War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan (7 page)

She looked each of the bridge officers in the eye as she spoke. "Step One, of course, is to attain broad air superiority. To a large extent, I've already done that. When we entered the system, I deployed long-range patrols and put enough fighters on alert that we can project power anywhere across this system with astounding rapidity."

Biko said, "How many F-151s are there in your Air Group?"

"There are currently 1277 exo-atmospheric fighters under my command."

Harry Cozen leaned forward in the chair. "Wait. Three months ago, you went to Sirius with all
three-hundred
of the new pilots from my fight school," Cozen said.

"You mean
my
flight school."

"Then, they expanded the next class to 1200 pilots, and you commandeered all of them as well. They just joined your Air Group a week ago so they can't have taken significant casualties yet."

"What the hell are you getting at, Harry?"

"You said you had 1277 planes. Matilda, do you mean to tell me you've only got 77 of the original 300 pilots you took to Sirius? Only 77 are still alive?"

Matilda Witt nodded without any expression. Cozen sat back in his command chair, and she said, "What about your experimental, jailbird squadron, the Lancers?" she said. "Didn't you start out with 44 of them?" She turned her head to look left where the images of the Lancers hung projected in the air, small as houseflies. "I see five Lancers remaining, Harry. What happened to the other 39? That's
88% casualties
. So far,
my
pilots' casualty rates are closer to 75%."

"The target," Dana said, pointing at the projection of the alien ship and a new set of dark vertical lines appearing on its hull. They extended into a rectangle and expanded into a square. "That looks like a launch bay..."

"I thought it looked too fat to be just a battle-cruiser."

"New contacts," Biko said. "The Squidies just launched their own fighters. Twenty-four red bandits." They flew out the alien vessel's open mouth in an angry horde.

Cozen said, "Did you plan for this, Matilda?"

If Matilda Witt was at all fazed by this unexpected development, then she didn't show it. She snatched a flight of Bitzers from the 38th Squadron and moved it out of the alien aces' path, placing one from the 23rd and another from the 99th where it had been.

*****

The Lancers and the Hellcats hung just outside the burning teardrop of the planet's electrified magnetosphere. With his helmet magnifying and enhancing the images, Jordo could make out the spikes on the alien fighters' ten-meter hulls. He still shivered a little when he saw them.

The bandits first ripped towards a flight from the 38th, but the friendly fighters were already moving out of the way. The
Taipan
squadrons were on a different comms channel and Jordo couldn't hear their chatter, but it was amazing how quickly elements of the 23rd and the 99th flew in to cover the hole.

The alien weapons had greater effective range, and the Squidies opened fire first, stabbing out at the Bitzers with thick streams of hyper-accelerated nuclei moving so fast every sub-atomic particle carried the force of tiny bullet. The aliens ran three planes through on that very first salvo. Two of them cooked off quick and lit up the rest of the sortie.

Jordo counted over a hundred friendly fighters diving aggressively on the outnumbered alien squadron from all sides. The 99th and the 23rd opened fire at nearly the same moment, stitching the dark with burning shells. Jordo's eyes widened watching the shells on their way to target because he'd never seen a fight where the Squidies didn't start with the upper hand.

The alien pilots knew they were as good as dead, but they had time to fire a last salvo before the Bitzers' shells reached them. This time, their beams spread out wider and waved, groping for the fighters like searchlights. They concentrated their fire and found six planes from an eight-plane flight element of the 38th. None of the 151s they hit cooked off or slow-melted, but the impact of those wider, thinner particle streams swatted friendly fighters like bugs and knocked them almost 40 degrees out of their line of travel. The gees resulting from a change of direction like that were more than their inertial negation systems could handle. Jordo didn't know if those pilots now lay against the sides of their cockpits with spammed brains or if they were bleeding out inside from ruptured organs, but they were likely dead.

The burning, hateful hail of 140mm shells fired from a hundred fighters finally arrived on target. The sabot and armor-piercing HE shells blasted and burrowed their way into the aliens. The flashes from their breached reactors lit up the battle twenty-four times in less than a second.

The primary attack squadrons rolled around the fast-moving debris field and kept going. Moments ago, that cloud of metal and plasma and exotic elements had been twenty-four, alien aces riding into battle in the finest, most glorious, killing machines their civilization could produce. Now, all that effort, all that they'd made had all been blasted to scrap and ionized gas.

Jordo cheered with the rest of the pilots, but seeing the enemy aces obliterated like that...like they were nothing... It made his gut twist up in a knot. He didn't understand why. He hated the Squidies. He hated them all.

*****

Matilda Witt smoothed the sides of her suit over her hips. "The alien fighters always fly faster and maneuver tighter, but throw this many Bitzers at them and there's not much just a couple of dozen of them can do to stop us."

Cozen said, "It cost you plenty of fighters and pilots to eliminate that enemy squadron. You haven't even attacked the warship itself yet."

"Replacing fighters and pilots is cheaper than fixing this rust-bucket carrier every time your need to blast away with its oversized railguns puts it in the line of fire and the Squidies nuke it or slice a piece off it. And before you call me callous regarding my pilots' casualties, I ask you, Harry. Exactly what were
you
planning to do with all these fighters and fast-trained pilots when you got your hands on them? Did you plan to keep them in the launch bays and polish them?" He didn't answer that.

Witt turned back to the battle. She said, "Now that my 151s dominate the sky, they will engage the enemy warship, destroying the smaller, more rapidly targeting, defensive batteries first."

She drew lines across the air of the bridge from her fighters to specific, defensive guns on the hull of the alien cruiser. She said, "Mr. Biko, I'd like you to observe very carefully how I direct the fighters to their targets. First, we open a hole in the vessel's small gun defenses and then, we exploit it. We widen the hole enough for my dive bombers or
Hardway's
torpedo junks to penetrate. When the bombardment phase is over, the enemy ship will be defenseless and disabled. The junks will land on the hull and the boarding parties will cut their way in."

*****

Jordo had been ordered to hold position and not engage, so that's what he and the Lancers did.

When the 99th and the 23rd and the 38th came in range of the warship's batteries, the fighters dodged and jinked to avoid the slicing and stabbing, fast-firing, small-bore streams that reached out for them. At long range it was easy, but as the Bitzers got closer, diving straight at the alien hull reduced their angular momentum enough that without some very fancy flying, they became easy targets.

A second after Jordo realized the vast majority
Taipan
's pilots weren't flying nearly evasively enough, the alien gunners' particle streams punched right through the hearts of the lead Bitzers and burst out their back sides with wild geysers of molten metal and gas. A dozen more streams sliced across the incoming fighters and took six more of them from the sky.

Still, Witt's fighter squadrons dove, firing on the alien guns. The first of the detonations and the flashes on the alien hull told Jordo that at least some of Witt's pilots were finding their marks. Their shells and sabot blew apart the magnetic vectoring rings that aimed the aliens' guns. Beams from damaged defensive batteries stabbed at empty space and sliced at the vacuum to no effect, but most of the cruiser's guns remained functional.

Witt's squadrons flew too predictably. They were mostly new pilots and the nuggets made easy pickings for the alien gunners. Even the slow and laggard big guns meant for hitting capital ships took fighters from the sky. The beams stabbed and sliced at the 38th Special Delivery Squadron as the modified Bitzers released fission warheads and pulled away. Some of their bombs got through, but their losses were heavy. It was hard for Jordo and the Lancers to watch so many nuggets die like that. Maybe because most of the Lancers had died in their first engagements, too, before they had a chance to really learn anything.

"Those nuggets down there are getting chewed to hell," Dirty said.

Paladin sounded grateful. "For once it's not
us
in the meat grinder."

Jordo said, "Yeah, it is."

Right away, Paladin groaned on comms because he knew what was coming. "No.
C'mon,
Jordo. Hell, no. Just let
them
do it. We got a
pass
this time... It's not
our
asses getting blown away for once."

The reactor flashes from mortally wounded friendlies and bandits played over the insides of the Lancers' cockpits like distant lightning. "Those new pilots can't out-fly the enemy batteries," Jordo said. "But you can, Paladin. And you have to because your goddamn name is Paladin." That was the name painted on his helmet, the hero name he
hadn't
yet earned on the day he got it. If Paladin had gotten a name he'd earned, then it would have been 'Asshole'. So Jordo gave him a better name on credit. "You remember way back, a hundred furballs ago when you wanted a hero nickname and I gave you 'Paladin'? The condition
was
you live up to it."

"Fuck you, J. Jordo Colt."

Gush said, "We've got orders to stay right here with the Hellcats. You know what they do when you disobey those kind of orders."

"Lancers, on me." Jordo spun his 151 on its maneuvering jets and blasted away from the Hellcats' formation, corkscrewing down towards the alien ship with the squadron behind him on the same line. As the acceleration pushed him back into the flight couch, he heard Hellcat 1-1 shouting in his ear over comms. "Lancer squadron, return to position! You are disobeying Matilda Witt's direct orders." No shit, he thought. "Lancer 1-1!" she said. "Acknowledge! You don't know what you're doing!" She screamed in his ear a few more times.

He thought that's the last he'd hear from her, but once the Lancers penetrated the planet's glowing magnetosphere and began to close the last few thousand Ks to target, she buzzed him less than 10 meters away, passing him at full thrust. Hellcat 1-1 flipped Lancer 1-1 the bird. Then, she and her squadron used their superior acceleration to blast into battle whole seconds ahead of the Lancers.

The visor of his flight helmet suddenly filled with new NAV vectors and orders from
Taipan
Control. The orders blinked along with transparent projections of large, red, directional arrows that half-blocked his vision. He heard a thin, male voice he'd never heard before order him back into position. It warned him about disobeying orders.

The Hellcats flew smart. They shot across the enemy's fields of fire with so much angular momentum that the alien gunners couldn't easily catch them. The Hellcats aimed their cannon at the defensive batteries that were targeting the flights from the 99th and 38th and 23rd. After they rained down hell, they pulled away for another pass, and then, the Lancers suddenly became the closest targets on that side of the alien hull. The Squidy gunners opened up. Now, it was a duel between the alien gunners and the Lancers, and the Squidies didn't stand a chance.

Time seemed to slow down all around him as if the whole universe just couldn't keep up with J. Jordo Colt. Alien beams stabbed and waved from a dozen guns on that side of the enemy hull and Jordo saw them all –
completely
. That is to say, in an instant, Jordo's eye and mind and gut embraced them entirely and somehow took in not only the positions of all the alien batteries and where they currently pointed, but everything about them including the rate of fire, the speed of aim, and even the observed, individual peculiarities of each alien gun crew. He saw not only where they fired
now
, at this instant, but where they
would
fire in the next millisecond and the one after that and the one after that.

Jordo saw the
golden thread
. All the Lancers had different names for it. Gush called it 'the path' and Dirty said it was like a song she instantly knew, but Jordo saw a golden filament stitched through the furball, drawing the perfect path that evaded enemy fire and led him to kill after kill after kill. Now, it drew a perfect line through the waving, alien guns, down through the crisscrossing spider's web of particle beams groping the vacuum to find him.

When he was close enough to reach out and touch the alien gun towers, Jordo spiraled down around a single beam that spat determined and spiteful bursts as if the alien gunners who fired it knew he was coming for them and now, it was personal. Jordo's six autocannon rattled the frame of his fighter, and as he fired, the space to port and starboard and above and below him filled with shells, too. A furious deluge rained down from all the Lancers' guns.

Jordo didn't stop firing as he circled and descended, rolling down, around the beam until the flashes and the secondary detonations at the base of his fire stream told him he'd destroyed the Squidy gun battery. Others around it lit up with fire and secondaries.

He was still headed right for the hull, but to get off the collision course on a path that avoided the rest of the Lancers' and Hellcats' fire, Jordo had to rotate on his maneuvering jets and blast out of his line of travel harder than his Bitzer was designed to.

He guessed it was a 45-gee turn as he cut it. Whatever it was, it produced more inertial gees than his inertial negation could counteract. An elephant sat on every inch of him, inside and out. The force of his own maneuver crushed him. His vision grayed over and then went red with all the bursting vessels in his eyes.