War of Alien Aggression 3 Lancer (10 page)

"What the hell was that? How could they send us into that?" Cleeg shouted it at Jordo as he came in, and Jordo didn't know what to tell him.

"They knew we weren't ready for that. They had to know!"

Then, they all started in. "They didn't even finish our training!"

"What was that even for? They just sent us in to get wasted!"

"We never shoulda' believed all their bullshit. We're not fighter pilots – we're rubes. Class-A suckers."

"Just fodder, man. Nothin' but fodder."

"'36 months and you're out'... 36 months... We won't last 36 minutes!"

"Why'd the Squidies even run? They could have dusted us all."

"
They figured it out
," Cleeg said. "That's why." He laughed and shook his head. "Shit. Now
that's
rich. The enemy figured out our squadron was a distraction before we did."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Gush didn't want to believe it.

"Don't you get it, man? This is how it was
supposed
to go. We were never supposed to have a chance. Our job was to zoom around out there like idiots and
fake
being pilots so the Squidies would shoot at
us
instead of the aces – instead of Shafter and them and the insertion team going to the 4th moon. We been
pretending
, man. We been pretending we were something we weren't. We're all suckers. That's all we are."

"No." Jordo said, "No," but only Otto heard him because he couldn't say it louder. It wouldn't come out any louder. Now, all of them were wise to what he and Snooze had known. What Cleeg said was true. But it didn't have to be. Jordo made for the hatch.

"Where
you
goin?" Gusher said.

"I'm going to see the man that got us into this. I'm going to see Harry Cozen."

Cleeg shouted, "Tell him I'm not goin' back out there!
Fuck
that!"

*****

Jordo followed the tube down out of the hab module to the hollow center of
Hardway's
spine. The spine intersected every section of the ship, making it the best way to get anywhere on the carrier. It was full of junk pilots and Staas Guards, redsuits and what he guessed were railgunners. He saw so many around him on that ship.
They'd
all survived.
They
hadn't been thrown to the Squidies like he and the Lancers had. Watching them while he rode an open car down the spine, he hated them all for that until he'd gone a hundred meters or so and seen the scarred, blackened, blasted parts of the spine where firestorms must have filled it at least once when enemy warheads hit. They'd died in those places.

The lift in the command tower's aft tube stopped long enough before the doors opened that Jordo knew he was being scrutinized by some kind of security. When the doors opened, he hoped he'd see company marines, but it was armed Staas Guards blocking his path.  

Behind them,
Hardway's
bridge was smaller than he thought. Jordo had imagined something bigger – grander, but the bridge was only 15 meters on its longest side. There were only a few manned consoles and the command chair in the center. That's where Cozen sat.

Diamond-pane windows at least a meter thick stretched around the front and sides and looked out the rear, down onto all the ship's modules. Rising up from the console where the Air Group Commander stood was an in-air projection showing the entire planetary system. The hellish planet and its nine moons floated meter-wide and translucent in the middle of the bridge in front of Cozen and his officers.
Hardway
floated 20cm long and out of scale on one side of the planet. On the other, the enlarged 4th moon was now guarded by the fat vertical hulls of the enemy ships drawn to scale with
Hardway
.

The XO, Ram Devlin, stood at the Ops console near the center of the bridge. Without even looking up, Devlin told the Staas Guards to let him pass. The guards at Bailey Prison had been Staas Guards. Jordo had never met one he liked and he clipped the bigger one with his shoulder as he passed.

Dana Sellis said, "They're here to shoot at alien boarders, Jordo, not you."

He wanted to tell her not to call him that. Instead, he turned to AGC Biko. "Burn and Shafter...Topper And Dig.... Lancer Flight One... What happened to them?"

"No word from Hobo," Biko said. "And you don't need to report to the bridge in person." 

"They're alive," Jordo said. The way Biko and the rest of them looked at him made him actually doubt it. "Why aren't we going after them? We've got to go after them. The Lancers will go. We'll do it." Now, they looked him like he was crazy.

"You won't survive," the XO said. "They'll tear you apart."

Cozen glanced his way just then and Jordo couldn't keep from blurting it out. "Mr. Devlin, it's pretty clear to us that we're expendable and that our survival was never an integral part of this plan, so don't you tell me you're not willing to take chances with our lives." Staas Privateers weren't like military vessels, but Jordo imagined what he just said was probably enough to get him thrown in a brig if they had one.

"Lt. Colt," Harry Cozen said. "It was my plan. And it failed. Whatever has happened to Lancer Flight One and the junk it escorted to the fourth moon has already happened. There's no signal from the team on board or the crew or any of the fighters. It is probable that the Squidies got them. I gambled and we lost. It's over now. We can't win. The enemy fighters hold station over the moon. Even if our people are alive, which they're likely not, that means we can't land a search and rescue or extraction team to get them. Alien reinforcements will arrive. Even if
Hardway
takes on the cruisers and beats them, because of those 24 alien fighters, we still couldn't accomplish our mission. Even if I was willing to sacrifice
all
of you," Cozen said, "it wouldn't change the situation. If you attempt to engage the enemy fighters over the 4th moon, then you will die. You will fail and it won't change a thing. We failed. Now, we pick up our teeth and go home. The remaining 23 pilots of the 133rd Fighter Test Squadron will return to training and maybe we can salvage something of this." 

"Training? With who?" Jordo almost laughed. "Who's left to train us? We're the only F-151 pilots left!"

"Would you rather go back to prison, Jordo?" Cozen turned away from him to face forward. "We're going to make a break for it in three hours, after SCS
Araby
is in position to cover our withdrawal." 

"You can't just leave now!" It would mean they died for nothing at all.

"Lt. Colt!" Biko shouted, but Jordo couldn't hear him.

"Me and the other pilots from Bailey Prison. We are what we are, Mr. Cozen... But Burn....Shafter...they're not convicts like us. They're not prison fodder for you to throw away. They're pilots that trusted you not to give their lives stupidly or cheaply."

"Get him out of here," Devlin said to the Staas Guards behind Jordo. They seized his arms from either side and began to move him towards the lift.

Jordo said, "I thought
we
were the suckers for taking your deal, Mr. Cozen, but maybe it was Burn and them. What the hell was this even for? This was all your idea. Why? Just so you could throw our lives away?" 

"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."