by A. D. Bloom
"Get that pilot down the tube, now!" AGC Biko shouted.
"And gag him if he doesn't shut up. Put him in locker 12," the XO said. "I'll handle him when we're out of this."
Harry Cozen said, "Belay that order."
"What?"
Cozen stood up from his command chair. "Thank you, Mr. Devlin...AGC Biko, I know he's your pilot, but it's me Lt. Colt needs to talk to. Let him go," Cozen said. "He's coming with me."
*****
Before the battle, Jordo had asked the redsuits about Harry Cozen. Staas Company only had 25 VPs, they said. Cozen was one of them. He built the company's military contracting wing. They had guesses about what he did between the last war and this one, but only guesses. If you were important and nobody could say what you did, that spoke volumes in itself.
Whomever Harry Cozen was, he'd been part of the war from day one. He took the command chair the day it all started, they said – showed up just before the Squidies did. The redsuits said he knew about the aliens before anyone else. They said a lot of things. They all suspected Cozen of something and at the same time, they didn't question him.
The man's office was as spartan as the rest of the ship. The desk was bolted to the deck. Jordo's feet felt bolted down, too as he stood in front of it and watched Cozen pour liquor into glasses. He held one out for Jordo to take. "Drink it." When Jordo didn't move, he pushed the glass into Jordo's chest so the scotch (he could smell it now) splashed and Jordo had to take it because Cozen began to let go of the glass.
He looked down and saw the spilled liquor dissolving the lunar grime on his exosuit. He wiped at it and made a clean, bright orange streak across his own chest.
"Hardway captured a red bandit intact once," Cozen said. "This is months back when we still thought they were drones. We captured one intact and we did a teardown to secure the reactor. We found a pilot inside."
"That's where you got the new inertial negation system – the pinch that lets us fly the Bitzers without getting turned to spam. You made your own version."
"It's a kind of pulse-pinch," Cozen said.
A shiver crawled up Jordo's spine like the feeling he got after hitting the big red button in the 151, that feeling of vibrating and rising and falling ten-thousand times a second. He'd heard of a pulse-pinch before. Stories of scrambled brains and one-way trips on planes the border drones could never catch. "We made our own version of their pulse-pinch," Cozen said. "But it's not as good as theirs." What Cozen said next he didn't have to explain. "36 months. It's how long our tests show you'll last in that fighter before the gravity flux from the inertial negation system turns your brains to mush. You must have felt the weird sensation it produces when it's fighting the gees."
"You're killing us," Jordo said.
"If you quit at 36 months of exposure, then you'll barely notice the loss of cognitive acuity."
"Next, I bet you're going to tell me we all get to retire to a tropical, Alaskan island with topless girls and palm trees."
"This is how the Squidies do it, Jordo. This is how the enemy is beating us. Their planes kill their pilots, too. We've got to be just as committed to have any hope of winning. And we'll need more of their technology and their materials. Their fighters' inertial negation systems, for example, are built using a previously unknown element we've tracked to a mining operation on the fourth moon of this planet."
"That's where Flight One and Hobo were headed."
"The unknown element we pulled from the aliens' pinch is half the reason they get more artificial gees and more speed and more maneuverability than we do. This is where they mine it. That's what we came here for, Jordo. That's what you Lancers died for."
"If we had this element... Can we use it to make better inertial negation systems that won't kill our pilots?"
"Maybe. That's why I pulled 44 convicts of of Bailey and called them pilots. We needed you to fly this mission. And we needed to see how fast we could train a complete novice to fly an AI-assisted F-151 in combat. You weren't supposed to get slaughtered this badly, but you didn't learn to fly as fast as we'd all hoped. And I sent you in anyway. Now, I'm cutting our losses. You're not going in after Lancer Flight One and Hobo because your pilots can't wax those bandits. We're pulling out."
Jordo said it like Shafter would say it. "I know how to give us the edge we need."
"What?"
"I know how to beat them."
"I very much doubt that, Jordo."
"Listen to me, Mr. Cozen. Throw me in the brig for insubordination or whatever it is you call it, but you're going to hear me out because you owe me that. You owe us that."
Jordo told Harry Cozen his plan and before he was done, Cozen stopped him. He took the pilot one deck up the aft tube to the bridge and made him repeat it to his officers. An hour later, they sent him to brief the Lancers. Jordo said it needed to be him that told them.
*****
The Lancers lay on the tables in the midships' mess partly because they didn't have anywhere else to go. Ram Devlin, the XO, hadn't got around to assigning them quarters. Jordo thought he was probably waiting to see how many Lancers remained alive at the end of the day before he stared handing out bunks.
Jordo wasn't surprised to see the rest of Hardway's personnel avoiding the midships' mess. The whole compartment stank of defeat.
The Lancers all looked up as he came in and Jordo didn't wait to tell them. He knew they wouldn't want to hear it, but it was the only way. "Get your flight helmets. We're going back out there."
"What?"
"Our 151s are being re-armed right now," Jordo said.
"Screw that."
"It's an order, Cleeg. They'll shoot you if you don't go."
"Then they can shoot me! I'm not going back out there to die. Don't you see how this all worked out? They suckered us into this suicide mission shite by making us believe we were real pilots and we had a real chance of surviving. Instead, only half of us died and Shafter and Burn and all them got killed. That's karma."
"Balls to your karma," Jordo said. "This is what we signed on for."
Cleeg groaned. "They tell you that up on the bridge, you dolt? You still think there's a possibility we'll actually survive this? C'mon, convict. How much of a sucker are you? '36 months and you're out'. Bullshit. Training in just three weeks? You stupid hard-on. Nobody runs a flight school like that, Jordo. And that's another thing: you're not Jordo, you idiot, you're J. Dolt, serving five to seven for being a gullible ass. You're the same, stupid convict you were before. All of you are." Cleeg pointed at each of them. "You're not Gusher and you're not Poppy. Your name ain't Hooch and Holdout ain't a freakin' fighter pilot. She's a twitchy, ex-stim whore named Jeana who can't read so great. We were never real pilots and they never meant to make us into none. They didn't even bother to finish our training. What happened today was what was supposed to happen all along – we got creamed." Cleeg said, "We go out and it's gonna happen again. We go out there, and we're gonna get served up on some platter for the Squidies and this time, they'll smoke all of us and none of us are getting out of it alive."
Cleeg was probably right. They'd probably die. Jordo knew he had no right to do what he'd done and get them sent in again, but it was the only way. It was the only way that it wouldn't all be in vain. Live or die, it was the only way they'd be anything but a bunch of stupid convicts who got suckered into thinking they were heroes.
His head whipped left because in the corner of his eye he thought he saw Snooze there, to port, as if he'd only been momentarily lost and now he was back. Jordo said, "I'm not stupid and neither are you. I say we knew what we were getting into." They were Snooze's words and Jordo gave them to Cleeg and to the Lancers. "We all knew what this was." Their eyes stared, open wide like they were all looking into the darkness. "We made this choice," he said, "but not because they bamboozled us – not because they promised us freedom or even because they landed in front of C-block and sold us all the bullshit – all the pilot bullshit, the nicknames a
nd the flash. No. Screw that. We didn't do it because they fooled us. We did this because this is who we wanted to be. I say you knew this shit was coming, Cleeg. Just like I did. So did you, Holdout. And Poppy and Spit. Snooze knew what was up. I say we all saw through the bullshit like he did and signed on anyway. I didn't get suckered into doing this. I'm the numbskull who decided to do it. I'm Jordo and I'm gonna be Jordo for as long as it lasts. Cleeg, you can stay here and let the Staas Guards shoot you if you want, but you volunteered for this shit no matter what you think. Shafter and Burn and Topper and Dig are out there. I'm gonna go and get 'em. I'm gonna go out there now and I'm gonna last a lot longer with a wingman. Snooze is dead, so, Cleeg, you piss-ass, it'd be real helpful if you quit your bitchin' and got up and helped me."
It was up to Cleeg to decide who he was. It was up to all of them. John Cleeg shook his head like he was saying no, but he stood up with his helmet. "I'll go. But you owe me something."
"What the hell do I o-"
"A name."
"A what?"
Cleeg said, "I never got a nickname like 'Jordo' or 'Poppy' or even a shite one like 'Gusher'."
Gusher said, "What's wrong with my name?"
"Everybody else in the whole squadron got one but me. It's not right. Real pilots get names. I want mine," Cleeg said, "and I'm not goin' back out there without one." He put the flight helmet down on a table and crossed his arms.
"Alright..." Jordo pulled the wax marker out from the sleeve pocket of his exosuit. "Gimme that." He took the flight helmet from Cleeg's hands. The reason Cleeg never got a name is because nobody wanted to say 'Asshole' all the time over comms. Jordo said, "You're gonna get a name you like, Cleeg. It's gonna be a hero name. But the deal is, you gotta live it. Until you die. That's the deal."
Cleeg swallowed and nodded. Above the visor Jordo wrote 'Paladin'.
Chapter Twelve
Through the multispectral display in his flight helmet, the planet looked angrier now. The shafts of radiant heat breaking through the clouds from the planet's high-pressure core stabbed at its moons and the ships in high orbit.
From his fighter, waiting outside the carrier, Jordo saw three figures in the junk's cockpit below him. Two of them had the heat signatures you'd expect from a living human in an exosuit. The third looked slightly different, but Jordo had to look closely at the lack of variation across the false color image of the figure being strapped into the pilot's seat in order to discern that the suit was actually empty. There was no pilot inside. It was just a pressurized exosuit with the heater turned on.
There would be no pilot inside the junk Marquis when she flew. Dana Sellis said the boat would aviate and navigate by a simple script running on the flight computer. It would fly towards the 4th moon and achieve orbit, deaf dumb and blind to everything around it. All it had to do was fly at the fourth moon along with the Dingoes and make this look like a real attempt to land.
Hardway came over the North Polar Region of the planet with all her junks flying. The torpedo bombers made a cone out in front of the carrier like the point of a spear and the gunnery junks deployed to defend them. It was the formation the Squidies would expect. The carrier and its junks steamed straight at the Squidies' cruisers on the other side of the gas giant.
Over the limb of the planet and through the shafts, the alien ships rose. There were five of them now. The Squidies had reinforced with a pair of ships not quite the size of the two cruisers, but they had the same towers and on top of them were even bigger main guns.
Jordo and Paladin and the rest of the Lancers flew with the QF-111 drones. They hid among the Dingoes, at the back of the pack. Only Lancer 2-1 and 2-2, Jordo and Paladin, rode at the front, leading the drones in. F-151s were really just Dingoes with cockpits so if the Squidies didn't look too closely, then it might work. The pack Jordo and Paladin led at the fourth moon was supposed to look like 2 Lancers and 75 Dingoes.
After catching the first junk and the fighters trying to get to the fourth moon, the Squidies had guessed why Hardway was here and they wouldn't leave that moon unguarded, but just as Ram Devlin and Asa Biko had predicted, once the Squidies saw the Dingoes and the junk making for the fourth moon, they pressed their superiority again.
"Hardway AT to Lancer 2-1, you have the reins, 2-1. Make your move."
"Lancer 2-1 to Hardway AT." Jordo's voice cracked. "Roger." He thumbed into squadron comms. "You all know how to do this. Hold with the Dingoes until I give the signal. If you break away before it's time...if you loose your nerve, it won't just be you that's screwed."
"This was a shite idea," Paladin said.
"And you're still here. I guess your dumb ass got the right name. Alright, Lancers," Jordo said. "You're going comms dark because you're Dingoes and Dingoes don't talk. Thrusters on my mark. And... mark." He blasted forward with Paladin on his eight o'clock and the eager Dingo pack concealing the Lancers on his six.
The decoy junk without a pilot was already on its way, and he adjusted his course so the Dingoes would more closely escort it on its scripted flight. Two minutes later, as the flashes from Hardway's battle with the cruisers lit up the starry blackness far off to port, the cloud of alien fighters rose over the cratered 4th moon.
The red bandits came barreling in bold and fast over the polar cap. They came in flights of three like before and already they were forming up into what Jordo now recognized as an intermediary stage between their regular flying formation and the one they'd used to massacre the drones a couple of hours ago – the one like a saw-blade.
The Squidies' formation strung out into a line of three-plane elements, and then, like before, the front-most elements dove at the Dingoes. Jordo and Paladin were still out front and he could see the bandits lining up behind the ones diving at him. They were all preparing to attack, one after the other. It was like looking up into a serial firing squad that planned to shoot them one bunch at a time.
They'd be inside effective range any second. Jordo thumbed comms to Paladin, "Lancer 2-2, hit the brakes." He and Paladin tapped reverse thrusters so they slowed. This close to the enemy, the Dingoes didn't slow with Jordo and Paladin. Dingo after Dingo shot past their Bitzers and tore across the black to sink their teeth in the Squidies.
"Time to go." Jordo and Paladin turned and bugged out, making it appear as if they were letting the drones fight the red bandits without them. Moments after they blasted away, the carnage began.
The aliens' lead element tore across the front edge of the Dingo pack and ran them through. The particle beams shot out the backs of three drones' hulls. It was happening just like before. This was how the Squidy aces had chewed the hell out of the drones the last time.
The red bandits' spinning saw-blade formation cut halfway through the Dingo pack in just seconds. In a few seconds more, the rolling front of destruction would reach the F-151s and the Lancers hiding in the rear. When Jordo saw the first alien fighters to strike at the drones had flown all the way back to the top of the formation and the Squidies were now fully locked in their a spinning saw-blade formation, he called: "Geronimo, Geronimo. Break! Break! Break!"
Comms filled with war-cries as the Lancers dropped out the bottom of the Dingo pack. The Squidy pilots never saw the Lancers until the 133rd were inside the aliens' formation.
Jordo and Paladin and the Lancers launched a mass of fire so thick and wide that by the time the enemy saw it coming, it was too late. Three of the bandits shuddered and spun, hammered hard by the Lancers' shells. They cooked off in quick flashes that warned the rest of the alien squadron, but the Lancers were already inside the Squidies' circle. Jordo pulled his nose up to follow its curve. Just beyond the enemy fighter in his targeting reticule was another enemy fighter and beyond that one was another. All around the circle, they were all lined up for the kill.
The Lancers raked fire across three Squidies and three more after that. Jordo thought they had to be stunned because only at this point did the alien pilots show any response to what was ha
ppening. The bandits closest to the remaining two-dozen Dingo 111s tried to spin on their jets and blast out to the side to engage the Bitzers instead, but the Dingoes followed them, autocannon blazing. It kept the Squidies from putting their streams on the Lancers for a few more seconds.
Three more alien fighters turned into flashes of hot gas and debris before the bandits could break and reform. Now, Jordo liked the odds better: 12 red bandits vs. 19 Lancers and almost two dozen drones. The Lancers had the advantage. "Follow me in, Paladin."
"I'm on your 4 o'clock, a half-second back," he said.
Jordo threw fire at three bandits he saw coming around the outside of the furball trying to get on the tails of Lancer Flight Five. Two of the aliens broke away to port and the other shot off to starboard. A three-bandit-element dusted Monty and Pick before six drones closed on the alien flight leader together and wiped him from the sky. The other two Squidies dodged fire from Holdout and Dirty, rolled, and then rotated on their jets to face Jordo and Paladin. Lancers 2-1 and 2-2 spun on their jets and spat tongues of fire from 12 cannon. Their shells ripped down the waving alien streams that groped for them.
Jordo fired and screamed and fired until an alien particle stream stabbed its way through his canopy. The kinetic force of the nuclei hitting it shattered the diamond-pane and punched a hole through the back of the cockpit. His visor darkened, but not before he saw his enemy cook off under a hail of fire. In that microsecond of blindness, Jordo cried out, "Dusted!" Then, in almost the same moment, it felt like Hardway had smacked into his port-side. The battle spun around him in all directions, but he never saw the bandit that ran his fighter through from starboard to port, right through the reactor.
The shaking and buzzing in every cell was suddenly gone. The inertial negation system had failed along with the reactor. Unprotected from the effects of inertia and the g-forces produced by his fighter's high-speed maneuvers, Jordo's hands and feet lost the sticks and pedals as he got thrown wildly about the cockpit. All he could see was streams and tracers flying crossways and reactor flashes and all of it spun past in a streaking blur. His 151 was wildly out of control. Then, it blasted the main thrusters and threw Jordo back into the flight couch, fully paralyzing him with g-forces. If it had accelerated any harder without inertial negation, it would have turned him to spam.
