War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan (16 page)

"That doesn't mean it should happen to the newest nuggets. Matilda Witt has 1200 new pilots under her command...fresh outta' flight school." Jordo kept his voice flat as he said it. "Casualty rates for them might be lower if someone else was giving the orders."

The XO and the AGC glanced at each other and then looked back to him.

Jordo said, "The 77 veteran pilots from the Sirius campaign... the ones that survived... they're now spread out through Witt's force as squadron and flight leaders. Hellcat 1-1 was
their
squadron leader until a week ago and if she tells all of them to do something, they'll still listen." Ram Devlin didn't look shocked. Neither did Biko. Jordo said, "But I want your guarantee. I want an
absolute
guarantee there will be an adjustment of tactics to reduce pilot casualties. Promise me that, and I can give you control of Matilda Witt's squadrons."

The AGC's eyes widened. "Did Pooch say that? Did Hellcat 1-1 say that?"

"Wait. Hold on," Devlin said. "Anyone can see they're dissatisfied, but I think loyalty means something to those pilots. They're not about to simply up and mutiny to reduce their casualties."

Jordo said, "What if they didn't know it was a mutiny? What if they just couldn't hear Witt's orders?"

"Go on..."

"According to the briefing, the Castor system is rife with alien jamming. Her fighters will deploy a network of disposable microsat relays behind them as they cross the system so that her comms signals can get through the jamming and she can give orders."

"Her command and control relay network," Devlin confirmed.

"What if her network failed? What if her command and control system broke down and all the orders and flight vectors she gave telling her squadrons what to do didn't appear in her pilots' visors?"

"It's proven to be a pretty robust system," the XO said. "It's not about to fall apart or be remotely co-opted."

"Yeah," Biko said, "But if they couldn't get orders from
Taipan
and if
Hardway
was close enough at the time to cut through the alien jamming, then the squadrons might follow orders from
Hardway
instead."

Jordo said, "They'll follow
Hardway
's orders if Pooch tells them to. If she says so."

"If Matilda Witt ends up looking bad enough in all of this... incompetent, I mean," Devlin said to Biko, "then Staas Company's Board of Directors might be persuaded to give the fighter squadrons back to Harry Cozen. That would take Witt out of the equation." The XO ran his hands over his face and through his hair before he looked back to Jordo. "Did Hellcat 1-1
actually
say this? Can she really deliver control of the squadrons if Witt's command and control is disrupted?"

"That's what she said." Jordo lied to them. Pooch had never even implied she was willing to do it. But he knew she would. That's the way it was going to go down. It had to happen like that if she wanted to save her pilots' lives. And she did. He knew Pooch wanted that more than anything. That's why she'd disobeyed orders with Jordo and the Lancers in the first place. It was why she'd deliver control of the squadrons to
Hardway
if she actually got the chance.

"Pooch will deliver," Jordo told the XO and the AGC once more. "If Cozen can promise lower casualties for her pilots, then she
will
deliver. But she wants a guarantee of protection from Matilda Witt and
significantly
lower casualties for her pilots in the future. No more cannon fodder tactics with the Bitzers. No more 75% casualties bullshit."

Devlin said, "I'll talk to Harry Cozen about it."

"Not good enough," Jordo told them. "I need an answer for Pooch
now
."

"Yes. The answer is yes. Tell Hellcat 1-1 it's a deal."

Chapter Thirteen

Two hours before the battlegroup reached the transit to Castor, Matilda Witt flew to
Hardway
. Ram Devlin and Asa Biko were there to meet her when she stepped out of the airlock fearless and relaxed like an apex predator with a full belly.

Ram thought she looked pleased with the performance he and Cozen had given in front of the bugged Brancusi sculpture. The two of them had talked about old times on Moriah just like she'd wanted. And Matilda Witt heard everything she'd wanted to hear.

Asa Biko stood outside the airlock doors, directly in her path. "Thank you for returning the two squadron leaders to duty," he said. "We're going to be needing them."

She said, "You can thank Mr. Devlin."

It was a sufficiently ambiguous comment to beg further inquiry from Biko, and before she explained to him exactly what she'd meant, Ram did his best to look terrified that she might reveal how he'd set Harry Cozen up for the fall. She'd use that to blackmail him now. That would be the stick she whipped him with. The carrot that she used to lead him would be the dangled promise of
Hardway's
command.

She explained to Biko, "Mr. Devlin, of course, is the one who lobbied so hard for leniency in the matter of the two squadron leaders. It took some time, but an hour ago, I finally heard the inspirational words he spoke. Thank you so much, Mr. Devlin."

"I was just doing my job."

Once they'd gone down the tube to the carrier's spine, Matilda Witt stopped on the walkway and looked both directions through hundreds of meters of haze. She wrinkled her nose. "That smell," she said. "What
is
that?"

"Sulfur," Biko said. "The atmo inside the Squidies' exosuits is packed with hydrogen sulfide. So are their smoke grenades."

"It smells like brimstone..."

"That's exactly what Harry Cozen said." Everyone else had just said they smelled like rotten eggs.

He and Biko had planned to bring her up the command tower's undamaged forward tube, but when Ram slowed underneath it, Matilda Witt kept going. Her eyes had already locked on the newly welded patches over the hole the alien commandos had blown into the spine. "The damage from the attack must have been significant," she said. "Decompression?"

"Minimal," Biko said. "They made small holes and it's an extremely big ship."

They took Witt up to the observation deck in the lift. She nodded at the smaller patch over the second hole the aliens had blown in the tube's bulkhead. "It's freakish how they can fit through the narrowest spaces," Witt said. "We eliminated a team of six of them attempting to gain access to
Taipan
once through a breach no wider than my head. I'm glad they didn't get in past the outer hull; I'd never get this smell out of my ship."

On the deck below the bridge, she only gave the blown out hatch and char marks around Harry Cozen's office the briefest of glances before she turned the opposite direction and followed Biko to the observation deck.

"Matilda," Cozen said as she stepped through the hatch. Lucy Elan rose and so did Bergano.

She said, "Don't get up, Harry." He hadn't moved from the couch. "This will be quick."

"You may not remember Mr. Bergano," Ram said.

Witt glanced at Bergano and his black eye, and her face said she wasn't impressed. "Sudden changes on the upper decks are usually a bad sign," she said. "Where is Dana Sellis? Why is
she
not here?"

Cozen made sure to let Witt see him sneer when he said it. "Dana Sellis has been relieved of her duties."

"Whatever for?"

He sighed. "The primary responsibility for the Squidies' successful penetration of
Hardway's
hull lies with Lt. Commander Sellis. And, I'm embarrassed to say, she tried to shift the blame somewhere else. That's the real reason I relieved her. She won't be involved in this operation."

"Unfortunate," Witt said. "I thought Lt. Commander Sellis had promise."

Matilda Witt remained standing. She set her matchbox computer on a low table in front of Cozen and projected the targets they would attack in the Castor system.

Seven ships floated in the air in front of them. Six were Squidy gunboat escorts. "The prize is at the center," she said. The ship at the center of the formation didn't look like any other Squidy-built hull Ram had ever seen. It wasn't an incisor or a fat, knife-shaped hull with towers. It wasn't a jagged-edged wing or bundle of caltrop spikes. This one was devoid of surface batteries and it was spherical.

"The Squidies have a new prototype," Matilda Witt said. "And we're going to use the F-151s and the junks to disable it. Then, we will board it and we will capture it, and if you're very, very nice to me, Harry, then I'll let you take it home and trade it for a medal."

"That's generous."

"You look better on camera than I do."

"What kind of prototype is it?" Biko asked. "What does it do?"

"Unknown," she said. "All Staas Company and UN Intelligence knows is that it's new, it's important, and they've been testing it in the Castor system. "It's not a massive ship. It's a mere 205 meters in diameter. Its armor has a signature like the alien dreadnought's armor. We think it's made of the same, tough stuff. Don't expect to penetrate that hull by conventional means."

*****

Pooch belted it out: "I want the Hellcats suited up and in the bays pronto. I want you
in
your fighters before the 38th SD and the 99th and especially before the goddam Lancers." The 133rd were only meters down the passageway in their compartment. Jordo might have even heard her say that.

"Lt. Lee Hannah, Hellcat 1-1, report to sub-tower module, compartment 412-b." The voice from the bridge came out of the squack box mounted high on the bulkhead and called Pooch by name. "Repeat: Lt. Hannah to sub-tower 412-b. Pooch to 412-b. On the double."

Toro, her wingman, said, "What the heck they want you for now?"

Compartment 412-b, she thought. That's in the sub-tower. That's where the bridge officers bunk.

Why she'd been summoned there was completely beyond Pooch. More discipline was all she could come up with. She'd lived several hours fully expecting to die for disobeying Matilda Witt's orders, but if they weren't going to shoot her, then more punishment must be coming her way. After all, nobody had even bothered to chew her out properly yet.

All the way down the carrier's spine, Pooch imagined she'd be demoted. Why they wanted to do it
now
was a mystery. When she arrived at compartment 412-b, three decks down into the sub-tower, among the reactor engineers, why they'd want to demote her inside an emergency radiation shelter became another pressing mystery.

She stood in front of the hatch, reading and rereading the compartment code. 412-b. She stared at the wheel for a few seconds before reaching for it, and it began to spin on its own. The windowless, belt-iron steel hatch swung open and behind it was J. 'Jordo' Colt with his index finger extended and held vertically across the center of his lips.

Pooch said, "What the f-"

"Shut up." He waved her inside, and against all better judgment, she stepped into the small compartment. It was just over 3 by 3 meters square and empty - nothing but radiation shielding in there. He took a cloth-covered box from the thigh pocket of his exosuit and opened it. Inside were six things like vibrating half-eggs that he put on all the walls and the ceiling and even the floor. They didn't make a noise so much as shake you inside like a pulse-pinch.

"We can talk now," he said.

"Those things make my teeth itch." She rubbed them through her cheek. "The hell you doing with anti-surveillance gear? And why the fuck am I in a radiation shelter?"

"We needed to talk in private. You want to talk about this sort of thing, then you need this sort of private."

Pooch listened to Jordo tell her what he'd planned, and it made her hands shake with anger. "Mutiny. That's just mutiny." He just didn't get it, she thought. He didn't get her.

Jordo said, "Matilda Witt went out with 300 pilots the first time. She came back with 77. So they gave her 1200 more. What the hell do you think is going to happen to
them
? I'll tell you what. The same thing that happened to you, but it'll be on a bigger scale...more lives...more dead nuggets. I'd say a couple hundred today at least. You already know what I'm telling you. But they don't have to die. You want a way to reduce your casualties? I found one. I've got a way make it happen. But it won't work without you, Pooch. All of Witt's squadron leaders follow
you
. When the moment comes and they can't hear
Taipan
, then you have to tell them who's orders to follow."

She shook her head. "No. No way."

"I've got Harry Cozen's
personal
guarantee that casualties will be lower. No more cannon fodder tactics, he promised me. And he guaranteed us his protection as well. Witt can't shoot us for disobeying her orders if we're following his."

"Harry Cozen said all that to
you
?"

He nodded at Pooch. "That's what the man said. To me."

Pooch still wanted to smash Jordo's head against the steel. "You think all I want is to save my own skin? I follow orders because I'm a loyal officer – because I want to win this war – not because someone is going to shoot me if I don't. Maybe you wouldn't get that 'cause you're just here to stay out of prison."

"Your pilots are going to get massacred. You've seen the battleplan. It'll be like the last fight, but on a bigger scale. Her tactics are going to get hundreds killed today...hundreds that don't have to die. It was that way for us, Pooch, for the Lancers and the Hellcats, but it doesn't have to be that way for the new pilots. It doesn't have to happen to them."

"I came here to
win
this war, Ram. If I hear there's big casualties coming, I'm not going to mutiny just to save my skin."

"Why did you follow me and the Lancers in to help the 38th and the 99th when we broke position in the last assault? Why did you disobey orders with me, Pooch?" Pooch clenched her jaw and ground her teeth. "I know you won't disobey orders to save your own life, but it's not
your
life we're talking about."