The Grapple
Page 25
Within the brotherhood of those who served as the eyes and ears of the Fleet, Buzh Frolov was “Mouse” from that moment on. And that’s how he got the idea.
Lazy Cat always missed Fedya. Skinny Cat never caught Fedya. All of Clever Cat’s traps never even touched Fedya. Fedya was the Fastesest Fastest Mouse in All the Wide-Wide World. Fedya always came back home to Valya and the mouselings. Fedya always brought them their cheese.
Fedya the Mouse couldn’t be killed. Because Fedya the Mouse wasn’t a real thing.
Scout Squadron 9973 lost nine pilots in nineteen days, flying missions at Nalus. Scoutship Tender Nevidimka took five burn-throughs in an ambush, with twenty-three crew KIA and a hundred and thirty-two wounded.
Ensign Buzh Frolov came back from Nalus with seventeen combat sorties, a Distinction in Combat Medal to go with his campaign ribbon, and not a single scratch. Count Viktor was waiting for him on the tarmac, with a pair of shiny new golden stars in hand. The promotion paperwork had made it home before he did.
When the tender got shot to shit, he was out on a sortie. By the time he’d come back, the slant-eyes were long gone. He’d burned all his remaining fuel running to get help sans post-jump breaks and velocity matches, and ended up with a bad bout of jump tremors for his trouble. That’s how he got the medal.
Half the ship was coming back on a stretcher or in a box. Buzh Frolov’s worst injury put him on Quarters for a week, with strict orders to take lots of long naps and avoid alcohol and caffeinated beverages.
Lieutenant JG Buzh Frolov was supposed to mobilize with the Voron. But he was busy floating in a regen tank with a blown-out lung, a messed-up heart, four cracked vertebrae, a bruised spinal cord and a saucer-sized exit hole in the small of his back, courtesy of a late good friend.
Scoutship Tender Voron was lost with all hands, somewhere between Xing and Lingjao, in the seventh week of the war.
“Mouse” Frolov got assigned to the Prizrak seven months ago, once he’d finally gotten out of physical therapy. He was the only pilot reporting aboard not to come straight out of Advanced Recon School. Eight of those twenty-three greenhorns were already gone. The replacements were all seventeen, going on ten. They’d shortened Basic Flight and cut down ARS, to speed the feed out the pipe.
They called him “Papa Mouse” now, behind his back. He didn’t even bother anymore, learning their names.
Fedya vs. the Cats, take sixty-nine.
Jump drive go.
Sparkle display.
Triple gong.
Discontinuity.
“Come on, little mouse, come on!” muttered lieutenant Frolov as his scoutship booted up and the AI processed incoming wavefronts.
Swivel those bulgy cartoon eyes! Tune those round cartoon ears! Twitch that pointy cartoon nose! Where are the cats? Where are the cats? There are always lots of cats here!
Frigate. Port aft low, one and a third light-minutes.
Lazy Cat, you’re too fat!
You’ll never catch me with a belly like that!
Missile corvette. Port forward high. Two and a quarter light-minutes.
Skinny Cat, you’re no threat!
I can run much faster than that!
Lots more cats, farther out. In-system, out-system, in-plane, out-of-plane. Eight minutes, fifteen, forty-five…
Eyes and claws all over the place. All looking to catch themselves a speedy little mouse.
Time to go, then. Speedy little mice didn’t stay alive by sitting in place. The faster the little mouse ran, the more wavefronts he caught, the more he knew about the cats. The faster the little mouse ran, the greater the uncertainty for the cats chasing after.
Ping the old data, spit the new probes, and down the mousehole Fedya goes. No sweat.
There was one good thing about Paradise. The whole place was mapped out to a fare-thee-well. The general solutions were so good and the almanac so precise, that the Zin simply couldn’t lock down all the ways in and out. There were spots out here where a scout could pull off an actual in-system long jump, if the pilot was helmsman enough, and lunatic enough to try it.
A big old battleship needed a real jump zone. A speedy little mouse like him? Any stellar body massing over ten petatons with a radius of over a hundred kilometers would do fine, ‘round here. He could go down as far as six and ninety outbound, in a pinch. It was a real small eye to thread between jump zone edge and jump barrier, when things got that pebbly. It was one hell of a ride through to the other side. But he was a light little mouse, he was fast, and the solutions were good. He was helmsman enough, he’d take the risk. Especially with a mean old cat on his tail.
“Come on, little mouse, come on!” muttered Buzh Frolov as the virtual throttle slid all the way forward. “Run, run, run for that cheese!”
“I’m the fastest little mouse,” hummed lieutenant Frolov as the scoutship skipped in and out of reality, “I go running through the house…”
Aha! Cats weren’t sleeping, at all. Here came that gunboat from out-system. The one that had been sitting eight minutes out. Starboard aft, running fast. The uncertainty cone looked ugly as hell.
“All right, if I were a cat and I saw a mouse doing four and a half c on my old course, where would I go?”
This is why it paid to keep varying the plan.
Greenhorns always forgot to vary the plan. They fell in love with the first set of dirty snowballs they picked to drop probes at, and went for them, no matter what. They got a puppy crush on the first set of beam rendezvous points they’d set up, and forgot that a probe’s output wavefront traveled on, and you could always catch it later, or even re-ping the probe and tell it to shoot a new signal beam somewhere else. They decided on an outbound jump point once and for all, and kept trying to get to it. That’s how greenhorns became missing greenhorns, long overdue and presumed KIA.
I’m the fastest little mouse
I go running through the house…
He didn’t like that planetoid. Why didn’t he like that planetoid? A planetoid like any planetoid. Lopsided, bit of a tumble, nothing seemed amiss…
Damn, what was that gunboat doing? Why that vector? He didn’t have a snowball’s chance, on that vector. What was his major malfunction?
Stupid?
Aha, right, because cats assigned to guard this pile of cheese were all stupid. Su-u-u-re they were. Funny-funny, ha-ha. Tell me another.
Gunslinger Cat wasn’t stupid. The cats had a Plan. Some trickery they’d thought up together, in advance. Gunslinger Cat’s job was to block off a route. He was herding the mouse.
Herding the mouse where?
Where-where? There-where!
To his buddy, the missile corvette. Coming in at flank, from starboard forward; outran his own wake. Clever bastard. But he’d guessed wrong where the little mouse would go.
Or did he?
What were those graviconcentrates doing all over that planetoid? Just a few too many dense spots for a regular old outer-system dirty snowball, weren’t there? And that’s exactly where a greenhorn would go, shying like a spooked colt, away from that damned corvette. Run away, drop some probes, kill two birds with one stone, maybe even try to jump out over there... And never come home alive.
He didn’t like that planetoid ‘cause it was full of mines, that’s why! Hiding out among the craters, just waiting for a speedy little mouse like him to come close enough.
No, no, no, Clever Cat!
I won’t fall for your fiendish trap!
The threat display whooped a warning.
Gunnery search radar beam. He’d jumped out right into it.
“Blya!” cursed lieutenant Frolov.
Clever Cat had packed drones in his missile tubes. Fired off twelve on probable vectors, and took the thirteenth vector himself. Just in case speedy little mouse figured out about the mines.
Fiendish trap, Clever Cat. One fucking doozy of a fiendish trap.
Pick a death, little mouse! Pick a death!
The
radiation alarm beeped as twenty-kilo shells burst off in the distance.
Three hundred and thirty kiloton yield. Pathetic little popgun, to a proper warship. But he wasn’t a proper warship. He didn’t even have a fighter’s shield density. He was a fucking scoutship.
Iron-hearted RoboCat had claws enough to tear speedy little Fedya to shreds. And RoboCat’s aim was getting better by the second.
Shields flashed white as a bright blue fireball burst almost on top of the ship.
“Come on, little mouse!” grunted Buzh Frolov, flipping off the safety interlock as he slid the throttle all the way into the red, “Blur those little cartoon feet!”
The jump drive screamed as Prizrak-17 danced between fireballs, with an interceptor drone right behind.
The drive chamber alarm was screeching. The error build warning was going off, too. His total dose indicator was glowing a deep, reddish gold, and the shield matter tank read three-quarters empty.
If the drive chamber failed, he died. If cumulative error built too far, he died. If that drone caught up again, he died.
This was shaping up to be a lovely fucking day.
Drones were fast, but drones were dumb. He could set RoboCat up for a solution before RoboCat set him up for a solution.
Time for Fedya the Mouse to whip out his mallet. When all else fails, boink the cat on the nose. And then run like hell!
It was simply a question of timing. The drone had to be where he wanted it to be. Good thing drones were dumb.
Fedya boinks RoboCat on the nose in three moves. Take one and only. No retakes.
And a one…
And a two…
And a three!
The scoutship’s walls rang with launch shock a split-second after the rocket pod cleared the hull. The radiation alarm beeped madly as a ranging shell burst less than two hundred kilometers away.
“I’m a clever little mouse...” hummed Buzh Frolov, sliding his oxygen mask aside to spit a gob of bloody mucus as the wreckage of an interceptor drone tumbled far behind.
The pod automedic’s hypo hissed against his neck as he eased off the throttle. Surgical nanites, and lots of ‘em. Felt like he had a jump hemorrhage in his lung. Maybe a few hemorrhages. Lungs, and other places.
Automedic was bitching about blood in his urine. Bet he had embolisms, too. Way too much time in overthrottle, dodging RoboCat. Plenty of small vessels to damage, in the human body.
Total dose indicator was looking nice and orange, now. Rad-hard shot three, coming right up!
There was another hiss from the automedic’s hypo.
Fucking beautiful day to be alive.
The automedic’s hypo hissed again. The thing just wasn’t happy with him today. Putting all kinds of med warnings up on the pilot status panel.
Forget his bunk, thought Buzh, spitting out another bloody gobbet. Looked like those ratings would be carrying Papa Mouse straight to sickbay.
Time to hit on Nurse Lana again. No great aristocratic beauty, she. A common shopkeeper’s daughter from out in the boonies somewhere. Small, shy, freckly, dark-haired girl with great big eyes and an upturned nose. Kinda mousy, but cute, with a sweet disposition and a kind heart.
Lana Bobrova wouldn’t make a bad Mama Mouse at all, come to think of it. Count Viktor wouldn’t have approved, but nobody planned on asking him.
Tech Ensign Bobrova was getting sweet on Papa Mouse. Her best customer, seven years her senior, a pilot and an actual count. Good thing Papa Mouse had some stem cells sitting in liquid nitrogen back home, or his little mouselings would all end up born with two heads and six eyes.
The urologist would love Papa Mouse’s glow-in-the-dark nuts. Put ‘em on the shelf in a pickle jar for med students to study, and straight-up clone Papa Mouse a pair of new ones. This is what radiation-aggravated mutagenic jump effects look like, future doctors and doctoresses. Pay attention to this rare fucking case.
His oncologist would love him too, in about sixty or seventy years. Better pick an old Survey doc. They had experience with radiation-aggravated jump cancers.
The other cats were still chasing. Determined motherfuckers.
No fewer than twelve bots up ahead, with Clever Cat right behind them. Bastard had packed not a single proper missile. Why should he have? Nothing but scouts and probes to shoot at, out here. Ripple-fired every single one of his tubes in a stern chase when his best shot got whacked, and the rest ran out of juice. Ticked that his surefire fiendish trap didn’t work, you bet.
Time to go home. He had his cheese. The control pod was beginning to feel like a bloody oven. Enough fun and then some, for one day.
Screw velocity match. Screw fine solution adjustment from spot data. Precompute solution, thread the needle, initiate on push. No jump gong.
Yes, dismiss the AI warnings. He was a big boy, he knew the risks.
Lieutenant Frolov spat another gobbet of bloody snot as he jabbed buttons and flipped switches on the virtual control panel.
There was an incoming data light.
“Emergency signal received,” said the ship’s AI.
A text burst from the surface of Paradise. Ship could even guess at originating time zone, from proper motion and doppler. Give or take a couple-three hours, anyway.
Escape pod 43, DTLS Leste, Serpent Swarm Corporate Security Force. Assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Group, Paradise Joint Peacekeeping Squadron. Timestamped yesterday. The cypher and sig checked out, consistent with last year’s books.
A belter stuck down on the surface for almost a standard year?
Rations ran out, long ago. Barely able to crawl in the crushing gravity, when he left the escape pod. Zero-gee bubble slowly failing. Body going haywire as everything fell apart from the constant pull. Organs calcifying…
A slow, ugly death.
Must be a deathword, then. The final testament of a man’s life, whispered out into the void in the forlorn hope of finding a Witness. Sent the message, took his Spirit Pill. Amazing he’d lasted that long, the poor bastard.
Well, there was one thing he could still do, thought Buzh Frolov. A last, tiny shred of decency, one comrade in arms to another. The Allmother was merciful to all, foremost to the condemned. The dead belter had found his Witness.
“Ship, read message,” commanded the pilot.
“In fulfillment of our duty under Article 12, Section 1,” read the AI, “we have raised native forces, and confront the common enemy. We hereby request your every assistance. An overlay of territories under our control and a list of our most urgent needs are attached. Please acknowledge if feasible.
“Signed:
“Lord Leonidas Nikolayevich, the Prince Freeman.
“Sir Yoseph Yehudah ben Sarah Weismann-Azulay, Sworn Knight of Freeman.
“Commanding, Free Paradise Army”
“You’ve got to be shitting me!” muttered Buzh. “No fucking way!”
Yosi Weismann must’ve written that message.
“Duty under Article 12” and “every assistance”! No one had ever accused that man of an excess of subtlety. Nor Leo, either, when it came to certain things. All that traipsing through the woods with boar spear in hand, in the company of grandpa Reginald and his clutch of old Navy buddies. All those war stories, every single one of them verifiably true. Things like that rubbed off, on impressionable young lads. Maybe entirely too much. And then he’d gone off to Miranda...
The Shipboard Law article, lifted almost verbatim from Section One, Paragraph One of the Serpent Swarm Charter. The sacrosanct thing that defined the boundary between League and Outside more sharply than any customs checkpoint, or any line on a map. The belters wouldn’t sign the Treaty without it. The Mirandans had walked away rather than sign, over it.
The Delta Triangulae League constituting a Common Vessel, it is the personal duty and individual obligation of every Citizen…
They sent high nobles’ sons to prison for walking past a common drunk lying in a ditch, under Article 12. They fi
ned millionaires six months’ income for failing to give a lift to some shoeless ragamuffin sitting on the bumper of a rusty, broken-down farm truck by the side of a country road.
Grandfather had taken him to see an execution, once. Count Viktor’s idea of proper civics education for six-year-old boys.
It was a freighter captain. He’d left a fellow Citizen aboard a third party vessel under attack by pirates. Standing face to face with death, the poor bastard had thought of nothing better to do than rehash his excuses.
He’d pleaded that he was outgunned; that breaking the magistrate’s seals on his guns and magazines on the far side of Tiantiju would have seen him arrested and his ship seized under Imperial law; that he had passengers aboard.
The crowd was no more impressed than the jury had been, and they’d let him know it, loudly.
After the executioner was done with him, they brought out his first mate. For failure to mutiny.
Article 12 was the only thing they still chopped heads in public for. By Order of His Majesty, in the middle of Palace Square.
He’d puked his guts out on the spot, and wet his bed for a month.
“Unable to decrypt separately-encrypted attachment,” continued the AI after a split-second’s pause.
“Reason?”
“Unable to access cypher: Apex VXA-22123155-NF77.”
“Ship, sandbox port 3B,” replied the pilot, connecting his personal signet to his control pod’s general-access datalink.
“Warning! Unauthorized device connected! Access denied!”
“Emergency override. Authenticate Lieutenant Junior Grade Count Frolov, Buzheslav Jaroslavovich, pilot, Service Number 1413-9327-7746-9171”
They could chew his ass later over this. He needed a definitive fucking answer.
“Override accepted.”
“Ship, authenticate originator of separately-encrypted message with sandboxed device on 3B.”
“Originator authenticated,” replied the ship’s computer, “Lord Leonidas Nikolayevich, the Prince Freeman.”
The Cats could fake a message, thought Buzh Frolov. Easy.