“You want me off Mousetrap because you think it’s dangerous.”
Mousetrap was dangerous, alright. There were sixty-three names on the newest memorial plaque. But Munchkin meant, and I understood her to mean, the Slug assault that was going to hit Mousetrap sooner or later.
“You came here so you could hitch a ride to Tressel, to be with Jude. You did more than your share, already. So hitch your ride.”
“When I came here, we didn’t know this was the front line.”
“We still don’t. The Slugs could hit Tressel first for all we know.”
“Stop rationalizing. I’m not running out on my troops.”
“Ord and Howard went back to Earth. Nobody thinks that was running out.”
“That’s a business trip. They’re coming back.”
I chinned my audio mute so she wouldn’t hear me sigh, and my faceplate was dark enough that she couldn’t see my eyes roll. Munchkin had no troops, though she and her Tunnel Rats would die—and too many of them had died—for one another. In the grand tradition of Lafayette and the American Colonies, the Flying Tigers in China, and the Eagle Squadron in the Battle of Britain, Munchkin was a noble foreigner who joined the fight against a common enemy. And her job was well and nobly done.
But she was right. I wanted her gone for selfish reasons. In my gut I knew the Slugs weren’t going to hit Bren or Earth or Weichsel first. The little maggots always knew where we were vulnerable, and they always smeared us when we needed it least. If there was a Pearl Harbor moment to hit Mousetrap, this was it. The humans the Slugs had used for mining for millennia had just finished mining out a neatly situated asteroid. But the humans hadn’t begun emplacing all those defensive armaments, yet.
To guard against exactly that vulnerability, fully three cruisers were now dispersed in the space around Mousetrap.
Above us, silver flecks drifted toward the larger speck of the Eisenhower. Ike was recovering her patrol fighters, then she would take in the last few transports from Mousetrap. Then she was off, bound for Tressel.
Tressel had lately been quiet, albeit troubled, and by all calculations was distant and non-strategic to the Slugs. It was jumps away from everywhere except Mousetrap, and its one attraction to the Slugs, Cavorite, had been depleted for millennia. If there was a safe haven in the human-occupied universe right now, it was Tressel. I wanted Munchkin together with Jude, and I wanted both of them as far out of harm’s way as possible.
As I watched, the last of the fighter flecks merged with Ike’s bigger speck.
A frown flickered across my face. For a brief window, now, Mousetrap would be a little exposed, until Ike’s replacement emerged from its jump and arrived on station.
Munchkin said, “Maybe you’re right.”
As I watched the Eisenhower float against the black fabric of space, something flickered. So fast that I couldn’t be sure I had seen the red streak appear, it began from nowhere and ended at the speck that was the Eisenhower.
The fleck bloomed into a white flash, then the flash faded to blackness, leaving behind an expanding sprinkle of tiny light points.
I grabbed Munchkin’s arm, and dragged her as I yanked us along the line, back to the airlock hatch that could get us back inside, sheltered from vacuum.
She said, “What happened to the Ike?”
My earpiece squealed as Mousetrap called itself to General Quarters.
I pulled faster toward the airlock. “Viper, probably. Hurry up.”
Without a sound in the vacuum of space, the Eisenhower had exploded into a halo of bits and pieces and human beings. Jimmy Wethers, his kid bosun on deck with the little whistle, all gone.
There hadn’t been much we could do to prevent this, that we hadn’t done, I supposed.
Nobody had ever actually seen a Viper. Mankind had only experienced one. Which had left me with two organic prosthetic fingers, and Earth defenseless. Viper was just a U.N. phonetic designator for a presumed velocity weapon that substituted size for speed. Before the Spooks knew about Cavorite, they estimated that Vipers traveled at .5 light speed, almost one hundred thousand miles per second, and academics said the Spooks were nuts. Actually, the Spooks estimated low. Current best guess was Vipers flashed in at one hundred sixty thousand miles per second. So a Viper could be small, the Spooks estimated no bigger than a refrigerator, if it was made of dense enough material, yet pack a punch.
That meant that a Viper could also loiter, undetectable in the vastness of space, waiting for a Football to send a signal, then accelerate to a target close by. A fire-and-forget homing mine. The Spooks suspected that Vipers and Footballs might have the Slug equivalent of delayed action fusing.
The airlock was twenty yards away, now. I glanced over my shoulder. Munchkin was five feet behind my boots, pulling like an Olympic swimmer in armor. Forty yards behind her came the Engineer crew.
Maybe the Viper that had just destroyed the Eisenhower was just a long-forgotten booby trap, scattered out here by the Slugs for nuisance value, thousands of years ago. They could be perverse little worms. In that case, we weren’t facing an impending assault. This was a tragedy, a disaster, but not a crushing blow.
I was five yards from the airlock when I glanced up at the Nimitz, floating against the glowing orange disc of Leonidas. All around the Nimitz flashes sparkled.
Munchkin said, “Jason, Nimitz’ fighters are engaging ship-to-ship!”
So much for an isolated nuisance. Chemical-fueled Starfires weren’t fast enough to engage Vipers. Probably Scorpions weren’t either, and Nimitz hadn’t even been refitted with Scorpions yet.
The black dot that was the Nimitz popped into a bright, white disc.
I looked toward Mousetrap’s north pole, as a Firewitch popped over the horizon, and skimmed toward us like a spinning spider, mag rifles ablaze. Mousetrap’s skin ahead of me erupted, in a volcano of shattered, black iron. I spun off into space, clutching a tether that was no longer attached to anything but me.
I called into my helmet mike, “Munchkin?”
FORTY-NINE
I SPUN, feet over head, and drifted in silence above Mousetrap’s enormity. I was far enough away now that I could see its curvature, and the hummocks and craters of its slowly rotating surface. The fifty-foot by one-hundred-foot solar panels of Mousetrap’s power array lay belþ€…ow me, already as small as a game of dominoes. I could make out the gash where the airlock, and the plaque pedestal, had been. I couldn’t see people, much less determine whether Munchkin and the engineers were dead or alive. I could see two other scars, hundreds of yards from the one that had severed me from Mousetrap, where other Slug rounds had torn additional rents in Mousetrap’s skin. It appeared the Slugs, as Howard had guessed, intended to take over our handiwork, not just blow it into rutabagas.
I called Munchkin once more, and got silence back. I twisted as I floated, but couldn’t see her. I switched to command net and heard nothing, though my display showed my radio was in the green. My armor was equipped with a transponder that could be homed on, if anybody had the time or inclination to search for it, but otherwise I was tumbling off into nothing, my arms and legs splayed as helplessly as a gingerbread man’s.
Yes, Eternads can imitate a spacesuit. They’re body armor, but they’re pressure tight against chemical, biological, and radiological agents. They’re pressure tight, but they aren’t much better at resisting the pressure differential between their inner, atmospheric pressure and real vacuum than a party balloon. They generate heat that will keep a GI comfortable in the Antarctic winter, but in the two-hundred-below shade of space, they popsicle their wearer in an hour or so. They generate and regenerate breathable oxygen, but their joints will brittleize, and fracture, so their wearer will boil in his own blood before he runs out of air.
I made sure my transponder was blipping, cranked up my headlight and set it to flash, cranked down my heat as low as me and the suit’s joints could stand, and started repeating a distress call, switching from fre
quency to frequency. I didn’t care whether a fighter jock, an intercomming supply clerk, or a rescue vessel heard me, just so somebody did.
But it seemed everybody had their hands full.
Only one anti-ship turret on Mousetrap was operational, and it spun and arrowed out streams of depleted uranium cannon rounds. Another Firewitch, mag rail rifles outstretched like tentacles on a blue-black squid, swooped across Mousetrap’s surface a hundred yards high, at probably a leisurely thousand miles per hour, firing glowing, purple Heavy rounds.
Before I could see whether the turret gunners hit the Firewitch, I rotated away from that view, and faced space. A Starfire augured toward Mousetrap, jinking left, right, up, down as it bore down on the Firewitch. And on me.
In the holos, the shot-down ace dangling in his parachute can tug his shroud lines, and maneuver. Thrashing my arms and legs against vacuum did nothing but make me spin worse, and pant harder. In space, a body—mine—remains in motion until and unless acted on by an outside force. Also, lack of apparent weight doesn’t equate to lack of mass. If the outside force that acts on the body in motion is a forty-ton spacecraft traveling six thousand miles per hour, the effect is about like getting hit by a speeding train. Except the splat sound dies in vacuum.
I switched to fighter jock frequency and screamed into my mike.
The Starfire jinked, released a missile, and peeled off high right. The missile lit, corkscrewed past me, and penetrated the Firewitch amidships.
The Slug monstrosity sailed on, ƒ€€d pthen, a mile or five beyond me and Mousetrap, it lurched, then it flew apart in all directions.
I hooted, then punched vacuum, which made no sense considering my circumstances.
Dogfights raged all around me, and the Starfires were faring better than the antiques we fielded ship to ship against the Slugs years before. But there were more Firewitches than last time. Lots more.
Most of the Starfires that barreled and swooped past me bore the red and yellow MCC-2 fuselage flash of the Nimitz. The Farragut was supposed to be out there somewhere, and she could recover Nimitz’ orphans. If Farragut survived, which seemed unlikely. Below me, Mousetrap itself offered a haven for the fighters, but they would have to fight their way to the North Pole inlet doors, and things on Mousetrap would have to remain stable enough that somebody could let them in when they knocked.
As for me, Starfires were no more able to pluck a floater from space than an Earth jet fighter could pluck a castaway from the sea. I was going to die in a few hours. That was pretty clear. I switched off the fighter jocks’ frequency—they needed no distractions—and screamed incoherently into the rescue band for four minutes straight.
I wasn’t babbling, just mad as hell. It wasn’t like we hadn’t done what we could to protect Mousetrap. Of a dozen operational cruisers, two were in transit to relieve others on station. Three were dispersed around Mousetrap, a beefed-up two were orbiting Bren, a pair were laying for the Slugs near Weichsel, and three were arrayed above Earth. We finally had ship-to-ship thermobaric weapons that, as I had just seen, worked against Slug ships. Firewitches and Trolls are one, or a few, large chambers inside, filled with air at Earth sea level pressure. So one penetrating warhead that disperses, then ignites, flammables inside a Slug vessel scores a kill. Yet still, the little maggots had done it to us again.
I cranked my thermostat down until I lost feeling in my toes, and tried to take smaller breaths, for no good reason.
Forty minutes later, Mousetrap looked about the size of a misshapen pumpkin. I couldn’t see any Starfires, except one drifting with a stub wing off. More Firewitches than I cared to count drifted in a loose cordon around slowly rotating Mousetrap. As I watched, more drifted up, from all directions, slow and lazy, moving no faster against the starry blackness of space than airliners on final.
I twitched my arms every few seconds, to keep the Eternads kinetic energy capture system recharging the batteries. I shut off my heads-up display, to save a little more juice. All the news it could display was bad anyway.
When I flexed my arms this time, something crackled like cellophane. My armor’s pressure membrane was brittleizing in the cold. The end of my life was a pinhole away.
I tumbled so my view changed again, from Mousetrap to space.
In the distance, a blue-black spider drifted toward me.
FIFTY
SURELY, the Firewitch would simply pass me.†€2 >
But the closer it got, the more heads-up it remained on me.
What were the odds? I was like a castaway in the mid-Atlantic, getting run down by the Queen Mary, approaching at five hundred knots.
The Firewitch had its array spread, so it really did look like a blue-black tarantula coming to gobble me up. The purple, visible-spectrum part of its inner illumination shone out through the hundred-foot wide, transparent blister centered between its six outstretched arms. At low speed, its array wouldn’t brush me aside, like debris it encountered near light speed. I would splat against its purple dome like a gnat on a windshield.
The Firewitch bore down on me, so close now that I could see crusty lumps in its array arms.
I stared into the big purple eye, waited for the train wreck, and said, “Crap!”
The eye flashed yellow. Then it burst like a brittle balloon. Then the Firewitch exploded silently into pieces that tumbled in all directions, not least toward me. A metal triangle bigger than a piano pounded my gut, and I began to spin in another direction, twice as fast as I had been tumbling, so I couldn’t distinguish what I saw, except alternating dark and blinding brightness.
I thought a voice said, “It’s over.”
Shadowy, curved pearly wings appeared around me, then slowly enfolded me.
Then there was only darkness.
FIFTY-ONE
I DIDN’T FEEL DEAD. I felt with my chin, and restarted my visor display. Outside temperature had climbed to a toasty zero Fahrenheit. Outside pressure existed, equivalent to plus-one mile above sea level. I lit my helmet lamp, and saw ribs. Not Leviathan ribs, like I had been swallowed. Perforated, curved, metallic ribs like the inside of a fuselage.
“I said, your tumbling gave me fits. Over.”
I replied, “What?”
The voice seemed to speak to someone else. “I have the floater, over.” Then, to me, it said, “Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“Lieutenant Kenneth Arroyo. But I asked you first.”
“Wander. Jason. Major General, United States Army.”
“No shit? Sir.”
I twisted around. The dark space I floated in was a tube six feet in diameter, and twenty feet long.
“Sir, there’s a weapons rack clamp on the top center of the bay, back there. You might want to feel around, then grab it tight.”
I twisted further, until my light flicked across an angular metal arm. A yellow canvas telltale ribbon, the sort that remained after a weapon had been released, dangled with one end free, in zero gee. I inched tŽ€gulo it, twisted the telltale around my wrist like a subway straphanger, and said, “Done. Why am I doing this?”
“I assume this is your first Scorpion ride, sir. It gets a little hairy, even with a gee suit.” The voice rose an octave. “We got company. Hang on, sir.”
I blacked out before I puked.
FIFTY-TWO
I SMELLED RUBBING ALCOHOL. The next thing I saw was a cocoa-skinned man with salt-and-pepper hair, who bent above me as he fingered the touchscreen of a monitor alongside me. He wore medical scrubs, embroidered with a frog clenching a threaded needle between its cartoon teeth, and with the words “Mean Green Sewing Machine.” His name plate read “Wallace.” Red-brown stained the surgeon’s scrubs, and his eyelids drooped like he hadn’t slept in a week.
I noticed that burn dressings covered his forearms. I found out later that Doctor Wallace had crawled into an orphaned fighter that had limped into one of Emerald River’s launch bays, through flames, then dragged the fighter’s unconsciou
s pilot to safety. Then, the surgeon had crawled back in, and dragged out the wounded Wizzo, too.
Doctor Wallace whispered into a Stenobot mike pinned to the scrubs, then said to me, “Aren’t you a little old for this sort of thing?” Then he patted my shoulder, and was gone.
I turned my head, and saw, on a Plasteel-framed bed alongside me, a kid in a transparent burn bag that enveloped him neck-to-toes. Through the gel, I could make out his limbs, legs, and torso, all angry red and purple and black. His pilot buzz cut had been shaved on the left side, around a stitch row that marched across his skull like a line of ants.
I said, “What’s your ship?”
“Nimitz. Was. Bastards caught Ike with all her eggs in the basket.”
“The Farragut?”
Orphan's Alliance Page 17
