War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan (9 page)

Her face twisted up. "I make my
own
goddamn mistakes. I don't need you or anyone els-" Pooch's words caught in her throat like the muscles in her larynx had spasmed out of control. Seconds later, she got her voice back and became a fountain of expletives of such volume, color, and caliber as Jordo had only ever heard from senior redsuits and company marines.

"I'm trying to help you," he said. "What the hell is it with you? Ever since you got here, you've had a hardon for me and the 133rd. You've picked a fight or escalated the situation every bloody chance you got. What is it? Is it because we're convicts? Are you a pissed-off victim of crime, Pooch?"

"No."

"Is it me? You got something against 1st Lt. J. 'Jordo' Colt?" Her eyes narrowed when he said that like he'd gone somewhere he didn't have the right to go. "That's it, isn't it," he said. "It's me. Who the...
What
the... Where do you even
get off
ju-"

She said, "You don't even remember me."

The violence in her stare made the spot between Jordo's eyes itch like mad while his mind ran through every woman he could remember ever meeting. There had been a lot of them before he'd crashed and gone to Bailey – a lot of women before Bailey Prison."

"Don't you look at me like that," she said.

"Like what?"

"Like I'm some forgotten piece of ass from your past. I'm not some shore-leave hussy you popped on Sagan Station."

When he finally did remember, a wave of inexplicable fear flashed through him. "Tranquility 5," Jordo said.

Pooch confirmed it with a mirthless grin. "Tranq 5."

It was an H3 dome town on the moon. Tranquility 5. Jordo and Burn flew there in their Bitzers. It was the first stop on their recruiting tour.
Hardway
was under repair and he'd gone out with Burn alone. They ignored the lanes and skimmed over the silver surface of the moon leaving momentary plumes of glittering dust in their wake. With no atmo, they were gone almost instantly. Jordo remembered zooming next to Burn, just meters above the surface, silent on comms, watching her through the cockpit.

When they rolled up and over the last ridge, Tranq 5 came into view. Burn told him it was a rake and bake town and he remembered hating that – hating
them
for a half-second. Raking out crushed rock and baking it to extract the Helium3 was what they'd done back at Bailey Prison. Jordo didn't know which pissed him off more – the fact that things were rough enough on the outside that people had to do the same thing for a living that he did in prison or the fact that they did it of their own free will. Jordo remembered thinking how if he had
his
freedom, then he wouldn't waste it in a place like that.

Tranq 5 was the first, big, lunar dust bowl town they visited and it was the first place Burn and Jordo did a little airshow over the dome – just some fancy flying up close so the yokels could gawk at the 151s. Burn took the recruiting seriously. "Fighters are sexy," she said. "So we're gonna show 'em off." And they did. It was fun chasing Burn through maneuvers as she tried to throw him off her tail. They even blazed the guns a few times while flying low over the dome. The rounds all went out into the black, but the tracers streaked over the town like a meteor swarm and the range det shells went off like fireworks.

Hundreds of dust-bowlers pressed up against the edge of the dome, looking out at the pads where Jordo and Burn set their fighters down, all of them gawking. Burn told him to wave from the ladder before he climbed down from his cockpit. The figures he saw inside the dome were a hundred yards away and silhouetted, but when he waved, they waved back, and Jordo felt like a hero. He knew it was stupid. It was
exactly
as stupid as those yokels were for cheering. Instead of welcoming him and Burn, they should have welded the airlock doors shut.

That's where he met Pooch...inside the dome, after the airshow and the part where they shook hands with people. Burn talked a lot about 'duty' and even 'opportunity'. Maybe Pooch was there for that part and he just didn't remember seeing her until later. Her name wasn't Pooch then. He said, "You came up to talk to me and Burn right before we left."

"That's right."

She didn't look much like the same girl. "You had hair then – lots of it. And you lost weight." He didn't want to say that her eyes had looked altogether different. He didn't want to tell her that the
first
time they'd met, her eyes showed some kind of light, some kind of goodness that that he couldn't help but hate her for. It was partly because a woman who shone like that wouldn't ever come near a convict like him and it was partly because despite being an asshole to her, she was still buying what he and Burn were selling.

"I asked Jordo," she said, "I walked up and asked J. 'Jordo' Colt, hotshot fighter pilot, if he thought
I
could do what
he
did – if
I
could fly an F-151 Bitzer. And you told me I could."

Jordo said, "And then you asked me what I would do. I remember that part. You asked me what I would do if I were you."

"And you looked around at my dried-up, little dust bowl of a dome town and you said,
'It's dangerous out there, but here, you're just dying slow'
. That's what you said." Pooch was one of the ones that signed up with Burn before they left Tranq 5 that night – one of the first fifty. "I signed up and look what it got me,
Jordo
. You didn't tell me the real deal. You didn't tell me how many would die. You didn't tell me how I would wake up screaming five times a night or how when I
did
sleep, my dreams would be haunted and filled with the faces of my lost pilots. You didn't tell me about the pulse-pinch that kills your brain slow and the... the... the
rage
... the fucking
rage
– goddammit, it's
always there
. It's like a hunger you can't feed. No matter what, it gnaws..."

"Burn told you the F-151's pulse-pinch would mess you up; you didn't care," Jordo said. "Now you're a brain-shake zoomie. You got
drain bamage
just like me." In that moment when he made a joke and she laughed, the hate was almost gone from her eyes. It would come back quick, but in that moment of undeniable commonality, it was gone because neither of them was alone in their hell.

It looked as if that was too much for Pooch to bear. She swelled up in the eyes, but then quickly stuffed it all back down before it got out of control. She swallowed and stared pure hatred at Jordo. "Two-hundred and twenty-three dead pilots," she said. "
Two-hundred and twenty-three
," as if the Hellcats' casualties were
his
fault somehow. "We graduated from that flight school and left for the Sirius Line with three-hundred pilots. Only seventy-seven came back."

"75% casualties," Jordo said.

"You and Burn...you never said anything about that."

It wasn't his bloody fault she signed up. He tried to string the words together to tell her that, but he couldn't and then, the anger in him suddenly rose out of the marrow of his bones and grew until, in only a few heartbeats, it coursed through his veins, burning under his skin. Through the static fuzzing his brain, he could still note how none of this sudden anger made logical sense. He knew it was the hyper-aggression. It was a symptom of his own battered and shaken brain and what the F-151's inertial negation system had done to it. But knowing that didn't help. Not when he still remembered what she'd said to him in
Hardway's
brig and how much it had stung.

"75% casualties. Yeah," he said. "That's
almost
how bad the Lancers bled. You want some sympathy, Pooch...you need a shoulder to cry on? Talk to me when the Hellcats hit 88% casualties. Won't be long now, I bet. Not with a squadron leader like you it won't."

He was glad she couldn't reach him through the bars because she lost control after that.

Chapter Eight

Hardway, Taipan,
the four, thin-skinned carriers, and the breaching ships all hung a low, dayside orbit around the now familiar ice moon of the Groomsbridge system's innermost gas giant, hiding in the glare while the fighters patrolled.

Ram Devlin was on his way to
Taipan
to negotiate the imprisoned pilots' release and he needed to go alone. As the Air Group Commander and ship's union rep, Asa Biko had insisted on going, but he didn't understand the true nature of the situation and Ram couldn't risk explaining it to him on the bridge.

Biko went on as if he thought Ram was flying over to
Taipan
to function as some kind of legal defense for the two pilots Matilda Witt had seized. He didn't know this had nothing to do with discipline or orders, regulations or contracts. It was all about leverage. Ram wasn't on his way to
Taipan
to represent anyone in any kind of drum-head trial. He was flying there to make a deal.

"You fly the longboat," Cozen told Biko. "But Mr. Devlin goes to Matilda
alone
. She responds better to one-on-one negotiation." He turned to Ram. "And you, Mr. Devlin. I presume there's no need to remind you of whom you're dealing with. In any negotiation with Matilda Witt, you will almost certainly lose."

"Is that the best advice you've got for me?"

"My best advice is to decide exactly how much you're willing to lose right now and stick to it."

Biko flew the longboat out over the first of the four box carriers lined-up between
Hardway
and
Taipan
. As they looked down at all the Bitzers packed into its open bays, he asked Ram what the hell Cozen had meant by his last comment.

"He meant Witt's going to let the pilots go," Ram said, "but she'll have a price."

"A price? What the hell do we have that she wants? She's already more powerful than Harry Cozen."

"You can never have enough power," Ram said. Those words came out more naturally than he thought they would, and in the reflection off the canopy, Ram saw Biko glance at him and narrow his eyes a millimeter as if he wasn't sure whether or not what Ram had said had been the result of his imagining what went on Matilda Witt's mind or if he'd been speaking for himself.

Taipan's
bay doors opened to let them in and then closed behind the longboat so quickly that they nearly caught the stern. Ram stood up in
Taipan'
s lead-blanket gravity and unstrapped the holstered Honma & Voss. He handed the x-ray laser to Biko. "I have a feeling they're not letting me on-board with a sidearm today."

The Staas Guards waited on the other side of the airlock – four of them this time. One of them was the squad leader that Ram had trapped in
Hardway's
airlock. He grinned at Ram and said, "She's waiting for you."

They showed him into Witt's office near the bridge. And then, she made him wait.

Twenty minutes later, the hatch opened behind him and when Witt saw him at the porthole, looking out at the box carriers and
Hardway
, she said, "There are a dozen masterpieces in this compartment, Mr. Devlin. Why are you staring out there?"

"Your collection is in here, Ms. Witt, but out there is what you don't have yet. Out there is what you want."

She closed the hatch behind her and spun the wheel before turning and straightening her business suit with a smile. "Drink, Mr. Devlin?" He hesitated. "Worried the Squidies might surprise us and you'll need to be sober?" She said it like it was a dreary detail. "We've got loads of clearzine ampules." They had plenty of the anti-inebriate on
Hardway
, too, and it would have your head clear fast, but Ram hated the way it gave you a full-on hangover for the 15 seconds it took to work its magic. "You
look
like you could use a drink," she said.

"Yes."

"Very good." She nodded at her crystal and mirror bar. "If you don't mind."

As Ram went to the bar and chipped at the block of ice with a pick and short, murderous stabs, Matilda Witt stood at the edge of his vision and watched him. "What I don't understand, Mr. Devlin, is why you look so morose. You come to me looking like a man on his way to an execution."

Immediately after he poured Witt's drink, the surface went nearly opaque with tiny waves – vibrations from the counter-surveillance gear that Matilda Witt had just switched-on. He handed the drink to her, and she said, "Don't look so sad; this is what you wanted."

Ram visibly balked as he poured his own drink. "You can't possibly believe I want to see my pilots exec-"

"No," she said. "Of course not. You
want
to make a deal. You're here for negotiations... negotiations for what you
really want
, Mr. Devlin."

"What do I want?"

"
Justice
." She spoke the word with a mannered gravitas that bordered on mockery. "Ram Devlin wants justice," she said.

"I don't understand," he lied.

"You want Harry Cozen to pay for the deaths he's directly caused and you know he's too big for a little person like you to threaten. You know only one of his peers can bring him down – a big person like me."

"You're a big person... and I'm..."

"You're little people, Mr. Devlin. And I'm big people. Harry is big people, too. If you prefer a more classical view, then think of mortals and Olympian gods. A mortal doesn't simply attack a god. He needs another god to help him do anything like that and even if he succeeds, do you know how rare it is that gods actually die? You'll never get the justice you want without me behind you," she said. "But I'm a kind Olympian. I'm making it easy for you. Because I know that for a
good
man like yourself, betrayal is never easy. Even betraying a man like Harry is a very difficult thing. But... For you, I have removed much of the pain from the equation. You can tell yourself that you gave Harry Cozen up not only to see justice done for the miners he killed aboard the junk
Mohegan
, but to save two pilots' lives – lives that I know you rightly consider your responsibility. So... Please, Mr. Devlin, I urge you to save your pilot. And mine. Make no mistake, I
will
have both of them shot if you don't give me what I want."