Orphan's Destiny

by Robert Buettner

  I Whispercommed Brumby. “Go on back there and see whether you can find the demo pack. Stay ten minutes to see whether that block’s gonna hold.”

  I stepped forward to see what Howard and Jeeb were looking at.

  The first thing I noticed wasn’t anything to look at. A stench so strong it seemed to knock me back physically rolled out of the chamber.

  I said to Howard, breathing through my mouth, “What the hell is that?”

  Howard gasped, his palm futilely covering his faceplate. “I’ve spent time in better outhouses.”

  I dialed up my oxygen generator and manufactured air replaced the stink. The blackness remained impenetrable. Distant howling echoed from the opening.

  I shuddered.

  I turned to Jeeb, who stood in explosion debris puddled an inch deep around his six ankles. Nodding at the darkness, I said, “All yours, bud.”

  He crept through the opening, spread his wings, and flew slowly into the dark. Jeeb’s infrared showed a single interior chamber, so vast that neither his visible nor infrared searchlights reached the ceiling or opposite wall. A catwalk or balcony swelled out of the wall fifty feet below our present level. I rigged climbing ropes, rappelled down, then belayed Howard. He twisted, gasped, and swung like a pendulum but I finally got him alongside me.

  He turned to the interior wall and his light reflected off it, iridescent Slug blue.

  I blinked as he shone his light on me.

  Far below us, the howling grew.

  Forty-Three

  The slug catwalk curved along the chamber’s wall and descended. With our headlights and Jeeb showing the way, we followed the catwalk down for twenty minutes, our breath echoing in air that carried the dank feel of something dead.

  “Howard, this doesn’t seem like an engine room.” The Slug walkway—slinkway?—was two feet wide and had no handrail.

  We had descended two hundred vertical feet by Jeeb’s altimeter when the howling rose to painful levels and I cranked down my helmet-audio amp’s gain. We played our lights on the noise and the beams flickered on hundred-foot-diameter drums, rotating in place like gargantuan steamrollers, eternally recycling. Gray glop poured off the rollers and cascaded down into darkness.

  Howard, following me down the catwalk, shouted over the din, “It’s peculiar. Not the sophisticated drive machinery I expected.”

  Once the walkway descended below the rollers, it branched and spread out into multiple paths that bridged the interior’s open expanse. We descended another hundred feet until, according to Jeeb’s sonar, we were one hundred feet above the chamber’s floor. I leaned over as far as I dared and shone my light down. Most Slug construction was sleek, but the floor down there was gray, bumpy, and as uneven as cobblestone pavement. And it seemed to ripple like a wind-agitated lake.

  When I swung my light back up through the blackness that surrounded us, it flashed over a lump on the walkway fifty feet ahead. When I swung back, it seemed to be one of the floor cobbles.

  “Hey, Howard!” I pointed and walked toward it, then readjusted the weight of the M-60 cross-slung on my back before I knelt to examine the object. My pack weighed like bricks so I welcomed taking a knee. I breathed rapidly, and as the air had chilled with depth, my exhalations curled out through my helmet’s exhaust valve, so intermittent fogs drifted across my headlight beam.

  The cobble was oval and dirty white, like an unbaked bread loaf.

  I reached for it. “Howard, this looks like—”

  The cobble leapt at me.

  I sucked in my breath so hard that the gasp echoed in the chamber’s vastness.

  It was a miniature Slug. When I recoiled, it flew past me, bounced on the walkway, and tumbled into thin air.

  Overbalanced by my gun and pack, I staggered backward and fell over the walkway’s edge. I followed the embryonic monster, as it dropped into blackness, and screamed.

  Forty-Four

  The chamber floor rushed up at me as I fell head first the one hundred feet toward it. In my headlamp’s beam shone writhing, mounded naked Slugs beyond counting or imagination. I twisted in midair and struck them shoulder first. They exploded like stomped tomatoes as they broke my fall. I came to rest ten feet deep in a squirming sea.

  Eternad armor is more renowned for perforation resistance than shock absorption, but except for the fire in a banged-up shoulder, I had survived my fall. That was more than I could say for the Slug that writhed and died two inches beyond my helmet visor. Ooze leaked into my mouth under my visor, with the taste of bitter rot and, I imagined, putrid flesh. I gagged.

  I thrashed and clawed upward, against the grisly maggots that buried me, until I burst again into open darkness.

  One hundred feet above me a headlamp beam hacked back and forth across the dark. “Jason? Are you alright?”

  I scrabbled amid the Slugs like a man overboard treading water, then shouted back, “Yeah. Jesus! Howard, it’s a nursery!”

  “Are they mature? Is there evidence of independent action?”

  “Howard! Get me out of here!”

  “Well, it’s just so fascinating . . .”

  “Lower your climbing rope. It’s coiled in the long pocket on the left side of your pack.”

  The scrabbling of gloves against Polyvis echoed above me.

  “I dunno, Jason. I’m not sure I can rappel down. This rope is—”

  I rolled my eyes. “Not for you to come down! For me to climb up! Belay the rope up there, then lower it.”

  “Oh.”

  Ten minutes later the purple-braided end of Howard’s rope slid down from darkness and wagged above my head. The delay gave me time to imagine that these writhing, mewling monsters were carnivorous. Every time I shifted my weight and something poked me, I figured some slinking Slug had wormed through an armor chink and was chewing my flesh. The truth was that the experience was as pleasant and harmless as doing the backstroke through a stinking pool of maggots.

  I caught the rope on the second try, attached a come-along, and began inch-worming back up toward the catwalk. I nearly fell back when I felt something clinging to my boot, shrieked, and my kicking set me swinging like Tarzan. The Slug fell away and I resumed climbing.

  An hour after my fall, Howard grasped my pack straps and heaved me the last feet back onto the walkway. I lay there gasping for ten minutes, until I could speak. My forearm muscles quivered, spent, beneath my Eternads. “What the hell is this place, Howard? What does it mean?”

  “Well, it’s unfortunate.” Howard rewound his rope, using one hand to loop it around his elbow and through the crook of his palm, just like a real soldier. “What I’m going to tell you is disappointing, Jason.”

  I hissed out a breath. “Howard, giant snails flying through space just bombed the Earth. Three weeks ago I amputated two of my own fingers. I just climbed out of a wriggling monster pit as big as Lake Erie. How much more disappointing can it be?”

  He sighed. “While you were climbing, I had Jeeb examine this chamber and the balance of the ship, to the extent he could travel and also by plugging into the Troll’s own diagnostics. This chamber is the main tissue incubation center. You were right.”

  The Spooks figured the Slugs cloned themselves. But I always figured the Slug hatchery would be some giant hospital with rows and rows of zoomy-looking beds hooked up to life-support hoses, or something. “Slugs just grow in a giant fertilizer tub?”

  “Simply put, yes.”

  “If this isn’t the power plant, where do we go to blow up the ship?”

  Howard punched up Jeeb’s holotank and his miniature, diagrammatic Troll floated in front of us again. Howard pointed. “Based on Jeeb’s explorations, I’ve revised this.” Howard cleared his professorial throat.

  I raised my palm. “Does this story end with useful information?”

  He nodded. “Both long-term and for our immediate predicament.”

  “If we don’t solve our immediate predicament, there is no long-term.”

&nbs
p; “We infer that this ship doesn’t move by reactive propulsion.”

  “Because Slug ships can approach light speed.”

  Howard nodded. We began to climb back up the catwalk with the green-glowing Troll holo floating above the generator Howard held in front of him, like a town crier’s lantern.

  “The Pseudocephalopod manipulates gravitons.”

  “Goddammit. Tell me what that means.”

  “Gravity is the universe’s dominant force. It’s everywhere, tugging on everything. We hypothesize it’s a manifestation of particles. We can’t observe them. Gravitons.”

  Leave it to Howard to chalk up Slug success to particles no one could see. I panted harder as we climbed. “So get these pesky gravitons off my shoulders.”

  “You’re closer to the truth than you know. The Pseudocephalopod does keep the gravitons off its ships.” Howard pointed at the stinger on the holo Troll’s back end. “I think this assembly, and this boom along the left side, generate an umbrella that shields the ship from gravity behind the ship.” He wheezed. “It’s as though the ship was attached to two rubber bands, stretched in opposite directions. A combination of force tugs equally from all sides on you and on me and on every atom in this galaxy. If you disturb equilibrium by cutting the rear rubber band—”

  “The gravity of the entire half of the universe that’s in front of the ship pulls the ship forward.” I managed a thin whistle. If Slugs could harness half the universe in order to shoot themselves through it, the little worms had impressed me again.

  Howard nodded once more. “No fuel required, except to power the gravity-block field generator.” He punched the holo generator control and a little Firewitch materialized. He pointed at the arms spread from the smaller ship’s front. “These form a basket that scavenges incoming gravitons and converts them to usable energy. Like a Scramjet scavenges oxygen. Elegant.”

  Howard raised a hand and paused, puffing.

  I asked, “Where is this elegant death machine vulnerable, then?”

  Howard shrugged. “If we could damage the machine, and if we could get through the interdicting warrior forces I underestimated at one hundred thousand—”

  “Howard, where?”

  He popped the Troll holo back up and pointed again. “Ten miles from here as the crow flies. But by the most direct route through the passages Jeeb mapped, forty-two miles.”

  I looked up. The light rectangle of the open hatch showed far above us. We climbed back above the rollers and heard Brumby calling for us. He would love the news as much as I did. We returned to Brumby fifteen minutes later.

  He paced back and forth along the hatch lip, weapon at port arms, glancing back down the passage every other second. “I dunno how long the block will hold, sirs. I don’t understand why they haven’t busted in already. Is there a fuel tank or something? Maybe I can improvise an explosive—”

  I shook my head. We had sealed ourselves in the Troll’s nursery, not its power plant. This ship’s vulnerability lay forty-two miles away from us. One hundred thousand Slugs would make it a nasty forty-two miles. Our break-in was like a holotoon where the convict tunnels out of prison but comes up in the warden’s backyard. No wonder the Slugs were no longer suicidal about getting to us. If Slugs laughed, they must be roaring.

  Forty-Five

  I dispatched Jeeb to patrol so we could circle our wagons.

  The three of us sat cross-legged in the dim passage while Brumby laid out the contents of his minipack. A few sausage coils of Megatex, drilled at intervals to take an electric detonation cap or, in a pinch, old-fashioned light-and-run-like-hell detonation cord fuse. We had a tubful of Thermite sticks, great for burning holes in spaceship hulls, not so good for blowing spaceships to pieces. A roll of high-temp, magnesium-impregnated det cord, great for setting off Thermite, overkill for detonating Megatex.

  Brumby surveyed his meager arsenal and sighed. “Sirs, they say you can make a bomb out of almost anything. But we need a big bomb. If we can’t blow this ship, shouldn’t we just leave? Do we leave?”

  It was a fair question. If we returned to the hull breach and called Mimi to return and pick us up, there was the slimmest chance we could get back to Earth and die like infantry with our boots in homeworld mud. Otherwise, eventually the Slugs would breach our barricades or infiltrate a significant force through their door slots. We would buy the farm actively or they could starve us or suffocate us, passively. If they assaulted, taking lots of them with us was little satisfaction, because down below us the Slugs were replicating faster than bathtub scum.

  But cutting and running wasn’t my style.

  I looked at Brumby. “What would you do?”

  Brumby tipped his head. “Not much waiting for me back home, sir. I’d just as soon buy it here as in a jail or a VA hospital.”

  I turned. “Howard?”

  “If there were a reason to return to Earth, a chance to win the war, I’d take it. What we’ve learned here about near-light-speed propulsion would have incalculable impact if mankind could survive. But once this vessel disembarks troops on Earth . . .”

  It was unanimous. We would go down swinging, right here. I reached for my M-60 and began to field-strip it for the last time.

  Two hours later, Brumby and Howard dozed, Brumby tortured and thrashing, Howard serene. I ran and reran holo’d Troll diagrams, looking for something, anything.

  Behind me metal scraped metal. I stiffened. The little bastards had found a way in that we hadn’t thought of. They always seemed to be a jump, a nanosecond ahead of us.

  My machine gun was laid out on its bipod, loaded and ready, aimed down the passage, the most likely axis of Slug approach. Too far from me.

  I reached for Ord’s Colt .45 automatic holstered on my chest. Ancient, but reliable and with stopping power to drop an armored Slug.

  I drew the Colt, spun, and squeezed off the grip safety.

  Jeeb reared back. Not that a bullet would have fazed him.

  I relaxed. “Any luck?” Talking to a ’bot about luck was as silly as talking to a ’bot.

  But I swear Jeeb nodded.

  Howard opened one eye, then sat up and stretched. “Let’s download him.”

  Twenty minutes later, the Chipboard in Howard’s hands trembled, as did the leads that hardwired it to Jeeb’s belly.

  Howard said, “Precognition! That’s the key!”

  “Precognition? Fortune telling?” I shook my head.

  We were surrounded by enemy legions bent on killing us. Yet the professor in Howard took over. “We believe the Pseudocephalopod originated outside the Solar System.”

  I nodded.

  “Any other planetary systems are light-years away.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So interstellar travel is infeasible. Because nothing can travel faster than light.”

  “My fist can, if you don’t get to the point, Howard.”

  He rolled his eyes. “The Pseudocephalopod has solved the puzzle of interstellar travel. We’ve thought for decades that there are places where space and time as we know them curve back on themselves, touch.” He folded a ration wrapper, then pointed to a place where it touched. “Quick hop from here to here.” Then, he traced around the wrapper with his finger. “Compared to the long way around.”

  “Shortcuts.”

  He nodded. “A logical place for a shortcut is the point where something has tacked the folded temporal fabric together. Only something massively attractive can fold space and time and tack them together.”

  “What’s strong enough to fold the universe?”

  “When matter comes together, its gravity attracts more matter. The more matter collapses together, the more attractive the mass becomes. Consider the Sun’s mass compressed until it was no larger than a single electron.”

  “A black hole.”

  “So attractive that nothing, not even light, can escape.”

  I stared ahead. “This spaceship falls into something smaller than a golf ball.
It gets squashed so small that it’ll take an electron microscope to find what’s left of it.”

  “Technically, you couldn’t find it with an electron microscope. It becomes packed so densely that light couldn’t escape to reflect back.”

  “Whatever.”

  “But for the Pseudocephalopod, that black hole is just a cosmic traffic circle. The ship whirls around it and gets slingshot out the other side.”

  “The other side being . . . ?”

  “A long way from home.”

  Howard leaned his elbows on his knees and cupped his chin in his upturned hands. “You know what I’d really like to know?”

  “How any of this helps us blow this ship up?”

  “Well, that. But what puzzled me until now was how the Pseudocephalopod overcame the paradox of relativity.”

  “That one’s kept me awake for years.”

  He sighed. “E equals MC squared. You do know that?”

  “Okay.”

  “As matter approaches the speed of light, time slows down relative to matter moving slower.”

  “Sure. The space traveler returns home a year older but his twin has aged twenty years.”

  He nodded. “Postulating a quick transit of the black hole, with rapid acceleration inward, followed by corresponding deceleration as the ship exits, because the hole tries to suck the ship back in. Time dilation would be insignificant except at velocities that would only be attained for a few minutes, measured in what would incorrectly be called absolute time. I’d guess an object would lose weeks or a year on a given transit, no more.”

  “I thought that was your big puzzle?”

  “That’s not the paradox that puzzles me. The Theory of Relativity also predicts that at relativistic speeds mass increases. Mass accelerated to the speed of light becomes infinite.”

  “So, for a few minutes, this ship is as big as Jupiter, relative to the rest of the universe? But the Slugs don’t feel it? Then they shrink back?”

  “Not exactly. It’s more that the amount of energy required to move the mass approaches infinity, you see?”