Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit

by Ryder Stacy

  “We’re all right, all right,” Rajat yelled out, breaking Rock’s spell. “We’re exactly where we should be, entering a 1,092-mile high orbit. All systems are functioning perfectly as far as we can tell, according to the inboard faultcheck—except for a toilet in the main lavatory which popped a gasket during take-off.”

  “Well, we can doubtless find a way around that if we’ve come this far,” Rock grinned, wondering if it was possible for a man to crap right into space. “You two were unbelievable. I gotta tell you that,” Rock said as the two gleamed with toothy smiles. “You’re going to be nominated by me as soon as we get back to C.C. for the Citizen’s Medal.”

  They knew what that meant. It was the highest award that could be bestowed on a Freefighter anywhere in America. Most of them were awarded posthumously. And still could be.

  Rock undid his seatbelts and started to rise only to suddenly find himself floating up into the air. For a second he didn’t know what the hell was going on and sputtered and gasped, grabbing at the air like a fish out of water. The two pilots laughed as they undid their belts.

  “Forgot to tell you, Rock,” Rajat said as he flipped a few more buttons. “There’s no gravity up here, once we cut acceleration! Watch where you go, cause you’ll keep going in any direction you head. You know—law of action/reaction, all that.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Rock said as he reached the “ceiling” and pushed off of it with his hands. Again he used too much force and the motion sent him twisting back down toward the steel floor. It took him another minute to get himself moving with slow enough taps and light finger pushes to start guiding himself back out of the pilot module.

  “There should be magnetic boots and spacesuits, all kinds of junk, somewhere behind all those doors back there,” Connors said as he called up the schematics of the place on a screen. But Rockson was already pushing himself back through the spaceship in slow, even moves, now he was starting to get the hang of it.

  It was like swimming but with even more of a sense of complete weightlessness. Like a dream, a dream of flying among clouds, of soaring like a bird. And even as Rockson propelled himself along he felt all sorts of childhood fantasies that had been long-buried pop up in little currents through his brain.

  The men were already floating all over the place by the time he got to the main crew quarters. They were laughing and having a good time. And they needed it. God only knew what emotions they had all gone through in the last few minutes. The men were bouncing back and forth from wall to wall, mock wrestling and sending each other flying. Archer was the biggest kid of all, spinning himself around and around in a crazy kind of out of control spiral with his huge arms and legs poking out all over the place. In spite of himself Rockson couldn’t help but join in the ridiculous merriment. God only knew it wouldn’t last very long.

  Twenty

  McCaughlin was still as motionless as a mummy in a tomb. But he was hanging on. The space ride didn’t seem to have hurt him any. He just lay there strapped down to his horizontal seat so he wouldn’t float off. The rest of the men tried to relax, even take a nap, as they hadn’t slept for days now. But it was hard to sleep when you’re floating a thousand miles above the earth for the first time in your life.

  “Everything still putting?” Rock asked as he made his way back to the command module.

  “As far as we can see, everything is A-OK,” Rajat answered, his eyes still turning everywhere as Connors did the same a few feet away, taking in the reams of data. How they could even keep track of a tenth of it was beyond Rockson’s comprehension. He had had trouble in basic N-space non-linear algebra back in C.C. High. “We need to test some of the mini-rocket systems for actual maneuvering now that we’re up here. This ship is way beyond a satellite—it’s an actual rocketship, designed to maneuver in space with speed and accuracy.”

  “Or so the manual says,” Connors laughed, giving Rajat a playful punch on the arm from his seat. “We don’t know if this ship has all systems.”

  “Well, we’ll find out soon enough,” the Asian said, blushing under his dark skin. “But truly, Rock, from what we’ve read, this bird really is qualitatively different from anything before. For example—” He looked at Connors who nodded and they both pushed buttons simultaneously. Apparently there were numerous fail-safe systems—back-ups and accident avoidance modes so that for many critical operations the two had to operate controls simultaneously. As Rock watched up on the video monitor the outside cameras swept up and down along the sides of the craft, and he saw four huge delta wings grow out on each side, with little nozzles all over them front and big.

  Rajat pressed something and nozzles on two wings fired for a split second. As light as if she didn’t weigh countless tons, the huge Dynasoar, like an elephant doing ice ballet, started smoothly gliding forward. Rock felt a slight tug and grabbed a seat.

  “All right,” Rajat exclaimed, raising a fist in exuberance. “It means the ship’s maneuver controls are workable.” The two youths exchanged high fives and Rock shook his head. He kept forgetting how young they were. It blew his mind.

  “Well Capt. Kirk,” Rajat said, saluting Rockson as he turned in his chair, referring to the Star Trek television series that the search men of Century City had been lucky enough to find an entire crate of ancient video tapes of in a ruined TV studio in Denver. Every schoolkid in the city knew the jargon from old TV. It was like they hadn’t been away a day, as if there wasn’t over a hundred years of death and mutation separating the two cultures.

  “Whoa, I’m not the captain on this particular part of the trip,” Rock said. “You two are. I’ll make military decisions—but you’re the flyers, both of you. I wouldn’t begin to try to pilot her. But I suggest that we test the ship’s flight capabilities and her weapons systems. If we’re actually going to tackle this Space Wheel, we’d sure as hell better have guns that fire, and steering that turns. You sure you’re not star-patterned mutants?” Rock asked. “I don’t think I was quite so self-assured when I was sixteen or twenty. In fact I was an anti-social, foul-mouthed, bitter teenager, let me tell you.”

  “Dr. Shecter tested both of us,” Rajat said, “and we both tested negative. I think we’re just plain old homo sapiens who have some aptitude for this kind of junk,” the Asian said, self-effacingly.

  “Have you plotted our orbit? How near is the Wheel?” Rock asked.

  “We’re about a thousand miles below their orbit and are on the far side of the Earth. That is—they can’t even see us right now—but we know where they are by process of elimination. It’s hard to explain but—”

  “I’ll take your word for it, believe me,” Rock laughed. “So we can just cruise this bird toward them whenever we want?”

  “Well, that’s one of the things we should test along with the weapons systems,” Rajat replied as he flicked some switches and the screen in front of Rockson suddenly was filled with concentric grids as beeps rang out insistently.

  “It’s calling you,” Connors said mockingly.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Rockson asked.

  “You’re the gunner, Rock. Neither of us would dare usurp that position. The controls are right in front of you. Handles like a machine gun according to the specs.”

  Rockson looked down at the almost gallery-arcade-looking set of plastic toggle controls in front of him.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. I’ve never fired a space cannon in my life,” Rock said with a strange look on his face. He hadn’t realized somehow that this was part of the bargain.

  “Well, Simmons was supposed to be the gunner, but he got killed by the Vampyres. Claustein was the back-up. He didn’t make it out of the avalanche. That leaves you, Rock. You’ve had the most experience with weapons of any man here. We know how to turn it on and aim it. So you’ll just have to play around.”

  “Right,” Rockson said, reaching down and gripping the twin handles of the curved plastic controls. “Well, there’s no time like the pres
ent,” the Doomsday Warrior muttered as he slid down in his seat getting into the most comfortable position.

  “You don’t have to know what it all means in front of you,” Rajat said, “although there is a schematic available. But see that button in front of you that lists different modes? Press Full Manual.”

  Rock did so and after a series of gurglings and beepings from within the gun handle, it suddenly loosened from its locked position so he could move it around freely. The video screen in front of him had split into six screens, each one showing (he realized after a few seconds of confusion) all six possible views from the ship. Video cameras were inset all over the thing and different portions of the sky—galaxies, nebulae—filled the six split screens.

  “This is like no other gun system you’ve ever seen,” Rajat said. “You can control everything from that one seat with those handles. On full manual, like she is now, you can shoot from all six sides of the ship at once, or separately. The controls are built into the handles. Options are: First, rockets with high explosive warheads able to take out whole sats, Second, laser beams that can slice through a space vehicle at a thousand miles in less than a hundredth of a second, Third, smart computer- and laser-guided missiles that can be sent out tens of thousands of miles in curved orbits and can track down their targets independently, Fourth, for close-range fighting, you can have magnetic mines that will float over and clamp onto anything metal, various detonation times can be set by that digital clock control to your right.”

  Rock kept looking around nervously. It was all a little overwhelming.

  “Where do you suggest we get some target practice?” Rock asked. “I can’t start shooting up at the galaxies.”

  “There’s a belt of satellite debris and other space junk not too far above us,” Connors suggested. “Why don’t we test her steering system to its edge—and you can check out the lasers?”

  “Lead on, Capt. Bligh,” Rock winked at Rajat. They were all in mortal danger every second they were up here. But damn, if they weren’t living a fantasy—flying a spaceship! An experience most teenagers throughout the twentieth century would have given anything for.

  The two whiz kids started shouting more incomprehensible numbers and readouts to one another as Rock fiddled with the gun unit. He saw how responsive it was, at least in switching from screen to screen, enlarging the image, or giving him full six-sided viewing.

  He began examining the panel in front of him and saw that the readings were clearly marked for easy and quick reference. The number of bombs of each type remaining. Full now. There were grids and graphs and orbital trajectory calculators waiting to be told where to send what little piece of hellfire. All the lights were green, the little digital readouts reading READY FOR COMBAT.

  Rajat played with every mini-rocket nozzle on the ship’s delta wings—wings that had to be deployed for atmosphere re-entry—sending out little bursts from all different angles to see just how responsive the ship was. The answer was very. It seemed to be able to maneuver almost like a dolphin in water, so finely tuned were the rockets. The only hard thing was getting the nozzle-firing rockets to work in full coordination with each other. But after a while, Connors and Rajat broke up control of the system with each other. They began getting their act together, started being able to make the ship soar, stop on a dime, turn ninety degrees and then suddenly speed up again as they headed up to higher orbit.

  Rock saw it first, the huge ring of debris swirling like a dark cloud about ten miles above them. It was incredible that there was this much junk up here, pieces of rockets, broken satellites, boosters, all turning in weird quick orbits, everything out of symmetry with everything else so it all kept banging into each other in a churning flood of debris.

  “You could open a junkyard up here, sell used parts to ships from other star systems,” Rajat joked.

  The whiz kids steered the ship up until she was only a couple of miles from the outer edge of the orbiting junk ring. Some force, perhaps a slight gravitational field generated by the mass of junk itself, was holding it all together in a fifty-mile-wide band. It was quite amazing really.

  “See that big long girder-shaped chunk of metal coming in at three o’clock?” Rock asked. “I’m going to try something small on it.”

  “Go to it, gunner,” Rajat shouted with enthusiasm. “We’ll hold her dead steady awaiting further orders, sir.”

  He pushed a button on the side of one of the gun handles to mode Monitor 1 and the video screen filled with the image of the metal beam. All Rock had to do was turn his own controls and a red circle in the middle of the monitor showed him exactly what he was targeted on. He got the thing dead center and set the Firing Mode to Mini-Missile, then pressed fire.

  The red circle turned bright red and before he’d even had a chance to wonder if the damned thing worked or not, the beam was gone. It wasn’t like he really saw it explode, although there was a red blur for a second—but then it disappeared. Shot apart with such speed into fragments that no human eye could track it.

  The computer could. TARGET DESTROYED, a panel read out in dancing green letters which ran across his view. COMPLETE DESTRUCTION. TARGET BREAKING INTO 1,789 FRAGMENTS TRAVELING AT ANGLES, A-158, A-157 . . .” Rock slammed the CANCEL READOUT button and sat back with a look of satisfaction on his face.

  “All right, Rock,” Connors laughed, his cheeks flushing with excitement. “Too bad there aren’t sound effects.”

  “There are.” Rajat said clicking some switches. “We got measuring devices for sonar, audio, video, you name it. The whole electromagnetic spectrum can be used to probe things with the Dynasoar’s equipment. They had to be able to know what was really a threat up here and what was just an empty shell sent to cause confusion. It’s one of the features of the ship, aside from the armaments, that made it cost so much,” Rajat went on, sounding like a professor lecturing his slow-witted class on history.

  There was a muffled kind of sound like a giant coughing in his sleep as the onboard system played back the sound of the explosion—or rather a compu-recreation. Space is silent.

  “Of course that’s too fast for human ears—so we’ll just slow it down a little.” He turned a dial and the sound replayed back. This time it was drawn-out, sounding a little more like an explosion—but still strange. Not like the explosions he was used to. Then the visual image was played back in ultra-violet mode and the video monitor turned bizarre combinations of reds, oranges, and yellows.

  “It picks up heat. What you’re seeing is hot. If it’s red—engines still working. The blue ones are dead, cold, the corpses of this graveyard.”

  On the replay Rockson could see the heat generated by the explosion, a sudden burst of red which instantly dissipated into nothingness in the cold of space. There were lots of glowing shapes throughout the orbital dump in infra-red.

  “It looks like there’s a lot of hot stuff out there,” Rock noted.

  “Probably just some mini-atomic engines—they put them in lots of these suckers, tiny ones designed to power their functions for up to a thousand years in some cases. I doubt most of them work. There do seem to be a lot though, don’t there?” He whistled as a whole little school of red came into view.

  “Let me try a few more shots. Why don’t you swoop along the underside of the garbage ring, we’ll see if it changes at all.”

  “Will do, Captain,” Rajat said, slamming his hand onto the main rockets, which burned for three seconds sending out what looked like a spume of white foam behind them though it was actually rocket fire. The Dynasoar took off like a surfboard skimming the waves of space, crewmen grabbing for handholds.

  “All right, slow her down,” Rock said, his hands getting itchy on the high tech controls.

  “Roger,” Rajat barked back, and he and Connors threw their reverse throttle engines on full for a half-second. The ship came to an almost dead stop, vis-a-vis the debris, and Rockson sighted up and fired almost immediately on a madly revolving booster from an old
U.S. ICBM rocket that had somehow made it up here.

  This time he used laser from twenty miles. And again it was instantaneous when he fired. There was a brilliant pencil-beam of white light that was suddenly suspended between the Dynasoar and the ancient USAF booster. It cut along the spinning metal dissecting it in two, and then flicked off, the entire operation lasting about two seconds.

  The old ship didn’t explode—it had no engines or fuel anymore, but the parts moved quickly apart, headed off into different orbits, bumping into other pieces of junk. This time, even with the audio-effect re-creation on full, he heard almost nothing. The laser worked silently like a snake striking in the dark.

  “I’m going to try one of the smart missiles,” Rock said, getting more impressed by the second by the amount of weaponry. The fact that he was in control of it all was just a little awe-inspiring. He could feel the sheer power of it through his hands. Could see why a man, an evil man would want to resurrect the Space-Wheel and use it for his own nefarious ends. The feeling of an almost godlike power at one’s fingertips was overwhelming.

  “Look there, Rock,” Rajat said. “There’s a whole string of garbage balls that look almost linked together. Weird, isn’t it?” Rockson zeroed in on the thing. It almost looked like a string of beads, space debris that had been strung along, nearly a dozen blobs of them, each about a hundred feet in diameter and perhaps the same distance apart. He couldn’t begin to imagine what they had been. Maybe plastic globes containing refuse thrown away by a Saturnian Space Liner?

  This time he pressed the Magnetic Floating Mines mode, wanting to try out all the firepower. Radar locked onto the target and began reading out distance, orbital path, and other vital information.

  Rock leaned forward and aimed the red target dot on his monitor screen at the center of the lead space sphere, and his eyes widened in horror. For a flag was waving out the side of the thing. It was unmistakable. A white flag. And by the strange way it moved, it was clear that someone was waving it!