by A. D. Bloom
Cozen said the words like they gave him power, but they didn't. "Under my authority as a Vice President of the Staas Compan-"
"I recognize your authority as a VP, but in a crisis situation that threatens the safety of a ship, company regulations clearly state that the orders of vessel's Captain cannot be overridden by a higher ranking executive. Not even 1633 can change that. You'll have to kill me to get me out of this chair."
Ram knew what would come next, but this isn't how he thought it would happen. Engle and Xian looked at each other over their command consoles. They knew what was happening. Cozen shot Ram a glance then. He was already hyper-aware of the weapon strapped to his leg so when Cozen's eyes went from the Itar to a spot on the deck in front of Captain Horan's command chair, Ram knew what Cozen wanted. The captured ship had to make it back to earth. It was humanity's most valuable possession. And Mickey had died for it. That reason alone was enough.
Ram floated in front of Horan's chair with his hand on the gun and his elbow pointed to the rear like he'd seen Mickey pose on Moriah. Horan saw it. His eyes narrowed. "You going to shoot me with that antique, Devlin? The law's on my side. You going to mutiny? What about you, Bergano?" Horan turned around and looked him in the eye. "Engle? Xian?"
"It's not a mutiny," Cozen said. "It's all perfectly legal." On Bergano's console, Cozen thumbed the button for the squack. His voice went out to every corner of the ship and rang in every exosuit's helmet. "This is Admiral Harry Cozen. I'm relieving Captain Horan and taking command of SCS Hardway. Under the provisions of Staas Company General Order 1633, this vessel is now a Privateer and a ship of war. Ram Devlin is now this ship's executive officer. This order is effective immediately. Mohegan and Gold Coast have already been attacked and we are now in a de facto state of war. As you know, two alien vessels have entered our system. The battleships Hannibal and Khan will face the alien Dreadnought, but Hardway has her own battle to fight. The other alien vessel is coming here and I'm betting they want their scout ship back. They can't have it. SCS Arbitrage will take it to Earth and it is imperative that she reach her destination. Hardway will make sure she does. We will intercept the approaching alien craft. We will engage it using improvised weapons and tactics, and we will destroy it. Hardway will avenge her dead. All personnel will receive combat duty assignments from Mr. Devlin. Redsuits, prepare to receive cargo from Arbitrage in bay 2. That is all."
Horan unstrapped himself and began to push off out of the command chair. Ram thought it was over. He didn't notice how when Horan unstrapped and pushed off the arms of the chair, the Captain hunched over a little. Horan aimed himself like a missile. He drew his knees up under him and then pushed off the chair hard, hurling himself at Ram.
Augustus Horan's shoulder clipped Ram on the right side, in the ribs. It didn't hurt much, but it surprised him and gave Horan a chance to jam up Ram's right arm and keep him from drawing the gun. They spun together to the left and up and back and over. Ram got his arm free and got the weapon out, but when they ended up inverted against the bulkhead with the business end of Mickey's gun pressed against Horan's chest and Ram Devlin's finger on the trigger, Horan wrapped his hands around the gun and fixed it there. He hissed, "You're not going to shoot me, Devlin." Then he moved faster than Ram thought he could.
A back-fist to the temple isn't a knockout blow, but it stuns. The one Horan landed made Ram see a flash like heat lightning behind his eyes. Then, there was a half-second where he told his body to do things, but it simply wouldn't do them. That's when Horan got the gun.
"Nobody's killing my crew today," Horan said. He kept the weapon pointed at Cozen as he made for a comms panel and thumbed the button for the ship-wide squack. "This is Captain Augustus Horan. Disregard any and all orders from Mister Harry Cozen. He is not in command of this ship. He is under arrest for endangering the welfare of this crew. I am in command of SCS Hardway. Secure stations and prepare to move out. That is all."
Horan went from there to the tower's main tube hatch and locked it using his command code. Then he went to the other one and punched in a code, but the door stayed open. He must have sealed the hatch below, Ram thought. He was going to lock them in the forward tube, between decks. Horan used Mickey's pistol to wave them towards the hatch down. "Inside the tube please, Mr. Cozen, Mr. Devlin."
Cozen didn't move. He dared Captain Horan to shoot him.
Horan glanced at the gun in his hand. "This is a beautiful weapon. Never seen one before. You're lucky I've read about them in books and know what this dial does. We don't want to make too big a hole in you." He turned the knob on the side to minimum discharge, pointed the pistol at Harry Cozen's thigh, and fired. A centimeter-wide circle of exosuit and flesh and blood vaporized an inch deep into Cozen's leg, and he screamed in pain and clamped his hands around the smoking, steaming wound. It smelled like a beefsteak – like barbecue.
Wounds like that don't cauterize completely. Blood already gushed out from under Cozen's clamped hands. "There's a medical kit in the tube with a bot that can patch that up," Horan said.
He pretended to ignore the pain, but Ram could see it flashing across Cozen's face as he spoke. "Do you think that reactor problem is fixed yet, Mr. Devlin?"
"I doubt it," Ram said. "Once those power spikes start, they're hard to stop."
Captain Horan said, "Lt. Bergano, Ensigns Engle and Xian, please place Mr. Cozen and Mr. Devlin in the tower's secondary tube and initiate emergency seal protocols for both tubes' hatches so that even Mr. Cozen's command codes won't open them."
A few seconds after they were down inside the tube, the hatch above them opened again and Bergano's face looked down. Then, Bergano grabbed a handhold on the wall above the hatch and pulled himself down inside the tube. Captain Horan and Mickey's gun appeared next. He said, "Mr. Bergano seems to have forgotten how to properly execute emergency hatch-sealing protocols. He's a fool, but he's no idiot. I think he actually wanted you to escape." Then Horan thumped the panel, and the hatch slid shut.
Cozen kept pressure on his wound, "What about Xin and Engle?"
Bergano said. "Mostly, I think they just don't want to get shot."
Ram found the medkit and opened its clamshell case. It stayed where he stuck it on the tube wall. Inside were plenty of coagulants and auto-surgeons, but first, Ram peeled a painkiller transdermal and pressed it to the side of Cozen's neck. When he reached for the kit's beetle-shaped, hand held trauma bot, Cozen said. "Leave that goddamn suture-spider where it is," he said. "Just help me out of this exosuit and give me a can of goddamn stopper bandage for now."
Bergano said, "You should have shot him, Devlin."
"No, Mr. Bergano," Cozen said. The blood pooled up as soon as he took his hands off the neat hole in his thigh. It drifted in globules. "Mr. Devlin did the right thing. I can't effectively command Hardway and expect her officers and crew to follow me after taking the ship by shooting her Captain. That's no way to begin a command."
Ram smelled the burning air first and then, meters below his feet, he saw the tube hatch glow as the tip of a plasma cutter pushed its way through, spitting molten metal around the edges. They were cutting out the hatch from below. A minute later, the crew had cooled the molten edges with gas and removed the section they'd cut out of the hatch.
Redsuits Polis and Foegel from the maintenance crews looked up at them through the hole. Polis hit the kill switch on the side of the plasma cutter, and the glowing 5000 degree blade disappeared into the unit, retracted by the same focused magnetic field that produced its cutting shape. He shouted down tube. "Got Mr. Devlin up here! Bergano too. And Cozen." Polis looked up at him again. "I mean, Admiral Cozen." Polis had already made his choice. So had Foegel. So had most of the crew, if the number of people filling the tube under them was any indication.
They'd never liked Horan, but they wouldn't have taken Cozen's side if they hadn't wanted revenge. They'd seen the bodies. They wanted payback. They wanted a piece of Cozen's war.
Cozen sa
id, "Get that cutter up here and get me on my goddamn bridge!"
"Aye aye!" they barked. They were his, Ram thought. They were Harry Cozen's crew now. All the lies and all the butter he'd spread had won him Hardway with ease.
He insisted on staying right below the cutting team working at the bridge's hatch and Dana had to make her way up to him through the crowded tube to give her report. "Asa Biko and another cutting team are almost through the hatch in the tower's aft tube," she told him.
There was no need to knock. Horan and the junior officers that had chosen to stay with him couldn't miss the plasma cutters melting their way through the hatches. Dana's team cut through faster than Biko's and then waited for them to finish as Horan shouted warnings and threats at Terrazzi and the other engineers. Nobody listened to Captain Augustus Horan anymore. Once both bridge hatches had been breached and cooled with gas, they pushed the cutaway sections up and rotated them as shields.
"I'll put a neat hole in anyone that comes out those hatches," Horan shouted. "You hear me, Cozen? I'm not going to let some exec take my unarmed mining carrier on a suicide mission and kill my crew."
Asa Biko shouted from the other tube across the bridge. "We're not leaving, Captain Horan. This ship isn't going to run. This fight is our fight."
"Are you ready to die, Biko? That's what's going to happen." Ram thought Horan really meant that, too. The Captain was convinced he was saving them. He never thought the crew would be the ones to come up those tubes to take the ship for Harry Cozen. Horan thought they'd want to save their own lives as much as he wanted to save them. He'd underestimated their righteous anger, their desire to avenge their dead, and the power of the belief Cozen had somehow put in them that Hardway could win this fight.
Horan shouted, "I won't let my crew die for nothing!"
"If you really mean that, Captain Horan, then you won't shoot us yourself. We're coming up now. All of us. Do you hear? We're coming up!" Biko shouted, "Polis! Foegel!"
"We're here!" Polis shouted to him from the top of the tube.
"Come out at the same time I do. Nice and slow in three...two...one..."
Polis peeked out of the tube between the floating piece of hatch and the deck. He waved the men and women below him upwards before he floated up with Foegel. Ram moved towards the hatch, but Cozen put his hand on Ram's shoulder and held him in place. Hardway's officers weren't taking the bridge; her crew was.
One by one, the miners and redsuits and pilots floated up past them out of the tube and onto the bridge. Ram didn't hear any screams or smell any burning meat. At least fifteen men and women went past them out the tube before Cozen went too and pulled Ram along with him.
They packed the bridge solid. Augustus Horan stood trapped in a clearing in the middle of the crowd. Biko looked into the business end of Mickey's gun and said, "You're going to have to shoot all of us, Captain Horan. We're not running away. This is our fight and we're going to avenge our dead from Gold Coast and Mohegan."
"This is suicidal," Captain Horan told him.
"We found a way to beat them on Moriah," Biko said. "We'll find a way to beat them here."
Ram saw the moment when Horan gave up. His entire body slumped at once and he looked shorter. He said, "Where's Mr. Devlin?"
"I'm here." Ram pushed off the deck from the back of the crowd, hit the ceiling, and pushed off it so he landed in the clearing near Horan. Captain Horan told him to hold out his hand, and when he did, Horan slapped Mickey's sidearm in Ram's palm and told him, "You should have shot me, Devlin. You didn't want to and that's why you didn't. That's how I stripped you of this weapon. You're at war now. Your duty is to this ship and this crew's lives, not to your conscience or your clean hands. If you don't understand that, then you're not ready for the job."
"Oni, Klosowski, Hollis," Ram said. "Please escort Captain Horan to his quarters and confine him there. Put guards on him. He's faster than he looks."
Horan straightened himself and turned to Cozen, now making his way forward through the crowd. "Don't get them all killed," Horan said, and Cozen nodded. Then Horan barked at the crowd behind him, "Make a goddamn hole." Before he descended into the crowded aft tube, he thumbed the ship-wide squack. "This is Captain Horan. I am relieved. Repeat: I am relieved. Admiral Harry Cozen commands Hardway now. This order is effective immediately. May God save all your souls."
Chapter Nine
SCS Arbitrage opened her bay, and the six QF-111 Dingoes took to space as a pack. Nobody had seen autonomous, exo-atmospheric combat drones fly since the War of the Americas. There were plenty in the Staas Engineering and war museums, but even Ram had never seen them in action.
In the last war mankind fought with itself in space, the drones' main job had been intercepting missiles and torpedoes. They were a Staas Company product and since the war ended so unexpectedly, Staas still had thousands of them in mothballed inventory. Ram should have guessed Harry Cozen would have some flying off Arbitrage.
The drones had no pilots, of course. An inertial negation system that could throw enough artificial gees around to compensate for the violent maneuvers and keep the pilot alive during combat required a reactor the size of a frigate's. Remote command and control systems couldn't be employed because they always got hacked, cracked, or jammed if your enemy was operating at the same level you were. So they made the Dingoes autonomous, closed input systems and gave them Artificial Intelligences.
Since artificial intelligence modeled on the human brain always went insane, the AI they gave the Dingoes was modeled on a dog's brain. The actual synaptic pattern came from a sheep herding dog named Dot, but 'Dingo' was a more marketable name for the Australian aerospace company selling them. Staas Company's marketing division insisted on called it the QF-111 Dingo.
The pack of six crossed the 500 meters between Arbitrage and Hardway slowly, almost drifting the whole way to Bay 2. They were small, only seven meters long with a curved hull barely big enough to hold a reactor module and ammunition. Massive maneuvering jets protruded on four sides to vector thrust in 12 directions and spin them 'round - pitch, roll, and yaw. Without a pilot, they were capable of 80-gee maneuvers. 140mm autocannon lanced out from the fronts of each of their hulls. Their flat, aft ends were packed with engines. The Dingoes were all teeth and legs.
Ram watched them from outside the launch bays as he floated in the vacuum with Chief Lee and his crew of redsuits. The Dingoes flew down Hardway's length in echelon before they turned and reverse burned in front of the bay to bleed off their speed. They flew in backwards, and once they were all in place, they set down on three, improbably small legs that extended from the underside of each curved hull.
Ram flew in after them before Chief Lee began to cycle the bay doors closed.
Lee floated in front of the gape-mouthed, 140mm cannon barrels with a Dingo towering over him. "Do we do anything to them?" he asked. He and his redsuits had never worked on them before. Nobody on Hardway had. "I mean... they'll read our IFF signals right? They know who the friendlies are, don't they? We don't have to input anything to tell them, do we?"
"I'll get you manuals as soon as I can, but Cozen said we just open the bay doors and let them loose when the time comes. They'll attack anything without a Staas Company or UNS transponder and then come back home."
Lee didn't look convinced. "The 140mm shells these thing throw will blow the hell out of warspite torpedoes and other drones, but can they take out an alien warship?"
Ram shook his head. "Don't count on it. No. Not if they have any real armor."
"Scuttlebutt says the alien main guns we're facing shoot some kind of particle streams." Ram didn't respond. "Mr. Devlin? What exactly is the rest of the plan?" That question was going around on every deck. No amount of desire for vengeance could make Hardway's crew overlook the fact that she was about to engage an alien warship while not yet being one herself in anything but spirit.
Ram told Lee he'd get briefed when everyone else did, and Lee looked at him like
he knew that meant the XO didn't have a plan yet. Ram had one. He just didn't like it. He went back up to the bridge, hoping the whole way there that maybe in the time he'd been gone, Cozen or Dana or Biko had come up with a better plan.
Terrazzi had got the reactors up and running, of course, and Hardway now had her .3 gees of artificial gravity back. When Ram stepped out of the lift and onto the bridge, Cozen addressed him as, "Commander Devlin." He'd been bumped up two full grades from Senior Lieutenant Devlin to Lt. Commander to Commander. They all had new ranks in the Staas Company Privateer fleet. Harry Cozen acted as captain, of course. He looked more than comfortable in the command chair.
"The new organizational structure..." Cozen asked Ram, "how is the crew taking to it?"
"It's too early to tell." But that wasn't the truth. In the mess and the passageways of the launching bays and all down the spine, the pilots and the miners who'd once mixed freely already showed signs of polarizing along the lines general order 1633 had drawn in their once unified ranks.
Under 1633's wartime protocols, junk pilots got commissions as junior lieutenants. 1st crewmen had been given rank as non-commissioned warrant officers along with the engineers. The redsuit maintenance and ordnance crews became chiefs and petty officers and enlisted crew. Only 12% of the miners became NCOs; the rest became enlisted sailors and aerial gunners. Nobody had to say 'sir' or 'ma'am' on a Staas Privateer and they still shared the same union affiliations, but order 1633 and the militarization made some of them officers and some enlisted crew. That was practically management and labor from their perspective.
Ram said, "Most of them thought they'd get better hazard pay. I did, too, actually."
Biko explained. "It's a screw-job."
Cozen said, "It's what your union negotiated with Staas in return for conscription under 1633's wartime protocols."
Ram once used Horan's command codes to look at the psych studies on the Staas servers. They said that despite the money the crew stood to make, if Order 1633 was ever given, then more than a few of the union ships would strike just because it wasn't really their fight. That wouldn't happen now, though. Cozen made it their fight.
