Free Short Stories 2013

by Baen Books

  Using the external handholds, he towed himself back down into the shadow, and then around behind the rad shack, placing its mass between himself and the approach vector of the saboteurs. Once there, he checked the rad shack’s sensor feed in his helmet: not good. Whether it was the sensors failing or the EMP interference, the data skipped sideways, winked out, came back, fizzled, leaned, then straightened and remained momentarily, quaveringly, readable—before it commenced its weird free-form dance all over again. But in that brief moment of clarity, Grim had seen the oncoming blip: larger now, and shaped like a lumpy, collapsed quatrefoil. There were four of them? Maybe it was just another sensor glitch—

  But it probably wasn’t, because it made perfect sense. It was just the right number: one heavy weapons expert, a backup expert who was probably carrying the missiles they planned to use on the Big Secret, and then two combat specialists. The combat personnel would be specially trained in EVA weaponsplay—which, given the way that conventional firearm recoil sent you tumbling ass-over-ankles in zero-gee, was not a common or easily acquired skill. Those muscle-boys would provide cover for the other two, distract and/or neutralize responding defense forces, maintain situational awareness. The guys with the missiles would be monomaniacally focused on their equipment and their target. And in one more minute they would reach the 2000-meter range mark: a logical distance from which to eliminate the rad shack.

  Meaning it was time for Grim to get a little distance from the shack, but without using his high-signature MMU. Grim placed both feet against its hull and reached down to grasp the handhold on either side of him as he coiled his body into a tight squatting position. Then he simultaneously released the hand holds and pushed as hard as he could with his legs.

  As he shot away from the rad shack, he checked the HUD to see if there was any reaction from the blips; no new course changes, there—and then the whole display went black. Great. Either the commo signal was lost or the shack’s sensor system was finally fried; either way, it was all on him, now.

  Which meant it was time to confront the Cochrane and its insanely diverse ammo bag. Clips of penetrators, expanders, nonlethals—those were pretty self-explanatory. Pulling up the top flap on the segmented grenade pouch, Grim laid a finger on an HE round, considered its use as both a weapon and a flare, rejected the tactic. Since Eureka’s own sensors would be pulled in, they wouldn’t see it. Instead, Grim selected two range-detonated flechette rounds, loaded them, and reasoned he should give the targeting system a quick check before trusting his life to it. He turned it on, and raised the integrated sighting scope to his right eye—

  And held his breath. Whatever computer was silently working in the recesses of the Cochrane, it was apparently laboring overtime: multiple moving objects were quickly located optically, ranged and vector assessed by a laser ping, and a guidon indicated how to reposition the gun to acquire the closest target. Damned impressive—but still just a toy, Grim reminded himself.

  He revised that opinion when the Cochrane flashed a new guidon into existence in what seemed like open space and indicated a cluster of four objects—which Grim himself still couldn’t see—closing at .97 meters per second at 2100 meters range. Sweet Jesus: unprompted, the Cochrane had found the attack force. Well, well, Grim thought, smiling at the gun, you’ve earned your continued existence—bitch.

  The targeting display flickered, then reasserted shakily. The electromagnetic soup was getting to the Cochrane’s electronics: Grim switched off the power, and brought the scope back up to his eye.

  Even through the faceplate, the unassisted sight-picture in the unusually wide eyepiece was still viable. At maximum magnification, the plain old mechanical scope was already picking out dark blotches moving across and occluding the background starfield where the targeting system had detected the intruders. Grim grunted in satisfaction: gotcha. He settled in to watch them, calculating that they would make their move within the minute, if his conjectures were correct. And so far, they had been—except for one unsolved tactical variable: where was the ship from which the attackers had deployed, and how had it stayed both out of sight and out of the trash stream?

  Grim glanced sideways at the scattered, tumbling bits of irregular blackness and grayness that were the trash stream—and suddenly he knew the answer: the attackers’ “ship” was floating past him right now. Their ship was now part of the junk. Sure: each of them had been sealed and launched in a self-disassembling pod with a hull of composites and plastics. It had had rudimentary thrust, life support, comestibles, and was set on a ballistic course, so it required no guidance. When the attackers neared the range at which Eureka’s arrays might pick them out, they (figuratively speaking) pulled their ripcords and let the pods fall—or rather, float—to pieces around them. That way, they could probably have approached to within about three hundred kilometers before getting into their vacc suits and preparing for—

  The attack began with a sudden burst of vapor, centered on a bright flash which bloomed and then arced out from the midst of the attackers: a rocket, speeding toward the rad shack. Grim flinched away as a blinding flash coronaed up from the far side of the boxy module, knocking it into a slow tumble as papers and pulped electronic parts vomited out of the huge, jagged rupture in its side.

  Time to return the favor. Grim reactivated the targeting system, leaned into the Cochrane’s sights again, ready to fire—but was surprised to see a question mark glowing on the right margin of the display overlay, underscored with the legend “0G opt?” Grim wanted to spit: goddamn, was this weapon busted already? Goddamned tinker toy piece of sh—

  Oh, no, wait: Mendez had told him about this. The weapon sensed profound changes in ballistic conditions—such as gravity—and would ask if you wanted an optimum solution. So: “0G opt?” was obviously offering him an optimal firing solution for zero gee. Well, that seemed like a good idea: he edged his thumb up to the “accept” button behind the handgrip, pressed it. The query blinked away.

  Grim focused on the four attackers again: they were at 1400 meters range and still clustered. He reasoned he might get two of them with a flechette grenade. But how to access the launcher?

  The needed information arose as chapter and verse from Mendez’s endless worship of the Cochrane: “You’ve got three settings, Sarge: main weapon, launcher, or integrated. Just adjust this dial down here—”

  Grim did. The Cochrane identified the ready round in the launcher: a laser-controlled, range-detonated flechette grenade. It computed the ballistics—which were pretty clean in free space—and superimposed the firing solution on the current scene: it painted a dim red cone on top of two of the attackers’ vector-projected plots at the time of warhead discharge. Then the image fuzzed, almost disappeared: another EMP surge. Damn: moment of truth. Grim snapped the safety off, lined up the weapon until the guidon told him his aimpoint matched the indicated firing solution, and squeezed the trigger—just as the targeting image flickered and winked off for good.

  For a split second, Grim was sure—again—that the weapon had malfunctioned: the almost imperceptible jolt from the underslung launcher barely tumbled him. But no, he could see the grenade moving briskly downrange. But wait a minute: he could see it? How was that possible? Why was it going so slowly—?

  And then he realized that, in zero-gee, the optimal firing solution was not as dedicated to maximizing accuracy as it was concerned with minimizing recoil: the munition had been fired with only a tiny bit of force.

  Grim, now moving backward more rapidly, and in a very slow tumble, entertained the brief hope that, because of the minimum discharge from the launcher, that it—-and his position—-would remain undetected by the attackers. No such luck: a mere second after his counterattack, the infiltrators turned toward him, weapons flickering. He twisted his head to keep them under observation: the muzzle flashes were very small, and seemed to occur in short, angry sequences: probably small-caliber weapons, with a maximum three-round burst setting. All common features
in zero-gee firearm designs that—ever unsuccessfully—tried to minimize the recoil of conventional rounds. A few self-oxidizing tracers indicated the vector of the fire, which dropped off: having seen that they were wide of their mark, the attackers were no doubt using their own MMUs to correct their tumble before reaiming—

  Almost precisely where Grim had seen the sparkle of their weapons, there was a barely visible flash, from which extended a small, lateral vapor plume: his flechette grenade. As Grim rolled up slowly toward direct alignment again, he brought the scope up to his eye.

  Seen at the visual equivalent of fifty meters, one of the figures he had targeted was thrashing spasmodically. Whether or not he was wounded, it was pretty clear that his suit was vented, probably multiple times. The other figure was a stark contrast: motionless, arms widening slowly, some object—his personal weapon?—had begun to free-float away on a slightly altered vector of its own. The third attacker, who had been at the edge of the area of effect, was also engaged in rapid motions, but these were brisk and methodical, not desperate. Probably one of the missile specialists trying to change over to his personal weapon.

  As Grim completed his first full 360 degrees of tumble, he switched over to the Cochrane’s main barrel and briefly considered using his own MMU to restabilize. But if he did so, he would lose the advantage of getting in another shot before they were ready to respond. On the other hand, taking another shot would make his own tumble worse. Mendez had mentioned something about rear-angled compensator jets for zero-gee firing stabilization—sort of like a mini-bazooka back-blast that equalized the force of the muzzle discharge—but Grim couldn’t recall the details. And since Grim had no time to screw with it, he used what he knew: he spun the propellant dial to the lowest setting—minimum recoil, in case the automatic optimization system had been fried. Then, before he rolled up beyond his current position of direct alignment with the target, he hastily lined up the attacker who had been outside the cone of flechettes, and fired four quick rounds.

  Grim was surprised—and relieved—to find that most of weapon discharge vectored him directly backward; as he fired, the muzzle brake’s cruciform nozzles selectively vented the Cochrane’s exhaust to precisely counteract any pitch, yaw, or roll changes to his trajectory. But the Cochrane’s system wasn’t perfect: possibly because Grim had rapped the rounds out so fast, there was still enough off-vector impulse to increase the rate and skew of his tumble.

  As he came around on his first, faster, slightly cockeyed rotation, Grim panned the scope across what he estimated had been his target area. At first, he saw nothing—then a faint white plume: he swept back toward that. The plume disappeared briefly, then appeared again, evidently rotating back into view. It was a punctured air-tank: the rapidly venting gases had thrown its wearer into an accelerating spin and were carrying him on a very divergent trajectory. Judging from the figure’s already muted writhings, he wouldn’t live to see where his new heading took him. Grim guessed that he had hit more than just the backpack unit.

  But now, as Grim continued his own knees-over-nose rotation, he faced two alternatives—neither of which had promising outcomes. Grim could either wait until he completed another somersault, try to access the last target through the Cochrane’s scope (unlikely, given his increasingly erratic tumble) and score some more hits (profoundly unlikely, for the same reason); or, he could let the Cochrane float on its lanyard while he grabbed for his MMU controls to correct his tumble—and thereby allow the other guy to finish getting his personal weapon readied and aimed, and thereby beat Grim to the probably fatal punch. But wait: Mendez had once said, “And here’s the beauty part, Sarge; you can use the Cochrane to correct your tumble—”

  —And then Grim was following his memories of Esteban’s instructions, just as they came to him, word by word—

  “First you set the magazine feed to ‘off’—”

  —Grim did—

  “—so that when you squeeze the trigger, the Cochrane’s muzzle works just like a little rocket. And to counterboost, you just reorient yourself so you’re facing into the direction of your tumble—”

  —Grim swung his left arm out, imparting enough spin to turn his body around—

  “—-then aim into the vector you need to correct—”

  —Grim aimed down into the direction of his roll and slightly to one side—

  “—and fire.”

  Grim squeezed the trigger, leaned into the light recoil, felt his rotational speed drop, saw that the yaw had almost disappeared. He straightened out the tube, fired two more times. And was almost perfectly stabilized. He threw his left arm back across his body to turn around again—toward the enemy—and, engaging the magazine feed, brought the weapon up to his right eye.

  He got his left hand back on the forestock, saw the starfield sweep past in the scope, caught a glimpse of movement—and then spotted a silhouette against the stars, head hunched down as if taking aim. Hail Mary, now. Grim thumb-selected autofire, twisting at the waist to keep the barrel on-target. He saw angry little flickers coming from the silhouette as he fired.

  Even the Cochrane’s compensators couldn’t keep up with a full-automatic barrage of thrust-generating discharges. Grim tumbled backward—and felt a sharp slap to the back of his head as the spinning began. That slap was probably death’s calling card: the attacker’s first accurate round had hit Grim’s helmet—luckily in the tough rear-plating, probably burrowing into the command electronics for his now useless computer and HUD. But the next round would probably hit something that was soft, would puncture, would release air, would leak blood: would kill him.

  But that next round never came.

  * * *

  After correcting his madcap cartwheels with the MMU, and maneuvering into the solar lee of a small rock that dutifully followed the ruined Rad Shack Four in its slow orbit of the distant sun, Grim waited. And waited. And contemplated his probable wholebody rem dose. And waited some more.

  Almost a full hour later, base finally sent a shielded pinnace out to nose among the rocks in the vicinity of Rad Shack Four. When it got within five hundred meters, Grim toggled his radio, heard the faint hum of the carrier wave under the EMP static, and said, “Hey. Over here.”

  After a moment of silence, there was the inevitable request for the day code, the countersign, and a curt request from a new voice: “Sitrep, Sergeant Grimsby.”

  “Uh—who is this?”

  “Sergeant Grimsby, my name is Darryl Wilder. I’m—”

  “Yes sir; I know who you are, sir.”

  A pause. “Very well. Proceed.”

  As the pinnace made its slow retroboosting approach, Grim proceeded to give the most respectful, thorough, professional, and utterly boring sitrep of his entire career to date. At the end, he even managed to forget about the rads sleeting through his body long enough to ask, “Any idea who was behind this, Mr. Wilder?”

  “No hard evidence yet, but I’d say it was the megacorporations.”

  “Corporate? Why? Are they afraid you won’t let them sell Big Macs on Alpha Centauri?”

  There was a long pause. “Sergeant, you seem very sure that our construction project at Eureka has something to do with interstellar travel.”

  Oops. “Uh...sorry, sir.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Shouldn’t have said that on open channel, sir.”

  “Hmm...no, you shouldn’t have. But your conclusion, and your presence of mind, is promising. So, it seems, is the Cochrane.”

  Grim stared as the gun; the approaching bow lights of the pinnace glinted off its selector switch: it seemed like a bright, conspiratorial wink. “Yeah, well—it was okay.”

  “`Okay’? Sergeant, from what our first readable scans are showing, it seems like it was the star of the show.”

  “Sure—but, with all due respect, Mr. Wilder, what if the Cochrane hadn’t worked?”

  “Just be glad that it did work, o ye of little faith,”—-an expression which made Grim wince:
that had been his Grandmama Rayshawne’s signature tag-line, so it just didn’t sound right coming from a man—“because if you had had your old Armalite-6, you would have had to conduct a full MMU tumble correction after every shot. How many shots do you think you could have taken that way?”

  “Uh—two. Maybe.”

  “Yes, ‘maybe’—with a capital ‘M.’ Either way, two shots would have been two too few: they came at you with four attackers. A conventional zero-gee weapon couldn’t have engaged them all. But the Cochrane could—and did. You were right to have Mendez leave the Cochrane behind, even if it was against regs.”

  “Uh, sir—”

  “Yes?”

  Grim paused: the smart thing to do was to take the credit for keeping the Cochrane at the shack. But—maybe because he had just recalled Grandmama Rayshawne belting out “Sweet Bye and Bye” at Church—he said, “Sir, I didn’t think of keeping the weapon at the shack. That was Mendez.” With any luck, that would earn Esteban enough brownie points for his OCS nod, allowing him to become a less-than-typically detestable shave tail—if he lived long enough.

  Wilder was still talking. “Well, your actions certainly proved that Mendez made the right choice.”

  “Yes, sir, but I did break a few regs.”

  “Well, I’m not your CO, but it seems to me that if we don’t bust you, we’re going to have to decorate you.”

  “Why’s that, sir?”

  “Well, in addition to single-handedly defeating a sabotage attempt on what everyone will soon know as FTL Project Prometheus, you just gave the Cochrane a field test the likes of which no weapon has ever had—either in terms of what was demanded of it, or how well it performed. The testing team at Eureka look like they stole grins off a Cheshire cat: they’re talking about sequestering and debriefing you for a whole week. But before that, we should have a talk about your future. How does that sound?”