by A. D. Bloom
He couldn't reach the controls, so Jordo tried to get control of the fighter through the neural interface in his helmet, but the artificial intelligence wouldn't accept his control anymore. It wouldn't listen to him. It only had one thought it repeated over and over and flashed in his visor: 'Eject! Eject! Eject.'
Jordo eyeballed the latches that would open the cockpit manually, but he couldn't move a millimeter. A half-second later, a bomb went off behind him. The entire coffin-shaped, vertical cockpit blew off the front of his Bitzer. The shock of the ejection charges hit his back and spine like a wall and he thought it had killed him. He came back from the dim a second later, tumbling through the furball in his severed cockpit. This time, when the black vacuum washed out white and his flight helmet's visor darkened to protect his eyes, he knew it was his own plane's reactor that had cooked off.
Jordo fell towards the planet, spinning across the furball in a coffin while they shouted on comms. "Somebody get them off me!"
"Lancer 5-1, jink, jink!"
"I am jinking!"
"Lancer 4-2, go port. No! Port!"
Jordo saw Dip's 151 get pinned by a particle stream like it was a mounted butterfly. Lancer 4-2's engines got blown off, and the remains of the fighter spun dead in space. Jordo got a look into the half-shattered cockpit. Sammy, the pilot inside, was misshapen and bent wrong.
The single bandit that waxed 4-2 shot past him and then veered hard to pick up Holdout. Gusher shouted, "3-1, Squidy on your 5 o'clock!" Gusher turned on his jets and pointed his cannon towards the Squidy ace. Then, Jordo's cockpit spun, and he couldn't see them through the back of the coffin.
He knew he'd be safer from shrapnel and radiation in the coffin, but as he saw one Lancer after another flash and wink out, spent, lost and dusted forever, the helplessness drove him to find the pair of manual latches that opened the cockpit. He pushed off from the box and floated free, naked in his prison-issue exosuit with shells and streams ripping past and fighters flying all around him.
Jordo tried to discern who was winning. There were fewer bandits now and a lot fewer Lancers. The drones were almost gone. Only a single flight of six remained. It was almost a fair fight now and that was the last thing Jordo wanted to see.
"Lancer 2-2...Paladin! Break! Break! Get out of it!"
"I gotta cover stupid Gush!"
Paladin was still alive. Jordo's helmet picked him out of the battle, rotating on his jets like an asshole, drift-firing and begging to get smeared. His cannons lit up one whole side of a Squidy fighter with splashing metal. The bandit spun out of control down towards the moon before it turned and pulled out and came straight at Jordo. It flew up at him from between his boots. The malevolent stream of nuclei it fired waved past his body only a meter away like a train.
Jordo scrambled and tried to swim in space. He tried to get out of the way as the next shot waved past his helmet, but he was helpless to do anything but flail and scream. His mouth opened so wide he thought the Squidy pilot and his fighter would fly right down it. Jordo counted his last heartbeats.
Beautiful, earth-made, 140mm sabot and high-explosive rounds ripped in from the side and slammed the Squidy's hull sending it spinning. It cooked off a few seconds later and after the flash, the pair of Bitzers that got the kill ripped past Jordo and hooked back hard. He saw the designations painted on their maneuvering jets and hull. His helmet read the transponders and labeled them, but he still didn't believe his eyes.
Lancer 1-2 and Lancer 1-4, Burn and Dig, dusted another alien pilot and chandelled back around. Burn's voice spoke in Jordo's ear as calm as if she'd run into him at the beach. "Lancer 1-2 to Lancer 2-1, you don't mind if we get some do you?" She and Dig got two more before the last three Squidy aces turned tail and ran. "That's right, Squidy," Burn said. "Get the hell outta' my sky."
For the next 15 seconds, squadron comms was useless for anything but victory cries. "Lancer 2-1 to Hardway AT. Red bandits are fleeing. Repeat: the enemy is fleeing. The Lancers own the 4th moon now."
"Hardway AT to Lancer 2-1. Roger your last. And welcome back, 1-2 and 1-4. All Lancers standby for new AT vectors."
Jordo swung his arms to spin himself a half a turn so he could look back to Hardway and the Squidies' cruisers. The two largest burned from the inside, jetting fire out massive holes. They spun down slowly towards the gas giant. The two light cruisers and the carrier remained. Hardway steamed right at them. They fired on her with particle beams and tore into her landing bay modules. They ripped her armor apart and left jagged molten wounds in the command tower and the hab sections. Suddenly he saw all the holes from close-detonating nukes. Hardway was singed, burned and blasted, but she was fully combat effective.
When she passed between the Squidy cruisers and the carrier, the forward railgun batteries opened up first. The first impacts splashed armor and hull off the aliens, and when the midships railgun batteries fired into the same spots, they hulled the Squidies right through, sending molten metal spewing into space out the exit wounds.
Hardway's junks launched torpedo salvos practically point blank and filled the aliens' light carrier with firestorms until she burned on her own.
The last Squidy cruiser managed to reach out around the slow-falling corpse of its brother and stab at Hardway's tower one last time with its main guns before the railgun batteries hulled it. When the midships gunners hit it near the engines, it fell away on its side and leaned towards the planet. Jordo's helmet showed him how the reactor spiked in beautiful starbursts of gammas before it cooked off.
"Hardway AT to Lancer 2-1, you will hold the 4th moon until relieved. ETA for additional enemy reinforcements is three hours. We're sending gunnery junks and our geologist to you ASAP."
"Roger, Hardway."
Jordo felt the 7-meter fighter creeping up behind him somehow and spun to see Paladin's grinning mug in the cockpit. Paladin said, "You gonna just float there?"
"Can't do much else."
"You sure about that?" Burn appeared to Jordo's 3 o'clock. Her fighter shot past behind him as she spun on her jets and came to a full stop less than five meters away, on the far side. Then she rotated slowly so she was pointed right at him. Looking down the cannon barrels was unnerving, but Jordo knew what she was doing. She tapped the thrusters lightly and drifted forward into him.
Jordo and his orange exosuit bounced off the canopy of Burn's 151 until he managed to wedge himself between the starboard three cannon and the cockpit itself with his back against the armored hull. She said, "You got it? You secure?"
"Yeah. I'm secure." He tried to hold his face like he had a pair as she flew him slowly through the planet's stabbing shafts towards the pilotless junk now orbiting high over the 4th moon. "I don't know how to fly a junk," he said.
On the other side of the cockpit, Burn shrugged. "You're worried about that? How hard can it be?"
He didn't want to ask, but he had to. "Shafter and Topper?"
She shook her head. "The junk we were escorting survived. It's still hiding on the surface. Me and Dig only got away from the bandits because Shafter and Topper picked up the check."
"We lost at least 30," Jordo told her.
He expected her to say something to that. He didn't know what. After double-checking her intercept vector, she said, "The trick to flying a junk is to imagine you're flying a ten-story slumscraper. Just remem-"
"Burn..."
"I heard you," she said. "Thirty. This wasn't my idea, Jordo. Or Shafter's. It wasn't us who planned this fight."
"I know."
"It wasn't us who won it either," she said. "This victory here at 211-Lovis is yours, Jordo. It's C-Block's victory."
He wished that were true, but they weren't the only ones that had fought and died. Nobody had bled more than them, but one look at Hardway burning over the gas giant and he knew it wasn't just the Lancers who'd won the day. They'd all paid for this victory like Harry Cozen said – with blood – the Squidies' and their own.
Epilogue
After Hardway returned to Sagan for repairs, Harry Cozen sent Jordo recruiting with Burn. He thought they'd be going to prisons to find pilots like she and Shafter had, but they didn't have to. There were plenty of free volunteers.
Today, he and Burn had flown acrobatics over a lunar dome-town and drawn a crowd before they landed their Bitzers. Those people had jobs and a union too and Jordo didn't think they'd bite on Burn's screw-job offer to be a fighter pilot. He thought they'd run from him and Burn as fast as they could, but they didn't.
Burn even told them everything up front. She stood up on a loader and told them about what the classified parts of the 151 would do to their brains and why nobody flew more than 36 months of combat. She told them about how being trained in three months would make them cheaper than their planes and as expendable as any infantryman that ever stormed a beach.
Jordo had heard about how recruiters always lie. And they do. But Jordo didn't think people signed up with the Privateers or the regulars because they believed all those stupid lies. Not anymore. Maybe once he thought that, but after going through it himself and seeing what he saw in the dome-towns where they went, he became convinced that no matter what lies recruiters tell, nobody really gets fooled, not entirely. Deep down, nobody buys the BS. That whole bunk fantasy they sell...none of the recruits believe it. It just makes it easier to sign your name for the shit deal you know is coming when you pretend you believe it.
Burn never lied to them, and still, men and women climbed over each other to sign up. Hardway had already sent junks to pick up recruits from six lunar dust-bowl towns just like this one. The war needed pilots. Lots of them. But that's not why Jordo was glad to go recruiting. It was because it gave him a chance to be alone with Burn for seven days.
When they'd almost flown to the otherwise unremarkable point in space where they would split because Jordo's destination was in one direction and Burn's was in another, Burn almost whispered to him over flight comms. "You should stay with me, Jordo." Then, she hid what she'd really meant in a rationalization. "I can't handle the hundreds of nuggets in the new flight school alone. Just transfer there with me. They're putting us up in good quarters."
"Get to stay at Sagan for a while, huh?"
"It's the only place big enough for all the nuggets and all the Bitzers. You like it there."
"You know I've got to stay with C-block and Hardway. I'm not a free man."
"Harry Cozen can get you transferred. You can do the rest of your time as OPFOR, training the nuggets." She had to know he wouldn't do that, but it was nice to be asked. "Okay, Jordo. You had your chance," she said. "Just some parting intel for you, zoomie. Just something you need to know about. Lt. Commander Dana Sellis might catch your eye when you're out there, but she and your new XO, Ram Devlin, have a long history. I'm not jealous. Just thinking ahead... Maybe you get lonely out there...maybe you go lookin' for something... It'd be real smart to remember what I just told you. Don't hit on the XO's girl. See ya, Jordo." Burn peeled off first and killed the channel before he could say goodbye. He flew back to Hardway alone.
*****
It had taken them weeks to repair the bays and the hull of the tower module. Those weeks at the Staas Yards had been a dream vacation for the surviving Lancers. It was almost like being free. When C-Block were out of their orange exosuits and wearing Hardway blue jumpsuits, nobody even knew they were convicts. The Staas Guard shore patrols even stayed clear of them. They laid into a batch of new company marines that showed up instead.
But even though the Lancers had won the day in the Lovis System, in the bars you didn't often see the Hardway crew drinking with the fighter pilots. They didn't share tables with the Lancers in the mess unless they had to and even then, they acted like the Lancers weren't there – like they were ghosts.
It took a while for Jordo to figure it out. It wasn't because the Lancers were convicts. It was because they were a reminder of an ugly truth. The price of victory is paid in blood, Harry Cozen said before the battle. At Lovis, the Lancers had paid with 66% casualties. Hardway's crew had bled, too, but not like that. They didn't cozy up to the Lancers because the presence of the surviving fighter pilots was a reminder that next time Harry Cozen paid for a victory, the price required of Hardway's crew might be just as high.
The War of Alien Aggression
Books 01-05 (Complete)
All five books in The War of Alien Aggression in a single volume - the war with the Squidies from the first engagement to the final detonations.
640 pages, 192K words, $2.99
amazon.com/author/a.d.bloom
Hardway
Intelligent life reaches out to Humanity using particle beam weapons and masers. The pilots and crew of the carrier Hardway are first to fight in the conflict that quickly escalates from a bloody first contact to a full-scale, interstellar war. Ram Devlin knows he and the rest of Humanity may have been tricked into engaging in a war that didn't have to happen. The verity of the history being written is in doubt, but the survival of his crew and the very future of mankind is at stake.
41K words, 137 pages
Kamikaze
The privateer attack carrier Hardway invades Procyon to destroy an alien blockade gun meant to keep the human race confined. Hardway and her pilots meet their match in the Squidies' massive gun and the alien aces that protect it until they discover why the aliens are beating them. Hardway's officers must commit to paying for victory in war's only true currency.
28K words, 96 pages
Lancer
Privateer Admiral Harry Cozen needs pilots for an experimental fighter squadron, so he offers the inmates of Bailey Prison a deal. Colt is serving 5-7 and he knows the deal is too good to be true, but he still takes it. He and the rest of the C-Block nuggets learn to fly the new F-151 Bitzer and prepare to sortie against alien aces on a mission far more dangerous than anyone's telling them.
35K words, 117 pages
Taipan
The privateer attack carrier Hardway is drafted into a force group commanded by Harry Cozen's bitter rival from Staas Company. She stole his fighter program and his thousand new pilots. Now, she's determined to use them as cannon fodder. Nobody can argue with her battle record, but the officers and crew of Hardway and the Lancers of the 133rd Fighter Test Squadron may be all that can keep her pilots alive in a knife-fight deep behind enemy lines.
61K words, 203 pages
Cozen's War
The Staas Privateers and the UN fleet have brought the fight to the Squidies' home system. The massive Earth invasion fleet faces off against every ship the Squidies' can muster. Harry Cozen is in command and this is his greatest gambit, but alien propaganda threatens to reveal the war's greatest secret on the very day the broadest and bloodiest battle of the conflict unfolds. Knowing how thin the margin is between victory and defeat, Ram Devlin races to the Squidies' homeworld moon with a weapon of mass destruction that could end the war in seconds. Humanity must win, but the price of victory may be a thousand more years of war.
39K words, 131 pages
About the Author
A.D. Bloom types loudly on a 1998 IBM M13 mechanical keyboard (13H6705), prefers writing on vertical monitors, and claims he’ll make portable aerial radar from a $12 usb radio dongle when he’s done with his current project.
amazon.com/author/a.d.bloom
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
