by A. D. Bloom
Lancer
A.D. Bloom
© 2014
Many thanks to Tom Robidoux for his editorial input.
Thanks to 'Blue Scar' D. for his consulting role.
Thank you to Jimmy Robidoux and the 182nd Airborne.
Cover images and custom models by Whayler.
The author would like to express his appreciation to the New England Air Museum, USS Nautilus (SSN-571), and USS Massachusetts (BB-59), F-15.net, /r/WarshipPorn and her sister subreddit, /r/Warships.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
2165
The War of Alien Aggression has raged for six months. Rebuffed on the Sirius Front, the combined UN and Privateer fleet is currently losing the war with the Squidies.
Chapter One
When the war began, all the Staas Company Privateers and the UN fleet could sortie to meet the Squidies' fighters were obsolete drones and lumbering gunnery junks. The enemy bandits flew circles around them, and alien aces raided across the inner system with impunity. Only now, six months after the war's unfortunate first days, did Staas Company and Earth finally have a manned, exo-atmospheric fighter that could meet the Squidy interceptors and win.
Today, when the alien aces came to raise Cain, a flight of experimental F-151 Bitzers lay in wait for them over cratered and baked Mercury. They rode a low, shadow orbit so the planet hid the glow of their engines.
The flight of four Privateers brought a dozen QF-111 Dingoes with them. The gun-studded, engine-packed, autonomous fighter drones shifted impatiently on their maneuvering jets. Their canine-based AIs were always eager.
As a convoy of fat-hulled, H3 tankers lured the enemy within a million Ks, the alien pilots continued to chase after them without hesitation. Either they hadn't grown suspicious of the fleeing convoy's close pass by Mercury or the aliens' string of victories had made them too arrogant to care. Lieutenant Commander Eugene Shaffer couldn't blame the alien aces for being arrogant. But he'd happily punish them for it.
Chapter Two
If J. Colt was off-shift, he got to go out in Bailey Prison's yard. Out in the yard it was pressurized and the lunar surface had been leveled and pounded and smoothed over until it was like dusty marble that glinted everywhere. There was nothing between him and the dome and the dome was all there was between him and the stars.
He and Marchett stood on the far side where the lights weren't as bright and you could see more of the plumes from the ships steaming through the black. Never once did Earth ever rise on that horizon.
Bailey was a prison colony on the moon's 'dark' side. It was just as well-lit as the other side, but forever out of sight of Earth. Bailey was a rake and bake facility where they roasted lunar surface rocks at 316 Celsius to extract the Helium3 deposited by aeons of solar wind. Earth's reactors were always hungry for more.
It could have been a worse place. They didn't segregate by sex. Three, open-door cell blocks of just over 360 prisoners lived in Bailey's own pressurized dome, adjacent to a cluster of H3 processing facilities. Most of the habitat itself was made of crushed waste rock from the processing plant mixed with water and an ossifying bacteria to make a kind of bio-concrete. Dust came off it constantly.
"Eighteen hours on the floor," Marchett said. His jaw moved like a rock crusher when he talked. "You know what we'd be making if they had overtime around here?"
He didn't reply to Marchett's question right away because a rose-colored star had caught his eye – a single enemy ship. He squinted and saw it was moving fast against the blackness. "Hey. You hear me?" At first, it appeared like the engine flare had blurred, but then his eye made out how it wasn't one ship, it was a formation of three. "Hey look at that," Marchett joked when he saw it. "Maybe it's a prison break."
"The Squidies are getting bolder every day. They're almost over the H3 plants." Before the pink stars crossed the line where he expected the gun batteries around the refinery to open up, another set of a dozen lights streaked in from the moon's shadow on an intercept course. These ships had the cold-tinted exhaust of Staas Company engines. They were too fast to be junks. They had to be drones, QF-111 Dingoes, but they didn't fly like them. The Squidy pilots ate gullible drones for breakfast, but after the two constellations collided, it was the rosy, alien exhaust plumes that flared up and snuffed out as they were hit by fire. In moments, there were only a dozen, bluish lights chasing one last Squidy. It looked like the fight would be over any second until he spotted a single, brighter exhaust flare. It was big and rosy. Another Squidy, but this one was too big to be an interceptor despite the tremendous speed of its approach.
"Where the hell is the UN fleet?" Marchett said it like he'd been let down.
After a flash on the Squidy ship's hull, he saw the big, blue, Staas Company engines of a large Privateer chasing it. The vessel in pursuit was no capital ship, but it engaged with what it had. From the impact flashes, it looked like a railgun.
The Squidies took the hits and kept streaking through space towards the scene of the dogfight over the dome. It seemed like the inbound alien vessel had been mortally wounded and was venting plasma out the side, but those were just the exhaust flares from a whole string of small craft launching off its bays.
The first three Squidies had been a lure. Now, it was the friendlies that were outnumbered. The aliens outmaneuvered them, too. Even from where he was he could see the aliens cutting harder and accelerating faster. Reactors flashed and cooked off like little novae, and within a minute, only the rosy exhaust plumes from alien engines remained above. The engagement was over. The Squidies won.
The alien marauders swung out wide and took a long, looping turn before veering back at the moon. A flight of three broke away and cut along the horizon, and when the lights of their engines dimmed, he knew it was because they were flying right at him. They came so fast that before he could shout a warning, the glints in the sky had already dived between the nearby lunar hills and were skimming low, backlit by their engines' exhaust. It was an assault run.
The bandits flew so low that their exhaust kicked up dust behind them. A dozen strings of autocannon tracers rose from the H3 facilities and chased the fighters like slow-motion hoses. Flak shells bloomed in bright orange over the monochrome lunar surface wherever the aliens flew and lit up the surface in their wake.
The Squidy fighters spat brief and narrow particle streams at the surface. They were ghostly and bright and so razor straight they hurt the eye. They raked across ground targets out of his sight, and set off detonations that painted the gray hills around the refinery complex a bloody hue. Then, they dove on the facilities' diamond-pane domes. Some of the prisoners actually cheered, but most of them started running when they saw a flight of alien fighters bank in and fly directly at the prison.
He got a close look at the one that buzzed close to the top of Bailey Prison's dome. It was deep red and angular and sharp on all sides like a handful of knives. Its beam drew a molten edged wound across the high side of the dome just before it loosed something small and malevolent as it peeled away.
The blinding detonation shook the pressurized atmo inside the dome and hammered the convicts in the yard. The shock wave knocked him flat and rattled his brain. It stunned him so he couldn't think until hands pulled him to his feet and that rock-crusher jaw screamed silent in his face. Marchett dragged him
towards the airlocks.
Seconds later, huge pieces of the diamond-pane dome began to crash down and the atmo blew out into the lunar vacuum.
Chapter Three
The Privateer fighter pilot who sat behind the warden's desk said his name was Lieutenant Commander Eugene Shaffer. The name painted over the visor on his flight helmet was 'Shafter'. All pilots get their name for a reason.
The other one didn't say much – just watched and listened. The patch she wore said, 'Steinmetz'. Her helmet said 'Burn'. Her exosuit said she'd look pretty good out of it and when he'd first seen her, he hadn't tried to hide the fact that he was eye-banging her. It was rude and aggressive and the fact that she let it slide scared him a little. It made him think that whatever they had in store for him was so bad that she didn't feel any need to add to it.
Shafter read out of his file while he sat on the stool in front of the Warden's desk and tried not to look at Burn again. A full two minutes later, Shafter said, "J. Colt. What's the 'J' stand for; it doesn't say here."
"Just 'J'. It doesn't stand for anything."
Shafter didn't look like he believed him. "Right then... J. Colt. Currently serving five to seven for human smuggling..."
"I ran a travel service."
"Resume includes piloting ballistic gliders. It's rare to meet one of you guys who can still talk. Usually the launch gees on an intercontinental ballistic glider turn the brain to mush after a few runs."
"My brain still works."
"Says here you piloted some endo-atmospheric planes."
"Endo-atmospheric?"
"Endo... inside... Inside the atmo. You flew ramjets and v-thrust, too."
"That's right."
"Any exo-atmospheric flying that's not listed here?"
"You mean in space? Just the top of the ballistic arc. That count?"
Shafter looked at Burn and then back at him. "Here's the deal. We're the Lancers, the Staas Company Privateers' 133rd fighter test squadron and we need pilots. We're offering ground-up training. You clock 36 months with us and you're done. You'll be out of prison and out of the war. You'll even get a bonus. Hold up your end of the bargain and you get a clean slate."
"How come you're recruiting convicts?"
Shafter said, "It's dangerous," like that explained everything. War is dangerous. But this was the first time he'd heard of convicts being recruited to fight as pilots. It didn't add up.
"36 months with us beats the hell out of 5-7 years in this hole," she said. Shafter's wingman could talk. "It'll be like your crime never happened," she said.
That was a lie. You can't erase the past.
"Don't be afraid to say no, Colt. We don't need you. We're recruiting warm bodies. And just so you know, we're not here because we're desperate," Shafter said. "I can have my pick of any Staas Flight School nugget or UNS newbie I choose. But I'm not recruiting at a flight school today because pre-trained pilots aren't what I need. The fact that you think you know how to fly may actually be a hindrance."
Unless the laws of physics had changed recently, this was all hogwash. It had to be. "How the hell did you put a pilot in a exo-atmo fighter plane? It's impossible. The inertial gees produced during any set of effective exo-atmospheric combat maneuvers are guaranteed to turn a pilot to spam in his suit and there isn't an inertial negation system made that can produce enough artificial gees to keep that from happening – not without requiring so much juice that the reactor to power it would have to be as big as a destroyer's. It's impossible."
"You believe what you see?" Shafter said, "You already saw our F-151s in action... in the battle over the moon just before the Squidies bombed Bailey's dome."
"You mean those blue exhaust flares weren't from drones? You mean to tell me there were living, human pilots in that fight?" He remembered what happened to all of them and how fast they all died. "You guys lost that fight."
"No shit," Shafter said. "Is that all you saw?"
Maybe Shafter wasn't just here for warm bodies after all. "I saw one flight of three enemy fighters approach the moon first. They were a lure – a worm on a hook. I know because after a dozen of your fighter pilots showed up to dust them, in came an alien pocket carrier with a dozen more bandits. It was a trap. They were hunting you."
"Me and Burn and two other pilots were on our way back from spanking the Squidies near Mercury," Shafter said.
"We're all that's left of the Lancers now. It's just us," Burn said. "And you."
This was all some kind of sucker deal. It had to be.
*****
Two hours later, he and Marchett and the 49 selected convicts of Bailey Prison's C-block sat on the floor of the 3rd sub-level basement. Bailey's lowest sub-level was cut below the one that housed the massive HVAC units and all the moistest air sank down there. He sat in 5cm of water.
The ceilings in the vaults were high enough he could peer up into the space between the lamps and see nothing at all. The lunar rock under him was like the yard – a smooth and polished piece of the moon itself. The water made it slippery.
"What's that?" Marchett pointed his chin at the 3m-tall set of field coils in the middle of the vault.
"That's a pinch. Makes artificial gravity."
Marchett asked, "What's it doing in here...with us?"
Pilk, the guards' shift supervisor, stomped in, and his goons fell in behind. "The two fighter pilots that were here had to fly off and personally secure transport for your no-good, convict asses. We told 'em we'd be happy to administer the physical test and save 'em some time." Pilk grinned with beady, little teeth. It was like he'd worn them down to half length. "See the red light over the door? When it goes on, all you gotta do is get up and walk out. That's it. That's all you gotta do. The ones that make it get to be pilots. The ones that don't make it get what they deserve."
"Why you gotta' do this, Pilk?" It was Hortez that asked it, but it's what they all wanted to know. "We never did nothing to you."
Pilk said, "After what some of you people have done, I don't like the idea of you walking out of here so easy. So call this my idea of justice." The guards left after that.
Most of the convicts probably didn't know what the set of field coils in the middle of the vault was for, let alone what was about to happen. "Lay down," he said loud enough for them all to hear. "If you know what's good for you, then lay your ass down on the floor." Nobody moved. He took off his shirt, balled it up, and lay down in the wet with it between his head and the stone. After seeing that, Marchett did the same.
The red light went on and so did the hard gravity. Ten-thousand drops of water that had been collecting on the vault's ceiling fell at once. Knees buckled and people got pulled down fast by their own weight. They all fell at once, splashing into the stone together. More than one skull hit hard, and bloodstains spread in the water.
Going from a standard, .3 gees of artificial gravity to a full two Earth gees in seconds pressed the wind out of his lungs. He fought to expand them, pushing against the weight of his own chest. The only breath he was able to draw was a shallow wheeze.
Blood ran from Marchett's nostrils as he tried to rise. He tried to lift his head, too, but it felt like someone was sitting on it. He managed to roll onto his side, but he couldn't get up from there. The living rock cracked under him and sucked in water.
Marchett made it up first, grunting as he managed to go from kneeling to crouching. His eyelids blinked too fast, fluttering randomly, weirdly out of control. Something was definitely wrong and it wasn't just the gees. Marchett pulled him up. "Door! Go!"
Nobody else had made it to their feet so far. Their gaping mouths and desperate eyes made them look like dying fishes. It was getting harder and harder for them to breathe. If they didn't get up soon, they weren't going to last.
Halfway to the door, he stopped. He bent carefully, squatting over his knees and pushed Jeana Bic on her side. He got his hands under her arms. "Help me lift her." The two of them lifted and grunted and until they got Jean
a's feet under her. Together, the three of them lifted up Telly Lyons and then Howe and Hortez. They raised up convicts until over half of the 49 were staggering and lifting other bodies from the floor even under their own, hellish weight.
That's when Marchett's big jaw locked up and his eyes glazed and rolled back in his head. He crumpled and fell flat. Jeana hissed, "He's messed up." It took eight people to drag Marchett in those gees.
In the corridor outside, a meter past the door, they crossed the pinch's area of effect and gravity returned to normal. His stomach flipped over and tried to climb up his throat. "What about them?" Jeana pointed back through the doorway. The convicts left in there now were the ones who'd cracked their heads. Two bled out the ears. Skull fractures, maybe. None of them moved.
"Leave 'em," Telly said. "Probably dead."
"No. Everyone makes it out. Screw Pilk and the guards. Pilk isn't going to get the pleasure of finding any of us in there." He staggered back into the artificial gees, but it was suddenly worse than it had been only seconds ago. It felt like his flesh was being pulled from his bones and all his organs were trying to plummet down to his feet. His vision began to dim and he didn't even know he'd lost consciousness until he came to and saw Telly, Jeana, Otto, and Howe carrying him out.
"We got them all," Telly told him. "Even the stupid ones like you."
Chapter Four
Five got sealed up in heavy black bags. Pilk and his goons put the remaining, 44 pilot trainees out Bailey's main locks in their orange, prison-issue exosuits and helmets. When the airlock doors opened, none of the prisoners hesitated to exit, but once they were outside on the lunar surface, they only got a few steps down the four-lane orgocrete highway before all the open space stopped them in their tracks. It pressed in on them from all sides. He heard Telly Lyons breathing fast and hard into her helmet mic, hyperventilating as her rebreather struggled to adjust the mix faster.
