Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) (19 page)

“Right. Lucky.” As far as we knew, Footballs weren’t all that smart. Unless you disturbed one pretty good, it just sat there. But once you woke a Football up, things went to hell fast.

“You think it sent a signal?”

Howard chewed his nicotine-substitute gum. “Yep. We monitored a microburst.” Add one more invention. The Slugs apparently understood radio. They didn’t use it much, so far as we knew. Howard pointed out that a unitary organism wasn’t too concerned about talking to itself.

“How long do we have?”

“The Pseudocephalopod’s a creature of this universe. It’s bound by the same physics we are. It can’t communicate faster than light, so it probably communicates across Temporal Fabric Insertion Points about the way we do. It depends on how many jumps exist between the Mousetrap and its central ganglion. Likely months or years.”

“So we keep working?”

“Faster, harder. It will know we’re here. It could still come via Weichsel, but now more likely straight here.”

“Boom? Just blow Mousetrap up, with Projectiles or Vipers?”

Howard shrugged. “The Pseudocephalopod didn’t blow up Ganymede, Earth, Bren, or even Weichsel. It preserves physical environments in which it perceives value. It may soften us up first, but then expect It to try to take Mousetrap in one piece.”

So we sent the bad news to Earth by drone mail and redoubled our efforts. Digging, then digging some more, for months, when it’s too hot, too cold, too dangerous, too lonely, and too boring is part of being infantry.

The other part is worse.

FORTY-EIGHT

“WHOA!”Munchkin tugged herself along ö€…in vacuum, floating ten feet above Mousetrap, as she hand-over-handed along a line strung between stanchions screwed into Mousetrap’s smooth, black iron surface. Her suit was tethered to the pull line, and to mine, so neither of us would be spun off into space. Mousetrap was dense enough and big enough that it originally had tiny natural gravity, enough to hold you down, unless you sneezed inside your suit. But that was before Howard and Gustus, with a boost from Cavorite, goosed Mousetrap’s rotation a little, so people and things would stick to the skinward-facing floors of the spaces we were creating inside.

Correspondingly, if a person was now on Mousetrap’s outside, up was the new down. A person not tethered to the surface would be flung out into space, to become a floater. It wasn’t a death sentence. We were wearing Eternad armor. Eternads look like what people expect of a spacesuit, and can serve as one in a pinch. A patrol from one of the cruisers on station above Mousetrap would retrieve a floater, theoretically. But if the pull line in my hands had been a snake, it would have been strangled long ago. In the blackness above our heads, the
Eisenhower
showed as white as a tiny moon. Equidistant from Mousetrap, the
Nimitz
, another
Metzger
-class cruiser, hung in space, a black dot silhouetted against Leonidas, as the planet rose huge and orange above Mousetrap’s tiny horizon, which seemed to curve as sharply as a watermelon’s skin.

Ahead of me, Munchkin paused, her legs paddling in nothing, and pointed at the engineer crew a hundred yards away. Her voice panted in my earpiece. “Almost there.”

“Munchkin, we
are
there.” In the sense of “complete,” for the mining phase. Therefore, as we did for the pressure-up phase, we convened a short ceremony to mark the end of the digging phase. The crew was installing a plaque on the surface, a memorial to the miners who lost their lives over the past eighteen months of construction. Today the primary excavation phase ended. I tugged my tether to be sure I was fastened to Mousetrap, then pointed at the
Eisenhower
. “When
Ike
gets relieved, you need to be on it.”

“I don’t report to you. Combat Engineers report through Gustus.”

I raised my palm as we floated. “You’re a supernumerary volunteer. Gustus can’t give you orders either. You can leave whenever you want.”

“You want me off Mousetrap because you think it’s dangerous.”

Mousetrap was dangerous, alright. There were sixty-three names on the newest memorial plaque. But Munchkin meant, and I understood her to mean, the Slug assault that was going to hit Mousetrap sooner or later.

“You came here so you could hitch a ride to Tressel, to be with Jude. You did more than your share, already. So hitch your ride.”

“When I came here, we didn’t know this was the front line.”

“We still don’t. The Slugs could hit Tressel first for all we know.”

“Stop rationalizing. I’m not running out on my troops.”

“Ord and Howard went back to Earth. Nobody thinks that was running out.”

“That’s a business trip. They’re coming back.”

I chinned my audio mute so she wouldn’t hear me sigh, and my faceplate was dark enough that she couldn’t see my eyes roll. Munchkin had no troops, though she and her Tunnel Rats would die—and too many of them had died—for one another. In the grand tradition of Lafayette and the American Colonies, the Flying Tigers in China, and the Eagle Squadron in the Battle of Britain, Munchkin was a noble foreigner who joined the fight against a common enemy. And her job was well and nobly done. But she was right. I wanted her gone for selfish reasons. In my gut I knew the Slugs weren’t going to hit Bren or Earth or Weichsel first. The little maggots always knew where we were vulnerable, and they always smeared us when we needed it least. If there was a Pearl Harbor moment to hit Mousetrap, this was it. The humans the Slugs had used for mining for millennia had just finished mining out a neatly situated asteroid. But the humans hadn’t begun emplacing all those defensive armaments, yet. To guard against exactly that vulnerability, fully three cruisers were now dispersed in the space around Mousetrap.

Above us, silver flecks drifted toward the larger speck of the
Eisenhower
.
Ike
was recovering her patrol fighters, then she would take in the last few transports from Mousetrap. Then she was off, bound for Tressel.

Tressel had lately been quiet, albeit troubled, and by all calculations was distant and non-strategic to the Slugs. It was jumps away from everywhere except Mousetrap, and its one attraction to the Slugs, Cavorite, had been depleted for millennia. If there was a safe haven in the human-occupied universe right now, it was Tressel. I wanted Munchkin together with Jude, and I wanted both of them as far out of harm’s way as possible.

As I watched, the last of the fighter flecks merged with
Ike
’s bigger speck. A frown flickered across my face. For a brief window, now, Mousetrap would be a little exposed, until
Ike
’s replacement emerged from its jump and arrived on station. Munchkin said, “Maybe you’re right.”

As I watched the
Eisenhower
float against the black fabric of space, something flickered. So fast that I couldn’t be sure I had seen the red streak appear, it began from nowhere and ended at the speck that was the
Eisenhower
.

The fleck bloomed into a white flash, then the flash faded to blackness, leaving behind an expanding sprinkle of tiny light points.

I grabbed Munchkin’s arm, and dragged her as I yanked us along the line, back to the airlock hatch that could get us back inside, sheltered from vacuum.

She said, “What happened to the
Ike
?”

My earpiece squealed as Mousetrap called itself to General Quarters. I pulled faster toward the airlock. “Viper, probably. Hurry up.”

Without a sound in the vacuum of space, the
Eisenhower
had exploded into a halo of bits and pieces and human beings. Jimmy Wethers, his kid bosun on deck with the little whistle, all gone. There hadn’t been much we could do to prevent this, that we hadn’t done, I supposed. Nobody had ever actually seen a Viper. Mankind had only experienced one. Which had left me with two organic prosthetic fingers, and Earth defenseless. Viper was just a U.N. phonetic designator for a presumed velocity weapon that substituted size for speed. Before the Spooks knew about Cavorite, they estimated that Vipers traveled at .5 light speed, almost one hundred thousand miles per second, and academics said the Spooks were nuts. Actually, the Spooks estimated low. Current best guess was Vipers flashed in at one hundred sixty thousand miles per second. So a Viper could be small, the Spooks estimated no bigger than a refrigerator, if it was made of dense enough material, yet pack a punch. That meant that a Viper could also loiter, undetectable in the vastness of space, waiting for a Football to send a signal, then accelerate to a target close by. A fire-and-forget homing mine. The Spooks suspected that Vipers and Footballs might have the Slug equivalent of delayed action fusing. The airlock was twenty yards away, now. I glanced over my shoulder. Munchkin was five feet behind my boots, pulling like an Olympic swimmer in armor. Forty yards behind her came the Engineer crew. Maybe the Viper that had just destroyed the
Eisenhower
was just a long-forgotten booby trap, scattered out here by the Slugs for nuisance value, thousands of years ago. They could be perverse little worms. In that case, we weren’t facing an impending assault. This was a tragedy, a disaster, but not a crushing blow.

I was five yards from the airlock when I glanced up at the
Nimitz
, floating against the glowing orange disc of Leonidas. All around the
Nimitz
flashes sparkled.

Munchkin said, “Jason,
Nimitz
’ fighters are engaging ship-to-ship!”

So much for an isolated nuisance. Chemical-fueled Starfires weren’t fast enough to engage Vipers. Probably Scorpions weren’t either, and
Nimitz
hadn’t even been refitted with Scorpions yet. The black dot that was the
Nimitz
popped into a bright, white disc. I looked toward Mousetrap’s north pole, as a Firewitch popped over the horizon, and skimmed toward us like a spinning spider, mag rifles ablaze. Mousetrap’s skin ahead of me erupted, in a volcano of shattered, black iron. I spun off into space, clutching a tether that was no longer attached to anything but me.

I called into my helmet mike, “Munchkin?”

FORTY-NINE

I SPUN, feet over head, and drifted in silence above Mousetrap’s enormity. I was far enough away now that I could see its curvature, and the hummocks and craters of its slowly rotating surface. The fifty-foot by one-hundred-foot solar panels of Mousetrap’s power array lay belþ€…ow me, already as small as a game of dominoes. I could make out the gash where the airlock, and the plaque pedestal, had been. I couldn’t see people, much less determine whether Munchkin and the engineers were dead or alive. I could see two other scars, hundreds of yards from the one that had severed me from Mousetrap, where other Slug rounds had torn additional rents in Mousetrap’s skin. It appeared the Slugs, as Howard had guessed, intended to take over our handiwork, not just blow it into rutabagas. I called Munchkin once more, and got silence back. I twisted as I floated, but couldn’t see her. I switched to command net and heard nothing, though my display showed my radio was in the green. My armor was equipped with a transponder that could be homed on, if anybody had the time or inclination to search for it, but otherwise I was tumbling off into nothing, my arms and legs splayed as helplessly as a gingerbread man’s.

Yes, Eternads can imitate a spacesuit. They’re body armor, but they’re pressure tight against chemical, biological, and radiological agents. They’re pressure tight, but they aren’t much better at resisting the pressure differential between their inner, atmospheric pressure and real vacuum than a party balloon. They generate heat that will keep a GI comfortable in the Antarctic winter, but in the two-hundred-below shade of space, they popsicle their wearer in an hour or so. They generate and regenerate breathable oxygen, but their joints will brittleize, and fracture, so their wearer will boil in his own blood before he runs out of air.

I made sure my transponder was blipping, cranked up my headlight and set it to flash, cranked down my heat as low as me and the suit’s joints could stand, and started repeating a distress call, switching from frequency to frequency. I didn’t care whether a fighter jock, an intercomming supply clerk, or a rescue vessel heard me, just so somebody did.

But it seemed everybody had their hands full.

Only one anti-ship turret on Mousetrap was operational, and it spun and arrowed out streams of depleted uranium cannon rounds. Another Firewitch, mag rail rifles outstretched like tentacles on a blue-black squid, swooped across Mousetrap’s surface a hundred yards high, at probably a leisurely thousand miles per hour, firing glowing, purple Heavy rounds.

Before I could see whether the turret gunners hit the Firewitch, I rotated away from that view, and faced space. A Starfire augured toward Mousetrap, jinking left, right, up, down as it bore down on the Firewitch. And on me.

In the holos, the shot-down ace dangling in his parachute can tug his shroud lines, and maneuver. Thrashing my arms and legs against vacuum did nothing but make me spin worse, and pant harder. In space, a body—mine—remains in motion until and unless acted on by an outside force. Also, lack of apparent weight doesn’t equate to lack of mass. If the outside force that acts on the body in motion is a forty-ton spacecraft traveling six thousand miles per hour, the effect is about like getting hit by a speeding train. Except the splat sound dies in vacuum.

I switched to fighter jock frequency and screamed into my mike.

The Starfire jinked, released a missile, and peeled off high right. The missile lit, corkscrewed past me, and penetrated the Firewitch amidships.

The Slug monstrosity sailed on, ƒ€€d pthen, a mile or five beyond me and Mousetrap, it lurched, then it flew apart in all directions.

I hooted, then punched vacuum, which made no sense considering my circumstances. Dogfights raged all around me, and the Starfires were faring better than the antiques we fielded ship to ship against the Slugs years before. But there were more Firewitches than last time. Lots more. Most of the Starfires that barreled and swooped past me bore the red and yellow MCC-2 fuselage flash of the
Nimitz
. The
Farragut
was supposed to be out there somewhere, and she could recover
Nimitz
’