by Tony Daniel
“You make me late soon!” it chittered, clearly preparing to give the captain a piece of its mind, then saw the Lits at her back. “Awk! Samawa-ree!” It bowed deeply.
“Greetings, friend Gilik,” the Lit said, rushing up to embrace the stick insect in a crushing hug. Creeling a protest, Roh detached itself. It peered at Nurys.
“Perhaps you are not useless,” Roh said, “despite your primitive machines.”
Nurys ignored him. She didn’t care about the Gilik’s scorn. They’d accomplished their mission. The Lits were safe. Earth had done their new friends a favor, and she was going home with all hands.
“A good heart is timeless,” Samawa said heartily, embracing the reluctant Gilik and Nurys in turn. “I will say so in my next broadcast.” He held up the bulging red bag. “I can do it at once, telling about the sacrifices made for us by all our friends.”
Nurys put her hand on the bag and all of her passion into her tone.
“Do me a favor,” she said. “Let’s run silent for now.”
Jody Lynn Nye lists her main career activity as “spoiling cats.” She lives northwest of Chicago with one of the above and her husband, author and packager Bill Fawcett. She has written over forty-five books, including The Ship Who Won with Anne McCaffrey, eight books with Robert Asprin, a humorous anthology about mothers, Don’t Forget Your Spacesuit, Dear!, and over 160 short stories. Her latest books are Rhythm of the Imperium (Baen Books), Moon Beam (with Travis S. Taylor, Baen) and Myth-Fits (Ace). Jody also reviews fiction for Galaxy’s Edge magazine and teaches the intensive writers’ workshop at DragonCon.
BOOMERS
J. R. Dunn
Another powerful ship in an alternate future, but this future is entirely frightening. What if the space race had begun earlier and was run harder and for keeps? It might have included thermonuclear engines and multiple fusion warheads in space. Since communism was and is economically unsustainable without continuing to grind its own populace on a downward course to penury and enslavement, there would have been a fall, just as there was in 1989 in real history. But with nukes in space, that fall might have left far more dangerous relics sequestered in the heavens—and left the KGB enforcers of that evil ideology to fester, plotting perhaps a comeback, or at least apocalyptic revenge, on all those who betrayed the Revolution.
“Don’t go scratching my Kevlar, bro.”
Kieran swung away from Cruz, giggling like an idiot. Leaning toward the front port, Strode said, “Stow that, you two.”
“Stow it. Aye aye, sir.”
“Since when are we in the fuckin’ navy?”
“What was that, Cruz?” Strode was speaking in a near-whisper despite himself. He instinctively glanced at the board to assure himself that they were still talking by cable and hadn’t somehow switched to broadcast.
“Nothin’, sir. Nothin’ at all.”
Strode decided to leave them be. According to Intel, the Russians booby-trapped all access to their boomers. Disturbing them while they were trying to crack the hangar controls would be what Colonel Klaus would call “inadvisable.”
He glanced up through the top port as much as the helmet would let him. The hull of the Russian boomer curved far overhead, the point of one huge star visible to his left, a handful of Cyrillic letters to his right.
Rokossovsky, they spelled out. Marshal of the Soviet Union Konstantin Konstantinovich. Hero of the Great Patriotic War. Order of Lenin, Order of the Red Banner, Order of Victory. Effective viceroy of Poland for nearly a decade after the war . . .
. . . and throughout it all, under suspended sentence of death, courtesy of Uncle Joe Stalin. Jesus, what a system.
“Got it,” Cruz said.
Strode lowered his eyes. Outside, the two suited figures were still huddled against the boomer’s hull, tools and parts floating beside them. “Got what?”
Cruz raised his arm slightly. Within the gauntlet, Strode could make out a small white cube.
“About five or six ounces of what looks like Semtex. Blow both your fuckin’ hands right off.”
Strode fought down an impulse to demand why they hadn’t told him they’d found it in the first place. “Good.”
“Brace me,” Cruz told Kieran. He tossed the explosive in the direction of Cygnus and swung himself clumsily back toward the hull. “Gimme me some light here.”
“No more cavities,” he said after a moment.
Strode smiled. A dental mirror was a crucial part of their equipment.
“Okay . . . we’ll crack this sucker in just a minute.”
“Excellent.” Strode could see Morris standing behind him, reflected in the plexi. He’d been so quiet that Strode had forgotten he was there.
There was a buzz in his earphones. He glanced at the board. A call from the LeMay. He carefully reached over and switched to the laser antenna. “Strode here.”
“LeMay CIC here, Major.”
Strode rolled his eyes. Who else would it be?
“Ah, how’s it going?”
“We just disarmed their welcoming present, Colonel. About ready for insertion.”
“Very good. Ah, still no sign of the crew?”
“No sir, not a peep.”
“Very well, then. Watch your step, son. There’s no trusting those bastards.”
“Understood, sir. Out.”
He switched off. Klaus was straightedge USAF—buzz cut, starched khakis, heavy horn-rims. He believed that anybody with more than an inch of sideburn was a hippie, and that all hippies were commies, and as for commies . . .
Well, Strode had been something of a hippie himself not all that long ago, and he was no commie . . .
He became aware that Kieran and Cruz were half-twisted around and gazing at the EV. He hurriedly switched over to cable.
“. . . set to go here, Chief. What’s the . . .”
“Sorry. I was on with the Big L.”
“Ah.”
“Understood.”
“Awright,” Strode said. “Gogol? You ready?”
“That’s an affirmative,” the assault team leader told him.
“Okay. Questions . . . No? Let’s go for it, Micky.”
Cruz bent over a small black box and manipulated it. Strode shifted his gaze toward the vast, closed hatch to their left. For a moment, nothing happened, then it started to slide open, moving upward like a garage door. He bit his lip when the lights inside remained off. But then they started glowing, softly at first, then brighter as the hatch slid up out of sight.
Strode shifted against his seatbelt. Nothing. The hangar was completely empty, as far as he could see. Oh, there was equipment strapped against the bulkheads. But EVs, vehicles of any sort—not a sign.
There was one section not visible from the EV. “Gog—is there anything in that right-hand corner?”
“Nothing. Bupkus.”
“God, this is so weird.”
“You ain’t shittin’.”
Strode nodded as much as the suit would let him. “Well, it’s not like we were expecting it to turn normal at this point.”
“Okay—we’re going in,” Gogol said.
“Do it.” The team entered the hangar. Splitting up and drifting slowly across the thirty yards to the rear bulkhead, shotgun barrels high and rotating slowly as they went. They reached the bulkhead and Strode shifted the EV about twenty feet to the left, facing the open hatch.
Cruz and Kieran were clambering around the hangar examining niches and equipment for any more surprises. “Clear,” Cruz called at last.
Strode eyed the hangar, the assault team covering the airlock in the rear. He’d had a mild argument with Klaus about this—the colonel didn’t like the idea of the EV actually entering the ship. But Strode just couldn’t shake his mind of the image of the Rokossovsky taking off and leaving him with no way out. The colonel had at last told him to use his judgment.
“Bringing her in.” He slowly slid into the hangar, coming to a halt about halfway to the bulkhead. Morris and Hi
nche climbed out to secure the EV. Strode unstrapped himself and grabbed for the case of claymores. At the hatch, he paused to glance at the bulkheads, the lock, the signs in Cyrillic, wondering if they’d find any answer to the question as to why a Soviet nuclear impulse vessel would head halfway across the solar system instead of parking itself at L5 as it had been ordered to do.
It took them a quarter hour to clear the hangar level. At six hundred feet long, the Rokossovsky had a lot of nooks, crannies, and corners that had to be looked at. Much of it on that level was parts storerooms, work spaces, and the like, large and packed with all sorts of stuff. Atmosphere was nominal, so they raised their helmet visors. This had the added advantage of allowing them to hear their surroundings unimpeded by the thermos-glass.
Another problem lay in the fact that Russian boomers got a lot of modifications after they were constructed. Rokossovsky had been modified quite a bit. He could see a lot of differences on this level alone. It was a relatively old ship, as far as boomers went, launched in 1977, just three years after the Zhukov went up. It was likely that Strode had seen this very ship back when he’d been in college, maneuvering around cislunar space leaving a trial of white-hot nuclear fireballs behind it.
He got the team back together and they headed for the next level, moving “up” toward the nose. The CIC ought to be located in that direction.
There was no lack of doors on the next level. They stretched off a hundred, hundred twenty feet in each direction.
“Personnel quarters,” Strode muttered.
“Yep.” Morris slipped past him and drifted over to a slot beside the closest door. Morris was G2, and could actually read the godawful Cyrillic alphabet. “These are names.”
“Okay.” Strode gestured up and down the hall. “Let’s clear ’em.”
The first one he checked was the standard bunkie, larger than the ones on the LeMay but otherwise pretty similar. There were two bunks, unlike the singles on their ship, a couple of closets, shelves for books and whatnot. A battered map of Mother Russia on one wall, some personal photos, and that was it. As he was swinging around to leave, it occurred to him that they were doubled up, despite the size of the ship, so that they could keep an eye on each other.
He glanced up and down the corridor as he swung himself out and gripped the rail. The boys were darting in and out, none with anything much to report, as far as he could see.
Morris waved to him from the other side of the corridor. “You’ll like this one. Take a look.”
Strode kicked off and halted himself at the doorway before swinging inside. It was the same setup as the other room, bunks, closets, and so forth, but on one side . . .
For a moment, he was cast back to his own room on the LeMay. No maps of Russia here—the wall above the bunk to his left was covered with photos taken around the system. Valles Marineris on Mars, Pluto’s Plain of Dis, the ice fountains of Europa. And there, the exact shot he had on his own wall, one of the most famous photos of the late seventies: the rings of Saturn, taken by Dyson himself.
A sense of something like kinship touched him as he regarded the photos. He thought he understood this guy, whoever he might be. Ah, ‘thought’ nothing; he knew he did. It was the same impulse that had caused him to join up in the first place. To drop his potential career as a Deadhead for the USAF, with the intention of riding the boomers to the edges of the system, to see for himself the sights preserved in these photos . . .
Not that he’d actually seen any of them, spending much of the past four years on station in long, leisurely trajectories around the Earth-Moon system, on the front line of defense in the Cold War. “Somebody’s got some soul on this wagon.”
“I thought so.”
“What’s his name, anyway?”
Morris swung over to a shelf and deftly slipped a book out from under the restraining strap. “Ahh . . . Krilov. Anton Lazarovich.”
Strode nodded silently. Bending closer, in that clumsy way you did in a suit, Morris glanced over the book spines. “Wow, this guy’s studying everything. Propulsion, guidance, avionics . . .”
“Lotta books,” Strode agreed as he swung himself out into the corridor.
By the time they cleared a dozen rooms, it was apparent they were going to find nothing. There were just too many rooms to search—not surprising on a vessel with a crew that could number anything from a hundred twenty to three hundred plus. They could easily waste the next two hours searching the rooms on this level and the next, which was also a personnel level.
There was a mixed-use level above that one. Strode decided to check that out next.
Emerging from the access tube, the first thing they saw was a cloud of what appeared to be standard 8x11 sheets drifting around the corridor.
“Paper,” Morris muttered.
“Thank God for Intel,” Cruz said.
Biting back an impulse to laugh along with everybody else, Strode said. “Okay, enough.”
The men fanned out down the corridor while Morris grabbed for a sheet, looked at it, and tossed it aside. Plucking another one out of the air, he frowned at it and clumsily reached out for another.
“Got the computer room here,” Cruz called out.
Strode headed over to him. The room was filled with even more paper. He batted a clump aside to look at the hardware.
“Looks like a fuckin’ museum,” somebody said.
That it did. A collection of big mainframes with tape drives and readouts, all of them dark now. Strode shook his head. The PC he had on his desk back in the LeMay probably had more processing power than this entire system.
“I’m surprised they’re not using abacuses,” Cruz said.
Strode waved at the mainframes. “This is all IBM equipment.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Bought in false-flag operations. They don’t know dick about—”
Morris had drifted in through the doorway, sheets clutched in his gloved hands. “How many nukes you think they’ve got aboard?”
“Well, it better be twenty-five,” Strode said. That was the limit set by the Reykjavik Treaty.
“No.” He raised the sheets. “They’re talking one eighty-five on this sheet and . . . two oh five on this one.”
“Pills?”
“Nope. Not kiloton yield. Fifteen, twenty megatons. They’re warheads.”
“Holy shit.”
Twenty megatons . . . those were city-busters. With two hundred of those, this single boomer could knock the US back into the stone age and go on to wipe out every Western installation in the solar system. Strode was beginning to get a vague picture as to just what the Rokossovsky had been up to. But it still didn’t explain why this bird was bobbing around just within the orbit of Jupiter.
Morris gestured at the papers floating around the room. “Look through all these, find me the ones that got this emblem on top. See it—the sword and shield?”
Strode grabbed one himself, then another, wishing he’d taken the time at some point to learn Russian. There it was—a sword within a shield, star and hammer and sickle centered over all. The emblem of the KGB, the little friends of all things living.
“Okay,” Morris was saying. “A lot these are duplicates . . .”
“We can sort those out. We don’t have to read them for that . . .”
“Uh-oh . . .”
Cohn was floating above a big block of machinery in the corner, gazing at something just past it. Strode hoisted himself to a spot where he could see what it was. There was a fan of dark stains against the rear bulkhead. Blood spatter, and nothing else.
“Jesus H. Christ—they had three warheads allotted for Moscow—”
That actually made sense, if the theory Strode was turning over in his head was anywhere close to the truth. Kicking off, he headed over to join Cohn. The machinery he was floating above, half the size of a Volkswagen van, was apparently their printer. A block of paper remained in a hopper at one end, the top sheet fluttering in the air currents. There
was a padlock hanging from a hasp on the cover for the controls. Somebody had sawed it open.
“They were printing these out here,” Strode said.
“For what? To hand them out to who?”
“To the crew. Somebody wanted them to know about all this.”
Cohn nodded at the printer. “Okay. And this guy . . .” He gestured at the bloodstains. “Got shot doing it.”
“Looks like it.”
“It’s called podsolnechnik—Sunflower,” Morris called out. “Operation Sunflower. That’s the name.”
Cruz was looking over his shoulder. “Well at least they got a sense of humor about it . . .”
A fusillade of shots rang out from the corridor. The men outside starting shouting and then returned fire. Strode heard the roar of shotguns as he headed for the door, struggling to grip his pistol with the oversized suit gloves.
They were still firing when he reached the door, two shotguns and one light MG. A suited man was pinwheeling slowly down the corridor in the direction they had come from.
Ardlino lowered his shotgun. “I got one. I swear I hit one of ’em.”
“Awright,” Strode said. He eyed the tube entrance where the attack had evidently come from. “Gog—you and Denny go up there and make sure that access tube is clear. Cohn, you go with them. We need a med . . .” he began, but Naylor had already started after the tumbling suit.
He waited for the all-clear from Gogol and then got everybody in defensive positions. Morris was still going through the papers as if nothing at all had happened. Naylor joined Strode, letting out a long sigh. “He’s dead, sir. Three rounds to the chest.”
“Kieran?”
“Yes, sir.”
Strode nodded to himself. “You did good, Omar,” he said at last.
Naylor bobbed his head and moved off. After a moment, Strode glanced around him. “Page? Where’s Page? Bring me the relay box, willya?”
He was reaching for it when all the lights went out.
