back-to-back jumps this Scorpion could withstand. I didn’t know whether the fleet, if there was anything left of it, could make use of this ship if I returned it.
I clipped out of my harness, stripped out of the Eternads to make elbow room, then bent over the controls, searching for whatever a Scorpion carried that corresponded to the Navex in a rental car. I rooted around behind the pilot’s couch, under the second couch where Jeeb perched, and in the stores locker, for water and survival ration packs.
A day later, I woke to Jeeb’s whistle. He stood tiptoed on all six locomotors while his optics bulged forward, toward the windscreen.
I looked up and saw a pale yellow star, growing visibly brighter as we plunged toward it.
Twenty-three hours later, the star looked as bright as Sol did from Mars, and a dark shape the size of two poppy seeds, one large and one small, became visible with the Scorpion’s forward optics, silhouetted as it inched across the star’s disk.
Hair rose on my neck.
It could be nothing. Or it could be the end of a journey that had begun for me as a civilian when the first Slug Projectile struck Earth in 2037 and that was now ending for me as a civilian four decades later.
After another twenty hours, the Scorpion’s ranging optics measured the planet as ninety-six percent the size of Earth. Its equatorial mean temperature was fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, but the planet was cold enough at its poles to sport white polar ice caps. Its rotational period was twenty-four point four hours. North and south of the poles, blue ocean glistened beneath white cloud swirls. The continent that girdled the planet at the equator showed from space grass-green.
It could be just another Earthlike planet. They were rare enough, but not every one was a guaranteed Slug nest.
Except that the satellite that orbited the planet, in an orbit barely higher than the planet’s exospheric atmospheric shreds, was red, smooth, and familiar.
I stared for thirty minutes as the Scorpion shortened the distance between me, the planet, and the transplanted Red Moon.
The planet’s continent, eight thousand miles long, stretched four thousand miles from the planet’s arctic to antarctic circles. The Scorpion’s spectrometer said the whole thing, eight thousand miles long, four thousand miles wide, and at least a half mile deep, was all organic compounds.
I shuddered. It was no continent. It was a living thing. It was the unseen enemy I had fought against all of my adult life.
But more than frightened, I felt cheated. Howard’s Spooks had predicted that the organism at its center would look like this. But somehow I expected some Moby Dick-sized Slug in a cape, slouched on a throne. Something that I could stab through its black heart with a fixed bayonet. Or at least something that I could finally ask, “Why?”
I didn’t know what plans lay within the Pseudocephalopod’s vast mind, now that It possessed the Red Moon. But I knew what mankind had in mind for the Pseudo-cephalopod. I whispered, as though It could hear me, “Hello after all these years, you bastard.”
I raised the red-striped, hinged lid on the Scorpion’s weapons console.
SEVENTY-FOUR
I HAD STUDIED THE SCORPION’S modified weapons console for hours on the flight in. The normal controls to deploy weapons rearward, from the stinger pod, remained unchanged but were useless with no weapons in the pod.
Three simple switches had been added to deploy the Silver Bullet munition. The first was a red one-finger toggle that armed the munition and opened the rear hatch. The second toggle, labeled “Deploy,” ejected the weapon. The third was a removable wedge, shaped like a grip exerciser or an oversized spring clothespin, labeled “Abort.”
I flicked the first switch and armed the munition. Behind me, hydraulics whined as the bay opened and exposed the bomb cluster.
Jeeb whistled, and in the same moment the “threat” buzzer sounded. Up from the planet’s surface, a half- dozen Firewitches hurtled toward me, growing from gnat-size to bird-size in a breath. The threat ’Puter crackled. “Defensive armament unavailable.” The Scorpion’s weapons pod was filled with Silver Bullet, instead of something that could shoot down an onrushing Firewitch.
The ’Puter asked, “Commence auto evasive maneuvers?” Better than me trying to fly the ship.
The first Firewitch rounds flickered up toward me.
I thumbed the “Deploy” toggle before I auto-evaded.
The Scorpion shuddered.
The Silver Bullet munition burst into a swarm of subdividing cluster bombs too small for Slug technology to shoot or chase. Some would drop directly below the deployment point. Others would arc in decaying orbits toward the planet’s surface. In the planet’s stratosphere, each bomb would burst again, into smart bomblets that would rain evenly down on the surface, then count down before they burst, poisoning the only other intelligent species in the known universe.
When the cluster bomb ejected, a bundle of satellites, really just little radio signal relays the size of tennis balls, ejected, too. Up until the bomblets detonated, the abort remote could transmit a signal through them and shut down the whole show. I snatched the abort remote from the console and tucked it in my coverall pocket. “Fat chance!”
The first Slug round grazed the Scorpion. On the console, a button the size of a biscuit flashed “Commence auto evasion.”
I pounded the button with my fist, and the Scorpion spiraled down toward the planet, with a half-dozen Fire- witches on its tail. In atmosphere, a Scorpion could out-maneuver portly Firewitches indefinitely.
I said to Jeeb, “We can dodge around the sky until the bomb goes off-”
A purple streak flashed beneath us as a Slug round barely-too barely-missed.
On the overhead display, a new light flashed red. Its label read “Lift impeller slats.”
Great. My tow pilot hadn’t been concerned about dinging this ship’s lift impeller slats, given the needs of the moment. But now, in atmosphere, we could dodge down, but we couldn’t dodge up. We were going to run out of sky.
Six minutes later the Scorpion dodged five hundred feet above a landscape that looked like a neverending green sore, unreeling below us in a blur. Firewitches potshotted us from behind.
The Scorpion juked left, clipped the surface below us, and cartwheeled.
SEVENTY-FIVE
THREE MINUTES LATER, the Scorpion came to rest, listing to the right, its hot skin crackling. Crashing a gravity-shielded ship isn’t physically traumatic; it’s like watching a crash holo from an armchair. But this crash killed the auxiliary systems. The Scorpion’s canopy was as opaque to our surroundings as a coffin lid.
I sighed to Jeeb, “The eagle has landed.” I shrugged back into my armor, drew Ord’s pistol, then triggered the manual canopy release.
Outside, the sky was blue. According to my helmet displays the air was chilly Earth-normal, but too oxygen- poor to breathe for more than two minutes. The Scorpion rested on endless tissue that looked just like the Ganglion blob Howard Hibble and I had captured on Weichsel, about a million years ago. Surrounding us a thousand yards away stood a solid wall of Slugs, without Warrior armor. But some carried mag rifles.
Of course. The Scorpion’s Cavorite impeller kept the Slug Warriors back the way a campfire discouraged wolves. But we sat on the One Big Slug like an unimaginably small flea biting an unimaginably big dog.
