come lookin' for love?" The whole Pit had gone silent. The gunners and mechanics and combat loaders were sure the fight would happen any second. Jordo hated them for being right.

  He asked Hellcat 1-1 straight out. "What the hell is your problem with the 133rd, Pooch?"

  "No problem," she said. "We came for a piece of the legendary Lancer test squadron. You don't seem like all that to me.... Not so bad to look at, though. I bet Flight Instructor Burn was sweet on you. That's what it was. Had to be, because what I'm lookin' at ain't impressin' me none."

  "You don't have to be impressed for Paladin here to turn you into a pretzel," Jordo said.

  The wad of cash Pooch pulled out of her thigh pocket was thick enough that even Paladin's big paws would have trouble twisting it. "Four on four engagement," she said.

  "What, in the Bitzers?"

  "We already scored sparker dummy rounds from the redsuits working the midships bay. We got practice ammo for the autocannon."

  Jordo said, "I got news for you, Pooch. On this ship, Old Man Cozen doesn't care if we bash each others' heads, but take eight of his fighters out without clearance and he's gonna lay a shitstorm on us."

  Pooch called Jordo a pussy, and Dirty said to her, "Four on four is nice, but if you're so wet for it, baby, then how about some 5 on 9?" There were five Lancers and nine Hellcats there in the pit. 10ms later, when Pooch's face began to contort like she'd figured out exactly what Dirty meant, Dirty's little fists were already on the way.

  Her first punch was a jab. It wasn't a big roundhouse meant to knock Pooch out. It was just the opening step of their tango. Jordo could already see the ecstasy rising on her face. It was on Pooch's face, too.

  Pooch shifted her weight and moved her head to the side, out of the way of Dirty's hard little fist. Like rocks, Dirty's fists. Her left snapped back before Pooch could grapple the limb, but Jordo saw her try.

  Dirty feigned that jab again. When Pooch tried to parry and snatch it from the air with a deft circular sweep, Dirty grabbed the waving hand, pulled her in, and kneed Pooch in the groin. They were both fast, but Pooch didn't see that one coming because she wasn't a dirty fighter.

  Time dilated then. In less than 5ms, Jordo would lunge out with a right aimed at the block-headed Hellcat behind Pooch. Paladin was already reaching for two of them with his big paws. Three more Hellcats crouched. A millisecond's glance at their eyes showed they were aiming themselves at Holdout and Gusher for a 1/3 gee body-slam. Colors got brighter. Forms became more voluminous and the gnaw in Jordo's gut was all gone now. It was the same for all of them.

  The redsuits shouted, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" Hardway's crew wanted to see this. None of the gunners or reds were going to break it up or call in the Staas Guards to stop it – at least not until somebody won. Most of them put money down on the fight within the first few seconds. That's why Jordo didn't understand how the Staas Guards got there so fast. Just after he connected with the big Hellcat's jaw and delighted in the almost perfect energy transfer, he caught sight of them flooding into the Pit through the forward and aft hatches.

  The Staas Guards didn't bother ordering anyone to break it up. They knew the Lancers, so they knew it was futile. They let their truncheons do the talking.

  Jordo locked eyes with Pooch as she brought an elbow down on Dirty's ribs. When she finally saw the two-dozen, incoming Staas Guards, the smile on Hellcat 1-1's face invited all of them to come get some. Pooch had enough for everyone.

  Chapter Four

  Harry Cozen, Asa Biko, and Dana Sellis flew back to Hardway in the longboat with Pardue, but Matilda Witt asked Ram to stay behind on Taipan for another hour so they could go over 'a few niggling details', as she put it.

  At first, she poured more Scotch for herself and made small talk that appeared to be of no consequence at all – patter, really. "Do you have any idea how difficult it is to design a flavor profile the human palate can actually taste in the low air pressures most space-going vessels maintain? My chef had a professional fit." From the way her eyes flicked here and there around the room and then back to Ram as she spoke, he got the impression she thought someone was listening. She rose from the couch, stepped quietly to the desk, and withdrew a polished wooden box from a drawer.

  "Of course, I'm sure Harry has all of you eating hard tack biscuits."

  She opened the lid in front of him, and inside the box Ram saw six devices he recognized because Harry Cozen had a box full of them, too. They looked like halved robin's eggs. They were multispectral noisemakers.

  She fixed the suite of counter-surveillance devices to the bulkheads and even the diamond-pane portholes of her compartment. After she set one on the deck, the surface of Ram's melted ice and watery scotch turned nearly opaque with the vibrations.

  Witt said. "We can speak freely now."

  "Do you really think someone is listening in? On your own ship?"

  "Harry's not above planting an entangled q-link device on you or buying one or two of my crew to put one in here for him. And he's not the only one that might be listening, Mr. Devlin. But no matter who has their ear to the door, so to speak, all they hear now is a symphony of random noise."

  Ram Devlin and Matilda Witt regarded each other in silence for the next few seconds. Both of them realized a negotiation was about to take place and since the winner in any negotiation is always the party that least appears to want the deal to happen, neither one of them said a word at first.

  Matilda Witt began on a deceptively innocent tack. "I never took you for a collector of precious rarities, Mr. Devlin. That Honma & Voss pistol you carry as a sidearm – they only made two-hundred of them and the ruby at its core came from the Lost Caliphate's vault."

  "That's right."

  "I'd like to buy it," she said.

  "It's not for sale. It was a gift."

  "I know that gun, Mr. Devlin. Harry Cozen pried it from the death clutch of a Revolutionary Guard Colonel – one of the few in that elite corps not to get vaporized. He carried it for a few years. Then, he gave it to a woman named Mickey Wells, his bodyguard."

  "Did you know her?"

  "You did."

  After so much time spent with Harry Cozen, it took more than the simple mention of Ram's secrets to make him twinge with the kind of perceptible alarm Matilda Witt was obviously trying to elicit. He said, "Mickey Wells arrived on Hardway with Cozen just before the first encounter with the Squidies on Moriah."

  "That's true," Witt admitted, "but you met her long before the day she died on Moriah. Someone went to a good deal of trouble and expense to hide it, but I found out that Mickey Wells was the one who brought you to Staas Aerospace Academy when you were eight years old and p
aid sixteen years of tuition, room, and board in advance. After that, she disappeared. She left you, Ram. She left you to go and work for Harry Cozen."

  Ram said, "The War of the Americas..."

  "...killed millions of North Americans including your parents. The narrative I reconstructed is that Mickey Wells came home from that war and somehow met you. She raised you as her own until she handed you off to prestigious Staas Aerospace Academy at the age of eight. You've been ours ever since."

  Ram thought nobody but he and Cozen knew about that. "What does Mickey Wells have to do with anything?"

  "She died in the very first action of the entire war. She was killed by a Squidy during the boarding of the alien scout ship." Ram didn't like remembering that moment and he hoped she couldn't see that on his face. From the grin on her thin lips, Ram decided she could. She said, "I need to know not only what role Mickey Wells and Harry Cozen played in the events of the war's first day, but also the events leading up to that point."

  "I don't understand." He did, of course.

  "There were events leading up to the first day of this war – events involving Harry Cozen and Mickey and the Squidies. There are many who say Harry Cozen isn't telling the truth about how this war began... There's even been speculation about his involvement in the death of the ten miners aboard the junk Mohegan – the first official casualties of our 'War of Alien Aggression'."

  "The Squidies killed the crew of Mohegan," Ram lied. That's not what he believed. What he believed could never be proven or revealed.

  "Mr. Devlin," she said, "I have more than a few reasons to question the official accepted narrative of how this war began."

  "There's always been rumors around anything involving Harry Cozen." Witt raised her eyebrows, inviting him to tell her more. "Read my report," Ram said.

  "I've read your report."

  "Then you know what happened."

  Matilda Witt's nostrils flared. "I can't prove it and I don't know how or why, but I know in my bones that this whole war was Harry Cozen's making. He and the woman to whom your gun belonged made sure it happened."

  Mickey didn't kill any innocents. She'd said so. And whatever it was that Cozen had actually done, she only kept him alive to do it because it was important to the future of Humanity – more important even than how she felt about doing it. She'd said it was the most important thing she'd ever done in her life. And Ram had believed her.

  Witt was right, of course. And Ram couldn't prove it any more than she could, but he was sure Harry Cozen had been the one responsible for the first casualties of the war – the killing of Mohegan's crew – the unprovoked outrage that was attributed to the Squidies and helped mankind dive head-first and without reticence into a good and righteous war against alien aggression.

  "Mr. Devlin," she said, "it's a lie. A war cannot be... Excuse me... History, Mr. Devlin. History cannot be based on a lie." Ram remembered saying the same thing to Harry Cozen.

  "My report is the truth." She'd have sensors pointed at him right now, he realized. She'd be recording thermals of his blood flow and his heart rate and measuring the low frequency tremors in his vocal muscles. All it would tell her was that this conversation made him anxious. And it should.

  Matilda Witt stood up and the way she looked down at him told Ram it was time to go. This round of negotiation was almost over. Now, he knew what she wanted: Harry Cozen's head on a pike. But she still hadn't shown Ram what she offered in return. For a moment, he considered the idea that maybe she thought the truth alone meant enough to Ram to make him give her Cozen.

  It did. Ram Devlin was just the sort of man who valued truth, but after Harry Cozen had used that aspect of his personality to manipulate him, Ram had learned to hide that facet of his nature. The truth was important to him and he did want to see Cozen pay for what he'd done, but from Ram's actions so far, Witt had no way of knowing that. She'd expect Ram to want something in return.

  At the hatch, before she opened it, she finally made her offer: "I want Hardway as part of my personal battlegroup. Harry Cozen won't be around forever. I'm already looking for his replacement. Hardway could very easily be yours to command, Mr. Devlin. Sooner than you think." She spun the wheel and opened the hatch before she glanced at his sidearm again. She said, "Think about my offer. I'd very much like to add that gun of yours to my collection."

  *****

  Hardway hadn't been built with a proper brig, but a month after having the Lancers on board, the redsuits made one just for the fighter pilots. The maintenance crews welded bars in place and turned half a munitions hold into a brig so the pilots could be jailed close to their fighters. The other half of the compartment was full of warspite torpedoes just waiting for a chance to detonate.

  The Lancers reclined on welded slabs that served as bunks. Jordo's pilots looked comfortable because they were. After serving years in Bailey Prison, a little time in the Staas Guards' brig didn't bother them much.

  The Hellcats looked less bothered by confinement than Jordo had expected. He wondered if they were emulating the Lancers, but he only had to think about it for a few seconds before he realized the Hellcats were probably used to being confined as well. They had to be suffering the same side-effects the Lancers were suffering from using the new pulse-pinches in their fighters. They were showing the same symptoms of tidal-flux induced brain damage...all the same hyper-aggression.

  The new inertial negation systems in the fighters let them fly as hard as the Squidies, but they were messing up the new pilots' brains just like they'd messed up the Lancers' brains. The Lancers had been a little scrappy before, but they hadn't been the Donnybrook brawlers they were now until their brains had gotten shaken with pulses of artificial gees every .02 milliseconds for a few hundred combat hours. You can't do that to a brain without side-effects. Cozen said it would take 36 months to mess them up so bad they couldn't fly. He never said anything about shite impulse control and hyper-aggression.

  If the 1200 pilots of the Taipan Air Group were suffering the same side-effects like the Hellcats, it would be a disciplinary nightmare. Witt's unarmored box carriers had probably been built with proper brigs and lots of them. They'd need them.

  In Hardway's brig, the nine Hellcats that tangled with the Lancers had been stuffed in a separate cage. There were too many of them to fit on the slab bunks. Half of them sat on the deck, up against the bulkhead. Pooch tried to burn holes in Jordo's head with her stare. She had a hardon for him and Jordo still had no idea why. It was more than just the expected alpha-pilot bullshit.

  "Bitch broke my rib," Dirty said when she saw Jordo staring back at Pooch.

  The Staas Guard who'd been assigned to stand outside the bars and insult the pilots every time they looked too comfy didn't slack off on the job. "So amazingly stupid," he said. "I thought it was just the dumbass Lancers here and it was mostly 'cause they were convicts and all, but you F-151 pilots are all alike. Freakin' nut-job psychos."

  That goon only had it half-right, but Jordo didn't correct him. Who wants to say they've got brain damage? "He's partly right about us," Jordo said.

  Pooch snorted again. "Speak for yourself. Maybe the Lancers are screwy in the head, but the Hellcats are rock solid."

  "I meant he's right when he said we're alike."

  That seemed like it pissed her off more than anything else he'd said. "No. No. There's a big difference between us. The Hellcats are volunteers. We signed up. You're all convicts who took a deal to get out of prison."

  "What a sweet deal..." Dirty said as she adjusted herself on the steel slab.

  "We're nothing alike." Pooch almost hissed it. She turned away and shook her head and pretended to laugh at the idea.

  Jordo said, "Yeah we are. You're another brain-shake zoomie, just like me. Bet you can't go six hours without trying to mix it up. When you don't get some...when you don't get the monster beat out of you...it's like the whole world is all grayed out." She looked away, in denial of it, but her pilots were listen
ing now, looking up through the bars at Jordo because they knew exactly what he was talking about. "That inertial negation can mess you up. I can't go five minutes without being so sure a fight's going to happen that I make it happen. And everything's just too pissing slow... All the time. You're the same way. Pulse-pinch shook your brain. Now, you're all shook up just like me...like us. Now, you got a monster inside."

  For the briefest moment, the torrent of hate coming from Pooch's eyes had ceased, but less than a second after he spoke those words, it came back hard. "Don't treat us like your nuggets." She practically spat the words. "We were behind the Sirius Line for three months on our own. We didn't need anyone holding our hands then. We don't need it now." Her voice turned ten degrees colder in a flash. "You're damaged maybe. We're fine. And besides, nobody needs advice from a squadron leader with only five pilots left in his whole, sad-ass, jailbird squadron."

  Jordo was glad he couldn't reach Pooch through the bars because suddenly it was as if his brain broke. It filled with angry static so loud he couldn't think anything besides fractured images of what he wanted to say...images of him making her pay for what she'd said. His vision flashed like someone was playing with the lights and he burned under his skin. If there was a chance he could have gotten his hands around Hellcat 1-1's throat, then the monster inside him would have tried and Jordo wouldn't have been able to stop it.

  *****

  Ram went through the hatch into the primary launch module's 2nd maintenance bay where preparations for the upcoming assault were already underway. Warspite torpedoes covered most of the deck where Chief Horcheese and her redsuits modified them to the specifications ordered by Matilda Witt. On the far side of the bay, Hardway's boarders drew MA-48 rifles and gathered with Lucy Elan's company marines around a detailed projection of alien anatomy.

  "Dammit!" Horcheese stepped back and engaged in positional correction to open a stubborn torpedo casing. She kicked the hatch cover near the reluctant latch using the heel of her boot and some hate she'd saved up for the Squidies. When she glanced up and saw Ram coming, it didn't stop her from kicking the torpedo. Ram knew enough to let her work.