by Bobby Adair
Brice squeezes perfectly through the gap—surprising, considering he’s unable to see the static grav fields. They’re invisible to the normal human, but glow like neon signs to a bug-head like me.
Lenox, with only the single bucket in tow, has little trouble following Brice through.
We’re a hundred meters astern of the Trog cruiser, in the neutral hole at the center of a toroidal grav field, the first of a dozen donut-shaped fields stacked smallest to largest from where we are, up to the stern of the vessel.
I point through the series of donut holes toward the cruiser’s dormant drive array. In everything but size, it looks like the array on the aft end of the Rusty Turd. Either could be mistaken for the dish of a radio telescope back on earth. “We head right up the axis of the ship now. There’s no grav to repel us unless we drift off the centerline. Once we arrive at the ship, we slip over the lip of the array, move onto the outer hull and grav compensate. The whole ship, bridge to stern, is wrapped in bands of grav alternating in polarity. One will pull you down. The other will push you away. You should be alright to walk down the length of the hull as long as you don’t move too fast across the field boundaries.”
Acknowledgments all around.
I turn to Lenox. “Place your bucket wherever you think best between the drive plates and then catch up.”
“Yes, sir.” She’s enthusiastic for getting to work.
“Let’s go.” I spin and lead the way again.
In the null g tunnel through the donuts, it takes just a few moments of effort before we’re at the gaping mouth of the vessel’s drive array. I fly over the lip, earning a close-up look at the thick layers of steel and composite materials that make up the hull. It’s the material I’m hoping to breach with nearly a half-ton of TX.
I plant my feet on the hull’s curve and turn just in time to see Silva alight right beside me with seemingly no effort at all.
“You’re good at this.”
“Of course.” She’s not bragging, just convinced.
Mostyn pushes her load up toward us. Below her, Lenox drifts out of sight into the concave array. As she disappears from view, she calls, “See you in a few, boss.”
Mostyn’s bundle rises above the edge, and Silva grabs a strap to pull it closer and settle it in beside us. Just as the bundle of metal buckets comes over the edge, it jerks out of her hands and shoots away like a balloon. “Dammit!” she curses.
I rocket off the surface as Mostyn apologizes over the comm for letting the explosives get away. It’s my fuckup. I knew. I saw, but my variable-g intuition isn’t plugged into all of my brain’s circuits yet. Every time I hit my suit’s auto-grav, my frontal cortex is tempted into laziness and wants to pretend it’s back in earth’s familiar constant field.
Graving way too hard for comfort, I reach the bundle when it’s nearly thirty meters up. I grip the straps and pull hard to arrest its momentum. The buckets shift and the straps hum under the strain. I can barely hold the weight. I call to Brice. “Careful! We grav compensate our suits for the shift in field polarity and strength. These damn buckets aren’t g-compensated at all.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Brice answers, his voice straining as he wrestles with seven hundred pounds of TX trying to get away from him.
“Help him,” I tell the others, as I try to control my load. It’s harder than I guessed, and I’m not winning.
Over the comm, I hear the others grunting and pushing.
Realizing I don’t have the strength in my hands to pull so much weight, I monkey climb around to the other side of the bundle, flatten my body, stiffen my suit, and use my suit’s grav to drive and steer it.
“Back over the lip,” Brice orders the other two.
“Inside the array?” pants Silva.
“Yes,” Brice answers. “We need to handle this differently.”
He’s right. Crossing the hull in a two-g reversing field, each three-hundred-and-fifty-pound bundle with flip back and forth from seven hundred pounds down to seven hundred up. Not only will it be near impossible to move them, we’ll be lucky if the buckets don’t crush us in the attempt.
I push my load back toward the null field inside the drive array’s concave expanse.
Chapter 34
One bucket at a time, nineteen buckets, five people, that’s only four trips down the length of the hull. Simple math. Simple solutions when brute force isn’t an option.
Walking up the cruiser’s outer hull, I’m passing through an outward-pushing field, and my bucket’s handle pulls me up with seventy pounds of pressure—a rigid balloon that after another ten steps will turn back into a heavy weight my tired fingers can barely carry.
The others are following me along the ship’s dorsal crest, passing a row of railgun barrels, some with large diameters, some smaller, some long, others short.
“Where are we putting these?” asks Brice. He knows where, in the barrels of the guns. He’s asking which ones we want to spike.
I point to a place I think is halfway down the length of the hull, slightly up the curve from where we are. “The ship’s three fusion reactors are mounted inside the main hanger there.”
“You want to take out the reactors?” asks Brice.
“Sounds good to me,” adds Lenox, having placed her solitary bucket where she figured it would do the right kind of damage, grabbed another from our cache, and caught up with our line.
The field I’m walking through reverses, and the bucket swings down from above, nearly jerking my arm out of socket as it’s pulled back toward the hull.
“God,” says Silva. “This is tiring.”
“It’ll be worth it.” I hope.
Mostyn, her voice taut from the strain, says, “These railguns, just ahead. Their barrels look wide enough.”
“Yeah.” No regular pattern exists in the distribution of gun barrel sizes protruding along the crest. Nevertheless, I’ve counted as we’ve been walking to gain an objective idea of how many barrels will suit our purpose, and to help me make the choice of where to start planting our bombs. It looks like we’ll be able to place one bucket snugly inside a railgun once or twice every thirty feet. “We’ll start with those, just ahead.”
“Won’t they just blow out through the barrel?” Mostyn’s question is timid, but valid. “Will the explosions damage anything?”
“Of course,” I tell her, going on to explain my hope, based on no engineering experience at all. “These barrels aren’t built out of thick steel like the ones you see on the seagoing battleships in the old movies. They’re designed to use gravity to push slugs down the long axis. All the support is in the rear.” At least that’s how I remember them from my look at the structures inside when we commandeered the Trog cruiser earlier. “The barrel isn’t designed to contain the lateral pressures of a chemical explosion. Especially not this much chemical.”
“So the gun breaches explode down inside the ship when the TX detonates?” asks Mostyn.
“Yes.” I make it sound certain, although I don’t know I’m right. Nevertheless, I’ve already figured out people like certainty when they’re risking their lives. In fact, I suspect they prefer flawed certainty to faultless ambivalence. They might not admit to it in a discussion of hypotheticals over beers and brats in the backyard, but out in the shit with red-hot railgun slugs tearing through the air at six thousand miles an hour, they’d choose certainty every time.
“Twenty of these charges going off at the same time along this row of guns will do the trick.” I scan back and forth, as I once more evaluate the layout. “The explosions will destroy the breaches on these guns and send a hail of shrapnel through the reactors inside. That’ll kill the ship. With a bit of engineering luck, the detonation will blow this seam wide open. Either way, the ship is dead, no longer a threat to us.”
“Except it’s still full of Trogs,” says Brice, pointing out the flaw in the plan. He’s being a dick, because sometimes, I think it
amuses him.
“Maybe we’ll catch them with their pants down again.” Another hope. Whether or not we kill any of their battle legions, we’ll definitely kill all the Trogs unlucky enough to be in the ship’s main hangar at boom time. The air inside will escape. They’ll all suffocate.”
Mostly I’m thinking, ‘One step at a time. Let’s kill the ship, and figure out how to deal with surviving Trogs afterward.’
I stop walking. I’m at the right place, I’m pretty sure, although with the curve of the hull, and me being so small and standing on such a large ship, I realize my perspective might be inaccurate. I don’t say that out loud.
Brice, guessing my dilemma, points up. “You could take off and get a better view.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
He grins. “Of course.”
Halfway down the ship’s length, so close to the bow, to flex my suit’s grav muscles and go zipping through space would surely catch the attention of the Grays on the bridge.
“Find a place for your charges,” I tell them, as I step up next to a railgun barrel and slip my bucket inside. Not a perfect fit, but as close as I’m likely to get. I give the top of my bucket a nudge to slide it down to the bottom of the tube, and watch as it recedes into the darkness inside.
A little to my left, Silva is doing the same.
Brice, Lenox, and Mostyn are piling their buckets together into a large-caliber, ship-killing weapon pretty close to the one Silva is loading.
“That’s a good idea,” I tell them. “Concentrating our explosives over a smaller area will probably work better than spreading them out.”
“Yeah,” says Brice. “I know.” As his tone conveys, I should have understood that he already knew that.
I think maybe he needs a shot of Suit Juice to take the grumpy edge off his fatigue.
Partially down the barrel, my bucket seems to be stuck. I have to use my rifle to tamp it in further. It doesn’t go all the way to the bottom, I don’t think, but there’s no way to push any more. I sigh. Nothing goes as planned, even the little things.
Brice and the others, their explosives planted, are hustling toward the stern. Silva is standing by the railgun tube she loaded, and she’s waiting on me.
I hurry along.
“Five down,” she comms me over a private link, making it pretty obvious she was looking for any way to start a conversation.
“Yeah,” I agree, suddenly at a loss for words that want to come so badly they burst full of nothing syllables. I’ve got nothing to fill a conversation with besides guilt, because the wife I promised myself to, a woman I loathe more than love, is shriveling away in my house back on earth. Worse yet, I’m not even sure how I short-circuited myself away from Silva’s smile and down to the hag wrapped around my wife’s sour soul.
The others are at least a hundred meters ahead of us and moving quickly.
I glance at Silva. “We should run.”
She nods and sprints ahead, tumbles at the grav change, and catches her balance.
“I’ll lead,” I say, “I can see the gravity fluctuations.”
Chapter 35
The distance from the aft drive array to the ship’s midsection, crossing through dozens of polarity changes, and being jerked both up and down by the heavy buckets of TX has taken its toll. We’ve planted fifteen bombs. Four remain and we carry those with us. We’re all bruised and tired, trudging forward to drop off our last load.
We’re silent as we walk, nothing but labored breathing over the comm.
I wonder how Blair and her rebels are faring against the Trogs on the subterranean levels, and I entertain the foundationless hope that Blair has helped the rest of the troops from inside the warehouse to escape. I hope they’re armed. I fantasize they’ve discovered the location where the Trogs have cached their automatic weapons. And I toss in the dream that Blair has organized them into units, eager for the coming fight.
Sadly, daydreams evaporate when luck in the real world changes polarity as quickly as a grav field.
“Trouble!” Lenox shouts over the comm.
I pull my eyes off my shuffling feet, scolding myself for inattentiveness as I scan for the source of the trouble, and I find it. A mob of Trogs is walking up the cruiser’s curved hull from the starboard side. We’re the reason they’re coming.
Brice immediately drops to a knee, levels his weapon, and starts shooting. He’s the only one who can fire his railgun, the only one not carrying a bucket.
Rounds veer up and down through the bands of gravity. Most hit the hull or fly off into space. The few that reach the widening wall of Trogs seem to be absorbed by the mass.
“This is shit!” curses Brice. “All these damn variable fields.”
“We gotta get out of here,” suggests Mostyn, not panicking. She’s run her evaluation of the situation, come to a conclusion, and she wants it heard.
“We have to plant the rest of the TX,” says Lenox, calmly.
All of those thoughts are running through my head already. I have to make a quick choice. Premiere on the list is whether Lenox is wrong, right, or committed blindly to my plan. Will that last hundred and fifty pounds of TX make the difference?
“Lenox, Silva, Mostyn,” I say. “Plant those last buckets. Brice—”
He laughs because he knows what’s coming, if not exactly, then he already has the idea. Brice stops his futile firing and taps furiously on his d-pad. “I’m transferring control of all the detonators to Lenox.”
She’s on her d-pad. “Got it.”
“Plant those explosives,” I command her. “Make your way clear of the ship and then blow ‘em all.”
I set my bucket on the hull. It’s one that’ll go unutilized.
“Move!” Lenox orders the girls.
Turning to Brice, I say, “Stay on my six. These grav fields will get pretty fucked up once the Grays see we’re airborne.”
I jump into the air and max grav right toward the center of the Trog line, weapon on full auto, a fiery stream of deadly metal blasting out in front of me.
Chapter 36
“Jesus!” shouts Brice. “There must be a thousand of ‘em.”
Seeing the immensity of the mob coming over the curve of the hull, I know Brice is right.
Spears of red sear past us as we fly. Trogs are shooting back. Most of them aren’t, as I realize one of the reasons their preferred weapon is the disruptor. In variable-g, you never know where your railgun slugs will end up.
I veer to the right and claw for altitude, firing down on the Trogs from above, pulling their attention away from Lenox, Silva, and Mostyn, who are trudging along the cruiser’s spine to make it to the location where they’ll put these last bombs.
“Not too much altitude,” Brice admonishes, as we pick up speed. “Or they’ll fire the ship’s guns at us.”
The cruiser’s gunners have no chance of hitting us at this range with the speed we’re moving, yet he’s right. If the gunners open their breeches to load their weapons, they’ll find the explosives. I angle back toward the mob and see several black forms spring out of the mass and fly toward us. “Ghost Trogs!”
“Shit.” Brice is looking. “Where?”
I point.
I cut a hard turn and angle for an empty swath of hull, well behind the advancing horde.
We cross a grav boundary, and I feel a punch that knocks the breath out of me. The grav is suddenly intense. I compensate as I shout a warning to Brice.
He hits the boundary and tumbles out of control.
It has to be four g’s, at least.
Below me, as I careen toward the hull, I see Trogs falling over. The ratcheting grav field is fucking with them, too. At least there’s that.
I hit the hull and roll. Trogs are all around me, on their knees and on their backs, reeling from the g.
Brice smashes down on a Trog, rolls, and springs up on wobbly knees, weapon firing.
The
grav starts to ease and I bounce to my feet, leveling my weapon, pulling the trigger to clear a path in front of me. “This way,” I shout, as I do my best to run.
The Trogs outside the field, ten meters away, are rushing toward us, stumbling as they encounter the change.
I amp up my grav again and take off. Good damn thing for us most Trogs like to keep their feet on the ground.
“Where’d those ghost Trogs go?” asks Brice urgently.
I glance at the black above us and see nothing. My bug can’t find their mass. My grav sense is overwhelmed by the rapidly changing fields. I feel like I’m in a dark room with somebody strobing a flashlight into my eyes.
I spin to aim my weapon at the Trogs closing in around Brice, and fire at a handful from the side. “Get off the ground, Brice!”
He jumps as he works the grav control on his data pad. He’s mobility-handicapped relative to me because he doesn’t have a bug.
“This way!” I shout.
Brice flies toward me, and I’m heading for another empty space on the hull.
“Ghost!” he warns.
Instinctively, I tuck my head and roll as I go into a dive. A black blur with a bright blue blade soars past me, scaring a load into my suit’s recycler.
“I never saw him.” My mouth is on autopilot with out-loud thoughts.
“We need to get down,” shouts Brice.
Looking back at the mob of Trogs, I see we’re at least thirty meters past them and they’re turning to come our way. Safe enough.
Brice is already angling for the hull, and his legs are starting to run even though he’s not down yet.
I’m scanning and flying backwards, looking for the second ghost.
My feet touch down, and I spray a wide arc of slugs that veer toward the deck as the g fluxes again.
“Damn those Grays!” grunts Brice, as he flips his suit back to auto grav so he can concentrate on defending himself rather than managing grav changes.
His railgun spews out a stream of hot slugs.
To my right, I see the ghost Trog who’d just missed me with his blade. He’s charging on foot.
