War of Alien Aggression 5 Cozen's War (10 page)

The alien dreadnought steamed to meet her, and the human skull painted 500-meters tall on its hull rose like a toothy, grinning moon, pockmarked with futile detonations. That ship towered over
Arbitrage
, and when she passed into the alien dreadnought's shadow, looking up at that skull was like looking up at her own, impending death. She raised her glass to it and drank deeply.
 

After passing through the lines of alien gunboats and cruisers and carriers at the rear of the Squidy battle formation, once she was through their lines, Witt kept going. She steamed boldly towards the fat and bloody gas giant around which the Squidy’s homeworld moon orbited like a moldy pea.

They wouldn’t let her get too far. Already, she could see the Squidies' ambassadorial ship breaking the limb of the homeworld moon and coming at
Arbitrage
on an intercept vector. She recognized the wing and single tower design from the last time she’d met with them. That ship was a terrible place. They could pressurize a section with nitrogen-oxygen atmo, but it always smelled like sulfur. Unbearable..hellish, really. Matilda Witt was more committed to peace than any other human, but on a personal level, she was actually quite glad she'd never have to visit with the Squidies ever again.
 

Chapter Fourteen

It looked just like the ship Dana saw on Moriah, on the first day of the war. It was the same long blade of a hull and the single tower. The projection was grainy, but there was no mistake. The ambassadorial ship that Matilda Witt had said would appear at the offer of peace negotiations looked exactly like what Cozen had called an alien scout ship before they’d boarded it and killed the things inside.

Every new piece of evidence she saw pointed to the fact that Harry Cozen had deceived her and everyone else. Did the aliens even attack that first mining junk to come back with a dead crew? Was Harry Cozen responsible for those deaths, too? She hated herself for even entertaining the idea. She didn’t want to think about it. Not now.

The projection of SCS
Arbitrage
made it look like a half-meter, armored tadpole with her tail chopped off, spitting plasma out the wound. The enemy fleet between her and
Hardway
was an executioner’s ax paused in mid-strike and waiting to fall on what was left of the invasion fleet, but
Arbitrage
steamed slowly through the lines like there was nothing to fear, carrying Matilda Witt and Ram and the
Boomslang
. Matilda Witt was their Trojan Horse. Hidden inside
Arbitrage
was the vessel that would doom the Squidies once it was past the battle-lines and the bulk of the enemy's defenses. All that remained now was to give
Boomslang
the kind of launch it needed.

Cozen spoke in low tones without taking his eyes from the unfolding scene. "Be ready to bring this carrier about in a snap, Ms. Sellis."

"
Understood, Mr. Cozen."
 

"
Mr. Biko, do all of our fighter squadrons appear to be where they’re supposed to be?"
 

"
At maximum acceleration, with no engagement delay, estimated time to strike range is 63 seconds. But they’ll take the shot further out. For bragging rights."
 

"
Not much chance for evasive maneuvering at that rate of acceleration."
 

Biko said, "
None, actually. But that’s what it’ll take to get there fast enough."
 

Once the alien ambassadorial ship had closed to within 10Ks of
Arbitrage
, both vessels turned and burned to halt their forward motion. Then,
Arbitrage
spun to turn her starboard side and her bay door away from the hellish low-end glow of Beta Draconis, placing that entire side of the ship in shadow.
 

"Matilda is opening the bay door," Cozen said. She launched in the longboat when the door was only open a fraction of its width. They saw it continue to cycle fully open as the pale blue flare of her longboat’s exhaust lit the starboard side of the ship before she radically changed vector and came on a slow, but direct course for the alien ambassadorial ship. All eyes were on her.
 

Cozen ground his next words out with the grit of his voice. "Give the order to the squadrons."

*****

The ninety-six F-151s and the Lancers’ six, hulking Sky Jack 223s blazed hell-bent, straight at their target, formed up in echelon. There was no way to pull off evasive maneuvers blasting themselves forward this hard, accelerating this fast. And Squidy was already on the way.

The squadrons of alien interceptors that had formed up to match the
Hardway
Air Group’s fighter threat as best they could now hurtled up through the Squidy battle-lines and came screaming at them.

Thirty-six, Pooch counted.

"This is Lancer 1-1. We go right through this and we keep going, you understand me? There will
not
be a furball here." Lancer 1-1 got to give the final bingo...lucky mutherfucker. At T-minus three seconds to range, he gave the command, "Cut rear thrust and pivot on your thrusters to face them for the pass. Open fire at will. Do the dirty on my Bingo in 3…2…1…"

After she rotated, she saw the lead elements of the Squidy formation coming right at her. All three of them flew with small-bore particle streams slicing in two-second bursts, gunning for her by slashing them across her path. She couldn’t change direction now. The only thing she could do now is what all of them did. They screamed rage and hate and threw it at the enemy with their cannon shells. High-explosives blossomed and sabot sparked and burrowed into the alien fighters as the alien guns cut across the Privateer formation.

The Squidies expected them to flinch, to pull away and evade, but they couldn’t, not even if they’d wanted to. Their inertial negation systems weren’t powerful enough to allow maneuvers at that speed without the pilots getting turned to a mass of crushed cells and bone chips and fluid by the inertial gees.

With reactor detonations flashing and all their guns firing, the two formations met in a conflagration of expanding fireballs whose edges grew and met and overlapped until a bright and brief, burning nebula had formed that obscured all vision, LiDAR and radar. Pooch flew blind and screaming with hellfire clinging to the vertical cockpit canopy of her Bitzer like she was in a glass coffin and someone had set the lid afire.

Forty-one Privateer fighters emerged from that cloud. Jarvis. Lancer 1-5 and 1-6. Dodge. Lancer 1-1. She didn't want to look and see who else was still alive, but her eye picked them out and her helmet flashed the names in her face. So many names were missing.

Almost as a single fighter, the remaining interceptors rotated to point their noses back on target and slammed themselves again with thrust and didn't look back.

The smaller, faster-targeting defensive guns of the enemy line ships opened up and took their toll. The Privateer pilots flew through the streams with grit teeth and set jaws until they’d gone beyond the range where the alien gunners would try to hit them.

The shock of Pooch's own survival flashed through her like a tingle that left her body floating. Her helmet now highlighted the target in wireframe. Matilda Witt’s longboat was between
Arbitrage
and the small, alien ship, just a few Ks out from the bay now, going so slowly it was almost a stationary target.
 

As they bore down on it with savage war-cries on comms, whomever was at the longboat's helm must have realized it was too late to turn around and make for their bay, but its engines plumed pale and blue and bright as it tried.

Each of the fighter pilots now bearing down on Matilda Witt's longboat had cursed her at one point or another. They’d all asked for this moment...revenge for using them like fodder...revenge for 75% casualties and all the friends they lost under her command. The only one to shed a tear was Pooch. Inside her flight helmet Hellcat 1-1 cried because she knew if Staas VPs like Witt were dying today, then there wasn’t much chance any of them would make it. She’d known that before. She'd stood tall in the face of it for her pilots' sake. Now, alone in the cockpit, she wept, but her voice never wavered.
This
command was
her
pleasure to give.
"This is Hellcat 1-1.
Open fire. Send that woman to hell."
 

The 151s and the 223s fired from outside what was considered their maximum effective range. Normally the time it took the shells to arrive would be enough for the target to maneuver out of their path. But that was when a single fighter fired its six autocannon. When the forty-one remaining fighters of the
Hardway
Air Group all opened up together, their combined fire fell across such a wide area, there was literally nowhere for Matilda Witt’s longboat to go to escape the vengeful rain.
 

*****

SCS
Boomslang
slipped out the open bay doors of
Arbitrage
when all eyes were on Witt's longboat and the hail of shells. From inside the stealthed ship's cockpit, Ram witnessed the death of Matilda Witt. Just before the sabot ripped through it and the high-explosive shells blew it apart, she spoke on comms one last time. She said, "I’ll see you all soon." Then, her boat cooked off in a strangely extended flash of uncontrolled fusion.

The fighters that had ended her then rotated to fire on the alien diplomatic ship next. Its thin beams tried to slice at them, but it didn't stand a chance.

Some of those fighters should be from the 38th SD, Ram thought. "Special Delivery," he said as they launched warspite torpedoes too close to the enemy hull for its few defensive guns to find them and save it.

"
Now. Get us out of here while they’re all looking the other way," Ram said. "Hit the main engines. "
 

"
Lighting ‘em up," Medoc said. "Watch our endo emissions."
 

"Got it."

The alien ambassadorial ship seemed to shudder as the warheads detonated against its hull. It was small enough to get lost in the detonation flash and when they could see it again, burning fragments were all that remained.

"
Go, go, go!"
 

"
Full thrust."
 

Ram thought he had enough of a grip on the handhold, but he was wrong.
Boomslang
had less inertial negation now than the one test run he’d been on and since he’d only been using one hand to hold on, when the ship blasted out of there towards the fat and bloody gas giant and the aliens' homeworld moon, he was thrown backwards with the Chief. They impacted on the bulkhead together.

"
That was fast." Medoc said before they managed to get up.
 

"
What?"
 

Medoc's co-pilot, Max, tapped at his console to project a display over the OMNI NAV set between their seats. The scale of the ships in the projection was minute, but they were big enough to discern the enemy particle streams slicing at UNS and Privateer hulls. "The fleet is outnumbered two to one and the Squidies still have that dreadnought. I saw what that thing can do at Sirius. I saw it slice over twenty ships apart before the rest of them could escape."

"
Get us to the enemy’s homeworld moon" Ram said. "We have to end this war."
 

Chapter Fifteen

The Squidies’ gas giant loomed over the Lancers and the forty-one, remaining fighters, filling Jordo's cockpit with blood red, monochrome light. The reflection of Beta Draconis off the clouds was bright enough that he could see Paladin’s face in his helmet. And Dirty’s. Neither of them rotated their heads or looked around now. They kept their eyes fixed on the aliens’ homeworld moon.

The thin atmo of that rock had an elusive green tint that could only be seen at the edges. Even from this far out, the muddy yellow ridges and blue-green valleys made it clear why they called it the 'moldy pea'. The Squidy population lived almost entirely underground in cities carved out of the soft rock. Besides the glittering places their mega-nests broke the surface, yellow, crusty, volcanic hills and cyan lowlands dominated.

The last fighters of the
Hardway
Air Group ripped across the vacuum towards it. Lancer 1-1 looked for
Boomslang
on LiDAR and radar and saw nothing, not even faint IR emissions from her exhaust. For a single, fearful instant, he thought maybe that wasn’t because of her stealth, but because she actually hadn’t successfully launched from
Arbitrage
before the enemy turned that ship to debris and gas. With any luck,
Boomslang
had slipped out of the bay while all eyes were on the death of Matilda Witt and they had been a hundred Ks away by the time the first of the alien warheads and the vengeful salvos from the Squidies’ fleet found
Arbitrage
.