by A. D. Bloom
"Chief Lee, Chief Lee," Ram said. "This is the XO. Man overboard. Look topside, over the primary bays."
"We saw her, Mr. Devlin. A team and a knuckledragger are already on the way."
EPILOGUE
43 days later...Sagan Shipyards at Lunar Lagrange
Usually, when the Lancers and the Hellcats ended up in Doc Ibora's medical bay after a hand-to-hand love fest, they had to be treated separately. Today was different. Today, the bloodied Lancers and Hellcats had fought the Staas Guards' shore patrol together. Now, they sat side by side while Ibora inventoried the pilots' injuries and griped about all the work they'd made for him.
Jordo basked in that moment. He didn't want to spoil it by saying anything in front of the pilots. His eyes flitted across their blood-crusted and smiling faces. Pooch didn't let the others see, but she winked at him with a black eye, already deep blue and growing shinier by the minute.
"Broken teeth, multiple fractures, compound fractures this time," Ibora said, stressing the extra damage that the Lancers and the Hellcats had done to themselves by picking a fight with the truncheon-armed Shore Patrol instead of each other like they usually did. "The damage that knuckles and knees and elbows do is bad enough, but those clubs of theirs can shatter a bone beyond what I can easily fuse in an hour."
Jordo said, "They started it." Ibora's face showed no reaction and he was sure the doctor didn't believe him, but the Shore Patrol really had started it. Six of them marched into the officers' club and once they had a look around, they went straight to Jordo and Pooch. It would have sounded paranoid if he'd said it to anyone, but it had been like the SPs had gone into the officer's club looking for Jordo and Pooch in particular. After they found the two squadron leaders, they surrounded the table and blinded them and five other pilots with flashes from their truncheons. Then, they took sucker shots until the rest of the Lancers and the Hellcats jumped in.
That's when all the SPs that had been waiting out of sight poured in the door of the OC like whatever dam on Sagan that had been holding them back until now had just cracked and burst. The SPs won the fight with those stun batons and, respect where it was due, some genuine, mad-dog meanness, the kind most folks aren't born with, the kind you have to work at.
Once they had every fighter pilot down for the count and twitching with 100,000 volts, Jordo expected to get dragged to the brig, but the SPs just picked up their own and left. Nobody got taken away anywhere. It was weird. It was like someone told the SPs to do it, but in the end, there was no point to any of it, not unless the goal was to unite Hardway's pilots with more common misery. It felt like a manipulation and Jordo suspected Harry Cozen had engineered the whole thing, but nobody else looked wise so he made a point to keep his trap shut for once.
Ibora pointed at the spot in the middle of Jordo's forehead where the club had struck and flashed lightning behind his eyes. Under the swelling lump was what felt like a bone spur, just like the raised spike some craters get in the middle if the incoming rock hits at just the right angle. "Probable brain damage," Ibora said. "Damage to your frontal cortex..."
A senior redsuit came in stomping the deck with heavy feet. It was Horcheese, the Chief with all the new parts. Her new eyes looked like murky jewels now. The multispectral transducers she got for eyes looked like marble with a fire inside each one. She got machine arms, machine legs, and a reinforced skeleton. She could have got regenerated ones made of her own flesh and blood, but Chief Horcheese, she went for the machine parts. Now, she could portage a fifty-meter junk in each artificial hand.
Ibora was so busy, he only glanced in the Chief's direction. "How are you coming along, Chief Horcheese?"
"Better than new, Doc," she said, but Jordo didn't believe it. Nobody looses that much of themselves and doesn't miss it.
"I don't think I'll have time to do the fine tuning on the neural interfaces we'd planned to do today." His eyes shot around the room at all the pilots. "I had time for you, but now, I have to fuse 36 frivolously broken bones and prevent two-dozen cases of creeping brain damage or we won't have a fighter wing."
"I already did the fine-tuning myself," Horcheese said. "I needed something else from you." She didn't say what. Jordo could guess. Ghost limbs always ache with real pain.
Ibora went on like he hadn't heard her. "And I've got to regenerate the portion of Lancer 1-5's left lung that got skewered on her own broken rib."
Pooch turned to Jordo as if what Doc Ibora had said had just jogged her concussion-addled memory. "I saw that rib get broke," she said. "Man, oh, man, Dirty's face," she said. "D'you see it, Jordo? Tell me you saw it." Pooch hopped off the edge of the exam table where she and Dirty had been sitting with Jordo and showed them all anyway.
"This is no shit," she says because everybody knows that, particular assurance of verity is how all privateer stories start out. "The SP goon... he's a big fucker... twice her size... He jams the non-zappin' end of his club in Dirty's side hard – I mean hard. She doubles over the stick and her eyes bug out so far she looks like some kinda' fucking fish. But then, no shit... No shit... Before she goes down, princess here looks up at him up and smiles like she's going to eat his face and grabs herself a real personal handful of Shore Patrolman." The way she mimed what Dirty did made Jordo's balls want to crawl up inside. "They got a little armor, but Dirty musta' crushed somethin' because when she finally went down from the next epic shot he gave her ribs, the SP went down with her. He fell, too, and he fell right the fuck on top of her and...and...this is the thing..." Pooch started cracking up now. "The baton, his fucking goddamn, stupid electrified baton... It's under him. It's between him and Dirty and it's discharging. It's on and it's zapping him in the gut and her in the side or something and the zap, the 100,000 volts is making them both spas the fuck out. So...so he's humping up and down on top of her and she's trying to buck him off like a bronco and the whole time they're both getting zapped into doing a public show, the two of them both got this look on their faces... The same fuckin' look..." Pooch made a face like a cross-eyed mule getting fucked by a knuckledragger and made a big show of jumping up on the exam table and hunching over Dirty and humping her good shoulder.
Pooch could only do it for half-a-second at a time before Dirty pushed her off or Pooch laughed too hard to hunch over and make big, comic humping motions. When that happened, Pooch would pull back while everyone else kept laughing, get a straight face and pull her shit together so she could go hump on Dirty with the electrocuted mule face and the cross-eyes until she lost it again. Her routine went on for a good minute and the only one not cracking up was Ibora.
Dirty alternated between laughing and mouthing, "Fuck!" every few seconds when the jagged end of her broken rib stabbed her again.
*****
"I have the bridge," Dana said as she came out the lift.
"Not for three minutes you don't," Ram told her reflection in the bridge's front windows. Below, the repair teams and the legions of knuckledraggers buzzed and flashed all over Hardway, welding on fresh armor plate. "The yards changed up the schedule," he said. "A new shift comes on in half-an-hour."
"Got it." She took the chair, and it felt good. "Looks like we're almost done," she said, nodding to the teams out on the hull. "Any problems with the bay doors on the new modules today?"
"Not yet."
The next time the lift doors opened, they brought Asa Biko and Harry Cozen and the rest of the next watch – Katz and Bergano to fill out Ops and NAV when Li and Chelis went off duty. Lt. Hussein was new. Biko was there to hold her hand, but she didn't know that. It was her first shift at the AT Controller's station. She'd served on a Privateer before, but when it came to attack carriers, she was as green as the new recruits.
Dana didn't know why Harry Cozen had come. She said, "It's all under control, Mr. Cozen."
He ignored her. "Mr. Devlin, stop haunting the bridge," he said, "Ms. Sellis has things well under control."
"I was just leaving."
"Get
a suit and helmet on. Meet me in Bay One."
"Something wrong?"
"Not at all, Mr. Devlin. This is a ceremonial duty. The two of us must be present as the new figurehead is welded to the bow. It's a Privateer tradition."
The spot between Ram's eyebrows tried to tie itself in a knot. "You don't mean the sculpture Matilda Witt gave you..."
"The Brancusi. Yes. 'Bird in Space'. I've decided this ship deserves a figurehead, so that bit of fine art is going on the bow of this ship."
Dana looked shocked. "But I thought you liked it. You said it was a perfect visual metaphor of flight."
"I do like it," Cozen said. "Some would even argue I love it. And it's going on the bow of my ship."
"But why?" Dana asked. "It's irreplaceable. Out on the bow of a warship its chances of survival are..."
"The same as ours," Cozen said. "Its chances for survival on the bow will be the same as the bow gunners in the forward railgun batteries or the pilots in the junks and the Bitzers for that matter. We are irreplaceable, just like that sculpture. Putting it on the bow doesn't point to how little I value it, but rather how much I value all of our lives. Riding on the bow, my Brancusi will share the risk like any of us."
Ram didn't believe a word of it, but he did like the sculpture.
*****
Ram Devlin and Harry Cozen came through the airlock into the open bay where Chief Horcheese was waiting for them with a knuckledragger. This was her first day back at work. Inside her helmet, her new eyes appeared to catch the ambient light and almost glowed from inside. Ram still wasn't used to the opalescence of her implants.
She smiled from inside the chest-mounted cockpit. "About damn time," she said.
Ram asked her if she'd rather be paid by the hour, and the 4-meter-tall knuckle-dragger in front of them shrugged its enormous mechanical shoulders. It began to kneel, and she said, "Climb on."
He and Cozen climbed up to ride 'gorilla back' on her shoulders. Even with four, new, mechanical limbs, she still flew the knuckledragger like an ace. It wasn't her physical fitness for duty that worried him. Ram had plenty of walking wounded under his command whose scars didn't show.
Chief Horcheese and her knuckledragger puffed them out of Bay One, flew 200 meters straight up the face of the command tower, and then made for the bow.
From Lunar Lagrange, where Hardway had docked at Sagan, Earth was a jewel in the black. It hung over the bow as Horcheese flew them over the new launch bays that been fast-printed by Sagan's crews.
They'd stripped what was left of the damaged modules from the carrier's spine and fitted the new ones in the first week. New railguns got fitted in the second week. Hardway would be back in action soon despite all the damage because Staas Company carriers had been designed with modular replacement in mind. Swapping out sections of the ship that had been damaged or fitting upgrades was the easy part. It had been the traditional repairs to the damaged armor on the command tower and engineering module and the Hab modules that had kept Hardway docked at the Staas Yards for the additional weeks.
"There it is," Cozen said. He pointed, and Ram used his helmet to zoom in on the bow, where he saw a crew of redsuits waiting for them with the almost two-meter-tall bronze sculpture held vertically in their gloved hands. Its arcing shape said speed and motion. No matter how tightly they held it, it looked more like a blurred streak flying through their hands than something anyone could solidly grasp.
A flight of 151s from Hardway's Air Group cut a hard turn in the black above the sculpture and echoed its lines against the stars.
Ram thought Cozen would keep all the squadrons for himself, but once he had control of them (some 831 surviving pilots and planes), he split them among the eight remaining Staas Company attack carriers. That made Harry Cozen a lot of friends.
The Hellcats would stay with Hardway. So would the Wicked Weasels and the 38th. Along with the Lancers, that would give the air group 94 fighters to compliment its 42 junks.
Ram opened a private, line-of-sight, comms channel with Cozen. "The pilots are the ones who are going to see that sculpture most often. You're putting it on the bow as a statement for them, aren't you."
Cozen kept his eyes on the Brancusi. "Yes, well. You see, Mr. Devlin, it has come to my attention that, apparently, I've given my personal guarantee that casualties among the fighter squadrons will be lower under my command than that of my predecessor."
"I don't know how that happened," Ram said. "Who would dare to speak for you like that?"
Chief Horcheese began her descent over the forward batteries and Cozen said, "Just hope, Mr. Devlin... pray that the loyalties of the Hellcats and the other pilots have not become conditional. Never forget that if they refuse an order, then you're the one who must do what is required to maintain discipline."
The Chief landed the knuckledragger mech on a new, five-meter-thick, belt-iron steel bow cap, an armor upgrade Sagan's crews had proudly added with their compliments. "Thanks for the ride, Chief," Ram told Horcheese as he and Cozen jumped.
It was good for the rest of them to see her back in action so fast. Her redsuits liked her. They looked up to her. They needed her.
Cozen made them turn the sculpture at several different angles and finally told them to place it exactly the same way they'd had it set when he and Ram arrived. "Do it," Cozen said. "Execute the weld." Horcheese and the knuckledragger's welder fused it to the hull.
*****
Pardue and Biko flew Ram on his trip across the docks to see the first of the Paul Bunyan Class super-guns. They had no engines. They were hastily designed to guard the handful of points in a star system where stable, viable, hypermass transits could easily be opened. This 2000m gun was the first of its class, on its way to watch over the Sol-Sirius Transit where Squidy had been pressing hard since the war began.
The way Pardue and Biko traded glances before they both insisted on flying, it almost seemed like they thought Ram couldn't fly a longboat safely without them. Ram was glad the two of them were the ones that had the pilots' seats when the longboat's reactor died and left them without power to maneuver.
The batteries and the backup systems failed as well. That kind of failure was nearly impossible and the second it happened, Ram was sure someone had helped it happen.
They were within spitting distance of the shipyards and it wouldn't have been much more than an inconvenience except for the fact that the systems failures all came on in the middle of a maneuver that left the longboat hurtling towards the side of the 2000m Paul Bunyan super-gun at enormous speed with no way to stop or change course.
Ram drifted above and behind the two pilots while they tried to get power back.
"Did you fire it with C-SYS 1-10 shut down?"
"Affirmative. How the hell did we lose the batteries, too? It's not possible."
Ram said, "Biko, Pardue, what the hell happened?"
"We're a little busy."
Ram wished he was busy. The 200-meter rings surrounding the barrel of the giant, Paul Bunyan Class gun grew larger by the second and all he could do was watch them.
"OCX."
"That didn't work," Pardue said.
He could already see which part of the two-kilometer gun they would smash into - the third ring in from the terminus. Other small craft were there to gawk at the new super-gun. They'd get quite a show. Impact in under a minute, Ram thought. Unless someone shoots us out of the sky.
"Hardway longboat, Hardway longboat, this is Sagan Control, you are on a collision course."
"Mayday, mayday," Pardue called out. "Be advised: Hardway longboat Zero-Six is deadstick. Repeat: we are deadstick and have no control."
Ram tried to calculate just how long it would take his body to vaporize on impact. He hadn't got halfway done when a projection of Matilda Witt wearing a sun hat and a floral print dress appeared projected in the cockpit canopy in front of them.
Biko said, "What the hell is she doing here?"
"Mr. Devlin," Witt said. Sh
e ignored the others. "I apologize for interrupting your appreciation of the fleet's newest, biggest Freudian symbol, but you've ignored all my recent attempts at communication and left me with no choice. I know I have your attention now."
"Impact in 40 seconds," Pardue said, glaring at the projection of Witt.
Ram said, "Did you sabotage our boat?"
Her thin lips smiled. "Oh, I don't want to kill you, Mr. Devlin. I'm on Corsica. I'm on vacation and I'm not in the mood to kill. I just wanted to ask that in your mind you don't judge me too harshly. Everything I've done has been to fix the mess you and Harry made. Peace is a more noble thing to kill for than war, Mr. Devlin."
"Thirty seconds to impact," Biko said.
The hull of the Paul Bunyan Class ship behind her grew to fill the cockpit view, and Witt's thin lips smiled in the most condescending way, as if she knew something Ram didn't. "Mr. Devlin, I know you would die to win this war, but would you give up your life for peace?"
"Yes."
"Would you trade Harry Cozen's life for it? I would. I certainly would. I even tried to. I'd trade his life and mine and yours and a thousand other lives for peace. Remember that when you judge me and remember how many more will have to die now because I failed."
"Impact in fifteen seconds..."
Matilda Witt's image vanished. The consoles in front of Biko and Pardue immediately lit up again as the longboat's backup power systems now kicked in with a reassuring hum. Whatever control Witt had over their systems, she'd chosen to relinquish it and release them.
Biko said, "Maneuvering thrusters are coming back online in... 3...2...1..."
The War of Alien Aggression
Books 01-05 (Complete)
All five books in The War of Alien Aggression in a single volume - the war with the Squidies from the first engagement to the final detonations.
