by Tony Daniel
The captain’s eyes widened.
Dahlquist said, “Without Mousetrap’s waypoint facilities for post-jump refits, commerce among the planets will shrink to a trickle. Without Mousetrap’s shipyards it would take decades just to rebuild enough ships to build a new waypoint from scratch, so nobody will bother. The Union will devolve back to the five hundred isolated planets it was before the war. The separatists won’t just have won this battle. They will have won the war. With a single shot that murdered eleven million people. History won’t be kind.”
The captain stood still as stone, eyes wide and staring.
Dahlquist said, “But we can stop this.”
The captain whispered, “I’m listening.”
“The observation dome and navigation blister are carry-forwards from the first capital ships. They were a redundant system that allowed a single officer to helm the ship by eyeball and hands-on controls in case of emergency.”
The captain shook his head. “They were vanity boondoggles. The contractors built them in to appease admirals and generals who had been seat-of-the-pants pilots. The navigation blister’s been used exactly once in history.”
Dahlquist nodded. “But it worked. So every ship still has a dome and a blister.”
Captain Hicks snorted. “Every ship still has them because the passengers like to look out the big window. So what are you proposing?”
Dahlquist pointed at the plasma cutter. “All I need is that. And two ratings to operate it.”
“We only have one plasma cutter. And there’s no point. The controls don’t activate just because the blister hatch is breached.”
“I don’t propose to cut the blister hatch open. The hatch unlocks automatically when the controls in the blister activate. Just as important, once they activate they lock out the bridge controls. One pilot in the blister can slow the ship to drift approach velocity in seconds. And once the bridge controls are locked out, all the Seps will have done is confine themselves in the bridge and the engineering space ’til Mousetrap can send up reinforcements equipped to dig ’em out.”
The captain crossed his arms and shook his head. “The controls only activate in the event of a defined emergency.”
“Exactly. That plasma cutter can’t cut through the bridge capsule in time. But the hull’s thinnest point is where it joins the observation dome. The cutter can open a finger-width breach through an inch of plasteel in five minutes. The ship should react to the pressure-drop emergency within one minute.”
“If the ship reacts to a slow leak. If a blister hatch that hasn’t operated in years unseals. If an entire vestigial system that hasn’t been tested or maintained for decades works.” The captain stepped to one of the cutter operators and tapped the man’s shoulder. “How long?”
The man shrugged. “It seems to be going faster now, sir.”
The captain turned back to Dahlquist and shook his head. “I can’t do both. Too many uncertainties your way, Dahlquist. We will continue with the plan currently in progress.”
“Too many certainties your way, Captain. Seven inches of plasteel left. Forty-four minutes left. It’s impossible!”
The captain turned away.
“Dammit, Richard!”
The captain called to the Marine named Tom. “Sergeant, please escort Mr. Dahlquist out of here.”
“Aye aye, sir. To where?”
“As far as it takes to assure he doesn’t further delay or disrupt this operation. If he tries to come back here, shoot him.”
Peewee tugged Dahlquist’s hand and whispered, “Hicks is being a jerk. You can’t just leave!”
Dahlquist hissed, “Zip it, Peewee.”
As Dahlquist, Peewee, and the Marine reached Macdougal, the younger man grabbed Dahlquist’s arm and turned to the Marine. “Sergeant, I’ll have a private word with Mr. Dahlquist if you please.”
The Marine glanced back at the captain, who was peering over the shoulders of the men operating the plasma cutter, then at the rank badges on Macdougal’s epaulets. “Aye aye, sir. Make it a short word.”
Macdougal whispered, “See? He’s irrational, Johnny. Look, whatever you’re planning, I’m in. Better, you join the rest of us.” Macdougal slid one hand into a coverall pocket, then drew it out so that a pistol’s butt was visible.
“Mutiny, Mac?”
“Desperate situation. Desperate measures.”
Dahlquist shook his head. “Not my style. Or yours. And certainly not the jarheads’ style. They’ll drop you all before you get your pistols out of your pants. And by the time the smoke cleared it would be too late anyway.”
Macdougal said, “You have a better idea?”
“Maybe. I just need an extra pair of hands. Can you slip away from this zoo?”
Macdougal shook his head. “Like you said about the jarheads. Deserting my post in the face of the enemy will just earn me a summary bullet.”
Peewee tugged Dahlquist’s sleeve. “I don’t have a post. And my hands are fine.”
Macdougal looked down at her as though she had materialized from thin air and his eyes widened behind his glasses. “Huh?”
Dahlquist sighed, then said, “Long story, Mac.” He stared down at her, then nodded. “You’ll do.”
The Marine sergeant escorted them as far as the post he had guarded when they first encountered him, then resumed his duty.
Dahlquist led her back the way they came, just the two of them, now climbing the staircase instead of descending.
When they reached the body of the female Marine, Dahlquist knelt over her and plucked the remaining FED from her pack strap.
Ten minutes later they arrived back at the observation dome hatch and Dahlquist opened and closed it twice by pressing its control plates.
Peewee asked, “If the Seps closed all the doors, why was this one still open when I first got here?”
“The manual controls here work, but the circuitry that connects it to the bridge wore out years ago.”
“Will your idea win the war?”
“If it works, it’ll keep us from losing it for now. That’s the best I got. Come on. I’ll introduce you to hull plate five-six-six-eight.”
She followed him as he pushed off, then drifted to the dome’s edge, where its thick crystal and the hull’s steel joined.
He pulled the dead Marine’s FED from a pocket in his coverall, then held it in both hands and moved it slowly toward the hull.
Clank.
The FED clung to the steel like a big gray wart.
Dahlquist smiled. “Magnetism.”
Peewee peered at the speed display, then out through the dome. In front of them Mousetrap now loomed huge, and behind it Leonidas filled her field of vision like an orange sky. “It’s already too late!”
“Huh?”
She pointed forward. “Newton’s first law of motion says if the ship stops from ninety-six thousand miles per hour now, you and I will keep moving forward. We’ll squash onto the dome like bugs on a skimmer’s windshield. So will everybody else.”
Dahlquist shook his head and smiled. “The only good that came out of the Pseudocephalopod War is we stole C-drive from the Slugs. Newton knew gravity, but he didn’t know gravity could be manipulated. This ship moves within a self-generated envelope that insulates it and its contents. We can stop on a dime, astrophysically speaking, and we won’t feel a thing.”
“I doubt that.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Really? Did you get squashed against an aft bulkhead when we deorbited Weichsel and accelerated to one-third light speed?”
“Oh. So you’re going to shoot off this bomb and make the ship leak. Then you’re going to Superman over to the boob nipple, climb inside, and put the brakes on.”
“Not the way I would have described it. But yep.”
“That sounds too easy.”
“Yep.” Dahlquist’s eyes glistened. “Peewee, if Hicks had given us that plasma cutter we could have made a tiny leak. But what we have is this FED. An FED can
’t defeat nine inches of plasteel. But this one will blow a hole through one inch of steel so big that the air in this dome will evacuate down to practical vacuum in thirty seconds, give or take.”
She frowned. “Explosive decompression. You won’t be able to go over there and steer.”
He nodded. “I’ll need to be in place at the hatch at the moment it unlocks, and be holding on to the grab rail for dear life. Because anything inside this dome that isn’t bolted down is going to get sucked out into vacuum when the hull blows.” He pointed at a knob on the FED’s end, from which a red button protruded. “The maximum delay time on this is fifteen seconds. After I rotate the knob to set it, you wait until I get hold of the grab rail. When I give you the thumbs up, press this red button. Then kick off hard as hell and drift back out into the centerline passage. Close the door behind you. Should take you eight seconds, tops.” He poked at her. “Be sure you close the hatch behind you. It won’t close automatically in response to the decompression because it’s busted. Got that?”
“Close the hatch. Got it.” She kept frowning. “You can breathe in the navigation blister?”
Dahlquist bent down and twisted the FED’s timer. “I’ll hold my breath.”
“Another stupid joke.”
He whispered and his voice cracked. “The blister’s designed to function during an emergency. In an emergency an operator is presumed to be wearing a self-sustaining pressure suit. But all of this ship’s pressure suits are boxed up in a surplus equipment warehouse three jumps behind us.”
“If I push the red button, you’ll die.”
“Not immediately. I’ll be conscious and animate for a good thirty seconds. Plenty of time to hit the brakes.”
She shook her head. “I won’t do that.”
“If you don’t push the button, I’ll still die. So will you. So will eleven million other people. You don’t have to be Newton to do the math.”
“The captain said the controls are so old they won’t work.”
“Some of us old things still work.” He shrugged. “It’s an unavoidable risk.”
Peewee shook her head as her tears welled up again. “No. No. I can’t.”
Dahlquist turned and peered again at Mousetrap as it rushed toward them. “It’s all right. There wasn’t anything left for me to do there.” When he turned back to her his old eyes were moist, and he reached out and brushed her cheek with bony fingers. “Go forth and do great things, Peewee.”
He pushed hard, shot toward the navigation blister, grasped the grab rail then turned back to her and pumped a fist, thumb up.
She clutched her trembling right hand with her left to control its shaking, extended her arms, and pressed the button with her right index finger.
The bomb clicked, then spoke. “Fourteen.”
She stared at it, paralyzed. She hadn’t expected it to talk.
“Thirteen.”
“Not fair!”
“Twelve.”
She spun a somersault, kicked, and made it through the open door into centerline passageway as the bomb said, “Five.”
She turned, looked forward, and watched as John Dahlquist clung to the navigation blister’s grab rail, his back to her. He appeared as serene as he had appeared in the moment when she first saw him, an hour earlier. But now it seemed like she had known him all her life.
His voice echoed in her memory. “Got it?”
Got what? Her heart skipped and she spun and stretched her fingers toward the door close plate.
Boom.
The detonation, focused or not, stunned her, and within the confined space the concussion stabbed at her eardrums like knife blades.
Escaping air roared past her, and though she stretched her arm the inches between her fingertips and the plate grew. “Ahh!”
Debris sucked from the centerline passage stung her cheeks as it struck them, then caromed away. She paddled with decreasing effect against air that kept growing thinner. She grabbed at the door opening’s lip as she was dragged across it, clutched it so hard that the metal edge cut her fingers. She grabbed the lip with both hands then thrust herself back, into the centerline passageway, and punched the door close plate with a bleeding fist.
An instant later she rested, gasping, with her back against the closed door, the maelstrom of escaping air muffled by steel that now insulated her from vacuum.
When she turned toward the closed door, she pulled herself, hand over hand, to the quartz porthole set in one of the door’s panels and peered through.
At first the view through the dome opening seemed as black as empty space. Then she realized that the ship had come to rest nose first against the black, pocked rock of Mousetrap’s skin. Even what must have been a gentle tap against the Moonlet’s surface had shattered the great quartz dome. The navigation blister had been driven back into the dome by the impact, crushed like a discarded cola plasti amid enormous, jumbled crystal shards.
“You okay?” Macdougal, the officer who wore glasses, drifted up alongside her.
She nodded. “Fine. We stopped?”
Macdougal nodded. “No thanks to our efforts at the bridge. But yes. Dead solid perfect. Almost. Thanks to Dahlquist. Nobody’s sure yet whether the Seps will surrender, fight to the death, or fall on their knives. But it’s over. Johnny?”
She pointed through the quartz port.
Beyond the ruined dome John Dahlquist, face and limbs frozen and frosted by the cold of space, lay upon the craggy ebony surface of the small world where he had been born, now still, spread-eagled, and staring back at them with dead eyes.
Macdougal stared through the port, then tugged off his glasses and wiped away tears. “Not the homecoming you deserved, was it Johnny?”
Dr. Patricia Wynant Reisfeld sat in a folding chair on a temporary stage erected in front of the immense cruiser moored in Mousetrap’s berth nine.
Fourteen years earlier the ship had been snatched from the scrapper’s jaws, already torn down to metallic skin and corroded bones, only after the pleas, and threats, and unkeepable promises sworn by a twelve-year-old girl who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
The rescued Bastogne’s remains had then dangled for four years, a forgotten, frozen carcass moored above Mousetrap’s stark crags while the wreck’s sole champion raised awareness and money to resurrect it. The awareness had been difficult enough. The money, over the ensuing ten years, had always fallen ten percent short of the contractors’ ever-increasing estimates.
She turned in her chair and peered back along the reborn cruiser’s now-modern, bunting-draped mile-long flank. Only when a starship floated in its berth could a human being comprehend its majesty.
At the rostrum the Governor General of Mousetrap, to whom the Lord Mayor of the Free City of Shipyard had yielded, completed his remarks, turned, applauding, and introduced her.
She stepped to the rostrum, gripped its sides with both hands, and peered through the projected prepared text that hung in the air and separated her from her audience like a luminous wall. The crowd was bigger than most she had lectured, cajoled, and inspired; smaller than some.
On her left was the crew, in crisp and white uniforms as new as their ship, officers seated, ratings at ease in ranks behind them.
To the crew’s right sat the bureaucrats and union presidents and captains of industry who she had jawboned, and coddled, and wheedled when money ran short or when progress took too long.
Front and center sat the Homecoming Foundation’s principal donors. Some she recalled as self-important demagogues, others as compassionate geniuses who seemed too nice to have built empires. Among them fidgeted a half-dozen donors in off-the-rack suits, who had been selected to stand in for the tens of thousands of grassroots contributors who had given the price of a meal they really couldn’t do without.
The bulk of the audience, on her right, were two thousand displaced Weichselans, some survivors fourteen years older than they had been when they left home, some descendants of Weichselans who
hadn’t survived until peace had been restored. These Weichselans would be the first refugees the foundation and its glistening ship would repatriate to their homes. But they wouldn’t be the last, as long human cruelty created refugees.
She reached past the christening champagne bottle that awaited on the rostrum, switched off the prompting projector, and leaned in to the microphone. “I seem to have lost my extensive prepared remarks. I’m glad of that. And, trust me, so are you.”
She paused until the laughter ebbed.
“Fourteen years ago, during the worst of times, two wise men challenged me to go forth and do great things. Today I hope marks a step toward meeting their challenge, toward the best of times.”
She had carried the champagne bottle here specifically for this purpose all the way from Earth, a birthplace she had visited often over the past fourteen years, less because it was the green, warm antithesis of Weichsel than because it was where the money was.
The Lord Mayor and the Governor General flanked her as she stepped alongside the ship’s observation dome, the bottle held inverted in both her hands.
As the bunting that covered the ship’s new nameplate dropped away, she broke the bottle against it, and a constellation of bubbling droplets glistened beneath the berth’s floodlights.
Patricia Wynant Reisfeld spoke into the microphone that the Lord Mayor held for her. “May you voyage far and keep safe all who travel within you, and forever honor the memory of the hero whose name you bear.” She leaned toward the ship and pressed her fingers against its moist crystal dome. “Godspeed, John Dahlquist.”
National bestselling author Robert Buettner was a Quill Award nominee for Best New Writer of 2005, and his debut novel, Orphanage, Quill-nominated as best SF/Fantasy/Horror novel of 2004, has been called a classic of modern military science fiction. His ninth novel, The Golden Gate, is set in the near present, but has a giant space ship in it just like his first eight. Various critics have compared his writing favorably to the work of Robert Heinlein, which proves you can fool some of the people some of the time.
