by A. D. Bloom
"Why don't we get maps?"
It all disappeared with a wave of Shafter's hand. "Come in and shut the hatch."
He did, and after he turned to face Shafter, he put his hands behind his back, set his feet at shoulder width, and stared ahead of him like he thought he was supposed to. Shafter said, "What do you think you're doing?"
"Being at ease?"
"It's called 'standing at ease'," Shafter said. "You're a privateer. Stand normal." He tried to stand normally and ignore the fact that however he held himself now, it wasn't going to feel normal. Shafter's stare bored into the spot between his eyes. "You think you won some kind of victory today, Jordo? You come up here thinking I was going to pin a medal on you?"
"I did well today."
"I guess that's why you're looking so smug. Yeah, well, credit where it's due. I guess you are doing pretty well. Yeah, Project Jordo is coming along just great. Hero of the day. Finally got a name. Good for you. But the fact that you look so pleased with yourself makes me wonder if I was wrong about you. I thought you were the convict who was lookin' out for more than just his own ass. You look so happy now that you must not give much of a goddamn about how the rest of your squadron is flying like crap and how it's going to get them killed. You saw what happened in the OPFOR exercises before Squidy crashed the party. If our pilots fly like that, then they're going to die."
"Hey! You're the one who decided we could all be fighter pilots in less than a month. Why the hell are you telling me how bad we are?"
"Because, god help me, I'm putting you in charge, Jordo. I'm making you a flight leader. You're Lancer 2-1 now." Shafter shook his head and laughed a little like he couldn't believe he was doing this. "When Lancer Flight One isn't around.... if me and Burn and Dig and Topper aren't there, then you're in command. The 44 Lancer nuggets are your responsibility now."
It came out his mouth like a question. "Thank you?"
"Don't thank me. They're going to have to fly better than they did today if they're going to survive."
"We can only learn so fast. We need more time."
Shafter looked away. "No more time. They're out of time," he said. "Now is when we need you. Orders will be on your matchboxes before reveille at 0500."
"What? We're going in? We haven't even had four weeks of training! Not to mention the fact that 20% of this squadron might just pass out or puke or have a panic attack once the action starts."
Shafter just nodded at that. "This isn't my plan. I'm just in charge of executing it. For the record, I think it's ethically indefensible to send you people in now, and if it were up to me, it wouldn't happen. But. I don't get to pick and choose. I didn't choose to fly the 151 and I didn't choose this. A Staas Company VP and Privateer Admiral named Harry Cozen told us to get our recruits from Bailey Prison. He signed his name on this plan and if you ask me, he doesn't really much care if you make it or not. But the we do. The Lancers do. Me and Burn and Topper and Dig give a damn if you live or die. We want you to make it."
"We're supposed to make it, right? I mean, it's not a suicide mission you're sending us on..."
"I've seen the mission plan. It's not a suicide mission, but your survival is not required for victory."
The bottom fell out of Jordo's stomach. "Say that again?"
"Your survival is not required for victory. But you can survive," Shafter said.
"How? You and Burn and Topper and Dig. You had thousands of hours of flight time before you got in a Bitzer. We can't do what you do."
"C-Block didn't lose every OPFOR skirmish against superior planes because they can't fly. They lost because of who they are. They lost because of what's most important to them."
"Are you saying we can't be pilots?"
"No. I'm saying that fighter pilots have to react fast...faster than you can consciously think. They work on instinct and instinct comes from inside. It's part of who you are – what you want – what you fear – what's most important to you. Your pilots' instincts are telling them to watch out for their own asses first because that's who they are. They'll never survive like that."
"I'm helping out the weaker links where I can."
"You don't get it," Shafter said. "This isn't about helping them fly better. They fly just fine with the AIs handling the complicated stuff for them." He held his breath for a few seconds and then exhaled out his nose. "I put you in charge because they're already following your lead. But do you even know why they follow you? Do you? It isn't because they crave being under someone's authority. They hate authority. They don't follow you because you can fly or because you chose to be a leader. They follow you because you showed them they were better than they thought they were."
"What are y-"
"During the physical exam back at Bailey Prison... When the guards cranked up the gees on that pinch and tried to turn you all to spam? Remember? You helped those convicts save each others' lives."
He was stunned. "You knew about that? And you didn't stop it?"
"We saw the recordings after it happened. It wasn't supposed to be like that."
Jordo felt his nostrils flare. "Some of us died in there."
"It wasn't supposed to be like that," Shafter repeated.
"But it was." The anger was like a fire under his skin.
"And when it was like that, you could have walked out and saved yourself. When Snooze got your ass off the floor, you could have just walked out on the rest of C-block, but you didn't. You made a choice to be something better than what you were the day before. And you helped Holdout up and Dirty and Gusher. The rest of C-block make that choice, too. You helped them be something better than they thought they were. That's why they follow you. They don't follow you because you can fly, they follow you because you showed them they could be something better. And they want that. Think about it. Think about it hard when you think about how to lead them." Shafter reached in his breast pocket, pulled out a small box, and gave it to him. "Don't look at me like that, nugget. I'm not proposing to your sorry ass. Open it." Inside the box were silver bars, 7cm long, meant to be worn on his exosuit collar. "You're an officer now. You're Lieutenant Junior Grade J. 'Jordo' Colt of the Staas Company Privateers' 133rd Fighter Test Squadron. Congratulations. Don't screw up."
*****
While the rest of them slept, he told Snooze what Shafter had said to him and how he was afraid they were all being sent to die. It was highly likely, he said, they'd all bought into a steaming load of bull dunk of record-setting stink.
"Yeah," Snooze said. "That's kinda the way I saw it going down. I think we're getting served up. Maybe a decoy squadron or something. They've been feeding us bunk from day one, but..."
"But what?"
Snooze half-laughed. "It's not like they ever fooled me, boyo. I mean, I knew it was bullshit... I still took the deal." Jordo nodded because he thought he understood why, but he didn't. Snooze said, "You're nodding like you get it – like you get how I'm sick already. I'm dead anyway in a year or so and you're thinking that's why I took this deal. But that's not why. Some asshole Psych is gonna say that I think I can get out of what's coming and that's why I'm doing this, but it's not. It's not like that... It's..." Snooze actually grinned when he figured out what he was trying to say. "I just don't want to be who I was anymore. And I don't have to be. Shafter offered us a chance to be something else. Yeah, they're sending us out...not just to maybe die, but probably. And yeah, I knew it was coming. They never fooled me, boyo, not for a minute. But...don't say they tricked me."
"You could have told me we were signing up for some suicide shit."
Snooze looked as if he thought there was something funny about this. "You knew, Jordo. You're the one who should have warned everyone else. You're the damn pilot – you could see through this bunk better than any of us. You knew they couldn't possibly train us up for combat in four weeks – not even with some dingo-dango artificial intelligence doing half the flying. You knew it was all bullshit and you still came along. Nobody tricked me. Nobody tricked yo
u either, dumbass. So don't act like a victim," Snooze said. "You're no victim. You're a volunteer."
*****
They pushed the orders to everyone's matchbox computers before reveille. He was still awake when they came in. The Lancers had been transferred to the Hardway Air Group. Forty-eight Bitzers and a pack of Arbitrage's drones would rendezvous with the privateer attack carrier SCS Hardway at 0930.
Even inside Bailey Prison they'd heard plenty about the carrier Hardway. If that was the ship the Lancers were flying off, then there was no question about it – they were going right into battle.
Chapter Nine
The redsuits he'd taken down like bowling pins when he'd flown into the airlock stood against the bulkhead of the landing bay and flipped him off as the unidentified voice of Arbitrage's bridge wished them 'good hunting'. He'd heard that woman's voice on the air traffic control channel for weeks and she'd never once said her name.
Arbitrage's drones tore ass out of the bay and ran in circles around the ship, chasing Burn. He saw them rip across the starry black framed in the bay doors just before all the Lancers launched together with Major Eugene Shaffer in the lead. Shafter turned the flight on vector, and the Lancers followed.
"Keep it in restricted mode," Burn told them. "Hands off the big red buttons until we're in combat."
"Still got mostly cherries here," Shafter said. "They deserve a taste."
"Whatever you say, Lancer 1-1. You are Honcho. Nuggets, you heard the man. Punch the buttons and try to keep up."
Once they enabled the pulsing inertial negation systems, half of the 133rd blasted off screaming with the thrill or fright of feeling their Bitzer's unrestricted acceleration for the very first time. The others screamed from the way the new inertial negation system vibrated every cell in their bodies with what felt like rapid gravitational flux. Jordo whooped as they all followed Shafter's lead and spiraled around the Dingo pack on their way to the rendezvous with Hardway. If they were on their way to die, at least Shafter made it fun.
Near one of the Lagrange points of Mars' second moon, Jordo's knot puckered when his fighter's LiDAR picked out two flights of what had to be a hundred bogies apiece. "What the hell?"
"We're cooked," Cleeg said over local comms.
Jordo's helmet drew a reticule around a set of warning beacons, buoys around the area. The message they broadcast flashed in his visor and tinted the region of space in front of them with red and white stripes: "Navigation Hazard. Do not enter."
Burn came over squadron comms: "Just in case there's a few nervous nuggets out there, you should know those aren't enemy contacts. That's the debris clouds from the Battle of Deimos Lagrange you're reading on passive LiDAR. That's the wreckage of Khan and Hannibal. They drifted into the L-4 Lagrange point and now the debris cloud follows Deimos around Mars – probably will for a while."
Even in prison, he'd seen that battle happen from the view of camera drones and radar telescopes. They'd all watched Humanity lose that encounter. The Squidies' 800-meter dreadnought burned Hannibal from the inside and sliced Khan's hull and her bulkheads until there wasn't a piece left over 5-meters. The ships that met it had been the UNS flagships. They had the thickest armor and the biggest guns. And they didn't put a single hole in the alien dreadnought's armor.
At the recently savaged, but quickly rebuilding Staas Company Yards at Deimos, they sighted SCS Hardway and two other carriers – Pont Neuf and Araby. As the Lancers and their pack of Dingoes closed on Hardway, Jordo's helmet highlighted the 50-meter junks on patrol around her. At least six flights protected the carrier.
"Hardway CAP, Hardway CAP. This is Lancer 1-1. The 133rd are approaching off the carrier's bow."
"Roger, Lancer 1-1, this is Flight 3 and Kiwi. My, my, my... Will you look at all those flyin' nuggets? Seems like just yesterday we sprung all y'all from prison. Welcome to the party, Lancers. You are cleared to approach the barn. Contact Hardway AT for bay assignments."
Jordo knew she was big, but when he realized the specks he saw in one of her 70-meter bays were QF-111 Dingoes like theirs, the real scale of the carrier fell into place. It was five times Arbitrage's length.
Shafter took them on a flyby. Hardway was 950-meters long and mounted on her spine in discrete sections were railgun batteries on the bow, twin launch bay modules (48 bays), and another battery of railguns set between them that looked like they belonged on a battleship. Light poured out from a hundred portholes in what looked like habitat modules.
The command tower and its antenna spires rose a couple hundred meters above and below the spine. At the top he saw the light from the larger windows that looked down on every part of the ship. He zoomed in with his flight helmet. A figure...a dark-haired woman standing there pointed at the squadron as it flew past. That was the bridge.
"Lancer 1-1, this is Hardway Air Group Commander, Asa Biko. The 133rd are now officially under my command. You and your pack of QF-111s are cleared to land in forward bays 33-39, starboard side. Doors opening now."
Some of the open bays they passed contained 50-meter mining junks, but the bays where Biko sent the Lancers had been launching QF-111 Dingoes. There weren't any drones actually in there at the time, but he recognized the maintenance gear from Arbitrage. It was the same gear they used on the F-151s.
A crew of Hardway's redsuits watched his flight land. They all leaned against the bulkheads with their matchbox computers projecting one part of the Bitzer or another in the air in front of them.
The first one to approach seemed friendly enough. "I'm Raleigh," he said. First thing he did after Jordo climbed down the ladder from the cockpit was ask if he could climb up and take a look inside.
"Sure." What else was he going to say?
The redsuit was up the ladder on the starboard side in half a second and he seemed to know where the release latches were. "We just got cleared for the manuals on these 151s twenty minutes before you arrived," he said. Jordo felt pretty possessive, but these guys were going to be crawling all over his plane as soon as he turned his back and he was going to be trusting them with his life, so he tried hard not to say anything stupid like, 'don't break anything'.
Snooze shouted up to the redsuit in Jordo's cockpit, "Hey, don't break anything up there!" He didn't stick his head out, just his gloved hand with finger extended.
Jordo said, "You guys never seen one of these before?"
"Nope," another one said. Suddenly, they were everywhere around his plane...touching it. "Nobody's seen these up close. We've been lookin' forward to this."
The maintenance crews had themselves a party while Jordo and the pilots went through the airlocks. In the passageway he found about half the Lancers' pilots. The other half were one deck down, outside the bays where they'd landed, he figured. He'd just got his helmet off and taken his first whiff of Hardway's metallic tasting air when he heard a shrill tone like a whistle that rose and then fell. It came out of his helmet and also from a low-tech transducer set in a box, mounted high up the bulkhead. "That's the squack," a redsuit told him.
"The what?"
The crewman pointed at the box. "That's the ship-wide comms if you ain't wearing any. If we got atmo." It had wires coming off it leading to the next one down the passageway. Technologically speaking that was only one step above shouting down a tube.
"Now hear this. Now hear this. All Lancer squadron flight personnel, report to forward bay 40. All Lancers, 133rd to bay four-zero, bay four-zero. That is all."
Arbitrage hadn't been that fancy, but Jordo and the rest of them quickly realized it had been a luxury liner compared to Hardway. On Hardway the bulkheads were made of the same belt-iron steel they'd mined from the local asteroids.
It rained in bay 40. It was condensate from the bay doors, above, pulled down by the ship's artificial gees. The bulkheads were stained black. That bay smelled like sour milk like the hardy, Martian molds they had in some places back on the moon.
When all the Lancers were in Bay 40, three Hardwa
y officers standing near the side of the bay climbed up on a maintenance lift that put them a couple of meters above the crowd. Only Shafter followed them up there. Burn went and stood with the pilots.
"I'm Asa Biko. I'm Commander of the Hardway Air Group." He was big – the kind of guy who probably preferred Hardway's low gees to full, Earth gees. "The Staas Company Privateers' 133rd Fighter Test Squadron is now assigned to Hardway. Shafter reports to me. I report to Admiral Harry Cozen who captains this ship. I'm going to be one of the voices of Hardway Control you hear in your helmet giving you orders. If you don't follow them, don't bother to land. Just park your fighter outside and vent your suit. It'll save the XO the trouble of shooting you."
The next man who spoke wore a standard, Staas Company blue exosuit that was singed all over like he'd been on fire. "I'm Commander Ram Devlin, Hardway's executive officer. I'm in charge of too many things to count. One of them is discipline. I'm too busy to deal with you, so resolution of discipline issues will be swift. Sir and Ma’am are not required on a privateer ship. And it's a common misconception that I shoot people. I'm an officer. That means I'll order someone else to shoot you." The pilots laughed at that, but he wasn't joking.
The last of the three Hardway bridge officers to speak didn't have any rank insignia. He didn't need it. Anyone could guess who he was. He had gray hair and eyes Jordo was afraid to look at too hard. The sound of his voice was like stone grinding stone. "I'm Harry Cozen. I know four of the Lancers here are veterans. The rest of you, the ones still wearing orange, prison-issue exosuits, are new pilots. I'm the old man who threw his weight around and sprung you from Bailey. Now, you're going to fly for me. It's important that you know this fact and never forget it: On this ship, in this war, our successes and our failures will define the course of human history. If we lose this war, then that history may very well come to an end. When this war demands sacrifices, remember that the price of victory is always paid in blood. Sometimes it's ours, sometimes it's theirs, but the price is always blood."
