by Bobby Adair
“That ship is massive,” utters Brice.
“Standard size, though, right?” Of course it is.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” he counters.
“You think we might not have enough to blow it open?” I ask, as I come to accept Brice’s worry.
“You know that’s what I’m thinking.”
“Tarlow said—”
“That’s what worries me.” Brice makes an exasperated sound. “I know he said we’ve got plenty to blow the hull open, but you know as well as I do, he’s guessing. All his knowledge about the structure and materials in these ships would fit into a Gray’s asshole.”
Everybody knows Grays don’t have sphincters, so I guess that makes Brice’s point.
I don’t agree, so I wonder whether my acceptance of Tarlow’s certainty was a case of me hearing what I wanted to hear.
“I don’t like trusting him,” says Brice. “He’s not dependable.”
“He’s just different.” I slip into Dr. Psychologist mode. “You’re projecting other unpalatable traits on him because of one or two characteristics you don’t like.”
Brice chuckles through a series of joyless noises. “So long as you don’t mind me fragging him when this goes to shit. I don’t care what you think the reasons are.”
That’s funny, although not in the way Brice thinks. “If this fails, the Trogs will blow every one of these asteroids to rubble, and we won’t have to worry about who’s alive when it’s over.”
We float for a bit in silence, Brice watching the Trog ship, me lazily spinning with a fantastic view of the whole universe.
Brice makes a few attempts to contact Blair by radio, with no response. Neither of us is surprised. That statically charged dust is doing its work.
“‘Bout halfway,” he informs me.
Our destination asteroid is coming into my view. We’re on course to impact it near where we’d planned—on the far side, out of the cruiser’s view, and hopefully with enough of the asteroid’s mass between us and the ship that the Grays up there won’t detect the grav Brice and I use to maneuver our explosives to a soft landing.
“Major?” It’s a woman’s voice, not Blair.
Startled, I ask, “Who’s this?”
“Silva, sir.”
“Silva?” I grin through a sense of relief I hadn’t expected to feel.
“Where?” asks Brice.
“You’re headed toward us,” she answers.
“Us?” I ask.
“Lenox and Mostyn are here with me.”
“You made it?” It’s a stupid thing to say, but sometimes stupid is the best I can come up with when I’m surprised.
“We went for cover when the shooting started.”
“Injuries?” I ask.
“None,” she tells me. “We’re holed up in a mining shack over here near a piece of drilling equipment.”
“I see it,” says Brice.
The asteroid is slipping out of my line of sight as I spin, but through my grav sense, I can make it out.
“How are you set for A and H?” Brice asks.
“Ammo’s fine,” answers Silva. “We’re topped off on hydro. There’s a stock of H packs and C packs in the shed.”
“We’ll come to you,” Brice tells them.
Chapter 32
I baby my load down to the surface. With the bulk of the Trog cruiser, an array of defensive grav fields surrounding it, and a few million tons of asteroid rock between us, I doubt the Grays in the bow will detect the grav I’m using to maneuver my suit.
My main concern is after using the mass of an asteroid as cover to sneak up on the Trogs twice, will the Grays be focusing their super sharp grav sense at every nearby asteroid to see what’s hiding behind it?
Brice nurses his bundle of TX buckets down to the surface beside me.
Lenox, Mostyn, and Silva are out of the mining shack and coming toward us.
“It’s good to see you guys,” says Lenox.
I smile, but I find myself staring at Silva, trying to see the shape of a woman inside her bulky orange gear.
She catches me looking at her, and I turn away, busying my hands at uselessly checking the tension on the straps around the buckets.
“We made it this far.” Brice punches me in the arm. “Right?”
I look up, and he’s smiling. Apparently, he didn’t expect this much success. “Yeah,” I answer, confidently.
“Hey, boss.” Silva punches me in the other arm, and I turn to see she’s smiling too, eyes trying to catch mine in a lingering gaze.
Just a moment past the end of my melancholy drift across the void, and I find it’s easy to look at her and entertain a thought about what a future might look like with another woman in it. “It’s good to see you.”
She wraps me in a hug. Lenox and Mostyn embrace us both as much as that can be done in the gear we’re all cocooned in.
“I thought we were alone,” Lenox admits as she pulls away from me.
“That’s okay,” offers Brice, as he leans over. “We thought the three of you were blasted off into space.”
“We were,” Lenox tells him, “but not so far we couldn’t recover.”
“What about the Rusty Turd?” asks Silva. She’s talking about our assault ship. “I can’t raise them on the comm.”
I shrug and shake my head.
“Destroyed?” asks Lenox.
“Don’t know,” Brice tells her, glancing at me because he believes there’s no open question on the matter.
Lenox follows Brice’s look in my direction and guesses wrong on its intent. “Are we stuck here, sir?”
“No.” I shake my head to emphasize my certainty on that point. “There are a lot of damaged ships over there on the surface of the Potato, and there are repair shops and parts. And people. We found the station’s crew, a few hundred of them in holding pens down on sublevel nine. Once we take care of our Trog infestation, we can probably repair as many of those ships as we want.”
Mostyn sighs. She wasn’t expecting anything so rosy. Likely, the three of them had concluded they’d be stuck on the small asteroid until they found a way to sneak back to the Potato and hijack something capable of making light speed.
Silva glances at the two erstwhile castaways with her, and then her eyes settle on me. She’s investing her hopes. She wants to believe in a happy outcome to all this shit. “What do we need to do?”
Brice points at his feet, down through the asteroid’s core, and out the other side, right up through the Trog cruiser’s curved aft drive array. “We need to knock that scag out of the sky and neutralize all the Trogs on the surface.” He catches himself as he’s finishing up. “And the ones underground.”
“Do we know how many yet?” asks Lenox, not an ounce of apprehension in her. She’s ready, and no doubt understands the risks.
“No. Not a clue.” I pat a TX bucket in my bundle. “We have our part of the mission. We’ll do it, and then we’ll worry about the Trogs on the surface. Once step at a time.”
“One step at a time,” confirms Brice.
“What’s this, then?” asks Silva, squatting down to examine the label on one of the buckets. “Doesn’t look promising.”
“Industrial explosives,” I answer. “They drop it into the bore holes they drill in these asteroids to split them in half.” I throw in the last part to emphasize the power of the syrupy-thick liquid in the buckets.
“Powerful,” figures Lenox, glancing past us, taking measure of the rock we’re standing on.
“They’ll do the job.” I share a look of what I hope is certainty with Mostyn, and then Silva. I pause when I see doubt in Silva’s eyes, probably because she sees the truth of the doubt in mine. “I don’t know how strong this stuff is.” I acknowledge Brice with a quick look, letting him know I’ve come around to his way of thinking. “The tech who set all this up for us is in the business of breaking rocks, not star cruisers.” I finish with a shrug. Not a great leadership moment,
but I’m going to ask these three women to come along on a mission that’ll only reduce their already dismal odds of long-term survival.
“Doesn’t matter.” Brice is certain. “We’re going up there, down there, whatever. We’ll split that cruiser open and kill all the Trogs in it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try the next thing, and the next, and the next.”
That’s the kind of certainty I can get behind—the certainty of persistence. “We have seven hundred pounds of this stuff.” I pat one of the buckets again. “We put it in the right place on that ship, and we’ll take it out of action.”
Lenox steps up close, and starts to read the label on one of the buckets. “It’s a ternary explosive.”
I nod.
“Did you mix it?” she asks.
“Do you know about explosives?” asks Brice.
“Only what I’ve read.” She looks at each of us as she straightens back up. “And I know a little bit about bubble jump arrays.”
I’m curious. “Go on.”
Lenox smiles devilishly. “Knock some of those plates out of alignment and either the ship won’t create a well-formed wave and won’t be able to bubble jump, or maybe it’ll end up on a skewed course and stuck in the interstellar void.”
“What are you thinking?” I ask. “Plant these in the drive array?”
“No,” she answers. “One, maybe two. Just enough to damage the array in case your plan to destroy the ship doesn’t work out. If we can’t kill ‘em, then fuck them up the ass with a pinecone for coming to our neighborhood and acting like assholes.”
I smile my enthusiasm. Nothing wrong with a good backup plan.
Chapter 33
Since keeping our feet on the surface of the asteroid is achieved primarily through suit grav to enhance the effect of the local g, I realize walking around to the other side of our small asteroid isn’t any stealthier than amping up the g and blazing through the sky. Either way, an attentive Gray worried about the cruiser’s rear flank will spot us.
So, we’re off the ground again, curving over the horizon as we separate from our big rock. We’re all in a line, heading straight toward the Trog cruiser’s stern drive array.
I’m in the lead, eyes wide open, grav senses stretched to their limit, trying to see any change as soon as it occurs, believing fluctuations in the cruiser’s defensive fields are my proxy warning system for impending danger. Right behind me, Silva is flying with nothing but a weapon in her hands. Mostyn is a few meters back, guiding my bundle of TX buckets. Brice follows her with his bundle. Lenox has the rear with one bucket in hand.
“Stay close,” I tell them. “There’s a surge in the field coming up. Follow my path exactly, or it’ll bounce you out.” Deflect them actually, just like a railgun round bending its path away from a Trog’s chest plate.
I see a series of donut-shaped fields stacked off the stern of the ship, and I can’t help but wonder at the grav talent of some of these Grays for the complexity of the field shapes they’re able to coax out of their defensive hull arrays.
I bear left to slip through a gap where two of the donut-shaped fields are neutralized because the polarities flip directions.
Silva grunts like she’s been slugged, and I know she’s drifted off my course.
“Exact,” I remind them. It comes out more angry than urgent. A mistake I don’t have time to apologize for. “There’s not a lot of room.” I slip into a neutral zone in the hole of a donut, come to a stop, and spin around to watch the others follow my path.
Silva floats to a stop beside me with a nod and a smile. Harsh words forgiven. Effortlessly so. Draftees resent officers as part of the natural order of the universe. I decide my easy absolution is due to another reason, one skewed strongly by what I want it to be. I decide she likes me as much as I think I like her.
Christ, do men ever mature past the sweet temptation of pubescent puppy love?
What would be the fun in that?
I need to focus on the mayhem ahead.
Mostyn is slowing and delicately maneuvering her load.
“Another meter forward,” I direct her. “Then cut hard toward us.”
She listens and moves as told.
Her buckets are buffeted on one side. She squeezes through the gap between the grav fields, and her bundle starts to spin.
Silva accelerates over to help Mostyn bring the load back under control.
Brice squeezes perfectly through the gap—surprising, considering he’s unable to see the static grav fields. They’re invisible to the normal human, but glow like neon signs to a bug-head like me.
Lenox, with only the single bucket in tow, has little trouble following Brice through.
We’re a hundred meters astern of the Trog cruiser, in the neutral hole at the center of a toroidal grav field, the first of a dozen donut-shaped fields stacked smallest to largest from where we are, up to the stern of the vessel.
I point through the series of donut holes toward the cruiser’s dormant drive array. In everything but size, it looks like the array on the aft end of the Rusty Turd. Either could be mistaken for the dish of a radio telescope back on earth. “We head right up the axis of the ship now. There’s no grav to repel us unless we drift off the centerline. Once we arrive at the ship, we slip over the lip of the array, move onto the outer hull and grav compensate. The whole ship, bridge to stern, is wrapped in bands of grav alternating in polarity. One will pull you down. The other will push you away. You should be alright to walk down the length of the hull as long as you don’t move too fast across the field boundaries.”
Acknowledgments all around.
I turn to Lenox. “Place your bucket wherever you think best between the drive plates and then catch up.”
“Yes, sir.” She’s enthusiastic for getting to work.
“Let’s go.” I spin and lead the way again.
In the null g tunnel through the donuts, it takes just a few moments of effort before we’re at the gaping mouth of the vessel’s drive array. I fly over the lip, earning a close-up look at the thick layers of steel and composite materials that make up the hull. It’s the material I’m hoping to breach with nearly a half-ton of TX.
I plant my feet on the hull’s curve and turn just in time to see Silva alight right beside me with seemingly no effort at all.
“You’re good at this.”
“Of course.” She’s not bragging, just convinced.
Mostyn pushes her load up toward us. Below her, Lenox drifts out of sight into the concave array. As she disappears from view, she calls, “See you in a few, boss.”
Mostyn’s bundle rises above the edge, and Silva grabs a strap to pull it closer and settle it in beside us. Just as the bundle of metal buckets comes over the edge, it jerks out of her hands and shoots away like a balloon. “Dammit!” she curses.
I rocket off the surface as Mostyn apologizes over the comm for letting the explosives get away. It’s my fuckup. I knew. I saw, but my variable-g intuition isn’t plugged into all of my brain’s circuits yet. Every time I hit my suit’s auto-grav, my frontal cortex is tempted into laziness and wants to pretend it’s back in earth’s familiar constant field.
Graving way too hard for comfort, I reach the bundle when it’s nearly thirty meters up. I grip the straps and pull hard to arrest its momentum. The buckets shift and the straps hum under the strain. I can barely hold the weight. I call to Brice. “Careful! We grav compensate our suits for the shift in field polarity and strength. These damn buckets aren’t g-compensated at all.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Brice answers, his voice straining as he wrestles with seven hundred pounds of TX trying to get away from him.
“Help him,” I tell the others, as I try to control my load. It’s harder than I guessed, and I’m not winning.
Over the comm, I hear the others grunting and pushing.
Realizing I don’t have the strength in my hands to pull so much weight, I monkey climb around to the other side of the bundle, flatten my
body, stiffen my suit, and use my suit’s grav to drive and steer it.
“Back over the lip,” Brice orders the other two.
“Inside the array?” pants Silva.
“Yes,” Brice answers. “We need to handle this differently.”
He’s right. Crossing the hull in a two-g reversing field, each three-hundred-and-fifty-pound bundle with flip back and forth from seven hundred pounds down to seven hundred up. Not only will it be near impossible to move them, we’ll be lucky if the buckets don’t crush us in the attempt.
I push my load back toward the null field inside the drive array’s concave expanse.
Chapter 34
One bucket at a time, nineteen buckets, five people, that’s only four trips down the length of the hull. Simple math. Simple solutions when brute force isn’t an option.
Walking up the cruiser’s outer hull, I’m passing through an outward-pushing field, and my bucket’s handle pulls me up with seventy pounds of pressure—a rigid balloon that after another ten steps will turn back into a heavy weight my tired fingers can barely carry.
The others are following me along the ship’s dorsal crest, passing a row of railgun barrels, some with large diameters, some smaller, some long, others short.
“Where are we putting these?” asks Brice. He knows where, in the barrels of the guns. He’s asking which ones we want to spike.
I point to a place I think is halfway down the length of the hull, slightly up the curve from where we are. “The ship’s three fusion reactors are mounted inside the main hanger there.”
“You want to take out the reactors?” asks Brice.
“Sounds good to me,” adds Lenox, having placed her solitary bucket where she figured it would do the right kind of damage, grabbed another from our cache, and caught up with our line.
The field I’m walking through reverses, and the bucket swings down from above, nearly jerking my arm out of socket as it’s pulled back toward the hull.
“God,” says Silva. “This is tiring.”
“It’ll be worth it.” I hope.