War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway (10 page)

"Oni, Klosowski, Hollis," Ram said. "Please escort Captain Horan to his quarters and confine him there. Put guards on him. He's faster than he looks."

Horan straightened himself and turned to Cozen, now making his way forward through the crowd. "Don't get them all killed," Horan said, and Cozen nodded. Then Horan barked at the crowd behind him, "Make a goddamn hole." Before he descended into the crowded aft tube, he thumbed the ship-wide squack. "This is Captain Horan. I am relieved. Repeat: I am relieved. Admiral Harry Cozen commands
Hardway
now. This order is effective immediately. May God save all your souls." 

Chapter Nine

SCS
Arbitrage
opened her bay, and the six QF-111 Dingoes took to space as a pack. Nobody had seen autonomous, exo-atmospheric combat drones fly since the War of the Americas. There were plenty in the Staas Engineering and war museums, but even Ram had never seen them in action.  

In the last war mankind fought with itself in space, the drones' main job had been intercepting missiles and torpedoes. They were a Staas Company product and since the war ended so unexpectedly, Staas still had thousands of them in mothballed inventory. Ram should have guessed Harry Cozen would have some flying off
Arbitrage
. 

The drones had no pilots, of course. An inertial negation system that could throw enough artificial gees around to compensate for the violent maneuvers and keep the pilot alive during combat required a reactor the size of a frigate's. Remote command and control systems couldn't be employed because they always got hacked, cracked, or jammed if your enemy was operating at the same level you were. So they made the Dingoes autonomous, closed input systems and gave them Artificial Intelligences.

Since artificial intelligence modeled on the human brain always went insane, the AI they gave the Dingoes was modeled on a dog's brain. The actual synaptic pattern came from a sheep herding dog named Dot, but 'Dingo' was a more marketable name for the Australian aerospace company selling them. Staas Company's marketing division insisted on called it the QF-111 Dingo.

The pack of six crossed the 500 meters between
Arbitrage
and
Hardway
slowly, almost drifting the whole way to Bay 2. They were small, only seven meters long with a curved hull barely big enough to hold a reactor module and ammunition. Massive maneuvering jets protruded on four sides to vector thrust in 12 directions and spin them 'round - pitch, roll, and yaw. Without a pilot, they were capable of 80-gee maneuvers. 140mm autocannon lanced out from the fronts of each of their hulls. Their flat, aft ends were packed with engines. The Dingoes were all teeth and legs. 

Ram watched them from outside the launch bays as he floated in the vacuum with Chief Lee and his crew of redsuits. The Dingoes flew down
Hardway
's length in echelon before they turned and reverse burned in front of the bay to bleed off their speed. They flew in backwards, and once they were all in place, they set down on three, improbably small legs that extended from the underside of each curved hull. 

Ram flew in after them before Chief Lee began to cycle the bay doors closed.

Lee floated in front of the gape-mouthed, 140mm cannon barrels with a Dingo towering over him. "Do we
do
anything to them?" he asked. He and his redsuits had never worked on them before. Nobody on
Hardway
had. "I mean... they'll read our IFF signals right? They know who the friendlies are, don't they? We don't have to
input
anything to tell them, do we?" 

"I'll get you manuals as soon as I can, but Cozen said we just open the bay doors and let them loose when the time comes. They'll attack anything without a Staas Company or UNS transponder and then come back home."

Lee didn't look convinced. "The 140mm shells these thing throw will blow the hell out of warspite torpedoes and other drones, but can they take out an alien warship?"

Ram shook his head. "Don't count on it. No. Not if they have any real armor."

"Scuttlebutt says the alien main guns we're facing shoot some kind of particle streams." Ram didn't respond. "Mr. Devlin? What
exactly
is the rest of the plan?" That question was going around on every deck. No amount of desire for vengeance could make
Hardway
's crew overlook the fact that she was about to engage an alien warship while not yet being one herself in anything but spirit. 

Ram told Lee he'd get briefed when everyone else did, and Lee looked at him like he knew that meant the XO didn't have a plan yet. Ram had one. He just didn't like it. He went back up to the bridge, hoping the whole way there that maybe in the time he'd been gone, Cozen or Dana or Biko had come up with a better plan.

Terrazzi had got the reactors up and running, of course, and
Hardway
now had her .3 gees of artificial gravity back. When Ram stepped out of the lift and onto the bridge, Cozen addressed him as, "Commander Devlin." He'd been bumped up two full grades from Senior Lieutenant Devlin to Lt. Commander to Commander. They all had new ranks in the Staas Company Privateer fleet. Harry Cozen acted as captain, of course. He looked more than comfortable in the command chair. 

"The new organizational structure..." Cozen asked Ram, "how is the crew taking to it?"

"It's too early to tell." But that wasn't the truth. In the mess and the passageways of the launching bays and all down the spine, the pilots and the miners who'd once mixed freely already showed signs of polarizing along the lines general order 1633 had drawn in their once unified ranks.

Under 1633's wartime protocols, junk pilots got commissions as junior lieutenants. 1st crewmen had been given rank as non-commissioned warrant officers along with the engineers. The redsuit maintenance and ordnance crews became chiefs and petty officers and enlisted crew. Only 12% of the miners became NCOs; the rest became enlisted sailors and aerial gunners. Nobody had to say 'sir' or 'ma'am' on a Staas Privateer and they still shared the same union affiliations, but order 1633 and the militarization made some of them officers and some enlisted crew. That was practically management and labor from their perspective. 

Ram said, "Most of them thought they'd get better hazard pay. I did, too, actually."  

Biko explained. "It's a screw-job."

Cozen said, "It's what your union negotiated with Staas in return for conscription under 1633's wartime protocols."

Ram once used Horan's command codes to look at the psych studies on the Staas servers. They said that despite the money the crew stood to make, if Order 1633 was ever given, then more than a few of the union ships would strike just because it wasn't really their fight. That wouldn't happen now, though. Cozen made it their fight.

From Moriah's dusty surface Harry Cozen had transmitted details of their encounter on an open frequency. The other mining carriers and Staas Company ships would have heard it. The story of aliens attacking miners would have a similar effect on the crews of the other ships as it had on
Hardway
.  

After years in zero-gee, Ram had gotten pretty good at keeping the contents of his stomach from floating up into his throat, but he tasted his own bile when he thought about every mining carrier transitioning smoothly to being a ship of war with crews thinking of nothing but revenge on the Squidies – all of it made possible with Cozen's lie.

The AT controller display still projected the same diagrams of Ram's attack plan over the console. The projection of
Hardway
floated 1/3 of a meter long, out of scale against Jupiter, set in an orbit so low that the figure of the carrier appeared to blur where it co-located with the gas giant. If
Hardway'
s junks had been drawn to scale, then they'd have been less than 3mm long. In the diagram they were a third the size of
Hardway
herself just so they could be seen. The approaching alien ship was an abstract red dot with an arrow indicating current direction of travel. Smack on top of the gas giant's pole was a lone junk labeled
Mohegan
. 

Ram said, "Tell me someone came up with a better plan than this while I was in the launch bays."

Cozen spoke without looking at Ram. "You said it yourself when you presented this plan, Commander Devlin. And you were right. Unless we plan to ram it, besides six Dingoes, we've only got two things on
Hardway
we can use to kill an enemy ship: mining junks and rocks. Chief Terrazzi ran the equations with Lt. Commander Sellis and they both came up with numbers that say this plan can work." 

"The redsuits replaced almost every system in that junk, but someone's still got to fly
Mohegan,
" Ram said, "and that junk isn't coming back." 

"Why can't we use a remote link?"

"Can't trust it," Cozen said. "It's probable the enemy has electronic warfare capabilities sufficient to disrupt any remote command and control."

"What we have already is a workable plan," Biko said, "We can do this."

Ram said. "
Lt. Commander
Biko, under the new chart, you're the Air Group Commander. The AGC is the one assigning the pilots. Who are you going to order to fly
Mohegan
on a suicide mission?" Ram knew who Asa Biko thought he was and who he wanted to be, so he knew the answer to that question before he asked.  

Biko leaned into the projections above the AT Controller display and said, "I'm going to fly it. I can eject the cockpit and survive. Maybe."

Ram almost laughed and Cozen sighed as if Asa Biko had suddenly bored him. Cozen said, "You can't do that, Mr. Biko. You're too valuable as my Air Group Commander." 

Biko said, "I'm not ordering someone to their death."

"I thought you said you'd survive..."

"Maybe."

"But now, you're not so sure?" Cozen said, "Give the order, Mr. Biko. Sending people on missions like this is part of the job."

"Then I don't want the job."

"You do if you give a damn about all those lives down there." Harry Cozen pointed out the front of the bridge, out the meter-thick windows and down at the launch bay module below. "
Hardway's
going to need an Air Group Commander and none of the other pilots are going to give her half as good a chance at survival as you are. You've got the job. So assign someone." 

"And if they refuse the order?" Biko said it like it was a real possibility and maybe it was.

"If they refuse," Ram said, "then I've got to shoot them." Those were the wartime regulations, even on a Privateer.

"Actually, you just give the order," Cozen told him. "You're a company officer, Mr. Devlin. You're management, remember? You
order
someone else to pull the trigger." It wasn't a joke. 

Biko said, "None of us asked to do this, Mr. Cozen. This isn't what they signed on for."

"It most certainly
is
what they signed on for," Cozen reminded him. "It's in the contract." 

"We're miners and junk pilots..."

"Our people have more experience than anyone flying small craft and operating in zero-gee. That's the reason this provision was negotiated into the contract, Mr. Biko. In case of war, the mining fleet and all its personnel can be drafted and militarized and all your experience can be leveraged. They
did
sign on for this
and
they're up to the task." 

"Personnel transfer with
Arbitrage
is complete," Dana said.  

"I'm clearing their longboat to launch."

Arbitrage
fled for the inner solar system and
Hardway
set a course to intercept the alien warship. Once Harry Cozen finally left the bridge and went down to Doc Ibora in Medical to have the wound Horan gave him properly tended to, Ram confronted him there. It was the most privacy they'd get and this had to be private.  

Ram found him on a table with a half-meter-thick, insectile bot wrapped around his thigh doing surgery under its shell. They'd stopped the bleeding in the tube with filler, but Cozen still looked pale from the mud he'd lost out the hole Horan put in him. Without an exosuit or a flight suit he was old and ghostly and wrinkled. He looked fragile even. Doc Ibora stood over him where he lay on an operating table and supervised the bot's progress as it repaired veins and arteries and pumped Cozen full of synthetic plasma.

Cozen lifted his head when he saw Ram. His eyes were dull from anesthesia. Ram said, "Doctor Ibora, I need a few minutes alone with Mr. Cozen."

"The bots do a good job, Mr. Devlin, but I should stay to make sure there are no problems." When Ram didn't reply, Ibora looked up and read the gravity of his stare.

"Leave us alone. It's an order," Ram said. In three years, he'd never given Ibora one of those. Not like that. The doctor didn't look as if he liked it much. He exited without another word and left Ram alone with Cozen in the trauma section.

Cozen said, "I think I know why you're here, Devlin. You have that look about you."

"What look is that?"

"Desperation." He was closer to the truth than Ram wanted to admit.

"Mr. Cozen, I know the truth."

Harry Cozen laughed and waved his hand like Ram had made a bad joke. It was the anesthesia, Ram thought. "What do you think you know?"

"There was never any alien attack on
Mohegan
or on
Gold Coast
for that matter. You fooled us. You made it all happen, Mr. Cozen. You used the company's remote links and a some set of undocumented master command codes to sabotage both ships and make Dana Sellis' scanners see what you wanted them to. You killed ten men and women. Then you lied to us, Mr. Cozen, and you used us to start a war with an alien species." 

"And you helped me," Cozen said.

"That's right." Ram wasn't proud of it, but it was truth.

"And now," Cozen said, "you're having second thoughts. You know you can't prove anything and you know nobody will ever prosecute me and you think I deserve to die for the ten deaths I caused." Cozen sighed like he found all of this tiresome. "On Moriah, you made your decision. You could have exposed the truth as you call it, but you didn't. Now, you don't like the weight of our lie."