War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan (14 page)

"But how the hell could that happen?" Biko said, "
Taipan
and her four carriers have pilots and planes to spare." Because of all Witt's fighter patrols, Biko had even temporarily reduced the number of junks flying
Hardway's
CAP because it seemed like overkill. "How could Witt's air controllers screw up like that?"

"I'll show you exactly how." Dana placed her matchbox computer on the table. "Project exhibit A," she told it, and the matchbox projected the battlegroup in the air above it. "The relative positions of the carriers and command ships haven't changed since we reentered the system. We've been steaming across Groomsbridge in this formation for hours." Her eyes flicked down to the computer as she spoke. "Add concatenated patrol paths as a layer."

The computer projected the paths of every one of
Taipan's
and
Hardway's
patrols around the big ships. It was a web of intersecting lines that glowed thick and bright and almost solid around the battlegroup.

"It looks pretty tight," Biko said.

"It does. Viewed from this perspective, it
looks
as if nothing's going to be able to creep up on
Hardway
without coming into close range of a fighter patrol and getting spotted. It looks tight. But it's not. Add the path of the moving blind spot as a layer."

The matchbox then displayed the changing position of the gap over time as a single, thick, red line projected through the carrier group. It wormed from the outer edge of the projection, cutting back and looping over itself over a hundred times, eventually intersecting with
Hardway
.  

"To not get spotted," she said, "they had to stay in the moving gap, the blind spot. That maintained the minimal distance of 2Ks between themselves and the patrols required so we wouldn't detect their stealth. That's how they got in."

"That's impossible," Biko said, pointing to the red line showing the flight of the alien special forces boarding party. "No pilot, alien or human, could easily note that vulnerability and pick out that flightpath.
You
found it because you knew exactly what to look for."

"I agree," Dana said. "You'd have to have this kind of flightpath worked out
before
the insertion attempt..." That didn't raise many eyebrows, but the next part would. Dana said, "I believe this gap was purposefully designed into the patterns of the air patrols."

"Are you saying someone on board
Taipan
created the vulnerability on purpose?" Cozen didn't look as if he could believe that. Dana had a hard time coming to grips with it herself. He said, "Am I to believe it is your contention that the alien commandos got on board my ship because someone aided them by setting purposefully flawed patrol patterns?"

"The patrol pattern was engineered to create the vulnerability the aliens exploited and it's not the kind of vulnerability that one creates by mistake."

Mouths hung open. All except for Cozen's. He didn't look surprised enough, she thought.

Despite the fact that all of this had happened on her watch, when it came to figuring out what had happened, Dana had done damn good work and she was proud of it. She didn't think anybody would be recommending her for a bloody medal, but she never expected the reaction she got.

Harry Cozen bellowed at her like a hoarse walrus. "There is no way I'm going to believe that anyone on
Taipan
had anything to do with planning this attack. That is patently absurd. It is impossible. Besides it being unthinkable that a human would ever aid the Squidies, no avenue of communication exists between our species. Your explanation is an unreasonable fantasy, Ms. Sellis – a fabrication designed to shift blame away from your own negligence in preventing this attack when you had the command chair. You have failed this ship in the most grievous manner."

She was stunned.

"When I promoted you," he said, "I never thought I'd have to question that decision. I hold
you
responsible for the alien incursion. If I have anything to say about it, then you'll never sit in the chair again."

Dana didn't understand. Cozen wasn't an idiot; he had to be in some kind of willful denial of the apparent facts not to see this. The alien special forces unit had penetrated dozens of fighter patrols along with the combined LiDAR and radar arrays of eight warships.
She'd
been the one to figure out what was happening, but since
she'd
been the one sitting in the chair, Harry Cozen was going to blame it all on her. She'd probably never have the bridge again, she thought. But it was far worse than that.

"When Matilda Witt comes aboard to brief
Hardway
's
officers on her plan of attack for the battle in the Castor system, there's no need for you to be present." Before he stormed off the observation deck, Cozen relieved Dana Sellis of duty and told her if he heard another word about her idiotic theory, then she'd find herself spending the rest of the war alone on a cold, dark rock.

*****

Dana Sellis betrayed very little, but Ram knew her face. They'd been close before the war.

As Cozen repeated again and again how he held her responsible, the way Dana's lids now flexed around her eyeballs told Ram she was trying like hell to make sense of this, unconsciously squinting at the problem. The millimeter of movement in her eyebrows, up towards the center told Ram this was wounding her.

She could never control her voice that well and they all heard the little stress vibrations and nervous spasms of her larynx when she spoke after Cozen stormed out in that decidedly uncharacteristic tantrum. "He's got to believe me," she said. "Matilda Witt is working with
them
somehow. Or Morrisey is.
Someone
over on
Taipan
is. Doesn't Cozen see that? Why can't he see that?"

"I'll talk to him," Lucy said. "Maybe its just the adrenaline still in his system. Makes him ornery."

Ram said, "He shouldn't have relieved you. And
I'll
be the one that tells him that. I'm the XO. It's my job to tell him when he's wrong."

He thought Cozen had gone back to his office, but when Ram went there to find him, there was nobody on the other side of the blown-out hatch. Everyone assumed taking the bridge had been the enemy's goal, but they came to kill or kidnap Harry Cozen. Ram was sure of it.

In the tube, the repair crews were just getting ready to start the welds over the holes the Squidies made. It had taken this long for the redsuits they sent in there to make sure there were no more Squidies hiding between hulls or between decks. When a bot found an unknown alien device glomed to the inner hull's gees, the whole area had to be evacuated until nervous redsuits could remove it carefully and isolate what turned out to be just a spent explosive cartridge from an alien maser.

Haze from the detonations and the Squidies' yellow smoke still hung in places, but since
Hardway's
pinch was producing .3 gees of artificial gravity again, most of it had fallen. Standing on the passageways along the side of the spine, the smoke hung in a low, foggy layer now that ended at Ram's knees. Flowing towards the bow vents, it looked like a river.

Past the men and women lifting the patching plates into position for welding, Ram caught a glimpse of Harry Cozen's gray hair and black jumpsuit through the haze. He was fifty meters down the tube towards the stern. He looked right at Ram; there was no doubting Cozen saw him. Even at a distance, you know when you've made eye contact with someone. Cozen disappeared down the tube into the Hab module's sub-levels.

When Ram followed and looked down the Hab's tube, Cozen looked up at him from the deck where the greensuit reactor engineers lived. He must have slid down the ladder to get down three decks so fast. Ram didn't bother calling for him to wait. He even took his time getting down there because Cozen wasn't trying to lose him. Cozen was trying to lead him somewhere.

Once he disengaged the ladder, Ram saw him again at the end of the passageway. The old man passed a couple of junior warrant officers who looked shocked to see him. Then, he opened a hatch and disappeared inside an emergency radiation shelter.

It wasn't much more than a heavily shielded closet. Cozen had picked it for the shielding, of course. It was practically an EM skiff – a guaranteed, no signals in, no signals out zone where surveillance was unlikely. But that wasn't enough for Cozen. He reached into the pocket of his black jumpsuit, pulled out a small, cloth-covered box, and opened the hinged lid. Inside were a set of demi-ovoid devices, the size of robin's eggs cut in half. He attached one to each of the bulkheads around them - walls, floor and ceiling. As he switched them on, Ram couldn't exactly
hear
the vibrations and the noise they produced all across the spectrum, but in the small, closed and highly reflective space, he could feel them in his teeth. "Just in case one of us has been tagged with a listening or recording device," Cozen said.

"At least three reactor engineers saw us come in here."

"Privacy first, Mr. Devlin. Discretion comes second. As long as they don't go telling Matilda Witt we're having secret conferences she can't hear, then there's no problems with a few raised eyebrows from Terrazzi's greensuits."

First things first. "Dana Sellis is right," Ram said. "She's right about how the Squidies infiltrated the battlegroup. I believe the pattern of
Taipan's
fighter patrols was crafted to appear tight, but to create a single, moving gap the aliens exploited to get through the defenses and board us."

Harry Cozen said, "Well, of course Sellis is bloody right. Matilda Witt served me up to the Squidies. I don't know
how
she managed to make her bloody diplomatic contacts, but I imagine there's more to the story of her survival behind enemy lines than any of us know."

"She told me 'lines of communication' had been opened."

"What?! And you didn't tell me until
now
? Good
god
, Devlin. You could have bloody..." Cozen appeared enraged, but Ram could tell he was faking it. His face wasn't red enough. No veins throbbed at his temples. Cozen already knew about Witt's contact with the enemy.

"She said that peace with the Squidies is possible. They're negotiating. But the aliens want you, Mr. Cozen. The Squidies want you in particular. They want you dead. Why? Tell me why. What happened
before
Moriah,
before
the first day of the war. What haven't you told me?"

For a moment after Ram asked the question, Cozen almost looked as if he doubted himself. Ram tried to see the wheels turning in Cozen's head, but all he saw behind the old man's eyes was a flashing glint like broken glass. "Almost a year ago, when you and I went to Moriah, the Squidies we found there thought we'd come to meet with them...to sign the peace treaty they'd offered."

"A peace treaty?" Ram's eyes widened with thoughts of all the dead in a war that could have been averted. "They offered a
peace
treaty? And you turned it
down
?"

Cozen snorted and shook his head. "They offered us a treaty like the ones given to the Native Americans. That's no peace Humanity can live with. And we don't have to. I made a choice.
We
made a choice.
We chose war.
That choice gave us the advantage of surprise and we leveraged that advantage to capture one of their ships with all its technology
intact
. We captured alien maps of a thousand, interstellar transit points."

The truth of Moriah was worse than Ram had imagined. "We killed their diplomats."

"
You
, Mr. Devlin, had the honor of killing their ambassador with a makeshift sword." It was more of a pig-sticker. "They know you, too. And your sidearm. You're on an alien spec ops hit-list as well." Cozen grinned. "That's quite a distinction." Suddenly, it was like the ship's artificial gravity began to malfunction; Ram felt himself pulled towards one bulkhead and then another. "You're swaying, Mr. Devlin. And you've turned pale. Perhaps you should sit down."

His mouth tasted like metal. It felt as if the gravity got stronger and as his ass hit the deck, Cozen spoke to him from the end of a long, dim-edged tunnel that seemed longer every second until Cozen was gone and all Ram could hear in the dark was the abstracted gravel and growl of the man's voice like he'd been locked in a pitch black cage with a beast.

When Ram came to full consciousness again a few seconds later, he tried to speak, but there were too many things to say at once. "We... the whole war... it's our..."

"No, Mr. Devlin, no. The entire war is
not
our fault, no matter how much you wish to blame yourself for it. The aliens' opening offers in our negotiations were unacceptable.
They
started this war by offering to be our imperial masters. Never forget that."

Ram wanted out of that suffocating box.

Cozen said, "If Matilda Witt is conducting negotiations with the Squidies between raids, then it may even be quasi-legal if she has the right friends inside UN intelligence. That's probably where she got hold of the exo-linguistics daemon she's no doubt using. That's where I got it."

"She said the whole war is a negotiation. She said that's what the Squidies think, too."

"She's right," Cozen said grimly. "This war is a bloody negotiation determining the fates of our two species and which of them will be dominant. I assure you, Mr. Devlin, any
peace
negotiated between our two species at this point would be the worst kind possible for mankind due to the simple fact that our alien neighbors possess more advanced technologies than we do. They are sufficiently more advanced that it ensures any currently negotiated peace would undoubtedly be an exploitative one. If we do not wish to be an India to their British Empire, then now is not the time for peace."

"But..."

"And neither is it a time for truth. I know that pains you, Mr. Devlin, but allow me to remind you that if rumors of any of this were to reach the global public, then the damage to the war effort would be significant and potentially irreparable."