The Escape Orbit

by James White

  It wasn’t an ideal position for the ambush, Warren thought, but it could have been much worse.

  With gestures which were an improbable combination of salute, cheery wave and thumbs up sign, Kelso and Sloan disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel heading for Number Two Attack Point, which was very nearly to windward of the shuttle’s position and from which the main body of commandos would be able to approach the ship under cover of smoke. At Warren’s signal the suit technician stopped pouring water over him and began pounding on the interior of the metal hull with a piece of wood. It was a slow, irregular beat, not very loud but still capable of being heard all over the Escape site, and it was the sort of noise which might very well be made by someone trying to attract attention when radio or other means of communication were impossible. That would be how the Bugs in the shuttle would regard it, Warren told himself. And later, if the pounding should vary in beat or volume they should regard it as a sign of impatience or desperation on the part of the survivors and not as instructions going out to the assault group via drum-talk….

  The shuttle’s lock swung suddenly open and the ladder with its oddly shaped rungs and stubby handrail came telescoping down. A billow of smoke from the fires behind Number Two rolled past the enemy ship and when it cleared there were two Bugs on the ladder. A few seconds later there were four, all descending as quickly as was possible for that particular life-form to move. Excitement as well as heat made Warren’s mouth go dry.

  They intended to make a fast rescue. That much was plain from the speed of their descent and the fact that the cargo lock remained sealed—they weren’t going to break out one of their ground vehicles. And the normal crew of the shuttle was five. Counting the one they must have left on radio watch there were five beings in the rescue party, which was a further indication that they suspected nothing or they would not have taken so many at one time. But the four Bugs moving away from the base of the landing ladder were armed—they might not be suspicious but at the same time neither were they stupid. In addition they carried metal-cutting equipment and packs which probably contained medication of some kind, all hung from the lightweight type of suit which gave the maximum amount of physical mobility with, as was usual with such suits, the minimum of physical protection. All at once Warren felt sorry for them.

  From the Bug point of view this was simply an errand of mercy, but one which required a considerable amount of intestinal fortitude to carry out. To eyes accustomed to much higher light intensities the Escape site must appear a very spooky place. Even though the sun shone through an obscuring cloud of smoke, the light was not good. All around them the ground smoldered, rendering objects and distances uncertain in what must appear to be a hot and foggy twilight, and when a large cloud of smoke drifted past their visibility would drop to a few yards. People who would subject themselves to such conditions, even for a few minutes, possessed qualities which Warren could admire. It was a pity that these admirable qualities would serve only to get their possessors killed a few minutes from now.

  Warren signaled again and the technician gave the hull a single, solid blow which made the interior of the dummy ring like a discordant gong. In the distance there was a crash of falling trees and the soft crackling of fires, both too far away to seriously frighten the Bugs. Behind Warren the smoke aimed at screening the site from the guardship’s telescopes, which at that time were thirty-two degrees above the horizon with a thickening atmospheric haze to penetrate in addition to the smoke pall, was rising like a thick, blue fog. At the same time the men at Number Two were busily making smoke which rolled slowly towards the shuttle, billowing upwards as it came to drift past the control-room ports high in the ship’s nose. At ground level this smoke appeared to be clotted here and there, but even to Warren’s more sensitive human vision the wavering, indistinct shadows did not at all resemble a slow-walking file of men.

  One to get ready … he thought.

  As a species the Bugs were six-limbed and insectlike, but lacking in the protective carapace of exoskeleton developed by the many Earth insects—they were the type of bug which squished rather than cracked when it was walked on. Their bodies seemed altogether too soft and heavy for their four walking legs, mainly because of the high liquid content of their systems and the fact that the movement of each vital organ or muscle was reflected as a constant twitching and bubbling of their semi-transparent tegument. But they were in no sense physical weaklings. Their two manipulators which projected forwards from each side of the head section, which in turn was connected to the main body by a short and ridiculously thin neck, were both sensitive and immensely strong. The manipulators, mouth and general sensory equipment housed in the head section had the hairy, frondlike appearance of something which might have grown under the sea. Not all of these physical details were visible as the four Bugs rounded the farmhouse, but because they were wearing the equivalent of the tight-fitting service battledress there was very little hidden.

  Two to get set …

  The second gonglike note made them hesitate, as did the realistic collapse of one wall of the farmhouse with the accompanying dense smoke. But they came on, their bodies wobbling like water-filled balloons in their haste, their head sections swaying heavily from side to side. Behind the dummy the smoke was rising so high and becoming so thick that the whole Escape site was darkened. The Bugs were now hidden from sight of the shuttle by the ruined farmhouse. They came to a halt before the dummy’s airlock, and one of them suddenly began to move away again, obviously intending to have a look at the other side of the mock-up. Warren made frantic chopping motions with his hand.

  … And three to GO!

  The reverberations of the final signal and the subsidence of more wreckage from the farmhouse both served to keep Warren from hearing the twang of cross-bows from the farmhouse, from points all around the site and from positions further along the interior of the dummy. It seemed suddenly as if the four Bugs had grown bristles—thick and very short bristles, because the bolts had penetrated deeply. They rolled over soggily and lay still, leaking the yellow stuff they used for blood and which turned black within a few seconds of being exposed to the oxygen-laden air.

  Warren swung away from the periscope and hurried carefully toward the airlock, thinking that if the four Bugs had made any noise as they died, which was very unlikely, the one left aboard the shuttle might put it down to a cry of surprise at the sudden cave-in of wreckage, some of which might have fallen too close for comfort.

  The Bug in the ship could not suspect anything yet, but it would require only a few minutes of not being able to raise its friends on their suit radios for it to become very anxious indeed. What happened after that depended on how well the Bug could see, how easily it became confused and, most important of all, how any fine and admirable qualities it possessed.

  The dummy’s airlock dropped open and Warren went through it, running.

  Chapter 19

  Because the dummy was supposed to be lying on its side the lock’s outer seal formed a short, steep ramp to the ground. Warren stumbled going down and the sweat of fear was mixed briefly with the super-heated perspiration already bathing him as he thought of the possible effects of a fall on the too-brittle seals of his helmet and air-hose. But he recovered balance and ran carefully into the smoky sunshine of the site, rounding the farmhouse on the side opposite that used by the Bug rescue party and heading for the tall shadow in the smoke which was the shuttle. He was not running much risk of being seen because the Bug on watch, if it could see anything at all in the smoke, would be watching the place where its friends had last gone from sight.

  Most of the assault force was already in position, packed tightly into the small circle around the ship’s stern which was hidden from the control-room by the bulge of the hull. A few feet above their heads the flaring mouth of the main venture, still glowing red, was a stark reminder of their fate should the Bug upstairs decide suddenly to take off. There were two figures already on the ladder,
climbing rapidly and silently on padded boots—Kelso and Sloan were not wasting any time. Two other men, the pilots, were starting up the ladder as Warren reached it. He joined them, having to pull rank on the other commandos waiting to ascend by tapping a few helmets firmly and indicating the number painted on his shield. He mounted silently, although not as quickly as Kelso and Sloan, so that the only noise from the ladder was the regular tap, thump, tap-tap made by the Committeeman beating on one of the handrails with padded sticks.

  Considerable research had gone into the development of that particular rhythm, which was the nearest they could come to the sound made by a six-limbed being slowly climbing a ladder. The Bug in the control-room should be really confused by that sound, since it had just seen its friends disappear towards the dummy and if any one of them had a reason for coming back it would have told him about it on the suit radio. The other possibility was that a survivor from the crashed ship had been wandering the area and found its way to the shuttle, missing its four rescuers in the smoke. This was a pretty strong possibility, Warren told himself desperately, and even if the Bug was frightened it would think twice about taking off and abandoning its friends and this possible survivor. At his moment it was probably asking the advice of its superior in the guardship about the situation.

  The first bolas with its attached line whirled upward past Warren as he climbed, closely followed by two more, to wrap themselves around the thin metal post and spidery antenna which projected from the hull a few yards above the lock. The weights on each bolas were enclosed in padded bags to ensure maximum silence in use, and the bolas with its attached line had been soaked in super-saturated solutions of CuSO4 until a few seconds before it was needed, and the other ends of the wetted lines were being grounded in equally wet earth. Copper wire fine enough to be woven into a rope was beyond even Hutton’s present resources, so that water and copper salts had had to serve instead.

  The three lines tightened suddenly and Warren saw the antenna support quiver, bend slightly, then sag until it was lying almost flat against the hull.

  If everything had worked as it should, the cutting off of communications between guardship and shuttle should not have been a dramatically sudden or frightening occurrence. There should have been a gradual fading of signal strength followed by a complete fade-out as the bolas first grounded the antenna and then pulled it off target, and the whole thing would be attributed to malfunctioning equipment—the other person’s equipment, of course. They should not be suspicious, Warren told himself as he reached the top of the ladder, not yet ….

  The lock chamber was a large compartment extending deep into the ship, a three-way lock opening into the prisoner accommodation as well as the Bug-inhabited section. It allowed prisoners to be disembarked without having to contaminate the whole ship with oxygen or letting the prisoners retain their complete spacesuits. The ship could carry up to one hundred prisoners in four closely-spaced decks connected by a ladder running up through a central well, so that the top two decks and the entire length of the ladder were covered by the weapon mounted in the floor of the control-room. This was an unsophisticated but very effective affair firing solid projectiles only, since anything more devastating might have blown the stern off the ship. The other seal opened into a companionway leading to the control-room, but in a series of flat zig-zags which was more comfortable for climbing by the ungainly Bug life-form. The two pilots were standing beside the Bug seal, and Warren joined them so as to avoid blocking the assault men who were silently following him up the ladder. Sloan was knocking the last of a series of wedges into the pivot of the outer seal, quietly with his fist. The metal wedges were padded for silence of insertion and for increased friction when in place. Kelso, a pouch of wedges tied to his middle, was checking the manual controls of the prison-deck seals.

  In a war lasting as long as this one had, it was natural for both sides to gain knowledge of how and why each other’s equipment worked, there being an ample number of wrecks to study. It was normal practice on both sides to have a manual over-ride on all lock controls, a local control which in turn could be over-ridden only by an Emergency Lock. But once the seals were opened on local and wedged, the emergency controls would not be able to close them. The snag was that the operation of the manuals would show on the control-room tell-tales.

  There were about twenty men in the lock chamber by now, standing motionless and with their wickerwork armor making them look like grotesque half-vegetables in the garish blue light used by the Bugs. The man at the base of the ladder had stopped reproducing Bug footsteps and the occupant of the control-room would be expecting this Bug-that-never-was to open one of the seals. Being a survivor of the crashed ship and hence unfamiliar with the purpose of the shuttle, it was likely that it would open the larger of the two seals, the one leading into the prisoners’ quarters.

  Kelso opened the large seal and sidled back along the wall to join Warren, Sloan, and the pilots at the smaller one. The assault men crowding the compartment moved through and began to mount the ladder to the prison decks, their place being taken by men already on the landing ladder. In addition to cross-bows they carried bunches of long, thick canes which could be slotted and locked together to form a thirty-foot lance. With these metal-tipped lances it was hoped that the men could get high enough to damage the machine-gun projecting from the control-room blister, or even smash through the transparent plastic of the blister itself. It was possible, just barely conceivable, that they could storm the control-room with them. But the attack through the prisoners’ section was to be mainly diversionary ….

  It took about eight seconds after the large seal was opened for the Bug to react, then the machine-gun burped thunderously and two men crashed to the bottom of the ladder. One of them landed head-first and he remained in that position, with one leg hooped around the fifth rung and his body held unnaturally stiff by his wickerwork shield, effectively blocking the ascent of the others. An officer bent forward to detach him from the ladder and continued to bend forward until he was flat on the deck, splinters flying from his back as a stream of metal tore through him. The same burst sent another man higher up the ladder crashing to the deck, and somehow the first officer’s body was no longer blocking the way. The men in the lock compartment pressed forward again. None of them got higher than the third rung.

  But still the men came crawling up the ladder from the ground and pushing past him, as if eager to get to some wild and wonderfully exclusive party. There must have been twenty or more bodies around the base of the ladder now, twitching and writhing feebly as they died from their wounds or from chlorine coming through smashed helmets, or from both. Many of them were plainly dead and moved only because the weapon above them gave them no peace. And the whole horrible, twitching mass leaked red, a red that was too vivid and garish in the harsh blue light to look like blood.

  Warren found himself pounding on Kelso’s arm with his fist and shouting—to no avail since the words were inaudible in the din outside his own helmet—for the Lieutenant to get on with it! But Kelso refused to move until he was good and ready, which meant the next time there was a sustained burst of fire from the control-room. When that happened the Bug’s eyes would be on its weapon and not on the master panel, where the opening to the second lock would be registering. He stopped maltreating Kelso’s upper arm and forced himself to look at the slaughter again.

  Somebody had got the bright idea of going up the ladder two at a time, one in the normal way and the other on the inside where it projected a couple of feet from the wall. The man on the inside had the ladder’s supporting struts to climb around as well as mounting the rungs, but it was a very good idea. The first time it was tried a very long burst indeed was needed to pick the inside man off the ladder, and Warren was suddenly aware that the seal beside him was open and Kelso was thumping a wedge into place.

  They went up the zig-zag companionway fast, but carefully so as not to spring a leak in their suits—Kelso, Sloan, the
two pilots and Warren trying hard to keep up with the younger men. They had to reach the control-room before the Bug had time to think, time to realize that its friends were dead, that there were no survivors from the crash-landed ship and that the present attack was so well timed that the whole thing had to be an elaborate ambush. They had to get there before it decided to hit the emergency takeoff button. It could even wreck the Escape by putting an Emergency Lock on the air-tight hatch leading into the control-room, by making it impossible for Kelso to operate the manual controls ….

  But the hatch was wide open when they reached it, the big, circular cover standing at right angles to the control-room floor. Kelso banged home a wedge so enthusiastically that he overbalanced and just kept himself from falling by grabbing the edge of the opening with both hands. He was still hanging there and trying to get his feet back onto the companionway as Sloan carefully withdrew a heavily padded bag from his pouch and from the bag took even more carefully a large, lumpy ovoid of glass. The glass container held nothing more harmful—to humans, at least—than oxygen under pressure, and the glass was as much thinner than that used in the suit air-tanks. He lobbed the glass container into the control-room, waited for five seconds and then went charging up through the hatch with one of the pilots hot on his heels.

  There was a soft, red explosion in the region of Sloan’s stomach and the Major folded violently in the middle and rolled from sight. The pilot toppled backwards a second later, his helmet and head inside it blown open. The Bug up there had a sidearm, too, Warren thought sickly, of the type which fired explosive bullets. But the Bug had no business being alive, with an oxygen bomb bursting beside it!