Orphan's Triumph

Kinetic energy is a product of velocity and mass, so a single refrigerator-sized Viper can put a hole in central Florida bigger than Cape Canaveral. In fact, one had, and I still bore the physical and mental scars.

“Then why are we still here, Eddie?”

During the First Battle of Mousetrap’s opening moments, a Viper had smashed headlong into the Nimitz and vaporized it.

“The Viper took us abeam, not head-on. Sliced us clean. I dunno how many we lost. Gotta go.”

The Slugs hadn’t figured out what cheap human gangsters had figured out centuries ago. A high-velocity bullet may pass through a body wreaking less havoc than a fat bullet, or than a bullet that fragments. So, I was alive, albeit a castaway, because the Slugs weren’t diabolical enough to invent the dum-dum bullet.

An hour later, while Eddie Duffy tended to the catastrophe that afflicted his crew of over two thousand, most of whom had been forward of Ninety when the Viper split the Abraham Lincoln, I inspected the life raft upon which I had been cast adrift in space.

My first discovery was the worst. I ran, Jeeb clattering across the deckplates in my wake, until I reached the flight deck. The starboard launch bays, where all the Early Birds and their crews had been, had been crushed. The port side was little better. The red lockdown light flashed above Bay One’s hatch.

I peered through the hatch peephole. The Abraham Lincoln’s hull, and the bay bulkheads, had peeled away, so the bay deck and the Silver Bullet Scorpion on its launch rails stood naked against space’s blackness, like a house chimney left standing after a Kansas tornado. There was no sign of the bay crew, the Scorpion’s canopy was up, and the harness straps of the empty pilot’s couch dangled up in a windless vacuum.

I pounded my fist on the sealed hatch. The Viper had struck during watch change, when the bay crew were milling around, and both incoming and outgoing pilots were exposed.

Whether it was Rommel on D-day eve, traveling home for his wife’s birthday, or Nagumo’s aircraft caught on deck rearming and refueling at Midway, or a Hessian picket who might have been satisfying a natural need when he should have been looking for Washington crossing the Delaware, military history often turned because somebody took an ill-timed break.

Mankind’s saving grace in this catastrophe had been Howard Hibble’s preparation of two Silver Bullets, not just one.

I returned to my cabin and punched up Eddie on my flatscreen. He didn’t answer. I tapped into the video feed that, as captain, Eddie could access to view his bridge displays from his cabin.

Damage Control reported two hundred dead or missing, among them the Air Wing pilots who were meeting in their wardroom, starboard. But the ship’s forward section was airtight and fire-free, although drifting as dead as a log.

Evidence of the status of my end of the ship was circumstantial, mostly what had been observed from the forward section and was now reported on the main ’Puters. The impeller rooms, far aft of me, appeared to be split open like pea pods. The ship had shut down the drive faster than a human could think, so inertia kept the two pieces in motion at a similar speed and trajectory, which was why the Abe’s dismembered parts remained within sight of each other.

Seated in front of the screen, I paused and breathed. In the billions of cubic miles of interstellar space that the fleet occupied, the Abe’s passage close to some unseen, drifting Slug football, and the Viper attack that passage had triggered, must have been pure rotten luck. Clearly, the Slugs had laid a Viper minefield in front of the final Temporal Fabric Insertion Point that separated us from the Pseudocephalopod homeworld, which in retrospect seemed only logical. But the chance of a football drifting into a cruiser in the three-dimensional vastness of space had to be as remote as a collision between two dinghies drifting from opposite sides of the Pacific.

I toggled over to Eddie’s externals to see what progress the rest of the fleet was making in coming to our aid.

There was static, so I had to squirm in my chair, lighter than I had been as the ship’s aft section slowed its rotation, while I waited for the link.

SEVENTY-ONE

THE AUDIO LINK CAME UP an instant before the flat-screen’s visual.

“Break right! Break-”

Then I was watching the same display that the captain had selected, during that moment, to show on the forward screen of the Abraham Lincoln’s bridge. The onscreen showed a heads-up visual through the front of a Scorpion’s canopy. When a cruiser’s ’Puter displays for mere human eyes, it adjusts to human sensory frailties. The audio lags a beat, and a display like a Scorpion-canopy image is slowed to the speed of a World War I dogfight. Otherwise, all a watching human would perceive would be flashes and blurs.

Ahead of his wingman, from whose viewpoint the display appeared, a Scorpion leader broke at a right angle to their path. That probably meant something was on the two ships’ tail.

As the lead Scorpion broke, it exploded in a red flash.

A beat later, a voice crackled out of my flatscreen, “Slug heavy!”

The wingman, the sound of his breathing pumping through the audio, stopped his Scorpion dead. Then a red light on the heads-up display floating translucent on his canopy winked green as he deployed a missile.

A Firewitch shot by the wingman, high right, corkscrewing through space, as the purple traces of fired heavy mag-rail rounds lasered from the tips of the eight spread arms that made an open basket at the Firewitch’s prow.

Beat. “Fox one.” The wingman’s voice.

Slow motion or not, the missile’s exhaust flashed like a red laser toward the Firewitch and exploded the mammoth Slug fighter in a vast purple cloud. The wingman pivoted his Scorpion back over front, searching for threats and targets.

Eddie Duffy’s voice overrode the audio. “Enhance the furball, please, Mr. Dowd.”

I swallowed. So much for my theory about a random collision of dinghies in the Pacific. The Slugs had jumped the fleet as it prepared to launch the two stealthy modified Scorpions that would win the war.

The Bridge’s enhanced display substituted enlarged images of distant ships for the pinpricks that maneuvering ships would show as when dispersed across hundreds of thousands of cubic miles. The display wasn’t pretty. The Abe, faithfully rendered in two pieces, drifted in the center of a massive dogfight, aka “the furball.” Around us were arrayed a half-dozen cruisers, where there should have been twelve. Whether the others had fallen to Vipers or in ship-to-ship combat I couldn’t tell and didn’t care. The fact was that the fleet had already taken a beating.

One of the six remaining cruisers drifted, like the Abe.

Against the backdrop of starlit space, Scorpions and Firewitches by the hundreds darted and spun in a silent cloud around the great pearlescent cruisers, the fighters’ marker traces boiling like red, green, and purple thread.

Audio crackled with chatter, from controllers and among Scorpion pilots.

So many fighters burst, then winked out, that the furball was like watching fireworks on holo with the audio off.

“Jason?” Eddie spoke to me over his audio while the battle raged.

“I’m fine. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

“Is the Silver Bullet Scorpion flyable?”

“Huh?”

“We can see the modified Scorpion, Jason. It’s standing on the launch rail, in what’s left of Bay One.”

“I saw it myself, from in here. I couldn’t see any damage. But I don’t know what to look for.” My heart thumped. “Eddie, is there a live pilot back here?”

Eddie said, “The George Washington’s sustained damage, like we have. She’s unmaneuverable but alive. But Silver Bullet II’s destroyed. We need to get Silver Bullet I off the