War of Alien Aggression 5 Cozen's War Read Online Free Page A

partially mistaken. That Chief was tired and worn, but her lids weren’t just heavy. As she told him about the improved reloading speeds, her eyes narrowed involuntarily. That wasn’t simple fatigue; it was distrust. Like Pardue and Ernie in Gold Coast’s cockpit, this Chief had believed the Squidy propaganda she’d heard.
    Once they got off, he let the gun crew have the next people-mover that came. It whisked them away zipping them down the ship’s kilometer-long spine more easily perhaps without the weight of him and all those questions. Ram took the next people-mover to cycle up to the platform and rode the 400 meters down the spine to the command tower all alone.
    He was the last to arrive. Cozen’s hatch was still ajar and inside, ‘the cage’ was still open. Harry Cozen’s office below the bridge had never been that large and the operational security measures he’d added made it smaller. He’d built a room within a room, two of them. The interior of the two cages now comprised the entirety of the usable space in the compartment. The two sets of walls and floors and ceilings were simple radiation shielding, belt-iron-steel, patch-welded like Hardway’s armor, but instead of keeping energy and radiation out, the armor kept electromagnetic energy from escaping. It was a cage, meant to keep secrets.
    Right now, it held Harry Cozen, an unnamed figure wearing a full exosuit and helmet with a blackout visor, and fifteen people with a lot of questions. They sat silent around the person in the exosuit. Cozen was the only one who looked relaxed. Ram saw the glasses and full decanter on the desk and was glad he hadn’t missed the scotch. They’d all need a drink after hearing this plan.
    You couldn’t bug this room except with a device based on quantum-paired electrons, but the almost imperceptible shaking in his teeth once Ram was inside told him that Cozen had already activated a suite of counter-surveillance devices whose function included negation of such technologies’ functional utility. This suite of noisemakers was better than the one Ram owned...different, though Cozen still wouldn’t tell him how. This one made Ram’s mouth taste like metal, like he was being irradiated, though Cozen swore that wasn’t the case.
    " You’re the last one, Mr. Devlin," Harry Cozen growled as he rose from the edge of his desk. "We’re only waiting on you." He looked like he was more than ready to finish this war, but it wasn’t fatigue driving him or an inability to witness any more of the horror. No. Harry Cozen’s eye glinted with all the eagerness of a sharp blade waiting to do the thing for which it had been made.  
    As Ram turned to shut them all inside along with humanity’s greatest secret, he ticked the meeting's attendees off as he saw them. The leaders of the F-151 squadrons were here, grim-faced. Chief Horcheese brought the two cherries he'd asked for. They probably wanted to know what the heck they were doing at a command level briefing. Redsuits don’t usually get briefed on anything; they just get told to fix it. Lt. Commanders Medoc, and Max looked almost expressionless. Ram hadn’t seen them since before their ship had been built. They’d looked happier then.
    Finally, after closing the hatch and the two doors and sealing them all in, he turned again, returning a nod from Commander Pai of Arbitrage before letting his eyes fall on the impenetrable helmet visor of the figure in the exosuit. His own warped and tiny reflection looked back at him before gloved hands reached up and flipped the four latches on the helmet. You could tell which of them in that cage already knew who was under that helmet. They were the only ones whose eyes weren’t glued as she lifted the helmet off.
    Disgraced Staas Company VP and former 2-Star Privateer Admiral, Matilda Witt looked the same in an exosuit as in anything else, like she was squaring off to fight with whomever she faced. The helmet mussed her hair and her face