by A. D. Bloom
"Six to one," Bolo said. "Give me six to one and I'll put Hardway's money in the pot." He was holding money from half the crew on the ship and when he held up the wad, Lucy's eyes widened.
Dana said she'd put money in on that deal, too, and Lucy laughed. "Six to one? That's crazy."
"Not if you really think your Marines can finish off Ram Devlin's squads before air support decides the battle."
"Okay. Fine," Lucy said. "Hardway pays six to one." Bolo tossed Hardway's pooled cash on the table and it landed with a thud. The rest of the bridge officers were in, too. Lucy told them, "It's a pleasure to take your money."
Jordo saw the blue stars moving against the black before anyone else – engine plasma from Holdout and Dirty rolling in fast in Bitzers. Less than two seconds later, they ripped past the tower in a blurred streak of guns and engines. A quarter second later, Paladin and Gusher engaged them.
"Air support has arrived," Bolo said.
"They'll have to win superiority first," Lucy reminded him. "Lt. Arroyo will have this all wrapped up before anyone wins the air."
Jordo was sure neither flight would be able to lay down effective close air support for either team until the other fighters were out of play. It was too dangerous. But as the four, F-151 Bitzers engaged each other over the topside of the bays, fire from their 140mm auto-cannon rained down on the hull. At first, Jordo thought he'd have to really chew some ass if his pilots thought they were going to spray randomly like that into a bunch of guys they were supposed to be supporting. Then, he saw how the burning, 140mm dummy shells from the Bitzers were only coming down on the figures in black exosuits – only on Lucy's Marines. The ultra low-density, high-frangibility dummy rounds disintegrated on impact in a shower of sparks, but the burning hailstorm knocked almost an entire squad of Lucy's marines down to the hull. Not a single round hit a Hardway crewman. It was eerie.
Holdout and Dirty flew corkscrews and rolls that almost made it look like they were trying to evade Paladin, but somehow, no matter where he went, they always ended up right behind him. It was like they were toying with him – like they'd thought it all out three steps ahead of him. They just dodged Gush's fire like he wasn't there while they hunted down Paladin. Holdout and Dirty could fly, but Jordo had never seen them fly like that.
Gush came 'round three times trying to blow them off Paladin's tail and every time, they broke, evaded the attack and re-engaged him in seconds. By the time Holdout and Dirty hosed Paladin down with dummy rounds, it was clear they could have dusted him a hundred times over.
Less than five seconds later, they closed on Gusher from opposite sides, port and starboard, and hammered both sides of his Bitzer's cockpit with sparking dummies just to piss him off.
*****
As the fighters twisted and turned above them, spitting shells at each other, Ram Devlin risked looking over the lip of the bay doors where he and Tse were ducked down under fire. The last of his crewmen didn't look like they'd hold out more than a minute longer against Arroyo's advance. Rounds streaked past his helmet from starboard and when he looked down his rifle, he saw an entire squad of Lucy Elan's marines charging on his position. Tse and Sturbin stood up and sprayed left and right and Ram Devlin stood up with them and panic fired in desperation.
The Marines charging them lit up bright and then appeared as nothing but silhouettes against explosions of sparks and strobing flashes from all the dummy rounds coming down from above. He caught a glimpse of the first Bitzer as it turned on its jets and blasted up and away from the hull after its strafing run. Then, the second fighter poured rounds from its six auto-cannon into the last of the Marines that had been charging Ram's position and sent them flying off the hull. Hardway would need to sortie an SAR junk just to recover them. He caught hold of two Marines before they were knocked spinning off the ship, but five more got by him.
Ram Devlin looked up to see his air support coming in again over the launch bays, strafing the Marines bearing down on the last of his crew. They flew in circles only 300 meters overhead and rotated on their jets to keep their guns aimed, circle-strafing and putting rounds on target without pause until the Marines were all down and Hardway's blue exosuits were the only ones standing on the hull.
*****
Jordo still wasn't sure exactly what he'd seen. Holdout and Dirty had never flown like that before. Hell, he'd never seen anyone fly like that. Even with all the cheering and Lucy Elan's colorful curses and all the money changing hands, Jordo could only wonder how the hell those two jokers pulled flying like that out of their asses. They were okay. On a good day, you could even call them pilots, but today, they'd flown like they'd been ten steps ahead. Jordo couldn't figure out how they'd done it. He was thinking about it so hard that he barely heard Harry Cozen. "My XO, Mr. Devlin, did us proud, but it was those two Lancers that won the day."
"That was Holdout and Dirty," Jordo said. "If you don't mind I'd like to go congratulate them."
"I recommend you do. And before Lucy Elan starts asking questions."
Jordo made for the hatch, but a message came down from the bridge before he got off the observation deck, and Cozen called for him to wait. The Admiral grinned. "Our moment has arrived. The alien Dreadnought has been sighted again," he said. "UN spy-birds have imaged it behind the lines at Altair, just two systems from Sol."
A new projection of the Squidies' 800-meter battleship rose from a matchbox computer in the palm of Cozen's hand. "The microsat got its good side," he said. He meant the port side, the side with the human skull painted on it. "It's time, people," Cozen told them. "We're going to Altair. We will engage the Dreadnought and we will remove that abomination from the starry sky."
Chapter Three
The redsuits and the junkers came down Hardway's hollow spine like a flood with Holdout and Dirty at its head. In the low gees the crew didn't so much carry Jordo's pilots as toss them back and forth over the crowd as they came. It was as if his pilots in their orange, prison-issue exosuits were, themselves, the trophies of the battle.
Holdout and Dirty beamed and laughed like they were having the time of their lives. They waved and mock saluted Jordo as the crowd first pushed him to the side and then swept him along with its irrepressible flow.
He wanted to ask them how the hell they flew like that, but now wasn't the time. This wasn't a moment he wanted to interrupt. This was the moment Hardway finally welcomed the 133rd. They were finally giving Holdout and Dirty the heroes' welcome the whole squadron deserved.
There had been 44 Lancers in the 133rd when they came on board. Now, there were only 14. Nobody had been anxious to get friendly with the fighter pilots. With casualty rates like that, they'd become like walking ghosts. They were a reminder of how cheaply war held all their lives and so Hardway's crew had steered clear of them until now.
As the flood rolled victorious down the spine with Holdout and Dirty held high as the champions of the hour, the crew chanted, "Lan-cers! Lan-cers!"
An hour later, Jordo came up the tube into forward Hab, Lvl 2 A, where the Lancers berthed and he heard more chanting, but even before he could discern the words, the sound of it chilled him. There was bloodlust in those voices. Maintenance crews clogged the passageway around the Lancers' hatch.
Who the hell was fighting in the 133rd's birth? Jordo pulled redsuits out of his way until he remembered he was an officer. Jordo barked out commands and made a lot of officer-style noise, imitating what he'd heard from Devlin and Bolo and even Admiral Harry Cozen. The redsuits all ignored him. He still had to fight his way through. When he got to the open hatch, he saw the Lancers and a bunch of crewmen inside and in the middle of it all was Holdout and Dirty. They circled each other and Jordo thought it was just harmless idiocy, another stupid fight between two pilots out to prove who was baddest. Then he saw the knife and the genuine confusion on the rest of the Lancers' faces and the murder in Dirty's eyes.
By the time Jordo realized something was horribly wrong, Paladin was already
moving. Dirty slashed at him, and as the knife arced, the freshly scraped metal shined crimson. She'd already drawn blood with that pot-metal blade. She missed Paladin, but Holdout's jumpsuit had been split open at the belly and shone dark with deep purple, arterial blood.
"Get back!" Dirty shouted, "Or I'm gonna cut the bacon off this fat bitch!" Dirty slashed backhand at Holdout and missed. That was Paladin's opening. Those long limbs entangled her and enveloped and twisted her like a pretzel. He pointed the arm with the knife harmlessly to the side and she couldn't move the rest of her body. It was a little chilling to watch if you knew what crimes they sent Paladin away for.
The way he held her, she couldn't do anything with that knife. Jordo thought the fight was over and done, but when Holdout saw Dirty couldn't move, she lunged. Her hands shot out for Dirty's face, now contorted with rage and barely recognizable. Holdout's looked like a mask, too, like an ancient Samurai's mask...ferocious, terrible and merciless. She raised her arms as she lunged, and Ram hit her in the ribs with his shoulder. It lifted her off her feet and knocked the wind out of her. He heard ribs crack on impact.
Doc Ibora could fix that in fifteen minutes. He'd fix her belly wound just as fast, but there was something wrong with Holdout and Dirty, something far worse than a couple of broken bones and deep lacerations. "Hold them down!" They didn't stop fighting even when they were pinned flat and spread-eagle on the deck with five people on top of each of them.
*****
Jordo and Paladin stood on the other side of the glass watching Doc Ibora inside his operating bay with Holdout and Dirty. He wore a medical isolation suit and stood over the two pilots where they were strapped down on the tables. Tubes ran into arteries in their thighs and arms, pumping deep purple out and deep purple in. Ibora cleaned their blood. He'd said was the easiest way to get rid of whatever it was he'd found in the two Lancers' bloodstreams.
Something about the whole med bay made Jordo want to run and take his pilots with him. It shone clean and white and the suction nozzles set in the bulkheads of the operating room unnerved him. Paladin said, "They're for the sucking the blood out of the air. In zero-gee, I mean."
"You a medic now?"
Ibora's isolation suit had a fishbowl helmet. Jordo watched him gesture through menus or data or test results projected in it until finally, he unlatched and stripped off his gloves, popped the latches at his neck, and lifted the helmet off. He tapped a panel in the wall and a shelf extended from it the size and height of a spartan bunk like the ones they'd first made for the Lancers aboard Arbitrage.
Ibora set the fishbowl down on the shelf, turned, and then sat heavy and hard for such a thin man. He unsealed the chest seam of the suit, reached inside and came up with a carved pipe with a long, wooden stem. He waved them inside. By the time Jordo and Ram got in there, Ibora had closed the lid of the pipe and was puffing dense, white smoke for the nozzles in the wall to suck away.
"So I guess it's not a disease," Paladin said.
"I was just using the suit to be cautious until I knew for sure."
Jordo said, "What the hell is going on with my pilots, Doc?"
He exhaled a stream of smoke and watched it bend towards the suction. "They had some kind of synthetic hormone in their system. I couldn't tell you exactly what because I have to reconstruct it from the metabolites – from what it turned into when it reacted with their systems."
"Is it a drug?"
Ibora fished out his matchbook computer and set it on the bench next to him. He gestured through files until the image of a molecule or a compound Jordo didn't really understand hung spinning slowly in the air next to Ibora. "It's an engineered hormone. And it doesn't metabolize well."
"Are they going to be okay?" Paladin asked.
"They're fine. Now."
"Can they fly?"
"Give them a stim to wake them up and they can fly in ten minutes, but I wouldn't recommend it."
"Where the hell did they get a synthetic hormone?"
Ibora said, "It was made here, on Hardway. According to the logs, it was printed in my zero-gee molecular assembler."
"You made it?"
"Please, Lt. Colt. I'm a doctor. I may have ended up at the ass-end of my profession, but I took an oath to do no harm and I took it seriously. I wouldn't make this compound. It's dangerous. No. I didn't make it. Someone got in here and made it. Wiped most of the security logs behind them."
"Dirty..." Jordo nodded his head.
"She's a chemist?" Ibora said it like it was impossible to believe.
"Sort of... It's how she ended up in Bailey Prison," Jordo said. "If she had a blueprint for the compound, then it wouldn't take her long to print it up."
"You need Staas executives' or company officers' command codes to run any of Hardway's printers," Ibora said. "There's a code in the log still." He chuckled. "Take a look."
Ibora's printer clearly showed one Augustus Horan had logged on the machine three days earlier. "Who the hell is Augustus Horan?"
"Our last Captain," Ibora said. "The one before the war – before Harry Cozen. Someone obviously stole his codes. They shouldn't even still work considering he was taken off Hardway in restraints." His lips pressed together like there was something he didn't want to say. "I had to make an official report for the logs. I'm sorry about that. I imagine as XO, Mr. Devlin will be taking some measure of action."
*****
Ram Devlin was the XO and he handled discipline. But he didn't call Dirty and Holdout to his cabin. He called their squadron leader, J. 'Jordo' Colt.
"They flew better than I've ever seen them fly," Jordo said. "Better than I've ever seen anyone fly. I know you saw it, Mr. Devlin. That's what you wanted isn't it? Are you going to take that away from them now?"
"Ibora said he doesn't even know how to count all the ways that compound could mess them up in the long-term."
Long-term, Jordo thought, that's a laugh for pilots in a squadron that had taken casualties like theirs. "Respectfully, Mr. Devlin, my pilots don't worry about long-term damage and you know good reasons why." Devlin didn't say anything to that bait. "What about Holdout and Dirty? Are you going to throw them back in prison?"
"No. I need them. Besides... Dirty's not a systems cracker and neither is Holdout. That means someone gave them Augustus Horan's access codes. That's the man I'm going to talk to about this. But. You're the Lancers' squadron leader so I want you to find the rest of the compound Dirty made and destroy it."
"Who gave Dirty and Holdout the access codes?"
Again, Devlin didn't answer. "Dismissed," was all he said. That meant it was probably Harry Cozen. Jordo was no computer expert, but even he knew that only Ram Devlin and Harry Cozen had the authority to change permissions on the mainframe and if Ram Devlin wasn't the one responsible for Dirty getting access to those codes, then that only left one possibility.
*****
While the rest of the Lancers changed into their flight suits, Holdout and Dirty came back to the 133rd's berth looking like hell. Their skin was gray. "What the hell you lookin' at?" Dirty said as they stepped through the hatch. "We're fine."
"You're fine," Holdout said. "Bitch, I've got a six-inch slash across my belly." She unzipped her jump suit and showed the Lancers. Doc Ibora had closed up the wound and sealed it well. Now there was just a micro-sutured, raised pink line across her stomach like a welt crossing her old C-section scar.
"Doesn't look like you're in any shape to take heavy gees," Paladin said.
"Stifle it, Paladin. We're good to fly," Dirty said. Her left eye winked and Jordo couldn't figure out who she thought she was winking at. A second later, he realized it was involuntary. All the Lancers stood frozen, half-in and half-out of their exosuits and stared at her. "What are you gawkin' at?" she said, "You lookin' for a date?"
Jordo grimaced because he felt like the decision was being made for him. It was being made by circumstance, by the war, and by all the people depending on them. But that wasn't the truth. The
only good thing about this was that it was their decision.
"How much of it did you make?" Jordo said. The taste in his mouth went bitter before the words got out. Dirty and Holdout both looked at him speechless.
Paladin put his hands on his hips. "What our squadron leader is trying to ask you ladies is: 'You holdin' out on us?'"
"Where's your slick, Dirty?"
"My what?"
"Your hiding place."
"Don't play dumb. You hid it somewhere." Jordo said, "I want to know where."
"You gonna take it away?"
"Where did you get Captain's Horan's codes? And the plans to print this," Jordo said.
"I made it from scratch," Dirty said. "It's my intellectual property now. That IP's gonna make me rich."
"Bullshit," Holdout said. "She got it the same place she got the codes – a big-ass hole in Hardway's mainframe."
"Bitch!"
"Shouldn't have cut me," Holdout said to Dirty. "That's what you get."
"That true, Dirty? What Holdout said?" Jordo asked, "Is it true?"
"Yeah, yeah. You can get access with my matchbox computer – the one Shafter gave us. Piece of shite only let us access two things besides the flight manual: a file with the blueprints for that hormone and some command codes."
Jordo ran his hand through his hair. "And that didn't seem weird to you?"
She shrugged. "Who the hell cares if it's weird? You saw how I flew. It was like... the whole world was standing still. Whatever Paladin and Gusher did, I was six steps ahead of those chumps."
"Hey..." Gush protested even if it was the truth.
"I saw every move those two numbnuts made before they made it," she said.
