Aud looked at Mimi. She stood with her feet planted, arms crossed.
Aud nodded. “Alright.” He turned to me. “I’ll authorize landings. But if we get any indication that the Slugs are going to destroy Mousetrap, the Scorpions go in.”
Mimi spoke into her mike. Within minutes, we felt the hull shudder as revolvers rotated the Scorpions out of launch position, and replaced them with troop transports.
Ord and I armored up, because I was going in with my troops. We returned to the bays, and watched as troops boarded the transports, then we headed forward again, to the observation blister.
I switched back to Jeeb’s frequency. “Munchkin? What’s the situation down there?”
“You guys have stirred the Slugs up.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning they’re pounding down our passageway barricades with Heavys. Jason, we won’t last an hour once they get through.”
I held up one finger to Ord, and raised my eyebrows.
He looked at me, and shook his head. We wouldn’t even be able to get our landing transports close to Mousetrap in an hour, much less relieve Munchkin’s survivors. As we swam into the observation blister, I relayed the bad news to Mimi on the Bridge.
“Mousetrap’s visible now, General.” Ord tapped my armored shoulder, as he pointed through the observation blister.
Ord grunted. “The real estate hardly looks worth the price, does it, sir?”
“Location, location, location, Sergeant Major.”
Ord and I pushed back from the observation blister’s forward wall, to head aft to our troop transport. I glanced at the time-to-drop countdown winking off my wrist ’Puter. Two hours. Too long.
Ord sighed. “A hundred thousand GIs don’t buy what they used to, General.”
Whump.
The vast hull shuddered, tumbling Ord and me against the observation blister’s cold curve.
Hssss.
A thousand feet aft from us, thirty-six launch bay hatches resealed as one.
A tin voice from the Bridge crackled in my earpiece. “Wing away.”
I turned to Ord, wide eyed. “What the hell, Sergeant Major?”
Ord turned his palms up, shook his head.
Through ebony space, thirty-six sparks flashed past us. In a blink, they dispersed toward Mousetrap, leaving behind thirty-six silent, red streaks of drifting chemical flame.
For one heartbeat, we formed the hub that anchored those thirty-six fading, translucent wheel spokes. It was as though we spun at the center of a mute, exploding firework. To our port, starboard, dorsal, and ventral, identical fireworks blossomed, gold, green, blue, purple, as the Fleet’s other cruisers launched their own craft, each ship trailing its mothership’s tracer color.
The ships weren’t chunky troop transports. They were Scorpions, their stinger pod racks packed with liquid fire. One order from the Bridge had rotated troop transports out of the bays in fifteen minutes, like cartridges in old-fashioned revolvers, and replaced them with Scorpions.
I torpedoed my weightless body hand-over-hand down the rungs that lined the center tube, back toward the Bridge. “If those bombers fry Mousetrap, our POWs die.”
I shook my head at Ord. “If this fleet kills Outworld POWs, the Union’s dead. If the Union dies, the Slugs will wipe mankind out. Did Mimi lose her mind?”
Ord paddled up alongside me, and shook his head. “Admiral Ozawa wouldn’t launch bombers, sir. She wouldn’t even consider it without consulting you, first. But there is a ranking civilian authority aboard this ship. If he ordered her to do it, she couldn’t—”
The two of us ’frogged along toward the Bridge, gaining weight as we moved away from the rotating cruiser’s centerline.
Bad enough that Planck was willing to sacrifice Munchkin and the other survivors. My godson—Munchkin’s only child—was as cold as his master. And Jude was out there, presumably commanding the bombers that were about to kill his own mother. And he didn’t even know she was alive inside Mousetrap.
Crack.
A side-tube pressure valve released, like a rifle shot, and my heart skipped.
A minute later, the bosun piped Ord and me back onto the Bridge.
SIXTY-TWO
I STALKED TOWARD MIMI, Aud Planck, and Howard, their faces bathed in red as they stood staring into the holo display. I pointed at the red swarm that marked the hovering Scorpions. “That’s it? You just gave up? You’re gonna blow the survivors to hell?”
Mimi drew back, stared at my clenched fists, her jaw slack. “Jason, have you lost your mind?”
“No! Have you?” My heart pounded, and I trembled. A military decision, even one I disagreed with, no longer made me lose my composure. But piled on to Munchkin’s resurrection, her current plight, Jude’s complicity in the impending murder of his own mother, six thousand others, and, apparently, Mimi’s betrayal, I had lost my mind.
Both aisles of swabbies stared up from their consoles at us. Raging battle or not, if a male lieutenant general was going to slug a female fleet admiral half his size, nobody wanted to miss the show.
Aud Planck stepped between us, took my elbow. “Change of plans, Jason.”
Mimi straightened herself, and tugged a uniform cuff. “If the survivors inside really have an hour, there’s no time to land transports.” She pointed at the green dot Scorpion swarm. “We reloaded and launched Scorpions so they can engage and draw off all the interceptors.”
I wrinkled my brow. “But we can’t land transports.”
“No.” Mimi waved the display to a cutaway of Mousetrap that her intel jocks had enhanced. It showed the center tunnel, six hundred yards wide and twenty miles long, which ran down Mousetrap’s centerline from the camerairis entry doors at the north pole to the similar exit doors at the south pole. Level Twenty, where the survivors holed up, adjoined the centerline tunnel fifteen miles south of the north pole doors. A tiny orange beacon blinked within level twenty.
Howard pointed to the beacon. “This is the central access-control facility. Where Gustus punched the button to close the hatches and pressure up Mousetrap. Every airtight hatch on Mousetrap, including the north and south pole doors, is controlled from there. Vacuum kills unprotected Pseudocephalopod warriors as dead as it kills humans. And we’ve never seen a warrior protected by any sort of pressure suit.”
We had rejected the blow down alternative early on, because we couldn’t fight our way to the Button fast enough. But now we didn’t have to. We were already there.
I thumbed my throat mike. “Munchkin? Did you guys think about blow down?”
“That’s why we holed up on Level Twenty. And probably why the Slugs haven’t come in after us. They know we’re holding a live grenade.”
“You could suit up.”
“We’ve got maybe a couple hundred pressure suits altogether. And Level Twenty can’t æ€fonbe sealed off separately. If we blow down the Slug levels, we blow down Level Twenty, too.”
I turned to Howard. “So far this doesn’t sound like a plan.”
Mimi said, “Tell Munchkin to get her people ready to move.”
“Why?”
“We’re gonna bring them a spacesuit, then strangle the maggots.”
I squinted at Mimi. “Spacesuit?”
She stamped the deck. “You’re standing in it.”
She walked toward the exit hatch, then turned to me, and waved me to follow. “Move it, Jason.”
SIXTY-THREE
WHEN THE TWO of us were alone in the outer passageway, Mimi spun to face me, then stuck out her chin. “I’d give up on those people down there? You think that little of me?”
I turned my palms up. “Mimi I—”
She shook her head, then spun back and jogged toward the launch bays. “There’s no time for this. Jason, tell Munchkin she has to get somebody reliable to handle the Button.”
“Reliable?”
“Dead-solid perfect.”
“Mind explaining why?”
“
On my mark, they need to open the north pole entrance, then close it. Howard says the doors are built to take the stress, and a one-second wink won’t hurt the interior pressure.”
“What happens in the one second?”
“We fly in.”
“Mimi, in one second you can’t get enough transports through—”
”Not transports. This ship. At fifty thousand miles per hour.”
My jaw dropped and I stopped dead in the passageway. Mean Green was as big as three wet-bottom aircraft carriers. Mousetrap’s inlet door was barely wider than Mean Green, designed for a cruiser to ease in at five miles per hour. They said landing a fixed-wing plane on a wet- bottom carrier at night was like taking a belly flop in a dark room onto a postage stamp and trying to hit the stamp with your tongue. This would be harder, and failure more catastrophic. “You’re kidding.”
She stopped, and turned, hands on hips. “Jason, there’s no time.”
Mimi actually planned to thread a moving needle in one second. If she missed by a few feet, the collision would be like slamming the Empire State Building into Mount Everest at seventy-one times the speed of sound.
“And if you get in? Fifty thousand miles per hour to zero in fifteen miles?” Theoretically, a C-drive cruiser could stop on the proverbial dime, and return change. People inside the cruiser wouldn’t even spill their coffee. But nobody had ever tried it, especially not î€uldinside a giant sewer.
Mimi said, “We’ll pull up to Level Twenty before the Slugs know what hit them.”
“Figuratively speaking.” If we hit them, or anything, at any significant fraction of fifty thousand miles per hour, everybody’s day would be spoiled.
We reached the launch bays, which were empty at the launch positions.
Mimi pointed. “I’ll nuzzle the launch bay level up to the cargo docks on Level Twenty. Then we’ll open all the doors and take on passengers.”
In some insane way, Mimi was making sense. If we could pull up transports like a row of taxicabs, it would take far too long to board survivors fifty at a time through their hatches. But Mean Green’s bay doors were bigger than railway tunnels.
What the hell. If everybody was crazy, I might as well play. I pointed at the bay doors. “The outer doors are eighty feet wide. If we throw out cargo nets, and help people board—”
She smiled. “See? It’ll work. Disembark some troops. To cover the boarding, and to help the survivors get in here. They probably aren’t healthy enough to move as fast as we need them to move, on their own.”
“How fast?”
“Howard thinks you’ll be up to your asses in warriors within ten minutes. The Slugs will decide to blow the place in a half hour, unless we kill them before they get a chance.”
Mimi might be right. One area where mankind’s untidy individual disorganization served better than the Slugs’ unitary intellect was initiative. A human commander on the spot could alter plans instantly when the situation changed. The Slugs had to send information back to a central ganglion, and get instructions back. Actually, the Spooks had never seen a central ganglion, but the theory fit the delays we observed in Slug units’ reaction times. Of course, once the Slugs all got pointed in one direction, they were ruthless little maggots.
I asked, “What happens when we get everybody aboard?”
“One thing you have to arrange is for somebody to put the Button on time delay. We seal up out here, the delay ends, the hatches all open. We fly out the south pole doors, just in case the Slugs can blow the place up. But every cubic foot of void space in Mousetrap should become vacuum inside one minute. Later, we come back and clean out four hundred thousand strangled maggots.”
“Four hundred thousand?” I adjusted the pistol in my shoulder holster.
“Howard’s estimate. But he says only forty thousand can get at you at a time.” Mimi pointed forward. “I gotta go.” Then she paused, looked up at me, and squeezed my hand. Her eyes glistened. “Don’t be stupid, okay?”
“Drive careful.”
Then she was gone.
SIXTY-FOUR
TEN MINUTES LATER, I stood in yet another launch bay, watö€REmerald River smashes like a bug. You leave the doors open too long, the centerline tunnel decompresses. You all can’t cross vacuum to us. If you blow that timing, the Emerald River might as well be in Sweden.”
“Got it. One second. On Mimi’s mark.” In the background, small arms crackled, and Slug mag rail rifles sang.
“How hot is it in there?”
“Getting worse.”
“Munchkin, how close are you to the access control room, personally?”
“In it. With a few others.”
“Any bad company?”
“Not yet.”
As we talked, I watched Ord and the captain commanding the company disembarked in this bay. They briefed the kids who sat cross-legged on the deck, their helmets in their laps. They were Pathfinders, with Mohawk haircuts, even the girls. They were better trained to find their way in Mousetrap’s interior tunnels.
I said to Munchkin, “As soon as we get inside, your people and mine are trading places. A couple hours’ vacuum won’t bother us in Eternads. My people are better armed and armored than yours.”
There was a pause, and machine gun fire.
Munchkin said, “No shit.”
I glanced up at the display screen on the bulkhead. The ready light that had been blinking red turned amber. I said to Munchkin, “I’m patching you through direct to Mimi. No relay on this end. None on yours. You got your finger on the trigger, personally?”
“It’s a Button. Yes.”
I switched the feed so Munchkin and Mimi were talking directly.
On screen, Mousetrap rotated far below us, its north pole doors closed as solid as the iron they were. In the far distant blackness beyond Mousetrap, sparks and purple puffs marked the battle among our Scorpions, the Firewitches, and four of our cruisers. Jude was out there, fighting for his life, unaware that he was fighting for his mother’s life, too.
Mimi whispered to Munchkin, “Five minutes.”
The Pathfinders helmeted up, checked weapons, buddy-checked one another’s equipment. Behind them, another company waited, with rope ladders and folded litters slung across their bodies, to drop down and recover survivors. We would be so near Mousetrap’s low-gravity centerline that our rescuers would be able to leap small buildings in a single bound. But Munchkin had confided that conditions below had been brutal. Food and water had been scarce, and then grown scarcer. We couldn’t expect the survivors to help much with their own rescue.
Mean Green’s other bays contained similar groups. How many bays would wind up close enough to Level Twenty’s dock to embark survivors we wouldn’t know until we got inside. If we got inside.
My heart pounded against my breastplate. A kid handed me an M-40 from armory stores, and I cleared, then locked and loaded it.
Mimi whispered, “One minute.”
The ready light on the bulkhead winked green, then kept flashing.
On screen, Mousetrap looked smaller than a raisin. The doors Mimi had to fly this monstrosity through weren’t even a speck on Mousetrap’s surface.
The kid who had handed me my rifle stood beside me, eyes squeezed shut, while he prayed into his audio.
Mimi whispered, “Ten seconds.”
SIXTY-FIVE
“GO!” said Mimi.
“Done,” said Munchkin.
I held my breath.
Emerald River went from adrift in space to fifty thousand miles per hour before I could blink. It was as simple as Mimi ordering baffles opened, just so. The pull of the rest of the universe did the rest.
But inside our gravity cocoon, it was like standing in a ballroom, watching a flatscreen film on the wall.
Mousetrap was tiny.
Mousetrap was huge.
The doors were closed.
Before I could flinch, the screen darkened. I hadn’t seen the door open, hadn’t seen us fl
ash through it.
Screeeeek!
On screen, a tunnel rotated like we were inside a drab kaliedoscope. The dim dot at the tunnel’s end was the south pole doors, five miles away.
Booom!
Snuggling a moving skyscraper up against a rotating iron moonlet was delicate, but delicacy was relative. Mean Green was going to need fifty thousand gallons of touch-up paint, but Mimi had delivered the goods.
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