War of Alien Aggression 5 Cozen's War (3 page)

"
That’s not what you were expecting to happen. You got lucky. You didn’t think you’d penetrate that armor with your cannon. You thought you’d ram that Squidy bomb. That’s what you were trying to do. If we’d ever tried anything like that, you’d have shot us yourself."
 

"
Yeah, well...if I get myself killed, I’ll have plenty of company," she said.
 

"
The fuck’s that mean?"
 

"
I trained how many combat pilots before I left? 1500? How many are alive now?"
 

"
You didn’t know it would work out like that. You didn't know we'd get used like fodder."
 

"
I knew it. I mean, nobody ever told me, but I knew. Didn’t I? I had to. Make planes as cheap as drones, train pilots faster than infantry grunts and what do you think will happen? They’ll use ‘em like fodder that’s what. It happened to you. There were 44 of you when we recruited you into the Lancers from prison. Now, there’s only 5."
 

"
That wasn’t your fault."
 

He swung the cell door shut behind him, and it clanged against the welded frame, but swung open again. She snorted as if that meant something to her. "If you say so, Jordo."

Chapter Three

They served burger-filled buns in the midships mess again. It’d been BBQ-filled buns the day before and bean-filled buns for lunch. Tig looked up from his tray to ask one of Cookie’s line elves if they had anything else and the moment he did, the beady eyes under the white chef’s hat glared at him, daring him. Ask. Ask, Squidy-lover.
Please
.
 

The only consolation was that even though it had three mess halls,
Hardway
didn’t have an officer’s mess and from where he sat next to Parker and Wambach and Keele, he could watch the ship’s officers eating the same food. A few tables away Lt. Commander Bergano gagged on it.

Tig broke the steamed, meat-filled bun open and looked at the processed material inside.

"
Bad idea, cherry." Wambach told him. "Eating one of those buns is all about trust."
 

"The hell does this burger-filled bun have to do with trust?"
 

"No shit," Keele said. "Opening wide and sinking your teeth into that thing without any reservation is a sign of
your
trust in the Staas Company to have
your
best nutritional interests at heart."
 

"
I didn’t know we made these things."
 

"
We didn’t," Keele said. "Staas Company's food division did. That’s not the point."
 

Tig sniffed it once more and shrugged. He said, "It’s all we’ve got." He bit off a hunk of it and chewed.

"Unless you want to eat Squidy-chow…" Wambach took a bite too.

"The heck does Squidy eat?"

"
Hey, Donger...Donger!" Wambach shouted to the next table where a squad of Lucy Elan’s company marines hunched over the same trays. "Donger knows. He’s been inside a nest."
 

"
Blue-green shit," Donger barked out. "They eat cyanobacteria. And some kind of crabs. But they’re big."
 

"
Crabs? Really?" Tig said.
 

"Fuck, yeah, they eat crabs. In one of those orbital nests I saw broken-up chitin shells strewn all over the place… meat scooped out of ‘em and piled up like in a kitchen, like we busted into Squidy’s mess."

"I thought chitin was bug stuff."

"Bug, crab, same bloody thing."

Wambach said, "I'll stick with the meat-filled buns."

Tig agreed Squidy's food wasn't worth taking, but they'd gotten plenty of other stuff off the aliens. The very first day of the war, they got interstellar transit maps from the Squidies along with the tech to open them. Scuttlebutt said the improved inertial negation systems in the fighters were reverse-engineered from a captured Squidy fighter. "That first day of the war… when
Hardway
captured that alien ship. Was that luck when you guys stumbled onto it? We wouldn’t have had a chance without all the stuff we got from that ship. I mean...I'm not saying Harry Cozen planned it, but it got us a l-"
 

Keele said, "Shut up, cherry."

"C'mon... You were on board
Hardway
then, on the first day of the war.
You
know. There's plenty of evidence that says Cozen must have known the aliens were there on Moriah before it started. So how'd they ambush him? I mean that rock it happened on wasn't even on company charts but he made right for it. How did he even find it?"

Wambach shouted, "Meester! Shut it! Stifle!"

"What? What the hell did I say?"

Wambach just shook his head at him wide-eyed like that was the best he could do to explain. "No matter what...You got no... You got no right to even talk about it."

"Why the hell is that?"

"Because you just got here," Keele said.

"What. Because I wasn’t on board yet when that happened? If Cozen ambushed the Squidies and we started the war, it doesn't matter when
I
got here. The war has been going on for years now."

"And what the fuck were you doing about it? You didn’t care. You were rolling around Staten Island City, stealing parts from the spaceport and getting into trouble with the local mob. The war didn’t touch you ‘cept the few times you looked up and saw battle lights in the sky or maybe watched the UN swabbies get their asses kicked on vid.

The war
did
touch him those years back home. It meant a lot more people had work. That meant more hoppers to jack so he could strip ‘em and rip ‘em.

Keele said, "Hell, Tig, y
ou didn’t even sign up with the Privateers. A judge sent you here."
 

"Fine, I don’t know anything. So,
you tell me
. If we started it, if this war didn't really start the way we all think it did, then what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?"
 

"
What are you supposed
to do
with it? Do your job. Shut the fuck up."
 

"
Why do I have to shut the fuck up about it?"
 

"
I got
my
reasons, cherry." Keele said, "Here’s yours: Most of the redsuits on this ship didn’t sign up after the war started. At least we didn’t mean to sign up. I mean we all got shanghaied through Staas Company General Order 1633. Contract had some crap in it about ‘time of war’ and ‘extraordinary need’. And that's not just us. That's most Privateers. All the attack carriers, anyway. We didn’t sign up, we got drafted."
 

"
So you didn't sign up either," Tig said.
 

Wambach thumped his own forehead. "
No, idiot. That's not the point. What he's saying is: if we got the royal shaft like that and if
we
can shut the fuck up about it so we can win this war and get it the fuck over with, then you can have the fucking decency to shut your yap about some alien propaganda bullshit story about who started this war and why. That shit does us no good." Wambach stood up so his chair shot out behind him. He ignored the shouts from the company marines behind him as he made for the hatch.
 

Tig looked at the mangled meat in the middle of his burger-filled bun. "But..."
 

"
History," Parker said. "I’ve studied a lot of history. It's who we are. Change the past...change what people know of it, and you can get away with anything."
 

"Why does
he have to lay into
me
so hard over it?"
 

"You're telling him there's a chance he's not who he thought he was, Tig. He’s pissed."

"And he’s saying it isn't
my
past that got changed because I wasn’t signed up then? That's bunk."

She nodded.
 

Chapter Four

From the bow guns’ observation port, Commander Ram Devlin, XO of the Staas Company attack carrier
Hardway
looked down railgun barrels so long they appeared to converge. He could just make out the bronze sculpture Harry Cozen had welded to the topside bow plate of the ship. It was priceless and putting it on the bow of a warship had been his message to the crew that their individual lives were just as important. ‘Bird in Space’ by Constantin Brancusi. 1926.
 

The sliver of metal still curved elegantly enough, arcing through space with the grace of a bird’s path in flight.
That
part of the sculpture’s visual metaphor had survived the ordeal of riding welded to the bow of a warship like a figurehead. Other elements hadn’t fared so well. The gleaming, reflective surface that had once made the 1.85m bronze seem to streak like a thing in fast flight was gone, pitted with spatter from particle streams or endless impacts with stray atoms and nuclei of the stellar medium. This 239 year-old bronze got patinaed with an ablative bath of exotic particles every time the carrier pierced the membrane of a hypermass transit to ride the passage to the next system.
 

That Brancusi had been beaten up, but it was still glorious. It was, in fact, a
different
work of art now then when it had been cast. The artist had made many of these, Ram knew, and those polished surfaces all communicated the glory of flight as this one still did, but the surface of this one was scarred and pitted with a different truth of flight, the one only flying things can actually know, the one that makes them envy the restive creatures on the ground.

He rode the lift down the tube to the ship's spine alongside a crew of railgunners swapping out for the 3rd shift. "Mr. Devlin," two of them muttered in acknowledgment. The other three stayed silent, eyes on their boots of their exosuits. This was the Staas Company Privateers and not some UN fleet ship. They didn’t have to salute or call him sir. But the way none of them met his eyes made Ram think there was something they didn’t want him to see in theirs.

Before the lift hit the carrier’s spine, he made up a question to ask them regarding the readiness of the bow guns, the answer to which he already knew and imagined would be something they’d be proud to report. The Chief who answered him had heavy-lidded, bruise encircled eyes. At first, Ram thought the light he saw behind those eyes was dim with the same wear the sculpture on the bow had taken. Then he saw he was partially mistaken. That Chief was tired and worn, but her lids weren’t just heavy. As she told him about the improved reloading speeds, her eyes narrowed involuntarily. That wasn’t simple fatigue; it was distrust. Like Pardue and Ernie in
Gold Coast’s
cockpit, this Chief had believed the Squidy propaganda she’d heard.

Once they got off, he let the gun crew have the next people-mover that came. It whisked them away zipping them down the ship’s kilometer-long spine more easily perhaps without the weight of him and all those questions. Ram took the next people-mover to cycle up to the platform and rode the 400 meters down the spine to the command tower all alone.

He was the last to arrive. Cozen’s hatch was still ajar and inside, ‘the cage’ was still open. Harry Cozen’s office below the bridge had never been that large and the operational security measures he’d added made it smaller. He’d built a room within a room, two of them. The interior of the two cages now comprised the entirety of the usable space in the compartment. The two sets of walls and floors and ceilings were simple radiation shielding, belt-iron-steel, patch-welded like Hardway’s armor, but instead of keeping energy and radiation out, the armor kept electromagnetic energy from escaping. It was a cage, meant to keep secrets.

Right now, it held Harry Cozen, an unnamed figure wearing a full exosuit and helmet with a blackout visor, and fifteen people with a lot of questions. They sat silent around the person in the exosuit. Cozen was the only one who looked relaxed. Ram saw the glasses and full decanter on the desk and was glad he hadn’t missed the scotch. They’d all need a drink after hearing this plan.

You couldn’t bug this room except with a device based on quantum-paired electrons, but the almost imperceptible shaking in his teeth once Ram was inside told him that Cozen had already activated a suite of counter-surveillance devices whose function included negation of such technologies’ functional utility. This suite of noisemakers was better than the one Ram owned...different, though Cozen still wouldn’t tell him how. This one made Ram’s mouth taste like metal, like he was being irradiated, though Cozen swore that wasn’t the case.

"
You’re the last one, Mr. Devlin," Harry Cozen growled as he rose from the edge of his desk. "We’re only waiting on you." He looked like he was more than ready to finish this war, but it wasn’t fatigue driving him or an inability to witness any more of the horror. No. Harry Cozen’s eye glinted with all the eagerness of a sharp blade waiting to do the thing for which it had been made.