Theft of fire, p.32
Theft of Fire, page 32
part #1 of Orbital Space Series
It doesn’t much matter that I know now they’re not nukes, that all they will do instead of vaporizing us is turn us from a partially functional flying vessel into a powerless tin can. Once that happens, someone will board us, and it all goes downhill from there. And by “downhill” I mean out an airlock without a suit, or something even nastier if somebody wants to make an example.
Then the White Cat shudders, and I realize I’m still working the stick, and the fusion drive is thrust vectoring, sending its near-lightspeed stream of ejected helium and neutrons this way and that, and I have control, blessed control, back again. It’s sluggish and laggy, the network must still be giving Leela trouble, but it’s there, and I can move again.
“Okay,” I call out, “brace yourselves.” As if we weren’t all tied into acceleration couches with five centimeter nylon weave straps, but it just kind of slips out.
We’re slammed sideways as I toss the Cat into a sharply vectored curve, then suddenly we’re weightless as I cut the engine and come about on orientation thrusters before spurting off in a new direction. My eyes, or rather my attention, since my eyes aren’t actually involved, is once again on the slowly swirling cloud of spacecraft tracks, and what I see is not heartening.
I’ve lost all the progress I fought for over the past hours, and am once again in the center of a tightening ball of pursuers, only this time they are closer still, with the first wave of six distinct contacts within a few hundred thousand kilometers. In every direction.
And those missiles are still on us, trying to come around and establish a new intercept. I can’t outrun them, they accelerate too fast. But I can keep dodging and weaving until they run out of fuel, or I manage to lay a SPAM fragment on one of them.
I’ve taken my brief reprieve to try exactly that, jolting the Cat three times in quick succession as twenty-kilo slugs fly off at an appreciable percentage of lightspeed. They don’t have a long wait before detonating into a cloud of sharp fragments—I’ve set the fuses short on purpose; those missiles are a few thousand kilometers away now.
Still a lot of space to be throwing shrapnel in. I’m going to have to get outrageously lucky to land even one of those tiny specks of hypervelocity grit on any of my targets. The odds get better as they close in, but I’m the only one firing now.
True to Miranda’s prediction, the other craft have silenced their railguns, and those incoming blips aren’t navigating a blizzard of counterfire from a fleet any more—just me, solitary, throwing snowballs. I’m tossing us around, changing course every few seconds. I’m not even jockeying for position in the swarm anymore—my world has shrunk to those three incoming tracks.
From behind me, I hear Miranda whimpering, and trying not to gag into her mask.
No time to care. Missiles coming in even faster now. Most of their mass is fuel, PMH and liquid oxygen, and the closer they are to running out, the lighter they are, the faster they accelerate, the tighter they turn. I have no idea how long they can last, but I’m guessing it’s longer than I can keep dodging them.
I cut the engines, gasp in freefall to reinflate my lungs as I come about again, slam the throttle back in. Five gravities. Six and a half.
Can’t outrun them.
Eight gravities. Engine heat’s in the yellow. I’m sipping and puffing air.
Can’t keep dodging forever.
Nine gravities. I think Miranda might have blacked out again... my display tells me her mask pressure has gone way up. The system is forcing oxygen into her lungs. Color drains from my vision, and the world is gray.
Try to shoot all three down? That’s more luck than I have, more favors than the universe owes me.
Ten gravities. I think. Something like that.
My vision is gone. I’m floating in the dark, nothing but displays projected on my visual cortex, lights hung in the void, and I can’t read them, they’ve lost all meaning. I feel the wind crushed out of my diaphragm. Something like an alarm is screaming somewhere, but I don’t know what that means, either.
I can’t think like this, can’t plan, can’t even see. I cut the engine, and my chest hits the straps as my lungs reinflate. I pant into the mask, sucking oxygen rich pressurized air that tastes of rubber, and sweat. Color floods back into the world, the 3-D display makes sense to me again, and I can see the missile tracks passing behind me. I’ve made them undershoot once more, but already the first is coming around, with the others not far behind. Faster now.
Can’t outrun them. Can’t keep dodging. And hitting all three? Good luck.
Think. Gotta think. Gotta come up with something.
And for once, I actually do.
My world has shrunk down to four blips in a holographic view... the White Cat and three pursuing dots. Somewhere out there, some twenty-five nearby craft are closing in, but I’m only dimly aware of them. I’ll deal with them later. If there is a later.
I can’t keep dodging forever, and even if I succeed, someone out there has plenty more missiles to throw. They say the fox is running for his dinner, and the rabbit for his life. But the fox only has to be faster once.
If you’re a rabbit, don’t keep running in circles. Head for the briar patch.
The missile tracks have looped around tightly, and are separating again, smart enough to work together and come at me from different angles, aiming at an intercept point somewhere ahead of me.
That’s what I’m counting on. I think of Miranda’s guard drones, still and incurious as the crane electromagnet dropped on them. Tougher and faster than any person alive, but not smart enough, not creative enough, not human enough, to think like me, understand my motives, guess my next move.
Simple. Reactive. Predictable.
I hope.
Watch how they separate. Gotta line them up. No matter how they fan out, there’s gotta be an angle that puts one behind another. Two points determine a line, three points determine a plane, but if I can line up all three...
I cut the fusion drive to idle, and drop us into the blessed relief of weightlessness, steel creaking as the hull relaxes. Miranda is panting behind me, loud ragged gasps. She doesn’t try to say anything. There’s nothing to be said. Nothing for her to do. Just endure. Hold fast.
We drift in dead silence, but that’s an illusion. We still have all our momentum, we’re screaming through the void at hundreds of kilometers per second—fast, still but slower that the missiles expected, and they must correct to avoid overshooting.
Slowly, the three tracks angle into my direction... and come together.
Yes!
Simple. Reactive. Predictable.
Now come about. Fast. I burn orientation thrusters in the Cat’s nose and tail, hard. Far harder than they’re designed for, tossing us sideways against our restraints, and they’re screaming overheat warnings at me, flashing red indicators in my vision, but I’ve modified them extensively for this kind of work, programmed them not to cut out. I know their limitations. I won’t melt anything. I think.
There.
Now back the other way... brake the turn, aaand... we’re sailing backwards. It feels motionless, but only in our frame of reference. Those EMP weapons are coming in, coming in, converging, and I have to wait for it, wait for them to line up, predict their reaction...
One shot at this. I watch the tracks ticking ahead in the display, screaming through the void at relativistic speeds, but slow on the scale of my display, in the vastness of space...
Wait for it...
Watch the trails...
Now. Throttle.
It’s a single twitch of my left thumb, but Sir Isaac Newton retaliates, slams me back into the seat with the biggest damn hammer in the universe. I’m holding on now, barely, sipping and puffing air against the weight of my own rib cage, fighting for consciousness, for the focus to watch three faint little white lines, waiting for the next right moment as I furiously code in fuse delays, dispersion patterns, firing solution inputs...
The railgun swings about.
And the traces merge into a single line, behind me, punctuated with three flashing dots.
They’re coming at me in a straight line. Behind me.
The railgun is still moving on its track, coming around to point directly behind me, and those dots are coming up fast. I can picture the high-temperature inconel alloy of their drive cones glowing white-hot from the intensity of the fire, and they’re devouring the gap between us, burning fuel recklessly in an attempt to seize this opportunity and strike...
But not fanning out. Not sacrificing their speed to disperse again.
Simple. Reactive. Predictable.
Artificial Stupidity.
I let go with the railgun, pumping out SPAM munitions as fast as it can cycle, short fuse, minimum dispersion. Two rounds. Three. Five.
And those predictable missiles are flying straight into the face of, not a long-distance interception shot, but a tightly packed cloud of tungsten carbide shards, each one tearing in with enough relative speed to make it a small bomb in its own right.
Dodge that, motherfuckers.
But there’s no time for me to celebrate. There’s one more thing I need to make this work, and I’m programming the engine now. Random vector, come about on orientation thrusters and main thrust vectoring, max burn. My display is nagging me about severe crew risk, and I’ve never punched “override” faster in my life.
All set up. Now I just need luck. I don’t know how much. But that first missile detonated when it was hit, accidentally or by design, I don’t know, but I need it again, or this whole plan falls apart. Three chances...
The closest pursuing dot winks out. No pulse, no shockwave, just gone. Either hit or ran out of fuel, no way to tell. Two more shots at this. That storm of fragments should be coming up on the next one right about...
The cabin lights flicker, the drive hiccups, my display stops updating.
High gain antenna... loss of signal. Lidar array... loss of signal. Back up antennae... loss of signal. Wideband radio receiver/transmitter... loss of signal. Tightbeam com laser... ready.
Electromagnetic pulse. We, and every ship in the area, are blind.
“Leela!” I scream into the coms, punching virtual buttons, queuing up my control sequence. “You have the comm. Run this burn until the sensor blackout starts to fade, then cut the engines, go full dark, understand?”
Her voice comes right back, no hesitation at all. “Yes, I understand, but w—”
“No time! Do it!” I bark, and don’t even wait for an answer, just start my sequence.
She better be on this. I hear Miranda sputtering and Leela’s cool response “Yes, Captain, understood, sir!” I’m wondering why a fucking twelve year old is talking like that when my display flashes “MAX BURN,” and alarms are shrieking, and physics pounces on me and shakes me like a rag doll and the world is colorless, and then gray, and then…
21
Plenty of Hot Water
There’s a bowling ball in my stomach, and a desert in my mouth.
At least I wake up knowing where I am.
Not that I want to be here. I’m crusted with partially dried sweat, I have aches where I didn’t even know I had places, there’s enough gunk in my eyes to make the lights of the flight deck into nothing more than soft smears of radiance, and my head hurts. At least there’s no hard acceleration.
We’re in microgravity.
Wait, microgravity? Leela must have spun the ship before shutting us down all the way. I raise my arm from the couch to paw at my eyes, and manage to clear them, a little bit. There’s something dried in my beard. I think it’s blood from my nose.
“Hey, you’re awake. How you doing?” Leela’s avatar drifts in front of my face, only a few centimeters tall, her voice almost a whisper. Sounds concerned.
“Ugggh. I think I’ll be okay eventually. How long was I out? Did it work?”
“Three minutes, twenty-five point two three seconds, and yes, I think it did. That’s after four minutes, fifteen point seven two seconds of about... well, you don’t wanna know how many gees you pulled. You really don’t. You probably shouldn’t do that again in, like, your life. I had to cut the drive a bit early.”
“For Miranda?”
“For you. Once you passed out, you weren’t bracing anymore, and you’re taller than she is, so... well, I don’t think you were literally going to die, but I was worried. It was pretty harsh. On both of you. Let’s just say I’m super glad right now that I don’t have a body.”
“She okay?”
A faint...
“No.”
... emerges from somewhere behind me. Miranda still has the voice of an angel, only now it’s more like an angel who is very tired from going to and fro upon the earth, and walking up and down within it, and is quite irritable enough to smite a city or two, or maybe turn someone into a pillar of salt.
Slowly, almost glacially, I unhook the straps and climb down from the couch. Frankly, I’d rather have zero gravity right now, instead of the spin, but I’m not about to fire thrusters to stop the ship’s rotation. Twenty percent gravity isn’t too bad. It’s not like I wouldn’t still be hurting even in freefall.
I make my way back to the second acceleration chair. Miranda’s mask is off, but she hasn’t unstrapped or moved at all, she’s just lying there, partially on her side, in a little ball of misery. Her eyes trace me wearily, and the white of the left one is now almost entirely bright red. That can’t be good.
I bend over her to undo the straps.
“C’mon, let’s get you up. You need to move to get the circulation going again.”
She whimpers like a distraught puppy, and I grab a handful of the back of her suit collar and lift her with one arm, gently. She just dangles limp, eyeing me with a sort of dazed indifference.
“You look awful,” she says.
“You look at bit rough yourself. One of your eyes is all red.”
“Probably just a burst capillary in the eyeball,” she says. “Looks worse than it is. I’ll check it when I have a moment. Hey, I know I keep asking versions of this same question, but what just happened? Why are we stopped?”
“It’s okay, this is part of the plan. Well, ah, the new plan. The plan as of five minutes ago. When I got that EMP to detonate close to us, it scrambled everyone’s sensors. So, while everyone was blind, including us, Leela and I flew us off in a random direction as fast as possible.”
“I don’t like as fast as possible. As fast as possible really hurts,” she says.
She’s not putting her legs down to the deck at all. She just seems quite content to dangle from my grip, like a kitten held by the scruff of its neck. This isn’t impossible, not in such a thin wisp of gravity, but my arm hurt even before she decided to let me do all the work for her, so I shake her, gently, trying to indicate she should uncoil her damn legs and stand up already.
She ignores me.
“Then I had Leela cut the engines before the blackout ended.”
“So we’re just coasting away in whatever direction we were going?”
“Yeah, exactly. With no drive signature to pinpoint our location.”
“Can’t they just find us with telescopes and lidar? And will you stop shaking me?”
“That’s a lot of space to search, and I’m trying to get you to stand up. I’m tired, too, you know.”
She actually pouts at me—“Awww... do I have to?” It would probably be even more adorable if she didn’t look like the result of a week-long bender, and I might even care if I didn’t feel worse than she looks.
“You want me to drop you?”
“Beast,” she grumbles, but there’s no heat in her voice. She puts her feet down and immediately leans against the grav couch the moment I let her go, sagging against the pale green smartfoam with a plaintive groan.
“There you go. Anyway, we’re going to try to sneak away by just coasting along on this vector until we get some distance. Better than trying to outrun another set of missiles. If you can’t fight—”
“You run,” she says.
“Right, and if you can’t run, you walk. We’re just gonna saunter away real quiet-like. It’ll take some time, but it’ll get us free eventually, with a little bit of luck. Leela, how are we doing for luck?”
“A lot of their signal traffic is tight-beam or encrypted,” she answers, growing to full size as she drifts to the floor, “but the bits I’m getting have a lot of yelling back and forth. Starlight’s not happy about someone shooting down that missile, the Blackhammer isn’t happy no one told them it wasn’t a nuke, Starlight doesn’t want any railgun fire—”
“They must know about the Snark. Or at least that we grabbed something from orbit.”
“—and nobody’s happy about that, Starlight included. They’re trying to coordinate a search, but... I dunno. There’s a lot more shouting than planning.”
Miranda perks up, if only a bit. “Oh, God,” she says, her eyes wide with yearning. “Does that mean I actually have time for a shower?”
“Yeah,” I say, “I mean, technically they could spot us any moment, but every moment they don’t, the volume of space they have to search gets wider. Could be days if we’re lucky. Go ahead.”
She pushes herself all the way upright and heads for the access ladder, hobbling a bit.
“Hey, Marcus,” says Leela as she disappears downwards, “I’m not tired at all, so if you wanna join her, I can stand a watch.”
“Thanks, Leela. And thanks for all your help back there. This would be a lot harder without you, and you’re not...”
Getting paid? Being given any real choice about going on this insane adventure? Being treated as a person at all, instead of a tool?
I’m not sure what I would say if I finished the sentence, instead of trailing off in embarrassment. The fact is, I need her help, and I’m too tired for philosophy and discussions of machine rights.
She appears in front of me again.
