by A. D. Bloom
He'd fantasied about how far he'd run and how fast he'd go if he ever got a chance like this and here he was, standing on the lunar surface in a fully charged exosuit with not a guard in sight. And like the rest of them, he couldn't move.
Marchett's voice came over local suit comms. "What the hell are you all looking at? Ain't you seen enough of this rock?"
Telly said, "Thinking of making a break for it?"
"Yeah. Right," he said. "Where are we gonna go?"
"We got enough battery charge on these suits to hoof it to the far side of the complex and jack an automated hauler. There's enough of us. We even got our own pilot."
Jeana said, "Where's Colt gonna fly us to they can't find us? Don't be an idiot, Telly."
"You want to run, you run," Colt said. "I'm going to the landing pads and I'm meeting Shafter and Burn for our our ride out of here."
Marchett shoved him forward down the road. "We've got less than five minutes, so if you want a ride, then you better move."
When C-block got there, the 44 stood on the gray, orgocrete slabs for only a few seconds before they spotted the formation flying towards them – three cold stars that silently zipped across the sky. From far out, they were just backlit specks, but when they got closer, he could make out how they were blocky and crude – the opposite of a fighter. You couldn't miss the four, outboard nacelles and the offset cockpit. These were Staas Company junks.
They looked like they'd been cobbled out of spare parts. In a way, they were. They'd been the workhorses of the mining fleet before the war and their 50-meter-long, tensegrity frames were like rafts onto which everything had been mounted. It was all modular and swappable. Everything from the cockpit module on the starboard topside bow to the reactor module slung underneath could be removed from the frame and replaced. They used to mine the Belt and the Jupiter Trojans, but he could see these junks didn't have ore containers or drills anymore. Gunnery modules had replaced them and clusters of gape-mouthed cannon barrels surveyed the sky from turrets on all sides.
They weren't pretty, but everyone knew the war caught the UN fleet with its pants down. If it wasn't for Staas Company and the newly militarized Privateers, then Earth wouldn't have had enough warships to last six months.
The three junks banked and rolled in on a low approach. He heard some grumbles and nervous snickers on local comms from people who were out in the yards when the Squidies came and bombed them. The junks' flightpath looked a lot like the path of the Squidies' bombing run. Once you've been bombed, anything flying at you low looks like its about to drop something bad on your head.
When the junks were almost over the pads, they rotated their outboard nacelles forward and fired them just long enough to bring themselves to an almost complete stop.
C-Block stayed on the edge of the pads until the junks set down and the airlock doors opened on the forward gunnery modules of all three boats. Two figures in Staas exosuits and flight helmets stepped out of the first junk and into the raw sun. Shafter spoke over local comms: "Nice to see 44 of you made it. Where's J. Colt?" He raised his hand and felt the eyes on him. "You're in charge of your fellow nuggets. Split them up in three flights and get 'em on the junks. Anyone gets left behind, it's on your head."
He boarded Kiwi with Marchett and Jeana and Hortez. Burn and Shafter got on board Kiwi, too, but instead of riding in the gunnery module with everyone else, Shafter went up a tube, presumably to the cockpit. The junks that came were configured to kill Squidies, not ferry personnel, so everyone else rode in the cramped gunnery modules with the crew chief and the backsides of the turrets and the centralized armored magazine that held all the shells and fed the guns. Kiwi's gunners stayed in their turrets, but with guns on four sides, there was less space in there than he thought. It was standing room only and he got pushed up near Kiwi's Chief who gave him the evil eye.
"Don't mind grumpy here," Burn said when she saw the Chief glaring at him. "Because of us he's pulling an extra shift." To the Chief, she said, "You got some problem doing your duty in the war against alien aggression, Crew Chief? Or do you got a problem with orange, prison-issue exosuits maybe?"
"I didn't sign up to ferry around a bunch of convicts," the Chief said. He was at least fifty.
"You didn't sign up at all." She pointed her thumb at him and said, "Just like the rest of his mining carrier, the Chief here got contract-drafted when the war broke out. Used to be a miner on SCS Hardway, out lookin' for the mother-lode. Now, get a load of this mother. Couple of heroic victories... couple of medals...suddenly he's too good for a transport mission." He noticed the Chief hadn't bothered with the sir or ma’am even though Burn had rank insignia on her suit that said she was a 1st Lieutenant. No sir or ma'am in the Staas Privateers.
The junk's gravity pinch sucked up so much power from the reactor that they only used the artificial gees to counter inertia from maneuvers. There wasn't enough power available to leave it on all the time to make constant artificial gravity, so once they took off and passed primary lunar orbit, the orange suits that had packed into the gunnery module floated free in zero-gee, gripping the few available handholds.
Kiwi's pilots and crew were on their own internal comms channel, and fifteen minutes into the flight, he could tell the Crew Chief was listening to it and hearing something he didn't like because his eyes shifted to each of the auto-loaders and he began to push through the crowded orange suits as he went from turret to turret and loader to loader to double-check systems. "Move it, people. Get the hell out of the way."
Burn said, "What's going on, Chief?"
"Making sure none of your convicts screwed up my loaders."
Before he could ask if they were going to need the guns, Burn must have patched the junk's internal comms into the local channel because now, he could hear them and the crew in his helmet. "Gunners, clear your throats."
When the turrets' autocannon fired, they vibrated the atmo inside the gunnery module so the sound of it drowned out everything else even with a suit and helmet on. "All guns and loading systems green-lit and GTG."
"Don't worry," Burn told the orange suits, "These junks all have four, quad-barrel, 140mm autocannon turrets. Together, they can throw up a hell of a lot of fire."
The voice of Kiwi's pilot sounded calm enough. "Hardway has just advised us of another enemy incursion and some Squidies coming our way. All gunners stay sharp, all hands brace for ACM."
"What's that mean?" Jeana said. She didn't look like she liked the sound of that. In fact, she'd looked pretty green since the junk lifted off. She looked motion sick.
"What's ACM?" Burn laughed. "Really?" It was a hell of a question from a fighter pilot in training. "Aerial Combat Maneuvers," Burn said. "Grab something and hold on or when the pilot rolls this bird, it's going to roll around you." There were handholds on the bulkheads and ceiling, but not enough, so there wasn't much for anyone in the middle of the module to hold on to except each other. Burn said, "C-block, if you've got a handhold, then grab it, if you don't, then hold onto the guy that does."
He was stuck in the middle of the compartment with Marchett and Burn and Jeana. Cleeg called out on local comms when he saw the enemy from the starboard side porthole. "They're here!"
Kiwi's pilot said, "We have red bandits coming in hot at 1 o'clock high. 1 o'clock high. Chester and Bunco, go to echelon formation and follow Kiwi's lead. Turning to show 'em our good sides on my bingo in 3...2...1...Bingo." The pilot blasted the junk's nose up and rolled. Flashes of light shot through the portholes. A second later, the port, starboard, keel, and bow turrets all opened up and shook the gunnery compartment from four sides.
"Good screen! Good screen!" The gunners shouted on comms. The fire didn't pause for a full five seconds.
"They're changing vector!" He couldn't see anything or do anything from where he was but wait to get dusted and it was killing him.
"Nine high! Nine high!"
He shouted, "What the hell is happening out there?"
&n
bsp; Burn glanced at the portholes. Blossoming detonations and stars spun past. "They're trying to throw up a wall of range-det shells to keep the Squidies' fighters out past effective range – far enough away that we've got a chance to dodge their fire."
"Topside, look sharp!"
"Throw up the wall at 2 o'clock!"
"They're breaking!"
"Coming back around... rolling in from 4 o'clock low!"
"Roll and screen. Bingo. Bingo." The gunnery module rotated fast around him as the pilot delivered port and starboard thrust from the nacelles in roaring opposition. If he hadn't been holding on to Marchett and Burn then he'd have spun over all the way like Hortez.
Otto Hortez lost his grip on Cleeg and spun off-axis, smashing the side of his helmet against the loader for the port-side turret. Cleeg shouted, "Grab him!" Hortez had already gone limp.
The red bandits came from 3 o'clock. The junks' turrets made a wall of flame in the vacuum like Burn said – a solid cloud of range-detonating shells blooming and fading and blooming again so fast it made a sustained curtain of hyper-velocity flak.
There were gaps in the fiery screen. Through one, he saw an alien fighter bearing down on them. It was the same, deep red, spiked and pointed hulls that he saw over Bailey Prison, but he could see weird alien markings on the side that looked hand-painted. His eye fell into the single, wide-aperture muzzle of the alien fighter's single gun in the same tenth of a second that it reached out for them with a stabbing stream that slashed across the black and left a glowing scar on his retina.
Kiwi spun and inverted. and he lost sight of the red bandit, but a half second later, the gunnery module got slammed from the side with fire. The outer hull must have been ripped open somewhere because he heard pieces of it ricochet off the inner hull.
He was pretty sure the junks' wall-of-fire tactic wasn't worth a damn against the alien fighters and the pissed-off look on Burn's face seemed to confirm it until her eyes suddenly brightened. Whatever private channel she was on, Colt couldn't hear what she said next, but he read her lips. She said, "What the fuck took you so long?"
The gunners all cheered on Kiwi's internal comms. Flashes of blue exhaust from dozens of fast-moving craft streaked past on the starboard side just before everything to port got ripped with cannon fire. "It's Topper and Dig and a pack of sixty Dingoes," Burn said. She patched C-block into Lancer squadron comms. "Lancer 1-3, this is 1-2. It's nice of you to finally show up."
"Well, we couldn't let the Squidies dust all our shiny, new nuggets on their first day of school. And the Dingoes needed something to chew on."
Now that the junk's flight path had stabilized, Cleeg let go of Hortez and let him drift face down. Hortez came to just a couple of seconds later and started flailing his arms. The inside of his visor was all deep purple-red. All you could see was blood. He began screaming on local comms: "Aaaaaaaa...Oh, god! Oh god! There's blood everywhere. I'm gonna' die!"
Kiwi's crew chief was on him right away. He pushed Hortez up against the bulkhead, but the panic wouldn't stop. "Help me hold him down!"
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" Nobody knew why Hortez shouted that; he just did. "I'm sor-ry!"
"Shut the hell up!"
"Oh, god!" Hortez made noises like he was choking on blood, drowning in it. Cleeg and Biggs got hold of him. He couldn't see Hortez's face for all the blood on the inside of the visor. There was so much it made him think maybe a piece of the gunnery module's interior had been blown off in the attack and had hit Hortez like a piece of shrapnel or a bullet. The Chief said, "We still got pressure in here. Pop his top! Get his helmet off!"
They flipped the latches and lifted the helmet off his head. Globs of blood floated out like there was some serious trauma. His face was red and slick. The color came out his mouth in burbles. "I'm gonna die!" he shouted it like a fountain.
"Trauma kit!" the Chief pointed to a half-meter square box on the bulkhead, and the orange suits passed it forward. He grabbed Hortez's shaved head with both gloved hands and turned it left and right, up and down, looking at every part of it twice and running his hands over every millimeter. The man's entire head looked to be covered in blood, but there were no actual wounds. The Chief looked up and down Hortez's suit for holes. He couldn't find any. He stared into Hortez's white eyes and his red face for a good three seconds and then slapped him upside the head. "All you got is a broken nose." The Crew Chief mocked him in falsetto: "Oh, god! I'm hit! I'm sorry! I'm sor-ry!" That got a lot of laughs from C-block on local comms.
Burn said, "Gimme his helmet." As they passed Hortez's bloody helmet up to her, she took a wax marker from the pocket of her suit. She wrote 'GUSHER' on it in big white letters, right above the visor – just like where she'd stenciled 'BURN' on her own helmet. She handed the helmet back to Hortez with his new name. "Every pilot gets a name. You're Gusher."
*****
When Kiwi got close to destination, Colt made sure he got a good look out the porthole. The junks flew them to a ship keeping station a million Ks out in the moon's shadow, surrounded by a dense pack of Dingoes.
She was a 217-meter Staas Company ship fitted with new armor and at least one main gun battery that he could see. This wasn't one of the modular builds from the mining fleet. It looked like she'd been designed and built around her single, enormous bay. The armored doors opened as the junks approached and revealed over fifty F-151 exo-atmospheric fighters inside. The offset vertical cockpits had proportions like coffins.
As Kiwi's pilots made the final approach, Shafter's voice came over comms: "Welcome to SCS Arbitrage – current home of the Staas Company Privateers' 133rd Fighter Test Squadron, also known as the Lancers. That's you."
Chapter Five
Arbitrage wasn't what he expected a Staas Privateer would be. None of the crew wore any kind of rank or patches beyond a name on their suits. Their exosuits were all the same and all the visors on their helmets appeared opaque from the outside so nobody could see their faces. When you could see their faces, most of the crew didn't look you in they eye unless they had to. It wasn't like Arbitrage's crew were unfriendly, so much as they didn't want to interact with you if they didn't have to. He didn't know what this ship did before he got here and he got the feeling he wasn't supposed to.
The ship's first officer, Pool reminded him of Pilk from back at Bailey Prison. He put the 44 orange suits in the section at the very lowest point on the bow end. Nobody had any idea what that section had been before, but it looked like they'd just welded four dozen belt-iron shelves on the bulkheads in one big, damp compartment, thrown a thin mattress on each shelf and called them bunks. There weren't even pillows, just a little matchbox computer placed on each. They didn't have any network access and they only projected one thing in the air above them – an illustrated training manual without a ref# entitled, Manual of Exo-Atmospheric Aerial Combat Maneuvers.
"We'll get you all some clothes besides those prison-issue exosuits soon as we can," Pool told them. "You can draw new suit liners on deck B. Need anything else, then talk to Lt. Steinmetz, a.k.a. Burn. She's your den mother. You're her problem, not mine."
The head was one deck up. So was the mess where they got fed. None of them were allowed any higher up than the big launch bay. Gusher found that out the hard way when he went looking for medical attention. Armed Staas Security Guards gave him a first aid kit and escorted him back to the lower decks at gunpoint. That pissed him off. He said nobody on this ship trusted anyone in an orange suit because they were convicts.
"Yup." Marchett said. "You didn't get pardoned. You're doing your time somewhere else. And it beats the hell out of where we were."
"36 months," Gusher said.
That's what all of them were thinking. They were counting down – thinking about how they'd be free after just 36 months. If this was as dangerous as he thought it would be, then 36 months was a bloody eternity. He decided to keep that to himself for a few reasons, but mostly because the half-hour Shafter gave them to get squared
away was almost up and now, if the leader of Staas Company Privateers' 133rd Squadron hadn't been lying to them, then they were about to get issued their planes.
*****
The helmet they gave him and the rest of the 44 nuggets had six bug-eyes on it like big lenses, three on either side of the visor. Once it shook hands with his exosuit, he gestured through the menus and options switches on the display projected in his helmet visor. The bug-eyes were transducers, part of a multispectral imaging package. On his trip down the passageway and up one deck to the launch bay, they showed him the body heat signatures of the crewmen he passed.
In front of the C-block pilots and the 151s, Burn had a way of barking out her words that filled up space and made the bay seem crowded. "You are standing in front of Staas Company F-151 manned exo-atmospheric interceptors. Seven meters long. Max acceleration is almost 600ks/s/s. Six, 140mm cannon. Packed with big engines in the back, 140mm cannon on the front, and studded with 96 maneuvering thrusters on four, main blocks. Armored hull. Got a reactor like a bomb waiting to go off."
It looked just like a Dingo...a drone. The only difference he could see right away was the vertical cockpit mounted off center on the starboard bow on a long neck. He said, "It looks like a drone with a cockpit."
"It was a QF-111 Dingo unmanned drone. Now it's a manned fighter. Now, it's an F-151 Bitzer."
None of the cons from C-Block looked like they believed her. She said, "Look. This is the way it is. Maybe you don't know because of where you were, but we weren't ready when this war started. Pilots haven't been in the fighter cockpit in space for a hundred years. Not since the maneuvers required to keep you alive got violent enough that the inertial gees would turn you to spam in your suit. It's no secret we stole a better inertial negation system from the Squidies. That's what's in these fighters. That's the only reason we're able to put a pilot in the cockpit again. Developing a new, manned, exo-atmospheric fighter that could be mass-produced on short notice turned out to be too much to ask. It would have taken Staas Company more than a year. Nobody even wanted to talk about how Staas and the UN were going to train all the fighter pilots that would be needed in time to make a difference. So the Staas Company geniuses tasked with giving us a human-piloted fighter plane welded a cockpit section on the front of a QF-111 Dingo and gave us the F-151 Bitzer. Bitzer is Aussie slang for a mutt...bit of this...bit of that. Bitzer."
