Orphan's Triumph

SEVENTY-TWO

THE INFANTRY ARMORY aboard the Abe hadn’t been stripped just because she was carrying no infantry this trip. A half-dozen Eternad infantry armor suits hung from racks behind a repair and refit bench. With the ship’s rotation now virtually stopped, the weightless suits’ legs bounced every time a new impact shuddered the ship’s dying carcass, like a robot chorus line. Eternads are made airtight and oxygen-generating principally to protect a GI from chemical and biological agents, but as a field-expedient space suit, they had worked for me in the past.

The second suit I tried on fit well enough that it should have been able to hold pressure once buttoned up. In Eternads, I could cross the open-to-space bay deck, clamber into the Scorpion’s cockpit, close it, and pressure the ship up.

The trouble was that the hatch that separated the destroyed bay’s vacuum from the shirtsleeve comfort in which I then resided wasn’t an airlock. Once I depressurized the flight deck, so I could open the hatch that led into Bay One, I would have no refuge to return to. If the Scorpion had been damaged, it would become nothing more than the most streamlined retired veteran’s coffin in history.

Ten minutes later, I stood at the Bay One hatch, listening as all of the flight deck’s air hissed through a bleed valve into vacuum while my heart pounded so hard that I heard it above the hiss. So far, I had ascertained that the suit had been down checked because its radios didn’t work. That did not, of course, mean that it hadn’t also been down checked for lack of pressure integrity, in which case I would blessedly pass into unconsciousness before I decompressed to death.

An hour ago, the human fleet had stood poised to launch the two Scorpions through the jump into which this derelict was now falling. The scorpions would drop a couple of bombs, and mankind would declare victory, without a single additional human casualty. We might still salvage victory, if I could limp this Scorpion to a pilot aboard another ship. But at best victory would come at a previously unimagined price.

The Slugs approached war with the blunt simplicity of a caveman with a club. Somehow all of our collective cleverness was never enough to anticipate what the Slugs, in their alienness, would do. I suppose we shocked the hell out of the Slugs just as often. But mankind had, until now, muddled through by the skin of its teeth and the individual initiative and sacrifice of our disparate, imperfect parts.

The pressure around me equalized with the pressure of the rest of this universe, which was none. The hatch status light flashed amber, its chime soundless in the vacuum I had created.

I undogged the hatch, and Jeeb stepped through with me.

If the Abe had been rotating, Jeeb and I would have been spun off into space, where gravity would still, eventually, tumble us to be compressed into the insertion point’s core. Instead, I was able to creep across the deck, grasping the tie-down loops spaced across the plating, while Jeeb clung to my back with all six locomotors, like a treed cat. If there is a benefit to weightlessness, it is that even though it’s the ultimate form of falling, you don’t feel like you’re falling, but rather like you’re floating in a pool.

I hand-over-handed up the launch-rail ladder, stopping and manually releasing the clamps that locked the Scorpion to the rail. I wedged myself into the pilot’s couch, which was designed to fit a slim kid in a G-suit, not a gorilla-sized armored infantryman, and wriggled into the shoulder harness. Then I found the canopy closure lever, held my breath, and slid it forward.

Nothing moved.

My heart, which was already rattling at the red line, skipped.

Eternads could generate oxygen for a long time and would keep their wearer warm as long as his movements recharged their batteries, but this was not good. Finally, I looked at the instrument panel. Red flashing letters read “Check Harness,” just like the seat-belt light on a family Electro.

Ord’s pistol in its shoulder holster, which I had reflexively strapped onto the Eternads somewhere along the way, bulged, so the harness clasp hadn’t latched.

With gloved, shaking fingers I forced the clasp shut. The red light winked off.

The canopy sighed closed, and the cockpit pressured up and warmed within sixty seconds. I replaced the armor helmet with the pilot’s helmet clipped alongside the head-rest and dialed in the tactical net. “This is Scorpion…” I read the nose number. “Sierra Bravo One.”

After two heartbeats, a Zoomie’s voice crackled back. “Roger, Silver Bullet One. Are you good to launch?”

“I’ve never done that part. Which ship am I bound for?”

Silence.

“Okay. Big John’s still got one bay operable.”

A chill settled in my stomach. “That’s it? We’re down to one cruiser?”

“We’re stalemated with the Slug fleet, but we’ve taken some damage, fleetwide.”

My correspondent displayed a knack for understatement.

“What do I do, then?”

“Wait one, Silver Bullet.”

Jeeb perched on the seat alongside me, his optics dilated wide. My optics were probably as wide as saucers, too.

A different voice said, “Okay, Silver Bullet, look to your upper right.”

“There’s a box.” My heart skipped yet again. “There was no box last time!”

“That’s the ’Puter that guides the ship through the jump. Don’t touch it!”

I dropped both hands in my lap. “Okay. Not touching.”

“Drop your right hand alongside the pilot’s couch. You should find a lever about the size and shape of a banana.”

“Got it.”

“Don’t move it!”

I jerked my hand away like I had been scalded.

“That’s the throttle. Look forward, out the canopy windscreen.”

Ahead of me I saw nothing. The insertion point was so close now that light couldn’t escape it.

But beyond the ruined tin of the launch-bay bulkheads, a white teardrop hung motionless in space. The other Scorpion’s stinger rear doors were clamshelled open.

I said, “Is that my guide?”

“We’re making this up as we go, Silver Bullet. We need you to ease the ship up the rail, then just drift. The ship ahead of you will back up to you, then pinch your stinger pod with its clamshells. That ship will drag you into the bay on the John Paul Jones.”

“What do I do?”

“Go along for the ride. Just don’t mishandle the throttle. You’ll take off like a goosed cheetah.”

I licked sweat off my upper lip. “Do I need to do anything with my stinger pod first?”

“No! The pod controls are inside the weapons console. So’s the principal munition deployment control. Put the weapons console on your list of things not to touch.”

I drew a breath. “Okay. Do I pull the banana lever now?”

“Like you were petting a cobra. You can’t be too gentle.”

I wrapped my fingers around the throttle and grasped it tight.

The Scorpion lurched and leapt off the rails.

“Lay off!”

Around me, ships darted, spun, and exploded in silence. My mere touch on the throttle had shot me into the furball.

One ship slid close to me, its stinger clamshell doors open.

In my ear a feminine voice cooed, “Come to momma…”

The pilot slid her Scorpion closer, oblivious to the battle around us.

Screee.

Metal scraped ceramic as the inside of my tow truck’s clamshell doors clamped my Scorpion’s stinger skin.

“Fuck!” Not so feminine.

I gulped. “What fuck?”

“Relax. I dinged your impeller lift slats. Doesn’t affect you.”

For the next ten minutes, my tow truck’s pilot tiptoed us, ignored and as tiny as watermelon seeds clamped back-to-back, through the vast dogfight.

Ahead, Big John grew as we approached. As huge and white as an iceberg, she maneuvered amid the twine ball of purple tracer hosing from her own surface turrets, as well as from the swarm of her defending Scorpions.

Firewitches dove on her, singly and in pairs, head-on, at her flanks, and from aft.

We closed in on the black rectangle that marked the open bay in Big John’s slowly rotating hull, and her turrets spat a protective steel tunnel around us.

Clang.

The attending Scorpion detached as Silver Bullet and I floated into the open bay as slowly as a man walks. In the transparent bubble on the bay wall, the bay boss bent over his control panel. Alongside him a pilot in coveralls, helmet in the crook of his arm, waited to take Silver Bullet back out and through the jump.

I sat back and sighed to Jeeb, “Whew!”

I punched up the aft screen to glimpse my tow truck’s departure.

The feminine voice purred in my ear as the Scorpion rotated back toward the fight. “Curbside delivery, Silver Bullet. You can leave the rest of the driving to a profess-”

The Scorpion exploded in the instant that the purple flash of a Slug round flickered.

Boom.

I pitched forward against my shoulder straps as my Scorpion struck the bay’s back wall and tumbled.

A male voice. “Silver Bullet! Get the hell out of there!”

“How do I-”

“Now!”

Ahead, the wall disappeared as the tumbling Scorpion pointed out toward the black rectangle of space.

I yanked the banana throttle. I blinked, saw blackness ahead, and slammed the throttle closed. The little nudge I had given the Scorpion felt like no motion whatever inside the ship’s gravity cocoon. I looked around to see what happened.

There was nothing there.

The male voice said, “Silver Bullet!”

“Yeah. What happened?”

“You did well to get the ship out of the bay.” The voice turned flat. “You may as well switch on the jump-guidance box.”

“Huh?” I couldn’t see a thing. It finally dawned on me that this was because I was hurtling into a black hole.

“You’ve traveled fifty thousand miles and counting. A Scorpion’s impeller’s not strong enough to back you out now.”

“I’m gonna die?”

Pause.

“Switch on the box. Let it try to guide you through the jump and out the other side.”

“Then what?”

“Then you’re on your own. In a few seconds radio waves won’t be able to reach-”