“We do, sort of.” I pointed at Jeeb. “Tactical Observation Transports are smarter than Siegebots. He’ll walk point for us. His sensors make a Siegebot look like a deaf, blind pile of scrap pile.”
Brumby and I cleaned weapons while Mimi and Howard went to inspect her V-Star’s modifications.
Brumby snapped the charging handle on his M-20 for the fourth time. “Sir, what if Admiral Brace figures out what we’re doing?”
“He won’t. He’s too busy.”
“Our ship’s supposed to be held in reserve. When he sees us move out early, he might shoot us down.”
I smiled and shook my head. “Brace is inflexible. But he’s learned a lot lately. He won’t do something that stupid.”
Thirty-Six
Two hours later I lay in the dark on my bunk when Howard rapped on my cabin’s hatch door. “We’ve got It onscreen.”
I rolled off my bunk and tugged underarmor over my feet. “How far?”
“I would have said hours. But they’re decelerating. A day to intercept at present rate of close.”
“Why decelerating?”
“To engage us. I think It knows we’re here. It’s going to neutralize Excalibur rather than leave a capitol ship loose behind It.”
“Neutralize. You mean destroy.”
“Well, the reason we came out here was to engage It.”
One hundred twenty-one to twenty odds are bad. They seem even worse when the 121 are spoiling for a fight.
We ran to the bridge, Howard leading while I hopped from foot to foot, tugging up my underarmor trousers.
The dim-lit bridge bustled with light and sound, but unlike my first bridge visit while in orbit above Ganymede, Brace was the only human there. The forward screen image had split into three. The left screen showed a pale blue light point against the stars—the Troll. The right screen flickered with Excalibur’s vital signs. In the center of the center, magnified, a Firewitch pointed head-on at us. Its six forward booms or horns or whatever they were rotated as the fighter whirled coldly toward us. Its surface winked with navigation lights—or what looked like navigation lights, though the Slugs couldn’t see them because they were visible-spectrum lights. It was an escort or scout headed our way.
A small shadow slid past me in the dull red light.
Mimi Ozawa, in flight suit, stood alongside Howard and whispered, “We’re fueled and your gear is loaded. The bridging unit’s checked.”
Mimi’s job was not only to fight and dodge us to the Troll’s skin. She had to deliver us close enough and delicately enough that Brumby could force a hull breach with Thermite charges.
But she couldn’t do her job and we couldn’t do ours until and unless Excalibur and the other fighter jocks did theirs. They had to win enough of the battle to create a melee Mimi could slip through.
Brace leaned over, peering at a display that showed fifty Mercury turrets ready. He spoke into the cherry-stem mike that curved around his cheek, to the Mercury-systems controller. “All systems on automatic. Switch to manual on my command. Only on my command.”
The response echoed through the speakers. “Aye-aye, sir.”
Mercury’s ’puters sensed incoming targets, locked on them, traversed and elevated each turret gun, and fired on target in nanoseconds, before a human operator could blink. They were even programmed to recognize the transponder signals from our own fighters, then abort firing. There should be no friendly-fire disasters. With just twenty V-Stars against over a hundred Firewitches, we couldn’t afford to shoot ourselves down.
Brace straightened, turned, saw us, and grunted.
Mimi said, “Mind if I disengage the docking boom from my ship, At?”
Former NASA astronauts, having served together as civilians, called each other by first names. Rank differences between them, like the one between Admiral Atwater Brace and Major Mimi Ozawa, were ignored. It was one of those jaunty pilot rituals.
Brace frowned. “Your ship’s in reserve. I don’t want it colliding with a deploying fighter.”
“That boom keeps me tethered to Excalibur ninety seconds longer at go-time. Ninety seconds is a lifetime in combat, At. I’ll be at the controls. You know I’m a good enough pilot to keep my ship out of other people’s way.”
Brace’s jaw muscles twitched. “Strap in at the controls if you want. But the boom stays connected. Your ship’s mine unless we identify a Pseudocephalopod derelict. Until then, you follow orders.”
Brace did have ultimate authority if he needed another fighter to defend Excalibur. She was the biggest movable object ever constructed by mankind. She was home to twenty-six human beings, even if they were squids like Brace. With the exception of our little secret mutiny, Excalibur was humanity’s sole, faint hope to hold hordes of invading monsters at arm’s length. So I couldn’t fault Brace for protecting her.
But Howard believed our mission would win or lose the war. Howard Hibble may have been a geek’s geek, but he would fight for what he believed. Nobody else on the bridge seemed to notice that his right hand had clenched into a fist.
The fight fan in me longed to let this one go the distance. Brace’s stateroom plaques announced that he had been an Annapolis boxing champion. He outweighed Howard, but the little guy had him on reach. Howard never wore the Silver Star he won at the Battle of Ganymede, but he won it for defending our command post against fifty Slugs. He had pounded the last two with his rifle butt, until the stock finally shattered.
I sighed and grabbed Howard’s arm. “Aye-aye, Admiral.”
We turned away from Brace. Mimi on one side and I on the other steered Howard off the bridge. Beneath my fingers, the twine-thin muscles of Howard’s forearm quivered.
So did his voice. “Dammit, Jason! The man’s a fool! Our only hope—”
“Howard, in twenty-four hours, Brace’ll be fighting an armada, every ship in it the size of Mount Rushmore. You think he’ll notice whether our boom’s connected or not? Stick with the plan. We’ll take off to try and board that Troll and he’ll let us go.”
The trouble with professors is they don’t understand people like us line commanders.
I knew what I was doing.
Thirty-Seven
We slipped our gear aboard Mimi’s V-Star, then I went back to my cabin to sleep. A day from now, I was either going to be awake for a long time or asleep forever.
In my cabin I lay atop the blanket on my bunk—a soldier doesn’t mess up a made bunk unnecessarily, even if it’s never going to be inspected—fingers laced behind my head. Awake a long time? Who was I kidding? We were going to be dead. I should have popped a stay-awake and savored every last minute, and talked a chip diary, then sealed it in a canister, launched it toward Earth, and hoped someone would be there to read it.
Jeeb’s microhydraulics sighed as he preened, perched on a chairback.
“Did it matter, Jeeb? My life? Any of it?”
“I am not programmed to respond to that inquiry. Please restructure.” Jeeb didn’t say that, of course. It just popped into my earpiece, a standardized, prerecorded soundbite.
Ruth Klein-Tway, and I as well, may have deluded ourselves otherwise out of sentimentality, but Jeep was just a ’bot.
I didn’t even have a priest to hear my confession. Not that I was religious.
If there was a God I’d know soon enough. I figured he wouldn’t be pissed at me for doubting his existence or for not going to church. I mean, God was supposed to be forgiving of human frailty. I smiled at the ceiling. If I had to spend eternity reporting to somebody like Brace I’d transfer to hell.
On the chance that God was listening, I covered my bet by praying. Nothing personal, just that Excalibur would survive long enough to let us get inside the Troll and go down fighting.
At some point I drifted off. I was lying on my bunk, then Excalibur exploded and I was tumbling through vacuum with bits of bulkhead and a synwool bunk blanket tumbling alongside me. I was very upset that the blanket was flopping around, unmade, in space. I waited
to feel cold sear my bones, to feel the pain of explosive decompression, but I just kept tumbling.
“Jason?”
Howard peered into my face, his hand on my shoulder.
“It’s time, Jason.”
I sat up and rubbed my face.
“The Pseudocephalopod picket ships are close. They’re firing ranging rounds.”
“Conventional weapons?”
We had wondered whether the Slug ships would be armed with death rays or lightning bolts or just explosives and cannonballs.
Howard nodded while I strapped on armor. He was already armored up, helmet beneath one arm. In rust-red Eternads, Howard resembled an anorexic orangutan in glasses.
I, on the other hand, resembled a Roman gladiator, I thought.
Howard nodded at my question. “Most of their shots went wide a thousand miles. The Mercurys picked off the on-target rounds.”
By the time Howard and I arrived in the passage at the air lock to our V-Star, Brumby sat there cross-legged, rewinding det cord.
Mimi arrived last, not because she was putting on makeup or something but because the pilots bunked forward, in Space Force country. In her flight suit she seemed as soft as a child in pajamas, but as she walked closer her eyes were as old and as hard as diamond. She tugged on her helmet and dropped the orange visor over her face. “We good to go, General?”
I nodded.
She stepped past me toward the open air lock that led out to her ship, past the attention-stiffened Space Force rating tending the ’lock deck.
Ten minutes later the light above the air lock flashed green and a buzzer’s rasp made me jump. The Space Force man on the lock was the same redhead who had mothballed Excalibur when we had left her a few weeks before. He said, “Systems’ checks done, General. All aboard, sir.”
Weapons clattered against armor, Jeeb fluttered off my shoulder and assumed his programmed point position just ahead of me.
We stepped off, Jeeb’s six footpads clicking on the deck plates.
The ’lock tender snapped off a salute, fingertips just below the carrot-tone fuzz that showed beneath his cap. “Go get ’em, mudfeet!”
Jeeb twisted his head toward the ’lock tender and, as he scurried past the man, touched his right front forelimb to his forward antennae, returning the salute.
The red-haired ’lock tender leaned toward me as I drew even with him. “Sir, you’re just boarding in case, right? I heard this ship’s in reserve.”
I lied but he didn’t recognize it. “Yep.”
The ’lock tender furrowed his brow, then brightened. “Well, good hunting, sir!”
“We’ll see you soon.” I looked away. That was a lie that we both recognized.
I stepped across the hatch lip and it clanged, then hissed as the ’lock tender dogged the hatch behind us.
The V-Star’s cabin air carried the metallic tang of ozone to the back of my throat as we wormed around jury-rigged thruster piping and into the V-Star’s troop bay.
Modified for the V-Star’s deep-space-fighter role, the bay squeezed us even more than it had when it was configured for troop transport.
The canister packed with three tons of S-51 plastique was lashed to the bay’s left side.
Neoplast containers filled with Brumby’s fusing and detonators and Thermite were packed against the bay’s right wall.
The retracted, tubular docking bridge that Mimi would extend, to let us swarm aboard the Troll like weightless buccaneers, filled the bay’s front third. The docking bridge would poke out through the hull space where the other V-Star fighters sported missile racks.
I snorted to myself. One more reason Brace’s insistence on holding this V-Star close for fighter duty made no sense. With the missile rack removed, our ship was barely armed.
Our only armament was defensive. We carried a single Mercury system, its turret and operator blister swelling from the V-Star’s back amidships, like a tumor. The six-foot-diameter cylinder housing the Mercury system’s turret and ammunition pods, festooned with hydraulic hoses, grew through the troop bay’s center from deck to ceiling, like Jack’s beanstalk. It left room for two jump seats, one for Howard and one for Brumby. That meant my seat was in the Mercury system’s fighting chair. This was an accident of limited space, not a functional assignment, since computers aimed and fired Mercury unless something broke. But there was a fringe benefit. Even Mimi, in her cockpit, had only a virtual windscreen, images projected by optical sensors that were located on the V-Star’s nose, tail, and flanks. But the spherical gyroscope of the fighting chair’s cage rotated inside a four-inch-thick quartz dome, like the gun turret of an ancient propeller-driven bomber.
Brumby helped me strap in, then settled back in his seat facing me. “Better you than me, sir.”
“Huh?”
Brumby shook his head as he blinked. “To be looking out the window. Space scares me.”
“Then you should’ve joined the infantry, Brumby.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it and smiled. “Yes, sir.”
I hit the “elevate” button, hydraulics whined, and the fighting chair rose into the blister. We hung off of rotating Excalibur’s side belly-out, so centrifugal force still made “gravity” that weighted us toward our own deck plates. That meant that, above my head, Excalibur’s vastness curved away in all directions. A hundred yards to either side of me, fighter V-Stars floated at the ends of their docking booms. White missile racks, externally plumbed thruster packages, and Mercury turrets and blisters spoiled their once-sleek lines. A hundred yards ahead of me, Excalibur’s Mercury-turret array stretched across my vision like a dull pearl string. Beyond the array stretched space, black and even colder for the icy light-points of stars that punctuated it.
“Jason? Do you see ’em?” Mimi’s voice whispered inside my helmet.
“Huh?”
“Straight out across the nose, then left to eleven o’clock.”
Barely visible blue smudged space’s ebony. I blinked. “I thought I had good eyes, Mimi.”
“Punch up your targeting optics. You’ve got the same magnification available to you that I’ve got up here in the cockpit.”
A sea of never-before-seen buttons, displays, and control handles surrounded me. “I don’t want to touch the wrong thing.”
“You can’t. Unless I activate your controls. Spin the yellow handwheel beside your right index finger.”
I spun it and scarlet and green heads-up light reticles traced their way across the inside of the observation dome. At their center, a box labeled “MAG 1000” showed a sea of blue roaches crawling toward us. I blinked.
The Slug armada was closing fast. I had expected them spread out across space, dispersed for protection. Instead they flew a few ship-lengths apart, like a strategic bomber formation close-coupled so the guns of one ship could protect its flanking partners. Golden flashes winked from noses and tails, like aircraft navigation lights.
“Alpha Squadron cast off.” The voice was male and metallic. Mimi had left me patched into Excalibur’s Combat Net.
To my right and left, the V-Stars’ docking booms retracted, until the wedge-shaped fighters floated free, tethered to Excalibur only by umbilicals that undulated like silver snakes.
“Alpha One clear.”
The report echoed nine times more, then the metallic control voice replied, “You are clear to take the squadron out, Alpha Leader. Godspeed.”
The V-Stars formed up an echelon a mile from Excalibur, in a silent ballet marked by little thruster puffs visible at their noses and flanks.
They hung static for one indrawn breath, then a noiseless flash made me blink as their main engines lit. In the second it took my vision to clear, Alpha Squadron were specks, visible only as light pinpoints receding into blackness. I breathed, “Damn!”
Mimi chuckled. “Now you know why I fly these things, Jason.”
I spun the fighting chair so the magnified reticle rested on Alpha Squadron. Bravo’s ten ships
flanked Alpha to its left.
Beyond the little knot of V-Stars, and so much larger that they seemed of equal size despite their distance, rushed a Slug-fighter phalanx.
The arms at the Firewitches’ noses spread like jaws, then crimson flashes flared at their tips.
“Alpha, we have incoming to you.” The control voice elevated an octave.
“Roger. We got ’em. Alpha, on my command, break right. Break!”
The ten V-Stars dodged and a glittering swarm of Slug ammunition sped harmlessly past. Cake. Maybe this wasn’t going to be a turkey shoot for the Slugs after all.
All ten Bravos juked left past two Slug volleys.
The combined closing speed of the V-Stars and the Slug vanguard, even slowed down to a relative crawl, had to be ten thousand miles per hour.
I bumped up magnification as Alpha spread into attack formation. The Slugs had formed into a cone-shaped lead pack of Firewitches. The big Troll and more Firewitches followed behind, a protected cylinder of blue streaks, now close enough that they were visible even without magnification.
Our two V-Star formations were juking every second, now. Red flashed as the Firewitches shot volley after volley. Coupled with their steadily winking navigation lights, the scene sparked like a level-six holo-game tank. But this one had no reset button.
“I have target lock.” I recognized the voice. Alpha’s lead.
“Locked” was repeated nine more times, followed by “Fox One” as each V-Star fired the first of its missiles. Even magnified at max I could see only streaks of rocket-engine exhaust, not the actual missiles.
The V-Stars flashed through the Slug formation like gnats passing skyscrapers.
My mag screen blossomed with explosions, orange as our missiles struck Slug ships and—ominously—three as green as broccoli.
Alpha’s V-Stars bent around and headed back to strike the Slug formation from behind.
“How many we lose?”
“Where’s Taylor?”
“Christ.”
“There goes Bravo.”
“Bravo, adjust your aim points. You gotta hit the Firewitch dead-center between the gun arms. The flanks must be armored.”
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