War of Alien Aggression 5 Cozen's War (7 page)

The silence hung thick until Chief Horcheese said, "
Devlin can’t understand anyone else but me when it comes to the nitty-gritty. Calls me his technical adviser. Things get too hardcore and he’s lost." Quinn’s shipmates were close enough now that Tig could see how it didn’t look like they believed her. "No shit," she said. "He's wizard with tactics. Bunk with machines. I’m his secret weapon."
 

Fiske said, "
And them? Shit, look at the chroma coming off those bright red suits. Those can’t be more than 4 months old. Those two knobs are bloody cherries. Why are they here?" Boomslang's crewmen talked like redsuits themselves, but they wore black.
 

"
They’re the redsuits that rescued
Tipperary,
" Quinn said.
 

"
You’re the reds that did that, huh?" It seemed like he'd heard of them.
"
Still don’t need you." Fiske stepped forward and extended his arm to give Tig a little shove and see if he had cherry-legs and would go down easy in the light gees. Tig didn’t flinch. They played this game all the time on
Hardway
. He was ready to take that blow and not budge a centimeter, but it never came.
 

The Chief's artificial limbs had a muscle fiber that was 10 times faster than any fast-twitch mod. Fiske didn’t see much besides a blur until she caught his forearm with one hand. He couldn’t pry it loose. They froze there like that until the realization visibly dawned on Fiske’s face that the Chief had been heavily augmented with artificial limbs and she was many times stronger than he was. She pivoted and shoved him back with enough force that he was lucky to remain standing after he hit the bulkhead. "Don’t bruise my cherries," she said.

Fiske went aft with Totoppolus and left them standing there.

"He’s tense like the rest of us," Quinn said, "but don’t question his commitment to the mission." Tig didn’t. In fact, Tig agreed with him. They
didn’t
need him or Chief Horcheese or Parker either on this mission. At least not to
fix
anything. Officially, they were backup crew in case of a casualty, but if this ship got hit, it was all over. All he could figure was that Commander Devlin had brought them along for an entirely different purpose than the one they'd been told.
 

Chapter Nine

Jordo flew inverted with the Lancers in close formation and looked up through the F-223’s cockpit canopy at the largest armada of human warships ever assembled in space. The cruisers, the battleships, and destroyers flew like armored peaks and
Tamerlane
led boldly, inviting the enemy’s flying bombs to detonate against her sides, daring their particle beams to cut her. Earth’s dreadnought and the battleships on the line, the carriers, the destroyers and frigates, all the ships there, all the ships lost, they represented the combined efforts of billions. When Harry Cozen gave the word, all that sweat and sacrifice and hate hurled itself at the enemy line…

The Squidies' cruisers and pocket carriers didn’t budge. Their half-kilometer vertical hulls canted a few degrees forward and in the moment they accelerated, their pinkish exhaust plumes silhouetted them. Up and down their line, alien capital ships and carriers that had remained spread out to match the invasion fleet’s threat symmetrically now scrambled with rosy fire under their asses to converge and meet the incoming threat.

The final battle for their home system had begun. Already the ports in their cliff-face hulls had opened. Jordo's flight helmet showed him the heat pouring out the warhead hatches. They’d launch the flying bombs any second. The alien fighters hung high and low around them, waiting to escort the Squidies' warheads in past the defensive screen. He couldn’t yet make out the bandits’ spiked hulls, but they'd be closer soon enough.

"Lancers and Hellcats, this is
Po’ Boy
. We’re gonna send Squidy our regards now." The squadron of junks flew between the capital ships, racing from the rear. Across the top panes of his canopy, the junks blasted off, hell-bent and full of hate with torpedo modules slung under their frames. Each of the 96 junks streaked plasma from four nacelles and their rear engines, leaving the vacuum hatched with thin, parallel trails like glowing 10,000K threads drawn in hot gas.
 

"Roger,
Po’ Boy
," he said, "Have eyes on you. Lancers and Hellcats will keep the bandits at bay." He spun a quarter turn on his maneuvering thrusters and blasted off to intercept the Squidies already making for the junks. Paladin rolled in close on his wing. "Stay close and in Fluid 5...Lancer 1-6...Burn," he said.
"Way ahead of you, Jordo." Her Sky Jack ripped across the black in front of him, spiraling down on the lead trio of incoming enemy fighters. "First one is mine."
 

The Hellcats were closer to the incoming bandits than the Lancers. Not even Burn’s jacked-up 223 could beat them in the race to get within weapons range. Each of the Hellcats’ 39 fighters sported six, long-barreled autocannon, and they opened up together, stitching eye-searing fire across the black like a net, chasing the lead Squidies, firing in front and behind and everywhere around them until there was no choice for the aliens but to brave their chances hotdogging through the Hellcats’ fire.

Once, the Hellcats had been nuggets and the aliens could have spun and jinked and leveraged the superiority of their inertial negation systems to dance through the space between the human pilots’ shells, but not anymore. Now, the 55th were mostly crackshot aces and if the Squidies wanted to get at the junks below, they’d have to bleed for it.

When they were close enough they knew the Bitzers couldn’t dodge them, one flight of alien bandits and then the next opened up with their particle streams. The hyper-accelerated heavy nuclei shot out of their emitters in razor-edged beams that sliced across the Hellcats’ formation, flaring up bright where they hit the Privateer fighters. Two cooked off quick.

The alien flight leader managed to get through, but the maneuvers it chose doomed the two Squidies on its wing. The net of fire closed around them, and after the sparking milliseconds when the 140mm sabot burrowed in, both of the bandits must have cracked a reactor because they jetted fire out the holes blown in their hulls as they spun out of control.

Jordo and the Lancers swung in on a spiraling vector, planning to cut across the enemy squadrons as they engaged the Hellcats. He caught a glimpse of the UN capital ships loosing their warspites in a fearsome salvo. The torpedoes streaked straight across the black, drawing five-hundred glowing trails between the warships of the invasion fleet and the alien defenders.

On his next set of maneuvers before he and the Lancers engaged the alien aces, he saw the trails from the Squidies’ flying bombs heading for the fleet. They corkscrewed towards the warspite torpedoes like they were on a collision course, but the two swarms passed through each other leaving the space behind them woven with a dizzying fabric of hot exhaust.

At the speed they came, the enemy fighters grew from glittering specks to furious bundles of spiked hull and rosy fire in heartbeats. Some of them ignored the incoming Lancers and the shells chasing them just to get a shot at the torpedo junks. Just before the Lancers' Sky Jack 223s tore through the Squidies’ formation, the desperate alien aces stabbed in rapier bursts. They hulled three junks. Wounded boats spun and spewed molten metal before they cooked off.

The gun towers that bristled up and down the alien ships of the line fired on the junks together like a thousand searchlights, slashing and waving, groping in the blackness for them.

"
Release! Away! Away! Fox! Fox! Fox!" Pardue’s lunar drawl made it sound casual when over five hundred more torpedoes launched from the bellies of the junks and joined the other five-hundred loosed from
Tamerlane
and
Minh
and
Pretorius
and all the fat UN capital ships. The combined swarm flew into the interlacing enemy particle streams, a patchwork of small-bore, fast-moving defensive fire, now slicing furiously to thin the dense school of fusion-tipped warspite torpedoes bearing down on them.
 

Jordo pulled up and away with the junks and glanced to the rear to see the enemy warheads spiraling at the UN ships almost as if they were out of control. They were doing their best to avoid the shells thrown up by the gunnery junks and the pack of QF-111 Dingo drones joyously chasing them across the vacuum with their cannon.

He never actually saw the UN battleships and the Privateer attack carriers behind them open up with the railguns. The combined alpha strike they threw at the Squidies ripped across the diminishing space between the opposing fleets in less than a second, but all Jordo saw in the exact moment the fleet fired was the first of the alien warheads detonating. His helmet’s visor darkened to protect his eyes. He thought he’d seen three UN ships blown open in that flash, all gutted like mined-out mountains and on fire inside.

It only took a fraction of a second for his visor to clear, but by that time, he’d turned his head just in time to see hundreds of osmium-tungsten railgun sabot rip through the waving streams and find the Squidies’ hulls like a hard-falling rain. Each of the impact flashes was bright enough that it bloomed and bled into the next so that all of the Squidies’ front line ships seemed to fade to white, dimming only enough for him to discern the lines of broken hulls and note how the aliens' defensive fire had stopped just before the cloud of warspite torpedoes detonated against their hulls.

*****

Hardway’s
kilometer-long spine still shook from the enemy particle stream that had ripped a 170m, molten-edged wound up the port side of the secondary launch bays. Pieces of the outer hull that spattered off impacted against the bridge’s windows. "Damage report, Mr. Bergano."

"
Coming in now, Mr. Cozen… Redsuits have the fires under control. The warhead we took lit up a full deck of the primary bays. Emergency bulkheads prevented the damage from being any worse." People always got trapped behind those, Dana thought. "Fifty-two," he said before Cozen asked. "Fifty-two casualties reported so far."
 

"
In the first enemy salvo, we lost the
Kirov
and the
Roosevelt
. And three destroyers," Biko reported. "Moderate casualties for the torpedo junks. They’re currently RTB for rearming and the fighters have the alien bandits occupied. Squidy lost more than we did in the alpha strike," he said, pointing to the burning husks of alien battleships, molten inside like cracked worlds, tumbling from the dozens of detonations that killed them.
 

Tamerlane
and the remaining ships of the flying wedge bore down on the thinned out vessels of the Squidy line as alien reinforcements poured in behind them.
"
They can hold us here only so long," Cozen said. "They’re taking it worse than we are."
 

"There’s a new set of contacts emerging from behind the 5th planet," Biko said. "Multiple, large contacts, Mr. Cozen. One is over 800 meters."
 

Bergano visibly paled. "There aren’t supposed to be any significant Squidy reserves left in this system," he said. His voice rose in pitch. "We made sure!
They aren’t supposed to have any reserves!
This whole plan is based on that! Once those vessels arrive, the Squidies will outnumber us. We’re overextended on the offensive, Mr. Cozen. They’ve lured us into a trap!"
 

"
Remain calm, Mr. Bergano," Cozen said.
 

Dana was calm, but she'd been briefed on this part. Harry Cozen had only pretended ignorance of the alien reserves. Bergano didn't know any of this was part of the plan and his reaction to seeing the enemy's unexpected reinforcements was understandable. This would turn the tide of battle solidly against Earth's invasion fleet.

Planned or not, they were still in a bad spot. Smart money wouldn’t bet on them now, but
this
was what it was going to take to get the enemy to believe the combined Privateer and UN invasion fleet was really on the ropes. Allowing the enemy to have the advantage was a dangerous gambit, but it was the only way Matilda Witt’s variant of the Trojan Horse could actually work.
 

Biko gestured over his console to enlarge and enhance the image projected over the bridge so they could see the largest of the incoming alien reserve ships more clearly. Once the tallest and widest of them grew as big as her fist, Dana knew it from across the bridge. Biko continued to enlarge it and once it was the size of her head, it suddenly looked like it was bearing down on them. At one meter-tall, hovering over the deck of
Hardway’s
bridge, the human skull painted on its side by alien hands still chilled Dana as much as it had the first time she’d seen it...right before this alien dreadnought clad in well-nigh impenetrable armor had savaged humanity’s two most powerful ships, UNS
Khan
and UNS
Hannibal
, obliterating both on the first day of the war.