War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway (2 page)

The officer at NAV that watch was Katz. "New LiDAR contact at just over one-million Ks. Decreasing range and bearing to
Mohegan
. It's on an intercept course with the junk. It's got a Staas Company transponder, but that's it. No registry numbers. No name."

Ram said, "Give us a look," and before Bergano could stop him, he'd tapped at the arm of the command chair to project a radar-augmented image from
Hardway
's arrays.

The unnamed ship intercepting
Hardway's
lost junk was just over 200 meters. Her lines said she was a Staas Company ship, but Ram had never seen one with a railgun before. Her outer hull had been repaired recently and stacked with additional armor. In some places you could see discolorations in the belt-iron steel where she hadn't taken enough damage to repair, but extreme heat had changed the structure of the metal.

There hadn't been a shot fired in space since the War of the Americas. That was two decades ago and since it was a relatively new ship he was looking at, Ram had to wonder where she got her scars. In the deep shadow he saw her name painted on the bow:
Arbitrage
.

Chapter Three

Arbitrage
was 217 meters from bow to stern and a classic Staas hull shape, a long, swollen teardrop with a truncated tail. Her oversized engines said she was fast. Ram decided that despite the railgun and the armor she must have been built as a salvage ship because of her single, massive launch bay. It was 170 meters, big enough for three 50-meter junks. Over comms,
Hardway
thanked the mystery ship multiple times for picking up their crippled boat, but all the unidentified, female voice of
Arbitrage
said was, 'Acknowledged'.

They said
Arbitrage's
redsuits cut their way into
Mohegan
and found the miners and two pilots frozen solid. An hour after that, the ship
pulled up parallel to
Hardway
's topside launch bays and opened her giant bay doors to transfer
Mohegan
back to the carrier. A dozen
Arbitrage
crew in unmarked, black exosuits portaged the dead junk across the 500-meter gap between ships and then handed her off to a squad of
Hardway's
redsuits flying knuckledragger mechs. They carried the 50-meter ship into bay 14 puffing bursts from their jets.

The bodies were inside. As for the ship,
Mohegan's
autopsy revealed the junk's main batteries had discharged into her reactor and all other systems in a fraction of a second. The zap killed the fusion reactor. The crew couldn't restart it without the power from the batteries and every battery on
Mohegan
, even the ones in the tools, had discharged at the same time the main battery did. The power conditioning gear was half-melted. So were the computers. The junk's crew had used add-on chemical thrusters meant for moving rocks to get the ship going on its path back to the carrier, but the solid fuel rockets couldn't get them up to speed. Over the days it took to get back, their suit batteries ran out. They froze.

It was an improbable accident. Five separate safety locks on ten systems would have to be removed for it to happen. Ram wrote the ISTSB incident report at Captain Horan's request. It stated the facts: someone would have to tell a junk's systems to fail like that and nobody aboard
Mohegan
or
Hardway
had the administrative user level to get the systems to do it. Ram got summoned to Captain Horan's office twenty minutes after he'd uploaded his report.

To get to the command tower from the forward bays he rode a platform that shot down the center of
Hardway's
spine. Inside the 900-meter tensegrity spine you could see farther than anywhere else on the ship so it became a natural place for the pilots and mining crews, maintenance crews and engineers to congregate and hang off the struts when they weren't eating or sleeping, working or gambling.

Ram heard Asa Biko's voice as he came up the command tower's aft tube on the lift. Inside Captain Horan's office, Biko stood tall and wide in front of the desk. Biko was a big man, but in
Hardway's
.3 artificial gees moving himself around wasn't much of a strain. Captain Horan finally said, "Enter, Mr. Devlin," as Biko continued to list the reasons management's neglect could have caused the accident.

Once Ram got inside, he saw Bergano against the bulkhead to his right. Two strangers stood on the other side of Horan's office. He hadn't seen them come aboard from
Arbitrage.
 

The man was in his fifties with gray eyes that glinted sharp like broken glass when he looked back at you. He wore a company officer's jump suit, but it was black instead of Staas blue. No patches. No insignia. Just his name: Cozen.

There were only twenty-five Staas Company Vice Presidents and an infrequently sighted Aussie named Harry Cozen was one of them. Ram only heard his name spoken in cautious whispers. Staas company had already been the number one aerospace and exo-atmospheric mining company when Harry Cozen came along. He made Staas Company the world's premier military contractors and the only demonstrable winners in the devastating War of the Americas. Now, Cozen was one of the ones that worked in the dark. The operations Harry Cozen managed for the company didn't show up in shareholder reports.

The woman with him wore a matching suit and the patch on her chest said Wells. It took Ram too long to recognize her. He thought he'd have known her the moment he saw her, but it took him a few seconds. To be fair, she looked different than the last time he'd seen her. She looked harder. And he'd never seen her without any hair before. When she saw Ram interrogating her face, she reached up and put on the thick black watch cap she'd been holding in her hand. It looked like she had hair then, and he recognized her instantly. Mickey! When she saw the flash across Ram's face, she winked. It had been twenty years.

Older, more scars, but she stood up straight. Mickey Wells had been a marine and a merc. If she was working with Cozen, then she wore it proud – as proud as she looked in the pictures of her taken when she fought with the Corps back in the War of the Americas.

Twenty-three years ago, when Ram was five, that same war killed his parents. Mickey came back after winning it and found him starving in the bombed out shell of her trailer. She didn't know him. She could have left him there, but she didn't. She took him to her one-room, fast-printed, tower apartment and took care of him. She taught him to read and she taught him maths, and then, three years later, when he was eight, she somehow got him sent to Staas Company's Academy in Perth.

He never saw her again after that. She just disappeared off the face of the earth. No message – nothing. Later, he would discover that the day before she vanished, she'd paid his tuition for the next sixteen years in cash. Where she got that much money he never knew.

It's not as if Ram ever consciously forgave her for sending him away, but even eight-year-old Ram knew it was easier for her without him. He remembered the things he knew Mickey did to get money – things she wasn't proud of and tried to hide. When he climbed up and found her guns one day up where she'd hid them at the top of the apartment's rattling HVAC unit, he guessed what she did with them. When she came home, he told her he'd found them and how he knew what they were for and that it was okay. He told her he was grown up now and he understood and she didn't have to hide things like that from him. She slapped those words right out of his mouth.

Ram looked for Mickey for years. He searched public records, company records, military databases – nothing. He even wrote a daemon program to lurk in the Staas network just to keep an eye out for her in any and all database entries it could access, but it never found any info on her. She'd vanished. Now that he knew who she'd been working for, it all made sense. Anyone standing close to Harry Cozen would be cloaked in the shadow of secrecy he cast.

Ram had to force himself to look away from her. It took him a few seconds to register what Biko was saying. "I've already filed a formal ISTSB complaint."

Captain Horan said, "There's proof it was operator error. Ask Mr. Devlin. His report said
Mohegan's
systems couldn't have failed that way unless someone had ordered them to. Isn't that right, Mr. Devlin?"

No. That wasn't right at all, Ram thought. His report even said nobody on board had the user authority to make it happen. It was obvious his words were being twisted.

That's when Harry Cozen opened his mouth and spoke for the first time. His voice was smoothed gravel. "Captain Horan, your records will be examined by UNOSHA and ISTSB. But your
other
records aren't in order, are they." It wasn't a question. Cozen already knew Horan would adjust the numbers at the end of the run to allow for a little skimming. His
second
set of books weren't ready yet. "Since
Mohegan's
unfortunate return, you've been scrambling to fudge the numbers in case there was an investigation, but you haven't had a chance to finish." Horan's face went beet red and the vein in his neck throbbed. A certain amount of corruption had always been tolerated, but apparently Horan's license to steal had just been revoked at the worst possible moment. Without company support, an investigation would find him out for sure.

"Mr. Cozen..."

"Go see to your ledgers, Captain Horan." Cozen said, "Now, please." His eyes flicked to the hatch. "Go. Now. Before you disgrace us all."

Captain Horan remained seated for an extra second before he did the only thing he could do. He said, "Yes, Mr. Cozen," and went to cook his books as fast as he could. He looked back just once before he left, taking Bergano with him.

After they were gone, Cozen walked across the compartment and closed the hatch. "Did you ever find out where they were working?
Mohegan
, I mean. Do you know where the incident actually happened?"

"No," Ram said. "They were supposed to be working a rock on the far side of the Jupiter Trojans, but the path Biko and I extrapolated from their return trajectory didn't intersect with the orbits of any known bodies. They probably deviated from their flight plan."

"Mr Biko," Cozen said. "I get the impression you give a damn about the lives of the people around you. I'm going out there to get some answers and I want you flying my junk. You're coming too, Mr. Devlin."

"Mr. Cozen?"

"We leave in eight hours," Cozen said. "Ten men and women died aboard
Mohegan.
We owe it to them to find out why." Biko asked about the flight plan, and Cozen said, "No flight plans." That worried Ram. If you don't say where you're going, then nobody knows where to look to find you when you don't come back. "Bring
Hardway
's geologist, as well," Cozen said. "Bring Dana Sellis."

 Ram put all the questions about Harry Cozen out of his mind mostly just because Mickey Wells was there with him. He had no idea what Cozen was getting them into, but seeing that Mickey looked so proud to be a part of it made him think that whatever it was, it was something he'd be proud of too.

Chapter Four

Asa Biko used the four, outboard vectoring nacelles to slip
Gold Coast
out of her bay and then lit up the two fixed engines in the stern. He and D'Ambrosse piloted the mining junk down the carrier's length, passing between
Hardway
and
Arbitrage
.  

Hollis, Tse, Lapuis, and Oboto floated in the personnel compartment with Dana and Mickey Wells. A Staas mining junk couldn't spare the power to produce constant artificial gravity like a carrier could. If you worked off a mining junk, you had to get good in zero-gee. Ram Devlin hung behind the pilots in the cockpit with Cozen because he wanted to know where they were going as soon as Cozen told them.

"Make for the far side of the Trojans," Cozen said. He meant the Jupiter Trojans – the sizable group of asteroids that rode Jupiter's L4 Lagrange point. The L4 was one of five places in Jupiter's orbit where the gravitational fields of Jupiter and the Sun effectively balanced out and the rocks there got what amounted to a free ride through space, proceeding ahead of Jupiter in its orbit. That was where
Mohegan
had been working. 

Ram didn't tell anyone else about how he and Mickey went way back. It wasn't hard to hide the fact that they knew each other. Every time it looked like he was about to say something to her, she glared at him like he was about to blow everything and then turned away. She went out of her way to ignore him. She spent most of her time double-checking her exosuit and adjusting the carry on that gun of hers. When she drew it from the holster, the gold inlays and the engraved ivory caught everyone's attention. "That's a Honma & Voss
Itar
," Dana said. "Wide-bore X-ray laser. User-regulated rate of discharge. Illegal carry on Earth. Only two-hundred were ever made." 

"And only 18 are known to still exist. This is #087," Mickey said. "You a collector?"

"My father is. He'd trade his whole collection for that. Where did you get it? Those were only made for the Revolutionary Guard. They were all killed in the Battle of Istanbul."

"Uh-huh. That's where it came from."

In the eyes of the miners, the fact that Mickey was armed said she wasn't management. It said she did the dirty work. That made her labor, like them, so they weren't afraid to ask her questions. "Never seen a company ship with a railgun on it," Hollis asked her. "What kinda wallop does it pack?"

Mickey said, "Don't know. Never seen it fired."  

Lapuis said, "Then how'd
Arbitrage
get those scars on the hull?" 

Instead of answering that, Mickey asked how far out they'd been.

"What about you?" Tse asked her. "How far
you
been out?"

"I was out past Sedna once. Before we turned around and came back, I went up and stood on the bow so I could be the farthest man from home for ten minutes." That got a laugh, but it didn't last.