Borders of Infinity

'Eloquently, with your eyebrows, a while ago. And while I'm inclined to agree with you, have you noticed yet how closely the remaining prisoners keep watching me? Have you ever watched a cat sneaking up on a horned hopper?'

Tung stirred uneasily, eyes taking in the phenomenon Miles described.

'I don't fancy gunning down the last thousand in order to get my shuttle into the air.'

'Skewed as we are, they might not realize there were no more shuttles coming till after you were in the air.'

'So we just leave them standing there, waiting for us?' The sheep look up, but are not fed . . .

'Right.'

'You like that option, Ky?'

'Makes me want to puke, but—consider the 9,000 others. And the Dendarii fleet. The idea of dropping them all down the rat hole in a pre-doomed effort to pack up all these—miserable sinners of yours, makes me want to puke a lot more. Nine-tenths of a loaf is much better than none.'

'Point taken. Let us go on to option two, please. The flight out of orbit is calculated on the speed of the slowest ship, which is … ?'

'The freighters.'

'And the Triumph remains the swiftest?'

'Betcher ass.' Tung had captained the Triumph once.

'And the best armored.'

'Ya. So?' Tung saw perfectly well where he was being driven. His obtuseness was but a form of oblique balking.

'So. The first seven shuttles up on the last wave lock onto the troop freighters and boost on schedule. We call back five of the Triumph 's fighter pilots and dump and destroy their craft. One's damaged already, right? The last five of these drop shuttles clamp to the Triumph in their place, protected from the now-arriving fire of the Cetagandan ships by the Triumph's full shielding. Pack the prisoners into the Triumph's corridors, lock shuttle hatches, boost like hell.'

'The added mass of a thousand people—'

'Would be less than that of a couple of the drop shuttles. Dump and blow them too, if you have to, to fit the mass/acceleration window.'

'—would overload life support—'

'The emergency oxygen will take us to the wormhole jump point. After Jump the prisoners can be distributed among the other ships at our leisure.'

Tung's voice grew anguished. 'Those combat drop shuttles are brand new. And my fighters—five of them—do you realize how hard it will be to recoup the funds to replace 'em? It comes to—'

'I asked you to calculate the time, Ky, not the price tag,' said Miles through his teeth. He added more quietly, 'I'll tack them on to our bill for services rendered.'

'You ever hear the term cost overrun, boy? You will. . . .' Tung switched his attention back to his headset, itself but an extension of the tactics room aboard the Triumph. Calculations were made, new orders entered and executed.

'It flies,' sighed Tung. 'Buys a damned expensive fifteen minutes. If nothing else goes wrong . . .' he trailed off in a frustrated mumble, as impatient as Miles himself with his inability to be three places at once.

'There comes my shuttle back,' Tung noted aloud. He glanced at Miles, plainly unwilling to leave his admiral to his own devices, as plainly itching to be out of the acid rain and dark and mud and closer to the nerve center of operations.

'Get gone,' said Miles. 'You can't ride up with me anyway, it's against procedure.'

'Procedure, hah,' said Tung blackly.

With the lift-off of the third wave, there were barely 2,000 prisoners left on the ground. Things were thinning out, winding down; the armored combat patrols were falling back now from their penetration of the surrounding Cetagandan installations, back toward their assigned shuttle landing sites. A dangerous turning of the tide, should some surviving Cetagandan officer recover enough organization to harry their retreat.

'See you aboard the Triumph,' Tung emphasized. He paused to brace Lieutenant Murka, out of Miles's earshot. Miles grinned in sympathy for the overworked lieutenant, in no doubt about the orders Tung was now laying on him. If Murka didn't come back with Miles in tow, he'd probably be wisest not to come back at all.

Nothing left now but a little last waiting. Hurry up and wait. Waiting, Miles realized, was very bad for him. It allowed his self-generated adrenalin to wear off, allowed him to feel how tired and hurt he really was. The illuminating flares were dying to a red glow.

There was really very little time between the fading of the labored thunder of the last third wave shuttle to depart, and the screaming whine of the first fourth-wave shuttle plunging back. Alas that this had more to do with being skewed than being swift. The Marilacans still waited in their rat bar blocks, discipline still holding. Of course, nobody'd told them about the little problem in timing they faced. But the nervous Dendarii patrols, chivvying them up the ramps, kept things moving at a pace to Miles's taste. Rear guard was never a popular position to draw, even among the lunatic fringe who defaced their weapons with notches and giggled among themselves while speculating upon newer and more grotesque methods of blowing away their enemies.

Miles saw the semi-conscious Suegar carried up the ramp first. Suegar would actually reach the Triumph's sickbay faster in his company, Miles calculated, on this direct flight, than had he been sent on an earlier shuttle to one of the troop freighters and had to await a safe moment to transfer.

The arena they were leaving had grown silent and dark, sodden and sad, ghostly. / will break the doors of hell, and bring up the dead . . . there was something not quite right about the half- remembered quote. No matter.

This shuttle's armored patrol, the last, drew back out of the fog and darkness, electronically whistled in like a pack of sheepdogs by their master Murka, who stood at the foot of the ramp as liaison between the ground patrol and the shuttle pilot, who was expressing her anxiety to be gone with little whining revs on the engines.

Then from the darkness—plasma fire, sizzling through the rain-sodden, saturated air. Some Cetagandan hero—officer, troop, tech, who knew?—had crawled up out of the rubble and found a weapon– and an enemy to fire it at. Splintered afterimages, red and green, danced in Miles's eyes. A Dendarii patroller rolled out of the dark, a glowing line across the back of his armor smoking and sparking until quenched in the black mud. His armor legs seized up, and he lay wriggling like a frantic fish in an effort to peel out of it. A second plasma burst, ill-aimed, spent itself turning a few kilometers of fog and rain to superheated steam on a straight line to some unknown infinity.

Just what they needed, to be pinned down by sniper fire now. . . . A pair of Dendarii rear guards started back into the fog. An excited prisoner—ye gods, it was Pitt's lieutenant again—grabbed up the armor-paralyzed soldier's weapon and made to join them.

'No! Come back later and fight on your own time, you jerk!' Miles sloshed toward Murka. 'Fall back, load up, get in the air! Don't stop to fight! No time!'

Some of the last of the prisoners had fallen flat to the ground, burrowing like mudpuppies, a sound sensible reflex in any other context. Miles dashed among them, slapping rumps. 'Get aboard, up the ramp, go, go, go!' Beatrice popped up out of the mud and mimicked him, shakily driving her fellows before her.

Miles skidded to a stop beside his fallen Dendarii and snapped the armor clamps open left-handed. The soldier kicked off his fatal carapace, rolled to his feet, and limped for the safety of the shuttle. Miles ran close behind him.

Murka and one patrolman waited at the foot of the ramp.

'Get ready to pull in the ramp and lift on my mark,' Murka began to the shuttle pilot. 'R—' his words were lost in an explosive pop as the plasma beam sliced across his neck. Miles could feel the searing heat from it pass centimeters above his head as he stood next to his lieutenant. Murka's body crumpled.