The Bonds of Orion

by Owen R. O’Neill

  Flying this low well below the flotilla’s horizon made getting a fix more difficult, but it could be done, especially if she blundered too close in this goddamned awkward lumbering beast. Her only protection then would be Huron, flying a few klicks behind her and keeping just under line of sight to the flotilla’s sensor masts; popping up at random intervals to take a peek at the Doms and make sure they weren’t doing anything problematic before they got in range to execute their plan.

  Whatever that plan was. The frantic hurry to get in the air hadn’t given them any chance to get into details on that, and there were questions that needed answering.

  Kris keyed on her comms maser. “Rafe? How the hell we gonna do this? That’s a Halith fleet-grade shield they’re running under. We could peck at it all PM with this antique shit we’re packing and not get burn-through.”

  “I know.”

  “So what’s your plan?”

  “Wait.”

  Oh, great. “Right. That’s a genius plan. What for?”

  “Shoal water.”

  “What water?”

  “In about twenty minutes, they’re gonna hit the edge of the continental shelf. It starts shoaling fast at that point and in this area here” he linked a chart onto her HUD “the water’s less than fifty meters deep.”

  “Okay. So the water’s shallow. What next?”

  “I want you to lay down a box barrage five seconds in front of their formation’s leading edge.”

  “Five seconds?”

  “Yeah. We’re fighter pilots, not ground-support flyers.”

  “But five seconds?”

  “Make it three, if you feel that’s better. And set the warhead timers for twenty seconds.”

  Kris was positive he’d misspoken. “You mean twenty milliseconds.”

  “I mean the self-destruct timers, Kris, not the warhead-detonation delay. Just like you did with the torps at Asylum.”

  Oh. The shield stopped at the water’s surface, so there was no protection from below. In effect, they were laying down a minefield beneath the advancing flotilla. The hydrostatic shock generated by ninety-six warheads detonating in a hundred-sixty feet of water right under that cluster of hovercraft oughta be . . . spectacular.

  “Okay. That’s a genius plan.”

  “It’s your genius plan, Kris.”

  “Can I remind you of that when ya try to swipe the credit later?”

  “Lemme get back to you on that.”

  * * *

  The unconceivable flash and roar as each pair of launchers ripple-fired their two dozen missiles, making her head throb despite the flight suit’s hearing protection, and shaking the Albatross so badly, she was afraid it might fall to pieces; the boost motors blazing like meteors across the sky. Each missile’s two-and-a-half ton warhead had an explosive-yield ratio of thirty-three to one. She’d just laid down eight kilotons worth of death and destruction in front of the Halith flotilla.

  Completing her long turn to the north, Kris kept as much of her attention as she dared on her tail cameras. Silently counting down the seconds, she reached zero, then -1 and -2, and then it came: an enormous geyser erupting from the surface of the ocean uncounted tons of water shot skyward by the simultaneous detonation of ninety-six missiles. Within it, black shapes charred and twisted pieces of wreckage, human and mechanical rose, up and up, sailing out of sight.

  Then the whole enormous column of water it must have been a mile high fell back and met the massive indraught, creating a tremendous wave that raced outward at terrifying speed. Flying just above the wave tops, Kris couldn’t see it but she still felt a shiver corkscrew up her spine at the thought. If she’d been close when all that shit went off . . .

  She opened the throttles all the way and keyed her helmet mic on. “Rafe? Did we win?” Her sensors could show her nothing of the blast area, and while it was hard to believe anything could have survived back there, they were as naked as they were born out here now. Even without its missile load, the Albatross was straining to reach 500 kph. Just one missile flying up her ass would ruin her whole day.

  “Looking . . .” His reply was overlaid by the dull rolling sound of the explosion reaching them, and at the same instant, the shock wave made the Albatross shudder. Kris held the massive aircraft steady with an iron grip on the controls. It wasn’t much of a shake, but the storm the flotilla had been hiding under had worked up a nasty cross sea. Just a little roll at this altitude was also liable to ruin her whole day . . .

  “I think we bowled a strike,” Huron announced cheerfully.

  “We did what?” Kris clamped her lips into a tight line. Huron was always least clear when he was most happy.

  “What’s still afloat back there and that’s not much is dazed and confused. They’ve got rescue ops underway and look to be in no shape to get after us. You scored a knockout, Kris. Congratulations!”

  “Thanks” not much above a mutter; more because of relief than anything, but also because the sincere praise from Huron always made her self-conscious. And his voice was warmer than she’d heard it in ages.

  “Whatever you’d like when we get back, it’s on me. Then we can bid this place a fond goodbye.”

  You can sure as hell say that again except for the fond part. But even as she opened her mouth to reply, her sounder lit up with a wail. The Albatross could cruise on the surface if needed, so the avionics included a sounder to scan ahead for subsurface obstacles. But what she was seeing on the display was no obstacle. She had no idea what it was. But it huge at least half a klick across and welling up out of the depths at a scary rate. Scary, because whatever it was, it was going break the surface right in front of her, and now the damn thing was spreading out . . .

  “Rafe!” she shouted over the link. “There’s some humongous fuck’n thing shooting up in the water ten klicks dead ahead! Can you see it?”

  “Got nothing here.” His voice had lost all its warmth and had the hard combat tones back in it. “Wait . . .” The sounder showed the thing to be almost a klick wide now and still spreading as it neared the surface. Kris pushed the Albatross into as tight a turn as she dared at this height. Then his voice came through with a new, sharper note. “I see the surface boiling.”

  Oh fuck! She couldn’t flying over a fucking volcano? Could she? “Is it an eruption?”

  “Nothing on FLIR ”

  “Shit!” Her yell cut across whatever he was about to say. The surface exploded not four kilometers in front of her, filling her entire field of view with things. Thousands of things. Millions of things, erupting in every direction like small missiles. But they couldn’t be missiles

  “What the fuck are those?” pulling back on the stick; fighting for every meter of altitude she could get.

  “I dunno . . .”

  Kris couldn’t tell which scared he more: the cloud for flying things streaking toward her or the palpable worry in Huron’s voice. She couldn’t ever remember hearing him actually worried . . .

  Her eyes flicked down to her instruments and sensor readouts. The missile-like things were mostly staying below twenty meters, but she wasn’t sure the Albatross could even break twenty meters . . .

  Two of the things hit her windshield; nearly at once, almost in the same spot. They were fuck’n alive! Her blurred impression was of a narrow conical shell, a meter long, and way too many appendages. Bits of smashed shell stuck in the sea-creature goo smeared all over the windscreen. The outer layers had cracked. It wasn’t bad, but taking another hit from one of these slimy fuckers there . . .

  A starboard engine exploded as one of the creatures struck it. The Albatross skidded, as if swatted by an enormous hand. As Kris fought it back into line, the inboard engine flamed out. The unbalanced thrust caused an overcorrection that cross-coupled with the skid. The Albatross rolled, one wingtip pontoon skipped on the wave crests, bounced, then caught a large swell and dug in. The wing sheared off at the root, spinning the Albatross around, sending it cartwheeling into the water.r />
  In the cockpit, Kris felt the sickening jolt, a soaring feeling that flipped her stomach; saw a strange whirling kaleidoscope of dark sea and sky and sea again

  Then nothing.

  * * *

  One hundred meters up and two hundred ahead, Huron glanced back just in time to see Kris’ number-4 starboard engine blow apart under the impact of one of the squid-like creatures. He watched the Albatross yaw dangerously, and for the space between one heartbeat and the next, he thought Kris might save it. Then the number-3 engine flamed out, the fatal roll began and seen at the unhurried pace of terrible dream the Albatross somersaulted across the surface, landing upside down with an terrific splash. The tail section and half the other wing sheared off on impact and sank, bubbling, while the rest of the fuselage floundered in the choppy sea.

  He already had the Thumper in a hard turn and staring at the wreckage a cold wave washing over him from head to toe he waited for Kris to emerge. Water poured in through the shattered tail, the stump of the wing rolled the fuselage over as it submerged, and no sign of Kris. The Albatross lifted its nose a drunken, almost yearning, motion then pitched down and began to slip beneath the waves.

  Bringing the Thumper in low, Huron went to full flaps, engaged the airbrakes and dropped the gear to bleed off as much airspeed as possible. Just short of the sinking aircraft, he cut the engine and jammed the stick back hard. The aircraft pitched up, fighting to stay aloft, stalled and plummeted into the sea.

  A shock like nothing he’d ever felt, a crushing pressure in his chest, vision going black, unable to breathe and a piercing ring in his ears, though he could still think and feel; the peculiar sensation that his limbs were flailing without volition, then groping for the straps with hands that didn’t feel like his while his vision came back slowly, monochrome, full of dancing splotches of light and dark.

  Consciousness true consciousness, not the horrible, suffocating grayness of those interminable seconds came back in a rush. He released the seat straps, yanked the lanyard to blow the canopy off and pulled the self-inflating raft with its survival gear from behind the seats. Nothing of the Albatross remained to be seen. Tossing the raft overboard, he dived in after it.

  * * *

  Strange eerie shifting half-light, a feeling of weightlessness even motionless and a screaming pain in her right shoulder. A flat undulated plain stretching ahead until lost in a vast turquoise dimness no boundary, just a slow fading away and that plain seeming to lift and tilt toward her; herself suspended and still unmoving. Stark details forcing themselves through the pain: the engine exploding, her hands hard on the stick, fighting the yaw, the helpless feeling as the Albatross started to roll . . .

  What the fuck . . .

  The cockpit was underwater, she was sinking to the seabed a slow, lazy final drift and the hard object gripped in her gloved left hand was the strap release. She realized then that, during that memoryless interval, she’d been trying to release the seat straps with her left hand, that the crash had jammed the release mechanism and dislocated her right shoulder, and that the survival knife was in the right-thigh pocket of her flight suit.

  And her suit was leaking. Already she could feel the wetness seeping through her glove and boot seals. The helmet seal was still holding

  Oh shit . . . A thin stream of water trickled down back of her neck. Twisting against the straps and fighting through the shriek of pain in her shoulder, she strained to reach the pocket holding her knife. Her fingers came up centimeters short. Trying to pull her right leg up, she found her boot wedged tight. Must be caught in the rudder pedals, she thought absurdly as a blind panic began to uncoil in her gut.

  The wrecked fuselage struck, a gentle impact, digging a furrow like a shallow grave in the sand.

  No fucking goddammit no . . . Her neck tingled, a chill sensation. Was her suit filling that fast? Numbness was spreading down her right side. Choking back a wave of hysteria, she fought to free her trapped boot. It wouldn’t budge. Her struggles became more frantic; the hysteria began to overwhelm her, blotting out all but the thought she was about to drown, thrashing like a trapped animal.

  A tap on the side of her helmet jarred her. Opening her eyes unaware she’d closed them another flight helmet floated before her like a hallucination. Before she could make sense of the apparition, hands gripped her right wrist and elbow, extending her arm in a slow strong steady pull. A fresh explosion of agony, then an audible pop and immediately the pain began fade. Air not water flooded her lungs as her chest convulsed. Gasping, she sagged into the seat, her vision filled with whirling sparks. The flash of a knife in her peripheral vision, and her torso came free, then her hips. Floating up, Huron’s hands grabbed her ankle, lifted and turned her. The boot came free, and, holding her around the waist, he yanked the lanyard the blew both cockpit doors in a cloud of bubbles. Half stunned by her sudden freedom and relief from the pain, her movements were weak, but his arm guided her out, and, as her head cleared, strength returned and they kicked to the surface together.

  Broaching it, she lay out on her back and cracked her visor. The wind had freshened, and the air was full of spray, but she gulped it in, staring into a clear blue sky. A pistol shot nearby made her start; Huron had his sidearm out and had fired a shot into the air. Seconds later, the two-man raft came skipping over the waves. Huron opened his visor and whistled. The raft obediently slowed and sidled over to them, and automatically shut down its built-in propulsion system when Huron grasped the lifeline. Heaving himself up by the boarding stirrup, he took Kris’ good arm and helped her onboard.

  “Wasn’t that fun?” he said when at last they sat together on the raft’s floor, taking stock of their surroundings.

  “Fuck’n picnic,” Kris muttered, holding her arm across her body. A shot from the raft’s first-aid kit was dulling the pain, and she flexed her hand experimentally. There was no trace of Huron’s Thumper. Their flight helmets had shorted from immersion in salt water, and their xels were also dead, leaving them no way to contact friendly forces.

  “Things could be worse,” Huron offered.

  “How’s that?” Alone in the open ocean with her shoulder throbbing, Kris was in no mood to be humored.

  “This thing” he tapped the floor of the raft “might not have had an automatic distress homing system.”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “I didn’t get a chance to check the manual, being . . . otherwise engaged.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Kris nodded. “Point taken. What now?”

  He surveyed the horizon for a moment. “Well, the way I see it, the Doms are back there, eighty klicks or so.” He pointed behind them. “The coast is about three hundred klicks that way” pointing in the opposite direction. “We’ve got an ELT beacon, guaranteed to bring the Doms running ’cause it’s still tuned to their gear, a week’s worth of food, water for three days and an MROD kit to make more, a fishing kit although after those fucking squid things, I don’t know what you’d wanna try to catch in these waters a flare gun with tracking flares and distress beacon also guaranteed to bring the Doms running sheets that can be rigged as a shelter and a couple of oars to break our backs with when the propulsion gives out.”

  “Any idea when that will be?”

  Huron glanced around again. “In these seas, I’ve got no idea.” The raft’s propulsion system was based on special polymer grains that reacted with sea water to generate CO2 that pressurized bladders in the raft’s tubes. Fins that extended below the surface and hardened acted steerable jets. “The manual says this thing can make about fifteen klicks an hour in calm seas, with an endurance of roughly a day.”

  “The manual you didn’t get a chance to read?” Kris interrupted. There was, in fact, a pocket to her left boldly labeled MANUAL, right next to one of the two bailing buckets.

  “I should have said our manual,” he clarified with that well-remembered smile. “We can hope this things is more-or-less up to spec.”

  “Uh huh.” Someho
w, that did not instill confidence.

  “So best case or even fairly decent case we could make landfall in say twenty hours. I don’t think this qualifies, though” indicating the steep seas that had grown perceptibly in the last few minutes.

  “I see that,” Kris agreed, looking about, then returned her attention to Huron. “Why are you favoring your side like that?” Despite his breezy jocular manner, he’d been sitting hunched, and she detected him wincing when he moved, however much he tried to hide it.

  “Took a pop when I ditched. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Why not?”

  He gestured over her shoulder at a layer of black impenetrable cloud bearing down on them, a foaming white line on the ocean beneath it, and lightning flashing in crazy dances all along its leading edge.

  “Because we’ve got that to worry about.”

  Chapter 26

  LSS Artemisia, in orbit

  Amu Daria, Epsilon Aquila, Aquila Sector

  “Not a sign.” On LSS Artemisia’s flag bridge, Lieutenant Richard Warburton passed his hand over the map displaying the last known position of Commanders Huron and Kennakris on the compartment’s omnisynth. As head of Commodore Shariati’s ESM department, he answered to the name ‘Trace’, not uncommon for ESM operators, and which he very much preferred to being called ‘Dick’. “With all the electrical activity going on here” he indicated the storm that had covered the crash site and was moving northwest “I doubt we could detect any of their emissions. And even if they did activate a beacon or fire off a flair . . .” He interrupted himself to highlight the area where the Halith flotilla had been sunk. “The Doms still have S&R units combing this area. If they pick up a distress signal, they’ll be on top of it in minutes.”