Orphan's Destiny

by Robert Buettner

  We were about to worm belly-down through the Slug ship’s twisted passages. The cryptozoologists predicted Slug defenders would ooze from dark passage walls and ceilings, knowing what humans would do before we did it. I knew what we would do before I did it. I was the only human who had been in a Slug vessel and I didn’t want to go back. I forced myself to exhale and shut my eyes.

  A gloved hand fumbled against my shoulder. Howard flailed beside me. “Jason?”

  My eyes snapped open. “Relax, Howard. We’re good-to-go.” Commanders are paid to lie at times like these.

  “I know, Jason.”

  “Ten seconds, Jason,” Mimi’s voice cut in. Cocky and crisp, the way only a female pilot’s voice can be. I’d once asked a pilot like that to marry me.

  I shook my head and my helmet scraped against the quartz porthole. No time to grieve.

  The hatch grab-bar vibrated in my gloved hands as hydraulics stretched the bridge’s docking collar around the Troll’s skin.

  Thub!

  The collar flattened around the alien hull like putty, sculpting a tunnel between the vessels.

  My heart pounded out the seconds as Brumby manipulated the bridge’s robotic arms. They screeched forward down the tunnel, then stitched breaching charges against the Slug hull, a spider spinning Thermite webs.

  I breathed deep. Ozone-tinged air pricked my nostrils and I felt weight on my shoulders, even in zero Gee. History’s first clash between ships in space had just been lost by mankind. Was my destiny to survive this long, just to die in the belly of this alien beast?

  Brumby called, “Fire in the hole!”

  Spider arms jackknifed aside.

  Destiny. I had been the first human to board an alien vessel. I had been the first human to contact an alien. And the first human to kill one. I had delivered the first human child conceived and born beyond the Earth. I had commanded the Army that saved the human race. Those all seemed improbable destinies. As improbable as the reality that the next twelve hours would change not just the history of the human race, but the history of the universe.

  I squeezed my eyes shut but the breaching charge flashed sun-bright through my eyelids.

  Forty-One

  Jeeb flew first down the docking bridge and I floated right behind him, into the purple-lit dimness of the Slug ship. Their artificial gravity tugged me to the deck plates. How the Slugs did that, I didn’t know.

  There was a lot I didn’t know. In front of my left eye, Jeeb’s sensors whirled data readouts across the Battlefield Awareness Monocle display. Interior temperature, sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Barometric pressure equivalent to an Earth altitude of fifteen thousand feet above sea level. Atmospheric oxygen fifteen percent, three-fourths of Earth normal, but livable. No atmospheric toxins. So far, Howard’s predictions were right. If we could secure this ship, or at least this tiny part of it, we could live and breathe here long enough to save the world. I shut down my oxygen generator.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Howard and Brumby swam down the boarding bridge into the Troll, through the enormous yellow donut of the bridge’s seal plug, that would inflate and keep vacuum away from us as soon as they got the Bomb past the Plug. The Bomb, leashed behind Howard and Brumby like a chariot behind two-legged ponies, drifted across the threshold from the bridge into the Troll, then thumped onto its wheels as it took on weight. Brumby and Howard twisted around, pulled the synlon ropes that bound them to the Bomb hand over hand, and drew our precious cargo toward us.

  Mimi, at the V-Star’s controls, spoke in my earpiece. “Disconnecting the docking collar and standing off, Jason.”

  We had agreed she would stand off because we might need to exit the Troll by another avenue. If so, probably because a thousand Slugs were chasing us. Quick pickup by Mimi could save our hides.

  I turned, watched as the bridge tube’s snout retracted, and held my breath. If the Plug failed to swell and cork the hull breach, explosive decompression would spit us all out into space. The Plug held.

  If Howard’s timetable was right, we had three minutes to seal off enough bottlenecks to buy Brumby time to figure out how to blow up the power plant, but still leave us a way to return to Mimi and escape. If Howard’s mapping was right we had entered at a main passage that spiraled up near the outer hull at this point. We would hustle the Bomb along it, deep into the Troll power plant’s gut. So far, so good.

  Brumby, looking past me into the Troll, spoke in my ear on Whispercom. “Which way do we go, sir?”

  I spun around. Howard’s mock-up said we should see a single passage. Now, in the real world, ahead of us stretched two branching passages. Crap.

  Either one would require us to crawl.

  That wasn’t the real problem.

  Brumby said, “Sir, the Bomb won’t fit down either of those passages.”

  He was right. Slug passages varied in diameter, but neither of these came close to being wide or tall enough to swallow the Bomb.

  Crap.

  “Howard, we’re supposed to be in a big passage.”

  “I know. I’m thinking.”

  “Can we just blow it here?”

  Brumby answered, “We need to confine the explosion, sir. Detonating the Bomb here, just under the Troll’s skin, wouldn’t do much damage.”

  Except to us three.

  I sent Jeeb winging ahead down the left passage.

  He got twenty twisting yards down the passage before the first Slugs hit us.

  Slug passageways are twisting cylinders, like purple-lit sewers. The doorways that lead off the passageways aren’t doorways. They’re four-inch-wide slots. Fine if you’re a boneless cousin to an octopus that can squeeze itself as flat as a bad omelette, useless to humans.

  For those reasons, the slots make fine ambush points.

  At first, the Slugs just poked their odd, curved guns out of the slots and fired wildly at us.

  A round grazed my helmet. Slug mag-rail rifles hurl big, powerful bullets. My head rang and I would have sore neck muscles from having my head snapped around, but I had gotten lucky.

  We pulled back to our entry point.

  Rounds began whizzing past us from the right passageway. They flashed by or pinballed off the passage walls, peeling off wall plates that crashed to the deck. Slugs had always been lousy shots. Theoretically, the red Eternad armor coating made us look like ghosts to an infrared-sighted observer.

  We flattened ourselves on the deck and returned fire. Three M-20s spit a combined twenty-four hundred rounds per minute. Each round blossomed into ninety as flechettes spread. Tracers among the flechette rounds sparked red in the purple light as they vanished into darkness. On full auto, the three of us created a Fourth of July finale.

  My rifle bucked against my armor’s shoulder cap for less time than it took to breathe before I had to change magazines. I rolled on my belly, one hand snatching a magazine heavy with brass from an ammo pouch on my belt while my other hand flung out the featherweight empty. It was awkward enough with five fingers, two fingers on my one glove just flopped around, empty.

  We faced a hundred thousand Slugs. More, if Howard’s opposing forces estimate was as wrong as his estimate that we should be in a bigger passage. We had no idea whether our return fire was killing Slugs.

  I Whispercommed, probably so loud Howard and Brumby heard my voice right through their helmets without the radio. The Slugs might not be able to see us. But so far we had certainly not seen them. “Switch to semi-auto. At least until they show themselves.”

  Since we couldn’t see them, our rifles went silent.

  My heart pounded in my ears.

  Cordite smoke fogged my vision.

  The fog swirled.

  The swirls resolved into solid objects.

  Black, armored shapes slid through the gloom toward us.

  Boom-boom-boom!

  I shuddered at the memory. Slug warriors on the attack beat their weapons against their armor, in unison, the sound still came to me in nightmares.r />
  Brumby whispered, “Hello again, you little bastards.” He squeezed off a round and a black ghost reared back, then dropped to the passage floor.

  In the instant it took for Brumby’s rifle to chamber his next round, the first Slug wave hurtled out of the dimness.

  Man-sized, armored except for the green-skinned head-end patch through which they saw infrared light, they snaked toward us like gleaming, black bananas. Each warrior carried a curved mag-rail rifle, its barrel sword-edged. They filled the passage wall to wall and floor to ceiling.

  Full auto worked fine.

  It was over in thirty-three seconds.

  I know that because it takes me eleven seconds to change M-20 magazines and three lay on the deck plates in front of me when we stopped firing.

  The leading edge of the first wave lay twenty feet in front of us, Slug slime oozing from armor through flechette-torn pinpricks. The warrior carcasses stacked one upon another to the ceiling plates like flour sacks in a warehouse.

  Howard breathed over the Whispercom. “Holy moly!”

  Brumby said, “Fuck!”

  I gathered up my empty magazines for reloading, from habit.

  Alongside the Bomb sat Brumby’s containers, no wider than an armored soldier’s shoulders. If we didn’t just want to sit here taking target practice on Slug warriors, we could haul Brumby’s containers with us, even if we couldn’t haul the Bomb.

  I turned to Howard. “You said you were thinking. Why’s your map wrong?”

  “We don’t understand how the Pseudocephalopod propels its ships. We may be nowhere near the power plant, after all. It was just a hunch.”

  I slapped my forehead. Well, my armored glove slapped my armored helmet. My palm never got within four inches of my eyebrows. “We bet the future of the human race on a hunch?”

  “The future of the human race was only worth a two-dollar ticket, Jason.” He paused. “I was counting on you to improvise. That’s what you do best.”

  I shook my head and muttered while I accessed Jeeb.

  Howard pounded a wall, and another plate loosened by Slug fire gonged the deck. “This stuff won’t stretch. We can’t move the Bomb intact. We’ll have to dismantle the canister.”

  Brumby shook his head. “Major, that’s three tons of S-51, at Earth-normal. Still a ton in here. We can roll that canister but we’re all already toting a couple hundred pounds of gear at Earth-normal.”

  Jeeb hovered two hundred yards up the tunnel that headed away from the axis of assault of the Slug mob we had slaughtered. In my BAM, I saw what he saw. The passage was blissfully Slug-free. It ended at a sealed Slug hatch, big and different from anything I had seen in my prior travels through a Slug vessel. Was it the kind of hatch an alien, green hive intellect would choose to seal off an engine room? Maybe Howard wasn’t as wrong as we thought.

  Howard whispered, “Uh oh.” He pointed at the dead-Slug pile.

  It bulged toward us. Something strong enough to budge a couple hundred Slug carcasses, maybe a couple hundred more live Slug reinforcements, was pushing through to introduce itself to us.

  I stared at the Bomb, our ball-and-chain. We had no time to break it down into totable packages.

  A dead Slug got shoved out of the jam, bounced over the other bodies, and rolled to our feet. The rest of the pile bulged forward.

  I pointed at Brumby’s explosives containers. “Grab those. Head down the other corridor.”

  Howard stared at the Bomb. “What about that? How are we gonna blow up a mountain with no Bomb?”

  Another Slug rolled off the moving pile. I hefted a container. “We’ll improvise. Move your ass, Howard.”

  Howard and I had made a hundred yards, panting and cursing the containers we carried, when I realized Brumby wasn’t with us.

  His voice seeped back over the Whispercom. “Sir, I’m sealing off the branch passages with Megatex as we go. The little fuckers slime through those slot doorways a couple at a time. But if we deny ’em the wide passages they can’t come at us hard enough to overrun us.”

  Megatex was the duct tape of contemporary plastique. A sausage roll of explosives that Brumby could play like a Stradivarius. “Okay. But keep close to us.”

  Whump!

  As if to punctuate our conversation, a muffled but unmistakable Megatex detonation shook the passage. I smiled. Between Megatex and Brumby, nothing was sliming through that passage for a while.

  We dropped every Slug that dared to wiggle a green pseudopod out of a door slot. But there always seemed to be more.

  Howard lurched along just behind me as we ran. “Fifty yards to go, Howard.”

  I picked up the pace. Two Slugs popped out of door slots to my front. Before they could aim their rail rifles, I snapped off two shots. The beauty of a flechette round is that aiming becomes a luxury.

  Slugs are basically animate fluid sacks. A solid hit pops them like water balloons. I rounded the bend where those two lay and slipped on spilled mucus. One foot went from under me, I crashed down on one armored knee and gagged. Slug guts stink like rotted mushrooms.

  Ahead, the passage branched, again. It wasn’t supposed to, again. But this one was big.

  Panting through my mouth in the thin air, I Whispercommed Brumby. “Left at the next fork. Stay close.”

  I kept moving, Howard in tow.

  Behind me, firing erupted and echoed up the passage. Rail rifles whine when they fire, like angry wasps. Brumby’s answering fire rattled. Full auto. That meant lots of bad guys.

  Brumby panted, too. “Sir, fifty of ’em just poured out from that big passage before I could seal it.”

  I looked down the tunnel ahead, toward our goal. Beside me, Howard wheezed, his eyes alight with urgency. Seconds ticked away.

  “Close up when you can, Brumby.” I stood and ran like hell to catch up with Jeeb.

  I won the sprint to the closed hatch. Jeeb clung shoulder-high to the passage’s curved wall, his hide chameleoned purple, so he was invisible if you didn’t know where to look. Homeothermic circuits matched Jeeb’s temperature to his surroundings, so he was as invisible to the Slugs’ infrared vision as he was to human vision. His probes were plastered against the door, reading conditions on its other side.

  “Demolition forward,” I said.

  Nothing.

  “Brumby? I need you here now!”

  A Megatex whump shook the floor again.

  Thirty seconds later, Brumby brushed past me, panting, his rucksack missing. He already had Megatex breaching-charge plastiques out of his minipack when he came alongside me. He took one breath, hands on hips, while his eyes flicked around, studying the door frame.

  My BAM lit with data from Jeeb. The space on the other side of the hatch was vast. What could be vaster than a starship’s engine room? Jackpot!

  Brumby jumped back from the door and brandished his trigger transmitter. The charges he had placed were generous, as big as bread loaves. I nodded. We didn’t have time to try again if he skimped on explosives. He shouted, “Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!”

  Howard and I turned away from the door and crouched.

  “Fire in the hole!” On the third warning, Brumby pressed the trigger, even as he ran back down the passage.

  Forty-Two

  Howard and i knelt closest to the door, so the explosion flattened us. Air whooshed across us as pressure equalized between the passage and the chamber beyond.

  Before the explosion’s echoes died, I heard rail rifles zing and felt rounds whiz above my back like swarming wasps.

  Brumby’s answering fire chattered back.

  Pinned down, I twisted my head. Howard lay beside me, eyes closed. Cracks spiderwebbed his face shield and, as I watched, blood trickled from one nostril across his cheek like a tear.

  Firing stopped as I switched my BAM display to check his vitals. A green circle indicated healthy, a green blinker meant wounded. Howard’s blinker turned solid green.

  I touched his shoulder. “Howard
?” No answer.

  I Whispercommed. “Brumby?” No answer. I switched nets, for the hell of it. “Mimi?” No answer. We had expected hull interference.

  My ears rang like firebells. Howard, Brumby, and Mimi could be talking but I might not be hearing.

  Beyond the open hatch, through drifting explosion smoke, I saw vast darkness.

  I stood and realized I’d sprained a knee. Limping back down the passage, I found Brumby tearing at debris, flinging Slug bodies and twisted metal aside.

  It hadn’t been fifty Slugs that jumped him, more like one hundred, by my casual body count. Warriors, in that black armor of theirs, and naked ones as well. One of their kamikaze charges, more extreme even than the first one that had hit us. That made me think that whatever was beyond the hatch we’d blown was something they didn’t want us to control.

  I stood in that passage a long time listening to Slug vital fluids drip. The smell of gunsmoke mingled in my nostrils with the stink of spilled Slug.

  Brumby stood and swore.

  “What, Brumby?”

  “The container I was carrying. I had to drop it to get forward when you called. Then the charges I set blew.” He thrust his hands at the mess that plugged the passage, floor to rounded ceiling. “The Megatex. The Microdets. All our best stuff was in there.” He shook his head. “It’s gone.”

  We trotted back to the blown door. Howard stood there, peering forward, bent at the waist.

  Jeeb stood alongside him, legs extended, tiptoe style, so his sensors could look ahead, too.

  Behind us, Brumby had sealed the side passages with explosives, but the way back to the breach where Mimi would pick us up remained open. Theoretically. The Slugs seemed to have abandoned coming at us one by one through their door slots. Slugs were content to sacrifice their buddies, but they knew when to quit a useless tactic.

  How long our little armistice would hold I didn’t know, but for the moment we could explore the chamber we had breached, unmolested by Slugs.