Orphan's Destiny

by Robert Buettner

  The trailing squadron shot through the Slug formation with, it looked like, the same result.

  Then one Firewitch seemed to boil orange.

  I held my breath.

  The Firewitch exploded so violently I swore I could hear it across vacuum.

  “Yee-hah!” A fighter-jock chorus sang across the combat net.

  Brumby tugged my leg. “Sir? What happened?”

  I didn’t realize I had yelled as loud as the fighter pilots. I glanced down into the bay. “We got a Firewitch.”

  Brumby pumped his fist and shouted.

  I didn’t tell him that if I read the green explosions right, we had lost a quarter of our guys on the first pass.

  “Jason?” It was Mimi. “Tell ’em to strap in back there. We’re losing too many V-Stars too fast. We need to go now.”

  Ahead of us, Alpha’s seven remaining ships made their second run through the Slugs. This time, the Troll was in their sights.

  “Jesus! It’s like a city!”

  “On your left! On your—”

  A green explosion flared, then died.

  Orange flashes, as our missiles exploded against the Troll’s hide, looked like no more than sparks.

  “We’re not gonna dent the big one, guys.”

  “We need nukes.”

  “Get me a count.”

  “I make us five, skipper.”

  I glanced at my ’puter. Alpha had taken fifty percent casualties in two combat minutes.

  Our V-Star jerked and I bumped my helmet against the fighting chair’s frame.

  Mimi had shed the docking boom, in violation of Brace’s orders. But not in violation of our mission.

  She rolled our ship, so the view over my head changed from Excalibur’s skin, curving away to its own planetlike horizon, to space’s inky darkness.

  Ahead of us, the Slug fleet stretched all across my vision field, a sea of winking, iridescent blue. The Firewitches’ red flashes now were incoming at Excalibur.

  “I have targets.”

  “Are the Mercurys operating?”

  No turret in the line that stitched across Excalibur’s hull even twitched.

  “Something’s fucked! Switch ’em to manual!”

  “Steady.”

  “But—”

  As one, the turret line swiveled. The six-gun rotating barrels elevated, tracked, then spit solid wands of fire. Thousands of thirty-seven-millimeter cannon rounds ripped through space, their outgoing kinetic energy colliding, as they struck incoming Slug rounds, at a combined speed near twenty thousand miles per hour. It almost didn’t matter that our rounds were high-explosive. They hit a Slug incoming round like a penny dropped off the Washington Monument into a cheesecake. The collisions made harmless purple explosions, each volley of Slug rounds painting the sky like a Fourth of July finale as the Mercurys threw up a solid steel wall miles away from us.

  I chortled into our intercom as Mimi tiptoed us a mile away from Excalibur. “Hooyah, Mimi! At least we don’t have to worry about getting shot down.”

  Mimi didn’t answer.

  “Venture Star One One Bravo, state your situation.” We named this ship for the lowest of the low, an infantry private, Military Operational Specialty 11B.

  Our little joke had annoyed Brace no end. I could hear the edge in his voice as he said it, even now.

  Mimi answered Brace. “At, we had a short in our docking boom. We had to disconnect or risk being trapped.”

  Brace’s voice was ice. “Ship’s readouts don’t show any electrical fault. Bring your ship back in.”

  “At, the squadrons—”

  There were no squadrons. There were a handful of V-Stars still flying.

  Mimi continued, “—are depleted. Every second counts. We’re your reserve. It’s time to release your reserve.”

  “I said, bring your ship back in.”

  “I’ve got a stuck thruster. Too hazardous to return. I could damage both ships.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Ahead of us, yellow flame lances crisscrossed the sky as Mercury’s cannons swatted away swarms of Slug shots. Two huge orange explosions boiled, along with two bright green flashes. The Slugs were paying a steep price, but we would go bankrupt before they did.

  Mimi said, “At, drop the rule book! This ship doesn’t even carry missiles! We’re useless to you.”

  “We’ll refit.”

  “You don’t have time.”

  Pause.

  “Hibble and the others are on board with you. The crew saw them. You’re pulling something.”

  Pause.

  “If I don’t see your nose come ’round in ten seconds, I’ll have you shot down.”

  I smiled. Ludicrous though Brace’s threat was, it wasn’t even credible. The Mercurys on auto couldn’t fire on a transponder-equipped vessel like us, any more than a vampire could charge at a cross.

  All around us, now, V-Stars swooped and explosions flared. The lead Slug ships drew so close I could see their red-flashing gun arms with my naked eyes.

  Inside my helmet, Brace counted. “Six. Five. Four.” Brace actually sounded like he would shoot down one of his own ships over some pissant turf battle.

  “Fire Control, this is Admiral Brace. On my command, switch to manual and engage Venture Star One One Bravo.”

  Manual? I shouted into my mike. “No!”

  “Zero, fire!” said Brace.

  Excalibur’s Mercury turrets rotated toward us. Black Gatling-gun barrels elevated and zeroed in. Tones, one after another, whined in my headset as Mercury fire-control radars locked on us.

  The explosion’s flash blinded me.

  Thirty-Eight

  I held my breath and waited to relive my nightmare, tumbling through frozen vacuum, the debris of my exploded spaceship all around me. My heart pounded. I flexed my fingers and felt the stanchion I had been gripping. I opened my eyes, blinked.

  Around me arched the Mercury blister’s quartz dome. V-Star One One Bravo hovered intact in space.

  I focused ahead of me, on Excalibur.

  Excalibur was gone. A Niagara of exploded debris tumbled toward me. The forward thrusters puffed as Mimi juked us to dodge Excalibur’s remains. Pilot that she was, she had reacted even before I knew what had happened.

  A rectangle like a taupe-paper funeral announcement tumbled at me. It gonged the blister’s quartz dome as I ducked reflexively. The twenty-gauge Plasteel panel floated away. It bore black stenciling “BULKHEAD 104. WATCH YOUR STEP.”

  Behind the bulkhead flew more debris, flailing. The redheaded ’lock tender who had saluted Jeeb somersaulted slowly as he passed us, his starched coveralls powder-blue in the starlight. His eyes were wide, his mouth open, screaming with no sound. Our eyes met for a breath, then he was gone from sight. And dead a ’puter-tick later.

  There in the turret, as debris hurtled away into nothing, I didn’t move. My mouth hung open.

  The enormity.

  When Brace switched Mercury’s guns to manual, so he could train them on us, unimpeded Slug barrages tore into Excalibur within seconds. Brace, who so prided himself on operating by the book, on caution and precision, had stumbled just for one instant. He had died for his error.

  No, it hadn’t been just Brace’s folly. I had goaded him when I could have helped him. Resisted when I could have cooperated. Our petty clash of wills had snuffed humanity’s faint, remaining hope.

  The mightiest construct in the millennial history of human ingenuity was now jumbled detritus, destined to float through space until the sun burned out.

  The twenty-six human lives Excalibur nurtured in her mile-long shell were gone, too, frozen meat adrift upon the cosmos. Because I was a smart-ass. For this destiny, other men and women had died and I had lived.

  “Jason?” Something tugged my boot. I looked down and saw Howard peering up into the blister.

  “Huh?” Howard’s voice seemed like he spoke through a blanket.

  “Excalibur’s gone,” I said.
<
br />   Howard paused, then said, “We can still follow the plan.”

  Ahead of us, a few V-Stars jinked and dodged. Firewitches swarmed around them. For the Slugs, all that remained was a lazy mop-up. Beyond them loomed the Troll.

  Mimi’s voice twanged in my headset. “Jason? There’s not enough distraction. You ready to shoot our way in?”

  “That’s not part of the plan.” Sticking to the plan had just killed Brace. “But what do you need?”

  Thirty-Nine

  Ten minutes later, Mimi twisted and rolled our V-Star among maneuvering Firewitches and V-Stars.

  Then, when I looked around, I saw only Firewitches.

  So puny were we that the mountainous Firewitches above, below, in front of, and behind us seemed to ignore us. Their navigation lights blinked serenely like fireflies in an ebony meadow. So huge were the Slug vessels that wreckage and interplanetary flotsam gravitated to them and loosely orbited them.

  The main engine’s vibration stopped. Mimi said, “We might make it by playing dead.” A bow thruster puffed and we began a lazy yaw, drifting toward the Troll’s mass. We were the last, unnoticed survivors of the resistance that the Pseudocephalopod Empire had swatted like a gnat. But Mimi was making us tumble like we were disabled space junk being pulled in toward the Troll.

  Perhaps we weren’t the last. Still strapped-in to the fighting chair, I spoke into my helmet mike. “Mimi? Any Maydays on the net? Any chatter?”

  She sighed. “There’s nobody else, Jason. The rest of the Firewitches are returning and mooring to the Troll.”

  Our ship rotated so that behind us I saw blue Earth and beyond it the moon, distant, serene, and, now, defenseless. A shadow crossed them. “Mimi, there’s one Firewitch that looks interested in us.”

  The Slug fighter approached us in no apparent hurry. It might be unsure whether we were undamaged, worth expending ammunition on. In minutes, it would be so close that it would know. “Mimi, they’re nosy.”

  “I see. They had a couple pickets out before. That’s probably all this is. Just another picket. Wait ’til they’re close, then give ’em the gun. Just set it on auto and Mercury will do the rest. I can get us to the Troll if you just disable that one.”

  Cake. All I had to do was disable a battleship bigger than Fenway Park using a weapon I touched for the first time twenty minutes ago.

  Firewitches were vulnerable. We had seen that. The Mercury system I was sitting in could inflict disabling damage. But from the point-blank range we would be at when our V-Star again tumbled into firing position, the Firewitch would present so enormous a target that it would confuse a Mercury on automatic.

  “Mimi, how sensitive is the Mercury system?”

  “You’re right. You’ll have to trigger it manually.”

  Before I could call down to Brumby, I heard him in the troop bay below me, reading aloud from an instruction chip that had been stored in a plastic pocket attached to our Mercury system turret innards. “In most combat situations, automatic mode, or manual mode employing fire-control radar or other ranging device, is preferable.”

  Below me, Brumby twitched as he read.

  “However, in extreme cases the system may be operated in full manual mode.”

  Howard poked his head under the blister lip. “Jason, you’ve got three minutes.” The edge on his voice cut the cabin air. Howard knew this really was our only chance. The last thing anyone needed to hear from the general in charge was doubt.

  “Don’t worry, Howard. I can fight this system. It’s like Playstation Forty.” I ignored the winking control array around me and the fact that Mercury operator school ran eight weeks.

  “—is traversed left or right by application of pressure to the respective foot treadle.”

  I put my right foot down, like a traffic light had turned green. The turret whined, spun right, and the framework nearly decapitated Howard. “Oops! Better stand clear, Howard.”

  He muttered something.

  The Mercury cannon turret now had rotated and sat at an angle on the V-Star’s back, like a baseball cap worn sideways for wardrobe effect.

  Brumby read ahead. “To elevate the guns, draw back gently on the right-hand pistol grip.”

  I grabbed the pistol grip, which stuck up above the fighting chair’s right armrest, and yanked.

  The cannon fired. The V-Star’s air frame shook. Hundreds of rounds exploded out of the gun’s multiple muzzles. Its barrel assembly spun as fast as a giant dentist’s drill. Feed belts clanked as new cannon rounds slammed into the gun’s multiple breeches. Hydraulics screamed. Howard yelped.

  Brumby read on. “Taking care not to depress the firing trigger. The firing trigger is the red button at the pistol grip’s upper right.”

  Crap. According to the system readout array in front of me, 612 rounds of Samuel Colt’s finest thirty-seven-millimeter high-explosive/armor-piercing mixed ammunition were now hurtling through space in the general direction of Pluto.

  “Sir, are you sure you know how to work this thing?”

  My chest swelled beneath my armor. If there was one thing the Army had taught me, it was how to fire a machine gun. This was just a big machine gun. With a couple of hundred more controls than I was used to. I made a horizontal smoothing motion with the same hand that had just blundered onto the trigger. “Grease, Brumby. Pure grease.”

  He frowned. “Sure, sir.”

  Two minutes’ practice later, I was pretty sure I could aim and fire the Mercury well enough to hit a target as big as a Firewitch control room. Which was optimistic since no human being had any idea where a Firewitch had its control room, much less how big it was.

  Howard craned his neck to look up at me. “The control ganglion has to be in the front, where the six firing arms intersect.”

  Mimi whispered to me, “With the firing arms spread, the front end of that thing is like a basket the size of Madison Square Garden. If the control ganglion’s where Howard says it is, it will be right where center ice would be for a Rangers game. That’s where you shoot. Okay?”

  I nodded, invisibly to her. “Okay.”

  “It’s your destiny, Jason.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know. Like Jason the Argonaut. You poke out the cyclops’s eye.”

  I smiled. “Is that Texan mythology? Odysseus blinded the cyclops, not Jason.”

  “If you get this right, five thousand years from now maybe everybody will remember it was Jason.”

  Drifting between the Firewitch’s firing arms I felt more like Jonah than Jason, like being swallowed by a whale. Curved and iridescent blue, the arms were as large as high-rise apartment towers, alight with window-style openings. I fancied I saw Slugs peering out at us. Unlikely since they didn’t have eyes.

  At the confluence where the arms intersected rose a dome, smooth and glowing purple. Not so unlike an eye. Mimi didn’t dare maneuver our ship obviously, so I rotated the turret and laid the gun on target. I pressed the foot treadle like there was a raw egg between it and my boot sole and I didn’t want to break the shell. The apex of the purple dome rose in my sights.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw a light wink. The IR sensor on the upper right of my display had flashed. Our V-Star was being painted by active infrared. Slugs saw in the infrared spectrum. They were shining searchlights on us. We were busted.

  “Mimi, I have to take the shot.”

  The Firewitch’s arms began to close around us. It might be too close to shoot us, but It could crush us.

  The time was now or never. I thumbed the trigger. The fuselage shook and the gun thundered. A stream of yellow tracer stabbed at the dome, dead-center. It exploded. From stem to stern, the Firewitch’s lights went out. The outrush of atmosphere from the Firewitch’s breached hull blasted past us and buffeted the V-Star like a leaf in a gale.

  Mimi muttered in my ear. “Damn, you’re good!”

  I was. Monsters blinded while-u-wait.

  Tugging to unfasten the straps that held me i
n the fighting chair, I sprained a thumb.

  I got the straps loose and swung down into the troop bay like a gymnast dismounting the high bar.

  Howard and Brumby, helmeted and armored, jaws tight, turned and stared at me.

  I strapped on my rucksack, cross-slung my machine gun over my back, and winked at them. “Now comes the fun part, guys!”

  I’d never told a bigger lie.

  Forty

  Two minutes later, I floated in the docking bridge that Howard’s Spooks had designed and that Mimi had deployed from the V-Star’s back. I pressed my helmet faceplate against the bridge hatch’s six-inch-thick quartz porthole. Ahead there was nothing but the Troll’s blue vastness.

  Mimi slid the V-Star alongside the Troll’s skin. Close up, it was seamed and pebbled. Inside the monster’s hide beat a heart. The propulsion system. Whatever power could carry an object this big between the stars could surely blow the Troll into rutabagas, and all its Firewitch friends with it.

  We faced the minor obstacle that one hundred thousand Slugs inside that skin would be armed, disciplined, and not keen to assist with our plan.

  Mimi’s voice rang in my earpiece. “Boarding Party, prepare for assault.”

  My finger trembled, testing my M-20’s safety for the hundredth time. We expected close-quarters battle and I had loaded flechette, effectively converting an assault rifle into a shotgun that fired eight hundred shells per minute. Over my breastplate I wore Ord’s shoulder holster and .45. It was loaded with Ord’s homemade flechette specials. But I felt naked without my M-60, which was strung across my back. Among us we carried all the gear Howard’s Spooks could imagine, since we had little idea what we might need.

  I huffed inside my helmet. The paradox of infantry was that at the moment of assault, when a soldier most needed to be quick and nimble, he was loaded like a rented yak.

  The V-Star’s thrusters rattled my teeth as Mimi eased us against the Troll.

  I turned my head and looked back at Howard and Brumby. Behind them in zero Gee floated the Bomb, a tube long enough and wide enough to garage a family sedan. Once we wrestled the bomb aboard the Troll, in that inexplicable Slug gravity, it would become a one-ton handful that we would have to roll through the twisting passageways to wherever Howard and Brumby decided was pay dirt.