War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan (22 page)

She found 4 complete exosuits in the forward hold. She tore the wrapper off one of the gold-painted helmets, put in on without testing it, fixed the latches, and pushed off the bulkhead towards the port-side escape hatch. Dana turned two switches and flipped a covered safety before depressing a pair of recessed buttons. The hatch opened almost instantly, and the escaping, pressurized atmo blew Dana out into the black.

As she tumbled and spun, a fast-moving constellation of angry, bluish stars veered towards her...F-151 interceptors still loyal to Matilda Witt. Dana's agonized fingers gestured through the menus she saw inside her new helmet until she could hear them on comms.

"
Taipan
control, this is Kodiak 3-6... Uh...we have a visual on lifeboat 01B. Can you repeat that order,
Taipan
? Kodiak squadron cannot confirm we copy correctly. Please repeat." 

"Destroy it," Morrisey's voice said. "Destroy lifeboat 01B. It has been commandeered by an alien saboteur. Engage and destroy."

The interceptors were on the lifeboat in less than fifteen seconds. That didn't give her much of a chance to run. By the time they came, she'd only flown a couple hundred meters away.

When Kodiak Squadron flew in, the 87th made a close pass that took them only fifty meters from where Dana floated in her exosuit. They must have seen the open escape hatch and there was no way they could miss her personal infrared signature that close.  

"Uh,
Taipan
Control, this is Kodiak 3-6... IR shows the passenger is a human female. Please advise."

Matilda Witt almost screamed it over comms: "It's a sensor trick! There's a bloody alien inside that lifeboat! Destroy it or god help me, when you land, I'll shoot you my bloody self!"

"Uh... Roger,
Taipan
. Kodiak 3-6 will comply."

The flight of Bitzers spun 'round on their jets, blasted themselves sideways, and then curved back at the lifeboat. Each of them opened up with the autocannon less than a kilometer out. They stitched the vacuum bright with shells and shredded the unarmored hull.

Dana hoped they'd leave after that, but the patrol from Kodiak Squadron veered in her direction next. They zoomed right at her before they hit their maneuvering jets and came to a stop. Kodiak 3-6 parked ten meters in front of her, close enough for her to look into the starboard-mounted, vertical cockpit and make solid eye contact.

She didn't want to risk using comms so she pointed at
Hardway,
now approaching in the distance. Then, she hooked her thumb to ask for a ride.

Kodiak 3-6 eased the fighter towards her at less than a meter a second. He caught her between the F-151's cannon barrels and the cockpit and turned towards the attack carrier. Kodiak 3-6 accelerated towards
Hardway
for only the briefest moment before he pulsed his maneuvering jets forward so that he came to a stop and Dana kept going.

Dana used the NAV comp in her helmet to see if she was really on an intercept course with the carrier. When she saw she was, when she saw she'd done everything she could do, she finally passed out from the pain.

Chapter Eighteen

Once the battered carrier came within a few thousand Ks of the command ship,
Taipan's
signal cut through the jamming. "
Taipan
to
Hardway
, you are ordered to respond." It was Morrisey.

"Send search and rescue junks ahead of us," Ram said. "Tell them to look for Dana."

"We can't spare them, Mr. Devlin. They're busy recovering 200 pilots."

"Then send out longboats."

"
Taipan
to
Hardway
, respond."

Harry Cozen leaned back in his chair and finally thumbed the comms. "
Hardway
here."

Matilda Witt spoke next. "Harry, we need to talk. Report to
Taipan
immediately."

Cozen smiled at
Taipan
on the tactical display. "I agree. We need to talk, but I think you should come to me, Matilda."

"Fine, Harry, fine. We can do this by holo-prescence," she said. "Even though it'll be all the more embarrassing for you."

"Agreed," he said. "Mr. Bergano, feed her signal through." Behind Cozen, on the Ops console, Bergano patched her signal through the imagers. Matilda Witt's ghost appeared at the front of
Hardway's
bridge, looking like a bull about to charge. Cozen said, "You lost complete control of your squadrons, Matilda. It
could
have been an utter disaster. Luckily,
Hardway
was here to save the day when your command and control relay network failed. I'd say it was your weak link, but I think the staggering scale of your command failure shows conclusively that it wasn't the only weakness at play."

"Sabotage. You're guilty of sabotage. And conspiracy."

"I won't tell the Board of Directors you said that. I'll just tell them if they give
me
control of the F-151 program and the pilots, like they originally planned, then they can expect more victories like the one they've just seen. I think they'll like that. It reaffirms how they were always right."

Witt shook her head and smiled without mirth. "Credit where it's due: you made me look bad today, Harry. No doubt about it. But the Board of Directors won't take anything away from me. Not after you write your report and tell them how you were following
my
orders all along and how
this victory is mine
." She grinned. "You're going to do that for me, Harry. Because I've got a trump card."

"Are you sure, Matilda?"

"Quite, sure Harry. You don't want me to play this card." 

"But I do."

Witt hadn't expected that. It showed in how her mouth hung open for the briefest fraction of a second. "You asked for it, Harry. I was going to save this for the Board, but it won't matter if your bridge crew hears this. Most of them were actually there."

She didn't explain what she'd meant by that. The projection of Matilda Witt simply reached into the pocket of her business suit and pulled out a matchbox computer. She held it up and gestured through menus they couldn't see until she found what she was looking for. She stabbed at the air with her finger and began playback of the recording.

The only way to get Jordo and Pooch back from her had been for Ram to deliver everything she wanted. With Cozen's help, he did just that. The recording he and Cozen made and then played back for her surveillance device told the story of how the Squidies came seeking peace and how Cozen struck first and how the war was all of his making.

Matilda Witt's thin lips rose at the corners as the recording played. Cozen let her go on until he got impatient. He shouted over it even though it wasn't loud. "Have you checked that for authenticity? It could be a fake, you know."

She said, "It's not, Harry."

"But have you
checked
?" he said. Of course she hadn't. Ram didn't blame her for not having checked the recording's authenticity. Since she'd recorded it herself, how could it possibly be a fake? "Indulge me," Cozen said. "For the benefit of all the witnesses. Mr. Morrisey is there on
Taipan
. I suspect he possesses the technical expertise to verify the quantum integrity of the recording. Quantum-linked audio-gravure recordings can't be faked. That's the very reason they're employed." 

Witt nodded to that. "Mr. Morrisey, if you please, put the final nails in Harry's coffin."

Morrisey's ghost stepped next to Matilda Witt's and withdrew his own matchbox computer. "Please play the recording again." She did, and seconds later, Morrisey spoke over the audio. He said, "There must be something wrong."

"Nothing's wrong," she said.

Morrisey leaned forward to whisper in her ear, and Ram knew just what he said that made her go white. He said, "It's a fake."

"That's utter nonsense," Witt nearly shouted at her aide. "I recorded it myself."

Morrisey said. "
This
recording hasn't been tampered with. The metaphysical layer is intact. The quantum integrity remains, but the original...the original audio stream that was recorded..." 

"What about it?"

"It's a collage of computer-generated audio segments. It's a fake. And a poor one."

"That's impossible!" She snatched his computer from his hand.

Harry Cozen said, "Metaphysical integrity is the first thing one looks for when trying to spot a fraud. Looks like someone's been telling you exactly what you want to hear."

Her jaw hung open. Ram thought he saw her projection sway ever so slightly.

Cozen saw it was a good time to push. He delivered his orders to her. "Matilda, you will hand over to me the remaining pilots, the fighters, the four carriers, and direction of the F-151 training program and the flight school."

"Why would I give anything up?"

"Make it easy for me and my report to the Board of Directors will be kind. It won't include any mention of Lt. Commander Dana Sellis' compelling analysis of your combat air patrols and how they enabled an alien special forces unit to board
Hardway
. It won't mention your secret negotiations with the enemy and that fact that you tried to serve me up on a platter for them to further your negotiations." 

Witt went a full degree paler than she'd been. "That's rubbish and you'll never prove it."

He shrugged as if it didn't matter.

"All in the name of peace, Harry. I'm just trying to undo the interstellar mess you've made. You've sent us all down the road to doom. You had no right to do that. I bet you
actually
believed that if we picked a fight with the Squidies and won, then the rest of them would leave us be. But it's not going to be like that. You should have taken their deal when they offered it."

"Don't underestimate Humanity, Matilda. We don't need anyone's protection."

Matilda Witt's projection turned to Ram. She said, "Big people and little people, Mr. Devlin. Remember what I told you. Gods almost never fall, but mortals...they fall like cherry-blossoms."

The bottom dropped out of Ram's gut when he realized that was her way of telling him Dana Sellis was dead. Matilda Witt watched him closely as if she was trying her best to discern every detail of the pain evidenced on his face. She nodded as if she understood something before her ghost vanished from
Hardway's
bridge. 

"
Taipan
and
Malibu
are both breaking away from the rest of the battlegroup," Biko said. To starboard, the command ship and the breaching ship turned slowly and made for the transit back to Groomsbridge, leaving the 4 box carriers behind with
Hardway
and
Tipperary
.  

Ram watched the flare of
Taipan's
engines until he spied a nearby object silhouetted against their glare. It passed between the departing ships and
Hardway's
bridge. It was a human-shaped shadow hiding in the black, coming closer fast. Zoomed in, Ram could see her clearly. She wore a
Hardway
exosuit and a gold-plated helmet from
Taipan
. 

"Chief Lee, Chief Lee," Ram said. "This is the XO. Man overboard. Look topside, over the primary bays."

"We saw her, Mr. Devlin. A team and a knuckledragger are already on the way."

EPILOGUE

43 days later...Sagan Shipyards at Lunar Lagrange

Usually, when the Lancers and the Hellcats ended up in Doc Ibora's medical bay after a hand-to-hand love fest, they had to be treated separately. Today was different. Today, the bloodied Lancers and Hellcats had fought the Staas Guards' shore patrol together. Now, they sat side by side while Ibora inventoried the pilots' injuries and griped about all the work they'd made for him.

Jordo basked in that moment. He didn't want to spoil it by saying anything in front of the pilots. His eyes flitted across their blood-crusted and smiling faces. Pooch didn't let the others see, but she winked at him with a black eye, already deep blue and growing shinier by the minute.

"Broken teeth, multiple fractures,
compound
fractures this time," Ibora said, stressing the extra damage that the Lancers and the Hellcats had done to themselves by picking a fight with the truncheon-armed Shore Patrol instead of each other like they usually did. "The damage that knuckles and knees and elbows do is bad enough, but those clubs of theirs can shatter a bone beyond what I can easily fuse in an hour."

Jordo said, "They started it." Ibora's face showed no reaction and he was sure the doctor didn't believe him, but the Shore Patrol really
had
started it. Six of them marched into the officers' club and once they had a look around, they went straight to Jordo and Pooch. It would have sounded paranoid if he'd said it to anyone, but it had been like the SPs had gone into the officer's club looking for Jordo and Pooch in particular. After they found the two squadron leaders, they surrounded the table and blinded them and five other pilots with flashes from their truncheons. Then, they took sucker shots until the rest of the Lancers and the Hellcats jumped in.

That's when all the SPs that had been waiting out of sight poured in the door of the OC like whatever dam on Sagan that had been holding them back until now had just cracked and burst. The SPs won the fight with those stun batons and, respect where it was due, some genuine, mad-dog meanness, the kind most folks aren't born with, the kind you have to work at.

Once they had every fighter pilot down for the count and twitching with 100,000 volts, Jordo expected to get dragged to the brig, but the SPs just picked up their own and left. Nobody got taken away anywhere. It was weird. It was like someone told the SPs to do it, but in the end, there was no point to any of it, not unless the goal was to unite
Hardway
's pilots with more common misery. It felt like a manipulation and Jordo suspected Harry Cozen had engineered the whole thing, but nobody else looked wise so he made a point to keep his trap shut for once.