So It Begins (38 page)

  With one last look around, Patterson scurried up the ladder. “Push it!” he yelled, even before clearing the opening. Donovich held it for just a moment before engaging. The inner hatch closed with a thump, its indicators switching to a steady-red.

  The pod-bay was a cramped toroid shape; its empty ordnance racks curved along the surface of the bay’s wall. At some point in time, the powers-that-be decided this would be a good place to mount the ship’s automated point-defense cannons. So, protruding from both the ceiling and floor there were the butt ends of the turrets, with brightly colored warning labels and yellow and black cross-hatching around each of the weapons’ ammunition feeds. But since the
Garryowen
was now out of the fight and heading home—as per operational doctrine—her ammunition stores were off-loaded and would be used as a reserve for the remaining ships in the squadron.
We’re not paid to bring it home with us,
thought Donovich.

  “I don’t know how much time it’s going to give us,” said Donovich, “So I’ll prep the pod. Here’s your quarter-of-a-million-dollar toy.” He handed the cylinder to Patterson in exchange for the utility bag. “Remember, it comes out of your pay.”

  Patterson just smiled and nodded. Carefully, he placed the cylinder on the deck before taking off and opening the tool pack. “Chief, lock the CM hatch; we don’t want Koenig buzzin’ around,” said Patterson.

  “No problem.”

  Patterson flipped over the black cylinder. Its yellow stencil markings indicated that it was a “MK 42 SLD,” along with a series of inventory tracking and ID numbers. With a practiced hand, he removed the electronic decoy’s baseplate and unfastened its separator charge; he looked it over, and then said a quick prayer before continuing.

  With a click, Donovich inserted the failsafe pin into the pod’s docking port control panel—this physically locked the port’s docking clamps, while electronically overriding the pod’s launch program—the T-handled pin had the traditional foot-long “Removed Before Flight” ribbon dangling from it.

  According to the manual, “. . . if a pod were to be launched while a ship was under drive; upon impact with the drive field, the pod would atomize, the resulting energy flux would cause the drive field to collapse and drop the ship out of hyperspace, not unlike a conventional Return Transition.” Donovich’s only problem with this answer was simple, “To date no one has tried it,” and he wasn’t about to be the one in the history books to find out.

  “Damn right,” he said. Reaching back, he grabbed the utility bag and pushed it into the causeway.

  “You set?” ask Donovich, as he crawled out a few minutes later.

  “Just about, if you’d give me a hand,” Patterson responded, as he held the charge up against the framework for the gun’s autoloaders.

  “Right.” Donovich held the charge in place while Patterson zip-tied it down. “What’s going to happen when this thing goes off?”

  Patterson screw-connected a spool of wire to the charge. “It’ll just pop, and hopefully launch the peach can into the Can with our friend sittin’ on it,” he said. “It’s a gas separator charge, works just like a car airbag. You can let go.”

  “Thanks.” Donovich moved off to ready the other pod; Patterson followed behind, playing out the wires.

  With the starboard pod now locked down and hatches opened, Patterson ran his wires up into it; then, with the AeroCom equivalent of a roll of duct tape, he secured and camouflaged the wires to the deck. “Right, get ’n,” he said.

  Donovich got down on his hands and knees and backed into the darkened pod; he lay on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, just behind the hatch in the causeway; Patterson squatted down and handed him a circuit tester to which he had connected the wires from the charge.

  “You know how this works,” stated Patterson. “Key the power on, then hold,” he said, indicating the recessed red test button.

  Donovich just nodded. “See you afterward.”

  “Yep,” replied Patterson; he then stood up and walked over to the charge, placing a can of peaches into the clamps that normally held the decoy secure. He watched as Donovich pulled his pod’s access hatch closed on the wires.

  The sight of Patterson disappearing down the ladder into the SM filled Donovich with a sense of abandonment; as an engineer, being physically alone for long periods on shift was business as usual, but he always knew there was someone else on the other end of the comm to come to his aid. This time, it was just him and the universe; waiting in the dark, while looking through a small porthole window into the lit pod-bay, half hoping that the damn creature didn’t show up.

  Time passed. How long, it was hard to say; Donovich just kept looking through the porthole at the open gap of the SM’s two-meter hatchway. From time to time, phantoms would startle him, as his mind turned passing shadows and random sounds from the service module into the approach of the unknown.

  There comes a point when fatigue wins out over fear, and the need to rest becomes all important; Donovich was already there. The urge to yawn kept forcing him to lower or angle his head away from the porthole for fear of fogging it up. “Damnit,” he whispered, as he wiped his eyes; looking back into the pod-bay his mind said,
something is out there
. His breathing shallowed as his fear grew more tangible. There it was, slowly crawling around the edge of the hatchway. They had thought that it would try another diversion; but no, stealth was its new game plan.

  Once in the bay, it stopped. It just stood there, clinging against the curvature of the wall; slowly, it started moving with spider-like locomotion toward the port pod. It looked just like the little one he had found in the DFC unit, but if it was, it had grown to almost a foot across. It stopped at the edge of the pod’s causeway, its hotdog-like head flexed, as if it was looking around; it seemed to be contemplating their trap. With surprising speed it darted off into the pod.

 
Just like an ungrateful monster
. . . thought Donovich as he slowly opened his hatch; he was trying desperately to be quiet as he crawled out on his elbows and knees, the circuit tester still in his hand. Now clear and standing, he could see past the loader’s framework into the pod. There was no sign of the creature; hopefully it was still under the seats trying to dig out the cans.

   He needed to keep his eyes on the pod, but he also had to be careful where he walked; now under gravity he could easily fall through the SM’s open hatchway. He briefly looked down to check his position. All was quiet in the SM. Patterson wasn’t in sight.

  Donovich was just coming around the loader when the creature came back up into view; he froze at the thought of rushing the pod, and then he remembered that he hadn’t keyed on the circuit tester. Without looking he brought his other hand to the box and turned the key.

  The beastie spun and leapt down the short length of the causeway at him. There was a boom as the gas charge went off, knocking Donovich aside. As he sat there, he realized that his thumb was firmly pressing down on the test button.

  Dropping the box, he scrambled to the hatch. The beastie wasn’t in the causeway. With everything he had left, he lifted the hatch into place. It stopped just short of closing. The beastie’s six pointy, blue-gray legs popped from around the edge of the hatch.

  “Shit!”

  He suddenly found the adrenalin-powered strength to push. His shoulder drove into the hatch. Without forethought of the consequences, he smashed his fist down at the nearest leg. The hatch snapped shut and locked as his hand connected. The beastie had pulled back.

   Breathing hard, Donovich just knelt there, both hands needlessly pushing on the hatch. Carefully, he looked through the porthole; the beastie just sat there, all bunched up, as he had seen before. Its hotdog head slowly flexed.

  “Donovich!” Patterson shouted, as he frantically climbed into the pod-bay; he stopped when Donovich turned and looked at him. Carefully, Patterson walked over and knelt down next to him; he reassuringly put a hand on Donovich’s shoulder, before looking through the porthole.

  “I didn’t get the pod’s hatch closed, just the bay’s.” said Donovich, concern and exhaustion coloring his voice, as he gestured over his shoulder.

  Patterson turned to him, “It’s okay, Chief.” he said calmly, “I’ll deal with it. It’s almost over, but you need to go tell Ware what’s happenin’.” He half-pulled Donovich to his feet. The Chief resisted. All he wanted to do was close his eyes and pretend none of this had happened.

  “It’s got to be you, Chief, you’re the guy in charge,” Patterson insisted, as he unlocked the CM’s gangway hatch; it opened with the usual lights and sound. Sluggishly, Donovich nodded and started up the ladder.

  Patterson returned to the pod. The beastie—as the Chief called it—was stretched out over the porthole. “Dear God!” he said. The creature’s legs, and in fact all of its different body parts, weren’t physically connected. They just seemed to stay in place like some stylized, computer-generated cartoon character.

  Patterson leaned back and eyed the docking port’s emergency pod jettison controls. Calmly, he reached up and removed the failsafe pin. The panel lit up as a warning klaxon sounded that the pod’s inner hatch was still open. He lifted the cover over the manual override switch and threw it. With his hand on the jettison pull bar, he looked back through the porthole.

  The creature had pulled back; its eyeless, cylinder-like head was staring back at him. Patterson leaned into the porthole “You’re not fuckin’ me over again,” he said as a little smile grew across his face, “You don’t exist,” he whispered . . . .

THE GLASS BOX

Bud Sparhawk

There were twenty missiles streaking to impact the planet’s surface and I was the only passenger, but not for long.

  When the sabot blew away, I flew off with the rest of the debris as the super-dense ballistic payload continued screaming toward a Shardie location over the horizon. It carried a single altitude-sensing charge in its tail that would accelerate the payload to strike at a thousand kps. At that hypervelocity the shock wave and impact would blast a crater five kilometers across and send dirt, rock, and dust into the stratosphere.

  Twenty of these hitting the planet would be my diversion.

  The wind whipped me as I dropped deeper into the atmosphere. Tendrils of spidersilk deployed behind me, threads with hundreds of microparachutes along their length, each one exerting miniscule drag, stealing momentum from my descent, then blowing away to swiftly dissolve in the air.

  The tendrils would be indistinguishable from the thousands of smaller, broken fragments from the sabot. I just hoped that my presence was indistinguishable.

  I skimmed trees and hills, stirring trails of dust as I moved at better than ten meters per second through the last portion of my drop. When the last of the threads tore away I still carried eight mps, slow enough to give me a chance of survival on impact.

  I tucked for the bounce and roll, hoping that I’d hit where nothing would stop me before all my potential energy was dissipated. Desert sand would be nice, water better, but I’d take an open field if it came to that.

  Just no damn forests.

  The weak and fading signal had come unexpectedly from a colony world abandoned to the Shardies six months before. It was a short burst that might have been missed if fleet hadn’t had a SIGINT unit probing the Shardies’ signals.

  “We tried to get away, but the things caught us,” the high-pitched voice had cried. “I’m hiding. Please help me.”

  Fleet was conflicted. It was not impossible that some group might have been missed during the evacuation. Campers, spelunkers, or others could have been isolated when the order was sent. How long had it taken to move the twenty thousand off the planet—two weeks, eighteen days? They’d packed the colonists into any ship they could find. Most vessels barely had enough oxygen to sustain the refugees. The evacuation was chaotic, disorganized, and messy. They tried to get everyone, but still, some might have been missed.