Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

  Mankind’s saving grace in this catastrophe had been Howard Hibble’s preparation of two Silver Bullets, not just one.

  I returned to my cabin and punched up Eddie on my flatscreen. He didn’t answer. I tapped into the video feed that, as captain, Eddie could access to view his bridge displays from his cabin.

  Damage Control reported two hundred dead or missing, among them the Air Wing pilots who were meeting in their wardroom, starboard. But the ship’s forward section was airtight and fire-free, although drifting as dead as a log.

  Evidence of the status of my end of the ship was circumstantial, mostly what had been observed from the forward section and was now reported on the main ’Puters. The impeller rooms, far aft of me, appeared to be split open like pea pods. The ship had shut down the drive faster than a human could think, so inertia kept the two pieces in motion at a similar speed and trajectory, which was why the Abe’s dismembered parts remained within sight of each other.

  Seated in front of the screen, I paused and breathed. In the billions of cubic miles of interstellar space that the fleet occupied, the Abe’s passage close to some unseen, drifting Slug football, and the Viper attack that passage had triggered, must have been pure rotten luck. Clearly, the Slugs had laid a Viper minefield in front of the final Temporal Fabric Insertion Point that separated us from the Pseudocephalopod homeworld, which in retrospect seemed only logical. But the chance of a football drifting into a cruiser in the three-dimensional vastness of space had to be as remote as a collision between two dinghies drifting from opposite sides of the Pacific.

  I toggled over to Eddie’s externals to see what progress the rest of the fleet was making in coming to our aid.

  There was static, so I had to squirm in my chair, lighter than I had been as the ship’s aft section slowed its rotation, while I waited for the link.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  THE AUDIO LINK CAME UP an instant before the flat-screen’s visual.

  “Break right! Break-”

  Then I was watching the same display that the captain had selected, during that moment, to show on the forward screen of the Abraham Lincoln’s bridge. The onscreen showed a heads-up visual through the front of a Scorpion’s canopy. When a cruiser’s ’Puter displays for mere human eyes, it adjusts to human sensory frailties. The audio lags a beat, and a display like a Scorpion-canopy image is slowed to the speed of a World War I dogfight. Otherwise, all a watching human would perceive would be flashes and blurs.

  Ahead of his wingman, from whose viewpoint the display appeared, a Scorpion leader broke at a right angle to their path. That probably meant something was on the two ships’ tail.

  As the lead Scorpion broke, it exploded in a red flash.

  A beat later, a voice crackled out of my flatscreen, “Slug heavy!”

  The wingman, the sound of his breathing pumping through the audio, stopped his Scorpion dead. Then a red light on the heads-up display floating translucent on his canopy winked green as he deployed a missile.

  A Firewitch shot by the wingman, high right, corkscrewing through space, as the purple traces of fired heavy mag-rail rounds lasered from the tips of the eight spread arms that made an open basket at the Firewitch’s prow.

  Beat. “Fox one.” The wingman’s voice.

  Slow motion or not, the missile’s exhaust flashed like a red laser toward the Firewitch and exploded the mammoth Slug fighter in a vast purple cloud. The wingman pivoted his Scorpion back over front, searching for threats and targets.

  Eddie Duffy’s voice overrode the audio. “Enhance the furball, please, Mr. Dowd.”

  I swallowed. So much for my theory about a random collision of dinghies in the Pacific. The Slugs had jumped the fleet as it prepared to launch the two stealthy modified Scorpions that would win the war.

  The Bridge’s enhanced display substituted enlarged images of distant ships for the pinpricks that maneuvering ships would show as when dispersed across hundreds of thousands of cubic miles. The display wasn’t pretty. The Abe, faithfully rendered in two pieces, drifted in the center of a massive dogfight, aka “the furball.” Around us were arrayed a half-dozen cruisers, where there should have been twelve. Whether the others had fallen to Vipers or in ship-to-ship combat I couldn’t tell and didn’t care. The fact was that the fleet had already taken a beating.

  One of the six remaining cruisers drifted, like the Abe.

  Against the backdrop of starlit space, Scorpions and Firewitches by the hundreds darted and spun in a silent cloud around the great pearlescent cruisers, the fighters’ marker traces boiling like red, green, and purple thread.

  Audio crackled with chatter, from controllers and among Scorpion pilots.

  So many fighters burst, then winked out, that the furball was like watching fireworks on holo with the audio off.

  “Jason?” Eddie spoke to me over his audio while the battle raged.

  “I’m fine. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

  “Is the Silver Bullet Scorpion flyable?”

  “Huh?”

  “We can see the modified Scorpion, Jason. It’s standing on the launch rail, in what’s left of Bay One.”

  “I saw it myself, from in here. I couldn’t see any damage. But I don’t know what to look for.” My heart thumped. “Eddie, is there a live pilot back here?”

  Eddie said, “The George Washington’s sustained damage, like we have. She’s unmaneuverable but alive. But Silver Bullet II’s destroyed. We need to get Silver Bullet I off the Abe and onto another cruiser.”

  “Once you stabilize the battle.”

  “Now. Both halves of the Abe are getting sucked into the jump.”

  I swallowed again. A cruiser, or, theoretically, a modified Scorpion, dove into a jump, dodged other debris, slingshot past the ultradwarf star mass core, then powered safely out the other side in new, folded space, light-years away.

  An unpowered cruiser, or a piece of a cruiser, that got sucked in didn’t power out. It would simply crush in upon itself, until it became part of an ultradwarf star mass smaller than a golf ball.

  “Can’t somebody come take us all off?”

  “They’re busy. Whether we all get off the Abe’s unimportant. But that Scorpion back there with you’s got to find a home on another cruiser. So a pilot can fly it through the jump and deliver the bomb.”

  “You said there was a pilot alive back here, somewhere.”

  “I said-never mind. Who’ve you seen alive back there?”

  I shrugged, to no apparent purpose. “ Me. Jeeb. I can’t get to the impeller rooms.”

  Eddie paused, and I heard his breath through the speaker. “You ever fly a Scorpion, Jason?”

  “Hell, no!” I paused. “Actually, kind of.”

  “It’s a very forgiving ship. All you gotta do is ease it off the rail and slide it over to a cruiser. Then somebody can talk you through maneuver and docking.”

  “Can’t they talk me through it first?”

  “Jason, we have four cruisers left healthy enough to receive that Scorpion. Pretty soon, we may have none.”

  Boom.

  The back half of the Abe shuddered so hard that Jeeb wobbled, perched above the flatscreen.

  Waiting here for the fleet to ride to the rescue was no option.

  “Crap!”

  “Now what?”

  “Eddie, I have to cross a hundred feet of vacuum to get from the bay hatch into the Scorpion.”

  Eddie’s breath hissed out again.

  Thumps and shudders shook the deck every few seconds now. The Slugs could be potshotting the Abe’s carcass, or the hull could just be breaking up.

  Above the flatscreen, Jeeb swiveled his head at every thump and whined, like he wished he could hide himself in a suit of armor.

  I leaned my head on my palm, with my elbow on the shelf in front of the screen. “Okay. I have an idea.”

  SEVENTY-TWO

  THE INFANTRY ARMORY aboard the Abe hadn’t been stripped just because she was carrying no infa
ntry this trip. A half-dozen Eternad infantry armor suits hung from racks behind a repair and refit bench. With the ship’s rotation now virtually stopped, the weightless suits’ legs bounced every time a new impact shuddered the ship’s dying carcass, like a robot chorus line. Eternads are made airtight and oxygen-generating principally to protect a GI from chemical and biological agents, but as a field-expedient space suit, they had worked for me in the past.

  The second suit I tried on fit well enough that it should have been able to hold pressure once buttoned up. In Eternads, I could cross the open-to-space bay deck, clamber into the Scorpion’s cockpit, close it, and pressure the ship up.

  The trouble was that the hatch that separated the destroyed bay’s vacuum from the shirtsleeve comfort in which I then resided wasn’t an airlock. Once I depressurized the flight deck, so I could open the hatch that led into Bay One, I would have no refuge to return to. If the Scorpion had been damaged, it would become nothing more than the most streamlined retired veteran’s coffin in history.

  Ten minutes later, I stood at the Bay One hatch, listening as all of the flight deck’s air hissed through a bleed valve into vacuum while my heart pounded so hard that I heard it above the hiss. So far, I had ascertained that the suit had been down checked because its radios didn’t work. That did not, of course, mean that it hadn’t also been down checked for lack of pressure integrity, in which case I would blessedly pass into unconsciousness before I decompressed to death.

  An hour ago, the human fleet had stood poised to launch the two Scorpions through the jump into which this derelict was now falling. The scorpions would drop a couple of bombs, and mankind would declare victory, without a single additional human casualty. We might still salvage victory, if I could limp this Scorpion to a pilot aboard another ship. But at best victory would come at a previously unimagined price.

  The Slugs approached war with the blunt simplicity of a caveman with a club. Somehow all of our collective cleverness was never enough to anticipate what the Slugs, in their alienness, would do. I suppose we shocked the hell out of the Slugs just as often. But mankind had, until now, muddled through by the skin of its teeth and the individual initiative and sacrifice of our disparate, imperfect parts.

  The pressure around me equalized with the pressure of the rest of this universe, which was none. The hatch status light flashed amber, its chime soundless in the vacuum I had created.

  I undogged the hatch, and Jeeb stepped through with me.

  If the Abe had been rotating, Jeeb and I would have been spun off into space, where gravity would still, eventually, tumble us to be compressed into the insertion point’s core. Instead, I was able to creep across the deck, grasping the tie-down loops spaced across the plating, while Jeeb clung to my back with all six locomotors, like a treed cat. If there is a benefit to weightlessness, it is that even though it’s the ultimate form of falling, you don’t feel like you’re falling, but rather like you’re floating in a pool.

  I hand-over-handed up the launch-rail ladder, stopping and manually releasing the clamps that locked the Scorpion to the rail. I wedged myself into the pilot’s couch, which was designed to fit a slim kid in a G-suit, not a gorilla-sized armored infantryman, and wriggled into the shoulder harness. Then I found the canopy closure lever, held my breath, and slid it forward.

  Nothing moved.

  My heart, which was already rattling at the red line, skipped.

  Eternads could generate oxygen for a long time and would keep their wearer warm as long as his movements recharged their batteries, but this was not good. Finally, I looked at the instrument panel. Red flashing letters read “Check Harness,” just like the seat-belt light on a family Electro.

  Ord’s pistol in its shoulder holster, which I had reflexively strapped onto the Eternads somewhere along the way, bulged, so the harness clasp hadn’t latched.

  With gloved, shaking fingers I forced the clasp shut. The red light winked off.

  The canopy sighed closed, and the cockpit pressured up and warmed within sixty seconds. I replaced the armor helmet with the pilot’s helmet clipped alongside the head-rest and dialed in the tactical net. “This is Scorpion…” I read the nose number. “Sierra Bravo One.”

  After two heartbeats, a Zoomie’s voice crackled back. “Roger, Silver Bullet One. Are you good to launch?”

  “I’ve never done that part. Which ship am I bound for?”

  Silence.

  “Okay. Big John’s still got one bay operable.”

  A chill settled in my stomach. “That’s it? We’re down to one cruiser?”

  “We’re stalemated with the Slug fleet, but we’ve taken some damage, fleetwide.”

  My correspondent displayed a knack for understatement.

  “What do I do, then?”

  “Wait one, Silver Bullet.”

  Jeeb perched on the seat alongside me, his optics dilated wide. My optics were probably as wide as saucers, too.

  A different voice said, “Okay, Silver Bullet, look to your upper right.”

  “There’s a box.” My heart skipped yet again. “There was no box last time!”

  “That’s the ’Puter that guides the ship through the jump. Don’t touch it!”

  I dropped both hands in my lap. “Okay. Not touching.”

  “Drop your right hand alongside the pilot’s couch. You should find a lever about the size and shape of a banana.”

  “Got it.”

  “Don’t move it!”

  I jerked my hand away like I had been scalded.

  “That’s the throttle. Look forward, out the canopy windscreen.”

  Ahead of me I saw nothing. The insertion point was so close now that light couldn’t escape it.

  But beyond the ruined tin of the launch-bay bulkheads, a white teardrop hung motionless in space. The other Scorpion’s stinger rear doors were clamshelled open.

  I said, “Is that my guide?”

  “We’re making this up as we go, Silver Bullet. We need you to ease the ship up the rail, then just drift. The ship ahead of you will back up to you, then pinch your stinger pod with its clamshells. That ship will drag you into the bay on the John Paul Jones.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Go along for the ride. Just don’t mishandle the throttle. You’ll take off like a goosed cheetah.”

  I licked sweat off my upper lip. “Do I need to do anything with my stinger pod first?”

  “No! The pod controls are inside the weapons console. So’s the principal munition deployment control. Put the weapons console on your list of things not to touch.”

  I drew a breath. “Okay. Do I pull the banana lever now?”

  “Like you were petting a cobra. You can’t be too gentle.”

  I wrapped my fingers around the throttle and grasped it tight.

  The Scorpion lurched and leapt off the rails.

  “Lay off!”

  Around me, ships darted, spun, and exploded in silence. My mere touch on the throttle had shot me into the furball.

  One ship slid close to me, its stinger clamshell doors open.

  In my ear a feminine voice cooed, “Come to momma…”

  The pilot slid her Scorpion closer, oblivious to the battle around us.

  Screee.

  Metal scraped ceramic as the inside of my tow truck’s clamshell doors clamped my Scorpion’s stinger skin.

  “Fuck!” Not so feminine.

  I gulped. “What fuck?”

  “Relax. I dinged your impeller lift slats. Doesn’t affect you.”

  For the next ten minutes, my tow truck’s pilot tiptoed us, ignored and as tiny as watermelon seeds clamped back-to-back, through the vast dogfight.

  Ahead, Big John grew as we approached. As huge and white as an iceberg, she maneuvered amid the twine ball of purple tracer hosing from her own surface turrets, as well as from the swarm of her defending Scorpions.

  Firewitches dove on her, singly and in pairs, head-on, at her flanks, and from aft.

&nbs
p; We closed in on the black rectangle that marked the open bay in Big John’s slowly rotating hull, and her turrets spat a protective steel tunnel around us.

  Clang.

  The attending Scorpion detached as Silver Bullet and I floated into the open bay as slowly as a man walks. In the transparent bubble on the bay wall, the bay boss bent over his control panel. Alongside him a pilot in coveralls, helmet in the crook of his arm, waited to take Silver Bullet back out and through the jump.

  I sat back and sighed to Jeeb, “Whew!”

  I punched up the aft screen to glimpse my tow truck’s departure.

  The feminine voice purred in my ear as the Scorpion rotated back toward the fight. “Curbside delivery, Silver Bullet. You can leave the rest of the driving to a profess-”

  The Scorpion exploded in the instant that the purple flash of a Slug round flickered.

  Boom.

  I pitched forward against my shoulder straps as my Scorpion struck the bay’s back wall and tumbled.

  A male voice. “Silver Bullet! Get the hell out of there!”

  “How do I-”

  “Now!”

  Ahead, the wall disappeared as the tumbling Scorpion pointed out toward the black rectangle of space.

  I yanked the banana throttle. I blinked, saw blackness ahead, and slammed the throttle closed. The little nudge I had given the Scorpion felt like no motion whatever inside the ship’s gravity cocoon. I looked around to see what happened.

  There was nothing there.

  The male voice said, “Silver Bullet!”

  “Yeah. What happened?”

  “You did well to get the ship out of the bay.” The voice turned flat. “You may as well switch on the jump-guidance box.”

  “Huh?” I couldn’t see a thing. It finally dawned on me that this was because I was hurtling into a black hole.

  “You’ve traveled fifty thousand miles and counting. A Scorpion’s impeller’s not strong enough to back you out now.”

  “I’m gonna die?”

  Pause.

  “Switch on the box. Let it try to guide you through the jump and out the other side.”