"And it's bloody well enough," he said half to the comm officer, half to himself. "But sometime you've got to trust in untried judgment, or you might as well pack up and go home. You need a little faith in people."
"Yes, sir." You've proved that, the comm officer thought. I never would have risked my neck to your judgment if I had a choice. But it's sodden-drunk old Cap'n George that kept us alive. A light glowed on the comm console. "Sir, we have a secure line to Albert Leader."
"To my headset, please. Thank you. Commander Larson. We have some tactics to discuss. ..."
Ten minutes later Mountbatten sent a signal: "'Let our just censures attend the true event, and we put on industrious soldiership.'"
Sir George grunted and said nothing for a moment when he heard it. Did Pembroke know his spacemanship as well as his Macbeth? Well, a sense of history never did anyone any harm, though Sir George felt, on the whole, he would have preferred a simple ‘yes’.
He transmitted his instructions to Pembroke, and decided to switch from tea to coffee. Black. Strong. He wished for a little something to brighten it up, but brandy wouldn't do at the moment.
The Impervious's engines roared into life, bearing down on the thirteen Guard ships to starward. The Wombats and frigates turned to harry the Guardians as the Imp brought her firepower to bear on the enemy. Mountbatten lead the rest of the Britannic fleet in an all-out assault on the twenty-six inbound Guards, intent on blowing the tanker at all cost.
Sir George, still wearing a pressure suit over a much-wrinkled formal dress uniform, sat in his borrowed flag officer's chair in his backup Bridge, surrounded by half-trained junior officers doing their best. This was it. The Guards were in trouble, but either side could win. If the Imp's lasers were powerful enough to thin the enemy ranks before the Imp was within their range—
They were. The lasers killed three of the Guards.
If the Wombat pilots weren't too shaken up and exhausted, if they had fuel and ammo enough to fight—
They did. They herded the Guard ships practically right into the Imp's torpedo tubes, and accounted for a few more kills themselves.
If the Imp could hold together, survive inevitable battle damage—
She could. Commander Higgins reported only a few more hits, from fairly small and slow-moving armor-piercing missiles of an unknown type. Strangely, the missile warheads didn't explode. The things just bored into the ship, crashed through a few bulkheads, and came to rest. Sapper teams were taking a look at them.
And, the biggest if, if the Mountbatten and the other ships were skippered by wunderkinden and not cocky fools—
And oh, thank God, they were, they were. Pembroke led them in a classic interdiction maneuver, making masterful use of the bulk of Britannica to hide his ships, boring straight in for the fuel ship, ignoring all other targets until that one was gone, then chasing the attack fleet, fragmenting it. Two large Britannic ships and two more frigates lost. A few smaller ships reported hits by the same strange slow missiles.
It ended in a rout. Both Guardian formations were broken. Within eight hours, the Guards lost twenty-one more ships, including the last tanker. Ten Guardian ships were unaccounted for. Probably all or some of them managed to slip through the debris and confusion of battle away, get far enough out to jump to C2. The remainder were chased down, pursued until they ran out of fuel, overtaken and destroyed. Several Guardian ships were invited to surrender. All refused. Not a single Guardian prisoner was taken.
As of that moment, the Britannic fleet lost one cruiser, four corvettes, five frigates, eight Wombat fighters. Historians might call it a British victory, but both sides were bloodied, and the British had dead enough to mourn and holes enough torn in the chain of command. Fending off a raid is never a triumph.
But there was time to rest, and heal, and sleep, and patch up the ships. For the survivors, that was victory enough.
Aboard Impervious, Warsprite, and Mountbatten, the sappers worked on the odd missiles and were baffled to find no warheads there to disarm. Only some odd off-white pellets of various sizes, packed in what seemed to be sawdust, that spilled out and floated around in zero-gee. Some of them were small enough to get sucked into air vents, others got caught in odd places, nooks and crannies of equipment.
By the time they thought to x-ray the pellets, and found they were eggs, the first of them was hatching deep inside Impervious's air system. The shell cracked and, in the darkness, a pale, frail, worm-like thing writhed and twisted mindlessly to get free. It crawled away from the egg, clinging to the wall of the air vent with hair-like cilia. It found a plastic coverplate over an airpump.
It began to eat the coverplate.
It lay its first eggs two hours later, without pausing in its feeding.
It died shorting out the pump.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Survey Service HQ on Columbia, Kennedy's Natural Satellite.
Pete Gesseti opened the door to Mac's cabin without knocking, switched the light on, saw Mac in his bunk and tossed the oversized, bright red envelope marked Secret to him before Mac had time to do more than wake up.
Mac's reflexes snatched the envelope out of the air and he sat up in bed. "Pete, what the hell—"
"There are two reports in there, and they change everything. You're going to have two questions, so let me answer them before you can ask. Yes, Joslyn is safe so far as I can gather, and no, you didn't give the frigging Guards any ideas. They had to have planned the raid long before you said a single word."
Mac felt the bottom fall out of his stomach, and he ripped open the envelope. Two loose-leaf folders. Naval Action Report: Guardian Attack on Britannic Fleet, aka "Battle of Britannica." And the second. Report on the loss of His Majesty's Ships Impervious, Mountbatten, and Warsprite. "Oh, my God," Mac said. He rubbed his face, trying to wipe the sleep out of it, swung his legs out from under the covers and sat on the edge of the bunk. "Oh my God, they got the Imp."
"These two reports came in to State and the Navy Castle fifteen hours apart," Pete said, "and they wouldn’t have gotten to Columbia until like next year, if they had gone through channels. But when they hit, all hell is going to break loose, and the big brass is going to need this base, and my boss put me on a high-gee shuttle to get these to Driscoll soonest so she could know what's coming. I sort of got two copies instead of one because I thought you'd want one. Shove that one under your blankets for now and read it later. Get dressed because I'm on my way to kick Captain Driscoll's door down now and I want you with me. Oh, as soon as my office saw these we put in a call to the Judge Advocate's office and it just so happens that your conviction was reversed and your permanent rank boomed up to captain about thirty-eight seconds after they knew we had heard about the Imp. They're going to look bad enough without you rotting away in a training job for warning them. The power of the threatened news leak."
It was too much. Still half asleep, Mac decided that when Pete Gesseti brought the word, the news was always too much. Shocked by the news, groggy and unshaved, relieved that his wife was all right, Mac changed into a work coverall, put on socks and shoes, and followed Pete out into the corridor.
"I always get lost in this underground maze of yours," Pete complained. "Lead the way."
Mac nodded and turned down the corridor. There were a hundred things he wanted to ask, but Pete talked on before he had a chance to say a word.
"Our Navy is going out of its tiny little mind. If this could happen to the Brits, we could be next," he said, following Mac through the corridors of Survey Service Base. "HMS Impervious and two other major combatant ships were eaten by worms. Not the steel hulls apparently, but every kind of plastic, pressure suit fabrics, graphite structural supports, insulation, you name it. Also any foodstuff—and corpses. They'd eat through something, and lay eggs, and the eggs would hatch and eat something, and lay eggs . . . one malfunction, then two malfs, then twenty, a hundred at once. And the cute little buggers excrete some kind of slime that reacts with oxygen and foams up
. That eats up ship's air, so pretty soon there's none left to breath and the blobs of foam block air vents and feed pipes and what have you. There's some sort of poison gas, too, but no one is sure if the worms produce that directly or if it's a byproduct of the reaction that locks up the oxy in the foam. People dying because the worms ate through reinforced fabric and their pressure suits were swiss-cheesed. Ammo going up because the fucking worms ate through the trigger safeties. Airlocks shorting out and opening pressurized interiors to space. Fuel tanks rupturing. And the worms breed incredibly fast. It took about thirty-six hours for them to wreck the Imp. Captain Thomas—except he'll be an admiral by about next Tuesday because he's all they've got left, there were one hundred fifteen senior Brit officers killed, and some from other planets, too—Thomas finally realized it was hopeless and gave the order to abandon ship. They starting taking crew off and the worms got aboard the rescue ships before anyone figured out what the hell was going on.'
Mac had been walking more and more slowly, listening to Pete's hurried words. Now he stopped dead and turned to look at the older man. All those people dead . . . and something popped into his mind. "Pete—wait a minute. It just registered. You didn't say Joz was okay. You said something like you thought she was okay."
Pete tried to look Mac in the eye, and couldn't. "Yeah. That's right. I think she's okay."
"Pete! What the hell does that mean?"
"Well—" he shrugged, "—the casualties were real bad, and survivors got shuffled to a half dozen places, a lot of them without ID and in bad shape, unconscious. They won't have a complete accounting of personnel for a while yet. But she's not on the casualty list, and there was a specific mention that three Wombat pilots were killed. I found three pilot names in the casualty list and Joz wasn't one of them. I dunno, Mac. That's the best I can tell you. Believe me, Mac, I tried. I tried like crazy. But she wasn't listed as dead, and that's all I could find.'
Mac restrained an urge to grab at Pete, shake him, as if he could squeeze more information out of him. Mac felt a terrible emptiness open up inside him. Joslyn was supposed to be safe, at home, in the midst of a great fleet deep in friendly territory. And now she might be dead— and not a clean, clear report of exactly how, not when he was prepared for the news because he knew of the danger. No. She would be missing and feared dead, but the news never certain, an agonizing time when he dared not hope because he was an astronaut and he knew what the odds were, and yet could not help but hope because he loved her, but still not knowing until the last corpse had been accounted for. . . .
"Mac. Mac. Stop. This isn't the time. We have to see Driscoll. Now."
Mac looked up sharply, and suddenly realized he had grabbed at Pete, had his hands clenched around the diplomat's shoulders, gripping him hard enough that it must hurt. He let go his hold, and tried to breathe deeply, calm down. "So let's go. But for God's sake tell me everything you know."
Pete let out a deep sigh, and fell into step besides Mac. "Thomas got out okay, but there were hundreds dead. There's nothing alive aboard the Imp and the other ships but the foam worms. They wanted to tow the Imp out of orbit before the worms shorted out an engine control and maybe rammed her into the planet, but they're afraid to get near her for fear the eggs can survive vacuum and one egg might float into an airlock. For a while there was a rumor that the eggs could survive re-entry. Not true, but the people on-planet are going nuts for fear that the worms might get loose on the planet.
"And now the ROK Navy brass has to admit you were right, quit pushing papers around and get on with the
0war. Except that you were warning that a big ship could be killed just as dead as a little one by a nuke—substitute worm' for 'nuke' and you were dead on target. If a few frigates had been wormed, we'd have lost nine people per ship and a pretty smallish ship at that. Easily replaceable. We lost the Imp, and that's a significant fraction of the League's naval power and personnel wiped out. Now they have to go to smaller ships. But now there's not time to build smaller ships."
Mac grunted. "And all this time I hoping I was wrong."
"You weren't alone in hoping that, my friend. And here we are." They came upon the entrance to the captain's quarters, and were stopped by the ROK marine on duty. "Sorry, sir, the captain—"
"You'll tell me that the captain can't be disturbed," Gesseti said in a calm voice, speaking rapidly, "and then I wave my credentials and this pretty red package marked Secret at you and show you the sealed letter from the Kennedy Secretary of War and you'll let me in, right? Wrong. Instead of wasting five minutes on that little scene you'll let is in now"
"Ah, well, yes sir, but the captain isn't in her quarters."
"It's three in the morning, local. Where the hell is she?"
"In her office, with two other gentlemen."
"Then we bust in on a private party. Lead the way."
"Sir, I can't leave my post."
"C’mon, Pete, I know the way without him." Mac turned and headed down the corridor.
The marine looked uncertain about what he should do, and stepped toward Mac as if to stop him. "Hey, wait just a second, ah, sir, she's not to be—"
Pete grinned evilly at the marine. "Stay put, soldier. You're not to leave your post, remember?" Mac and Pete headed down the hall to the captain's office.
Mac was thinking more clearly by this time, and there was an obvious and frightening question. "Pete, those worms can't possibly be some natural breed the Guards found growing under a rock. Not and eat shipboard plastics."
“No.”
"And no one in the League can breed things like that."
"Nowhere near it. Been trying for a long time, too."
"And if the Guards can do that, what else can they do?"
"Don't make me think about it. I saw shots of the Imp's interior and I'm already having nightmares." They arrived at Captain Driscoll's outer office door and went in, to find another marine sentry on duty, sitting behind a desk. "Good evening, Private," Pete said. "We need to see the Captain most urgently."
' But she's extremely—"
"Not any more, she's not." Pete said, neatly stepping around the desk and opening the door to the inner officer before the marine could react.
“Hey!"
"It's all right, Eldridge, let 'em through," Driscoll said, her voice coming from behind the door. "I know that voice, and when Gesseti wants in, he gets in. Law of nature, and we might as well cave in gracefully to it."
"Yes, ma'am."
Pete grinned at Mac. "Like I always told you—never hurts to have a reputation."
The two of them went in, and Mac forgot all military bearing when he saw who Driscoll's visitors were. "Randall! George!" He shouted, giving each of them a bear hug before they were out of their seats. At least some friends of his were safe and alive. His newborn fears for Joslyn made seeing old friends all the more pleasurable. "You guys are supposed to be on Bandwidth!'
'Yeah, Mac, but we found ‘em!" Randall said. "I wanted to rouse you when we landed two hours ago, but George warned me you like your sleep—"
"You found 'em? The Guards? You found Capital?" Mac asked.
"Near enough," George said happily. "We got hold of an astronomer and the three of us doped out what sort of
0star system Capital had to be in—and we're here to hand Captain Driscoll a search list, all the possible systems."
'And the odds look damn good," Driscoll concluded, grinning. "You can salute me any time you're ready, Lieutenant Commander Larson."
"Uh? Oh, yes ma'am." Mac saluted and then caught the twinkle in Driscoll's eye. "Sorry about that. Ma'am." He liked Driscoll. She was a good officer, with a style of leadership that seemed wildly informal and ramrod straight at the same time. You were never quite sure where you stood with Driscoll, and that kept you on your toes. No doubt, that was what she had in mind. Captain Gillian Driscoll, United States Navy, was a short, stocky redhead, a gray hair or two beginning to show, still fighting to keep off the fat that de
sk work put on a person, but still trim, firm, and ready to bite anyone's head off, should the need arise.
"Forget it," she said. "Who can remember salutes at three in the morning?"
"Besides, we've got to break the boy of the habit," Pete said. "His conviction has been overturned and he's been bumped to captain his own self. That's the one piece of good news I've got. The rest is all ..." Pete looked around and stopped talking.
Driscoll followed his glance. "Oh, yes, you might not know these gentlemen. Commander Randall Metcalf, U.S. Navy, and George Prigot..."
"Of no fixed address," George suggested. "No one has ever quite managed to figure out my status. Mac! A captain! Congratulations!"
"George Prigot. Yeah, Mac told me all about you," Pete replied slowly.
'Relax, Pete," Mac said. "They're family. Randall and George have security clearance for Secret, Top Secret, and Very Unlikely, even right up to Ridiculous. And they're in on this."
"Okay, so I bend a few more security rules," Pete said blandly. "But here's the report my boss wanted you to see, Captain," he said, handing the red envelope to Driscoll. As she opened it and started reading, he pulled a tape cartridge out of his pocket. "Is there a—"
"In the cabinet against the far wall," Mac said. "Here, I'll set it up." Mac took the cartridge, opened the cabinet, and switched on the playback unit. "I'll throw it on the big screen." He crossed back to Pete and handed him a remote control unit.
"What's on the tape?" Randall asked.
"Real bad news," Pete said flatly. "Captain Driscoll, have you read enough so you'll know what you're seeing?"
"Yeah. Jesus Christ. I've read enough so I don't want to see anything."
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