Orphan's Triumph

Abe and onto another cruiser.”

“Once you stabilize the battle.”

“Now. Both halves of the Abe are getting sucked into the jump.”

I swallowed again. A cruiser, or, theoretically, a modified Scorpion, dove into a jump, dodged other debris, slingshot past the ultradwarf star mass core, then powered safely out the other side in new, folded space, light- years away.

An unpowered cruiser, or a piece of a cruiser, that got sucked in didn’t power out. It would simply crush in upon itself, until it became part of an ultradwarf star mass smaller than a golf ball.

“Can’t somebody come take us all off?”

“They’re busy. Whether we all get off the Abe’s unimportant. But that Scorpion back there with you’s got to find a home on another cruiser. So a pilot can fly it through the jump and deliver the bomb.”

“You said there was a pilot alive back here, somewhere.”

“I said-never mind. Who’ve you seen alive back there?”

I shrugged, to no apparent purpose. “ Me. Jeeb. I can’t get to the impeller rooms.”

Eddie paused, and I heard his breath through the speaker. “You ever fly a Scorpion, Jason?”

“Hell, no!” I paused. “Actually, kind of.”

“It’s a very forgiving ship. All you gotta do is ease it off the rail and slide it over to a cruiser. Then somebody can talk you through maneuver and docking.”

“Can’t they talk me through it first?”

“Jason, we have four cruisers left healthy enough to receive that Scorpion. Pretty soon, we may have none.”

Boom.

The back half of the Abe shuddered so hard that Jeeb wobbled, perched above the flatscreen.

Waiting here for the fleet to ride to the rescue was no option.

“Crap!”

“Now what?”

“Eddie, I have to cross a hundred feet of vacuum to get from the bay hatch into the Scorpion.”

Eddie’s breath hissed out again.

Thumps and shudders shook the deck every few seconds now. The Slugs could be potshotting the Abe’s carcass, or the hull could just be breaking up.

Above the flatscreen, Jeeb swiveled his head at every thump and whined, like he wished he could hide himself in a suit of armor.

I leaned my head on my palm, with my elbow on the shelf in front of the screen. “Okay. I have an idea.”

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.