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
“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
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.
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.
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.
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-”
SEVENTY-THREE
I’VE JUMPED WITHIN THE GRAVITY COCOON of a captured Slug Firewitch, which hurt. I’ve jumped within the cocoons of a half-dozen different cruisers, which was always a nonevent. I don’t recommend jumping inside the cocoon of one of the only two Scorpions modified to jump a Temporal Fabric Insertion Point, unless you enjoy nosebleeds, blood in your urine, a head that feels like it’s been in a punch press, and nausea.
On the other hand, the jump itself is over before you can blink.
If the Pseudocephalopod had mined the backside of Its front door like it had the front, I should have been dead, or at least attracting attention the way the fleet had.
But the way things were supposed to work, the Silver Bullet Scorpion was supposed to be too unexpected and too undetectably small to attract attention.
I had the throttle wide open-why not? Never slow down, something might be gaining on you. The Scorpion flashed through the emptiness of new space at thousands of miles per second. Flying a Scorpion in atmosphere, as I had with Jude, was not only slower, and therefore easier, it provided a frame of reference. I didn’t know where I had been, or where I was going. However, I was making great time.
Theoretically, I could turn this crate around, jump back through the T-FIP, and let the fleet figure out how to deliver the bomb that filled the bay behind me. But there was no way of knowing whether the jump-guidance box worked for a return trip, or how to work it, with no one to talk me through things. I didn’t know how many, if any,
