Six Bits

by Laurence Dahners

  “No sir.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Fifteen or twenty more minutes, sir.

  “Too slow. Coded radio message to Zoaden and Yaitan, direct from our shipboard antennas. ‘Suspect that planet-based microwave radiators are in communication with Exceltor, therefore they will not sweep Exceltor for you. Recommend that you destroy radiators immediately. If you are swept by their radar, assume that Exceltor will have picked you up on blossom antennas that they extruded through some of those 2 meter ports. Jump immediately to safety. Quinjot, if, as I suspect, you have assigned your least-qualified port technicians to find and establish the rescue port to this fragment of Xajion, then I recommend your court martial for dereliction of duty if Zoaden ever successfully returns to Krane. I expect the humaniforms will home in on this radio message and destroy this fragment of Xajion in a few more minutes. Good hunting to you.”

  BRIDGE—HUMANIFORM CRUISER EXCELTOR—COMETARY EARTH ORBIT

  1402 EST

  Lt. Snellen turned abruptly in her chair, “Captain! Krane-type radio broadcast, opposite side of P3! Coded, should take ten to twenty minutes to break the code. The broadcast antenna was not within line of site for Exceltor, but one of our blossom antennas has a directional fix and approximate vector.”

  “Pass it to the gunnery room and have them check it out. I assume it came from a ported antenna from the bow fragment of that carrier. They probably can’t get back in direct port communication with the destroyers. Must be in pretty bad shape.”

  Azimus exclaimed, “Whoa! Captain, one of the dirtside microwave radar antennas just swept that region and it looks like the bow fragment is actually at that location. They must be in bad shape if they can’t even port an antenna!”

  “Have gunnery assign two ports to finish disabling the bow fragment, but keep everyone else on the search for those destroyers.”

  BRIDGE—KRANE DESTROYER ZOADEN—EARTH ORBIT

  1404 EST

  With dismay Quinjot read and reread the message from Quell. Mother’s carapace! Now he must somehow find that DNA-based scum before the humaniform ship did, or at least cover his tracks. “Kueck! Have you found Xajion’s bow fragment yet?”

  “Sir? You assigned Quac that task, sir. I’m looking for the humaniform ship, as I have been tasked, sir.”

  “I assigned who?”

  “Quac, sir.”

  “I couldn’t have. I specifically remember assigning you!”

  “Sorry sir. We thought you said Quac. In any case he’s just found the fragment sir. We homed him in on the radio broadcast, sir.”

  “For the Mother’s sake get a port in there and rescue them!”

  “Working sir.”

  “OK also assign three gunnery teams to destroy those planet-based microwave broadcasters.”

  Quinjot was nervously wondering whether he’d sounded sincere when he heard the words he dreaded.

  “Sir, we’ve just been pinged by one of those planet-side microwave sweeps!”

  Damndamndamndamn, damn! Quinjot’s left head turned, then both began darting back and forth indecisively. “Give me a running count on the time since the ping! Prepare for emergency shift… back to P4! Is that rescue port working yet?”

  “Opening now sir.”

  “Get them over here, NOW!” Quinjot turned his right head to check the running count. Thirty seconds! How long would it take the humaniforms to track them down from that ping? “Is that escape shift set up?”

  “The shift-ring’s already set up sir. We’re locating the P4 shift. We had a getaway shift already set to the backside of P6 if you want it sir.”

  “Keep it! If I call shift and P4 isn’t ready, go to P6. Observers, any sign of a targeting port vectoring in on us?”

  “No sir.”

  “If you see one, don’t report it, just call for emergency shift!” He thought uneasily about how slim the chance of seeing a targeting port actually was.

  BRIDGE—HUMANIFORM CRUISER EXCELTOR—COMETARY EARTH ORBIT

  1406 EST

  “Captain, we think we have a ping on the destroyer behind P3!”

  “Feed gunnery.” The captain said. He murmured, “Gun room.” Then, “Guns, rush multiple ports to the location of this ping that we’re feeding you. They must know they’ve been pinged and will be pulling their antennas in preparation for jump. Blow holes in ‘em as soon as the first ports get there; don’t wait for other ports to arrive.” He thought, We can’t possibly get many chances like this against these odds.

  “Working sir.”

  Captain Leis turned to Azimus. “What do you think’s going on with the ship that jumped in behind the moon? None of our ports have caught a glimpse and the planet based radars have now swept the entire circumference. At the altitude they jumped in at, any sustainable orbit would have brought them out from behind the moon by now. You think they came out so fast that they’re already beyond our sweep or did we just miss them because of their better stealthing?

  A glazed look passed over Azimus’ face as he rocked in his seat. “Don’t think their stealthing is that good sir… I can back calculate from the reflection we just got off the other one though. I’ll also calculate what their incoming velocity would have to have been to be beyond the first sweeps.” His head tilted to an odd angle and he began murmuring to the computer.

  GUNNERY ROOM—HUMANIFORM CRUISER EXCELTOR—COMETARY EARTH ORBIT

  1408 EST

  The long narrow room hung thick with the odor of nervous sweat. General Price found himself pacing back and forth along the rows of “cubes,” each with its own team of two to three operators. Price looked over their shoulders into the displays as if by staring harder he could somehow make an enemy ship appear in one of them. His skin crawled with the sensation that one of the enemy’s locator ports was just outside the wall of the chamber getting ready to position a star-port and blow them all to hell.

  Suddenly, with a quiver in his voice, one of the noncoms shouted to Nedcam. “Sarge, I’ve got ‘em! I’ve got ‘em!”

  Nedcam bellowed. “Teams one, three, nine, and twenty two! Take splits from Delos! Put some holes in it! It’s gonna jump!”

  Price ran to where Delos sat at the number two cube. Delos’ cube showed the long, thin “false color” image of one of these “wormhole ships” and he saw the ring at one end brightly sparkling. The two cubes next to Delos’ immediately came alive with the same image and then began to diverge as their operators took the new ports that they had “located” on Delos’ off at slightly different angles, though still rushing toward the ship. As the cubes’ viewpoints rushed in close, loud booms repeatedly crashed through the room from the big cylinders in the back. The cubes’ displays zoomed back and showed radical changes. The “ship” started to deform and violet “false color” sparks and plumes began spraying out into the surrounding space from several sections.

  BRIDGE—KRANE DESTROYER YAITAN—EARTH ORBIT

  1415 EST

  “Captain, I think Zoaden’s been hit! Their comm-port’s just translocated violently!”

  “What? The motherless scum hadn’t shifted? Didn’t they pick up Kinjie’s message?” Jenkoit’s cilia stood on end and his exhalations began to cloud up. What else could possibly go wrong? How could a single humaniform cruiser, even if aided by the retrogressed locals, possibly have destroyed a light carrier and now a destroyer in just a few hours? Sure, there was a lot of luck involved in wormhole warfare, but this was beyond belief! “Locate a rescue port on that comm-port and see if we can bring any of them out. How much longer ‘til we have to re-shift to keep from crashing back into this damned moon?”

  “Four hundred seventy five seconds sir.”

  “Set the shift on automatic, to go at the last second.”

  “Do you still want a bounce-type vertical relaunch sir?”

  “Yes! What’d you think, that we were going to run?”

  Quietly, “No sir.”

  GUNNERY ROOM—KRANE DESTROYER ZOADEN�
��EARTH ORBIT

  1416 EST

  Commander Kinjie lay stunned on his side, his left head-hand weaving drunkenly in the air and his right stretched out flaccid on the deck. His relieved joy when the rescue port had blinded everyone by opening in the front of Xajion’s bridge had turned into dismay when, seconds after he ran through the port into Zoaden’s gunnery transport room, the destroyer had been wracked with violent explosions. His carapace had slammed into a bulkhead with stunning force and now he was having great difficulty controlling his neuromuscular system. To his horror, it seemed that all three of his excretory orifices had spilled involuntarily. The slippery mess beneath him was contributing to his difficulty in getting his feet-claws back to supporting him.

  A minute passed and Kinjie found his legs had regained sufficient control that he was able to rise unsteadily and begin moving up the passageway toward the bridge. Another clap of thunder rang through the ship. The artificial gravity suddenly went off. At first Kinjie was dismayed, but then realized wonderingly that much of the clumsy motor dysfunction he’d been struggling with had been weakness. Without gravity, he found he could propel himself forward more easily, though reaching things to push off of remained difficult.

  Kinjie realized that part of the reason he was traveling well was because he was being pulled along by a strong air current! There must be a hull breach near the bow! Why didn’t the bulkhead doors close? he wondered. Then he realized, Ach, the power cabling must be cut too!

  Kinjie’s pressure suit began to activate, indicating that there’d been a significant pressure drop. He peered ahead into the bridge with his good left head-hand. The images coming from his right head-hand’s eye cluster as it banged along flaccidly beside him kept distracting him. Zoaden’s bridge was strewn with floating bodies and moaning victims. He noted, with the same satisfaction he’d felt over diplomat Quell’s injury, that Captain Quinjot was one of the completely flaccid ones, drifting and slowly revolving near the ceiling, apparently dead. The bridge seemed to be losing air through multiple small holes, rather than one big one.

  As Kinjie turned to look toward the comm-ports, a tremendous flash of light from the opening of Yaitan’s rescue portal nearly blinded him. Recognizing it for what it was, Kinjie immediately launched himself toward it. The blast of wind blowing out of the rescue portal into the low pressure of Zoaden’s bridge pushed him back. Kinjie caught himself on a desk and relaunched toward the portal, harder this time. The rescue port’s airlock chamber was now nearly empty so the resistance of the air current had died down. Kinjie sailed through the rescue portal, only to crash agonizingly to the floor in the normal gravity field beyond the portal. Mother! What a mess!

  A noncom lifted Kinjie in the necks of both of her head-hands and carried him to the lock as others scurried into Zoaden to search for other kranes to rescue. Kinjie’s functioning left head-hand turned and maneuvered close to the ear on the noncom’s right head where it was supporting the front of Kinjie’s own carapace. “Take me to the bridge,” he said, the sound coming out as a whispered croak.

  Kinjie found himself lulled by the sound of the noncom’s claws as they clattered down the long passageway toward the bridge. He was again strangely disturbed by the receding, rolling, out-of-focus view behind him that came from his flaccid right head-hand. With a supreme effort, he found that he could pull that head-hand around and get it looking forward. To his relief, the view from that eye cluster, though tilted and still out of focus, merged into the dominant picture from the left head-hand and even gave him some fuzzy sense of binocular depth.

  Jenkoit was not sure whether he was dismayed or amused at the picture Commander Kinjie made as he was carried onto the bridge. He lay on a noncom’s carapace, cradled by the noncom’s necks. His left head-hand wove drunkenly in the air and the right head-hand lolled on his own carapace. When the noncom slid him off onto the floor it appeared for a minute that the commander might tip over onto the back of his carapace to lay helplessly with his legs waving in the air like some kind of bug. At the last moment the noncom caught and righted him, getting smeared grossly in the process by some of the yellowish circulatory fluid leaking from a crack on the right side of Kinjie’s carapace. Jenkoit wondered for a moment whether Kinjie’s injuries were permanent. Before he could speak however, multiple sensors on the bridge recorded Yaitan’s shift-ring flash.

  Kinjie’s left neck became suddenly rigid at full extension and he managed to look imperious despite his drooping right head-hand. “Why are you shifting? You’ve lost the rescue port on Zoaden!”

  “Yes sir,” Jenkoit found himself responding before he remembered Kinjie had been seriously injured and didn’t deserve such respect anymore. “We were in a bounce trajectory on the back side of their moon and had to shift before we struck.”

  “Where have we shifted to?”

  “Sir, we re-bounced.”

  “You what?” Kinjie’s voice was incredulous. “A bounce is occasionally a good trick. Once! Do you really think you are going to surprise someone as sharp as that captain on Exceltor twice with the same trick?!”

  Jenkoit’s heads lowered a fraction and his cilia developed a slight droop. He didn’t respond. His crew looked on in amazement to see him dominated by an injured krane!

  Kinjie turned on the bridge crew next, barking commands in the odd tone that his use of a single head-hand produced. “Get the crew working on an emergency reload for a new shift-ring! What the space are you looking at! Have you located the humaniform cruiser and you’re just standing there with your mouths open waiting to tell me?”

  “No sir,” a chorus.

  “Well then get moving for the Mother’s sake! Have the gunroom detail someone to reestablish a rescue port on Zoaden. Also see if we can open a port on the stern fragment of Xajion. Maybe we can use some of its weaponry. Target a safety transfer behind P5. Target a maximum accumulator escape shift back toward Kaldon. Start destroying those ground based microwave antennas. How many shift-rings do we have left for this boat?”

  “Five, sir.”

  “Mother’s Mother! So, after we shift out of this damned bounce, we’ll only have one shift to play with if we’re to save three for an escape back to Kaldon?!”

  “Yes sir,” Jenkoit said weakly, feeling totally humiliated.

  BRIDGE—HUMANIFORM CRUISER EXCELTOR—COMETARY EARTH ORBIT

  1421 EST

  Azimus broke out of his reverie and became motionless for a moment. “Sir, the numbers say that the krane stealthing is not good enough for us to have missed them coming out from behind the moon. They may, of course, have had a high enough velocity for us to have missed them, but a velocity that high would not produce an orbit around either that moon or P3.”

  “So what do you think? Are they launched out from behind that moon at a high velocity? Could they have landed back there?”

  “Sir, this is a big moon. Its gravity may be low but it’s still way too high to land a ship.”

  Suddenly the ensign working with Azimus shouted. “Sir, double shift-flash behind that moon! Ring diameters both about 6 meters, probable krane destroyers. Flash brilliance low, they didn’t come from very far sir.”

  “How close?”

  “No more than a few light seconds sir.”

  “What? Did anyone else pick up their origination flash?” Leis looked around the bridge to see a lot of shaking heads.

  “They bounced!” Azimus leapt out of his own chair and pumped a fist with his proclamation. “That’s why we didn’t find them! The bastards bounced!”

  “Could they have re-bounced?!” A dawning light of amazement crossed the captain’s face as he shouted, “Get a vertical view on those last two shift-sites! If they re-bounced, they’re toast.”

  JOHNSON SPACE RADAR STATION—WHITE SANDS, NEW MEXICO

  1425 EST

  Specialist Juan Gomez was about a mile away from the station on his way home when it happened. Because of all the excitement he’d stayed way past the end of
his shift that morning. First they’d been called on to try to locate, resolve, and identify the object that had produced that big flash directly overhead at 0206 their time. He’d been outside on break to smoke a cigarette at the time and the flash had startled him. He’d been running back into the building within seconds, trying to get the attention of everyone for what he’d thought was an aircraft explosion. To his amazement over the next few hours it became obvious not only from their own radar, but on feeds from other sites, that the flash had come from orbit; had come from an impossibly large object; and had left the object intact. This morning another big flash and a series of smaller ones had obviously damaged the object. It was like there was some kind of space war going on up there! Then they’d been tasked to sweep near space for other such objects. In the excitement, he’d just kept staying there at work. At noon his supervisor had seen him and sent him home, “To get some sleep because they were surely going to need some fresh people tonight.”

  He initially thought the blinding flash in his rearview mirrors was brilliant sunlight off the windshield of a car right behind him. A microsecond later his mind caught up with the fact that the flash was way too bright and that he knew there wasn’t a car behind him. He slewed off the road and looked back. “A-bomb,” was all that went through his mind as he slashed the car back onto the road and began trying to put some distance between himself and the huge cloud of destruction back at the radar site. What in God’s name was going on!