He stood, rapped against a hull girder, and the sound of his knuckles echoed in the vast bay. “The newer cruisers can’t take a punch like these old girls. The rest of the fleet’s here strictly to keep the maggots off us, so we can deliver the two Scorpions to the last jump.”
The human race had put all its eggs into two sturdy baskets, then told the mightiest fleet in human history to watch those baskets. I didn’t have a better idea, and if I did, nobody cared what a retired general thought. “Eddie, you really think we’re gonna have to fight our way in to the last jump?”
He shrugged. “We planned for a fight. But we hope to be pleasantly surprised.”
We stepped back through the hatch and resumed our daily torture. I grimaced not so much from the exercise as from my concern that the maggots’ surprises were seldom pleasant.
SIXTY-NINE
TWENTY-FIVE JUMPS, and more daily jogs than I cared to remember, later, I floated weightless in the deserted observation blister on Abraham Lincoln’s prow. Spangled blackness glided around me as the ship rotated. Dead ahead beckoned the lightless disk of the next, and presumed last, insertion point, its gravity already accelerating us forward. Invisible over my shoulder, and all around us, the fleet surrounded this ship, dispersed over spans longer than the distance between Earth and the moon.
Jeeb perched on the blister’s handrail alongside me, and one of his legs squeaked loud enough in the stillness that I winced. He stared up at me with polished optics, and I tasked him. “Accelerate left third locomotor replacement.”
In response, his internals clicked, so faintly that only I would notice, as he reprogrammed.
I rested one hand on the rail beside Jeeb, and my replaced arm throbbed. By now, Jeeb and I each resembled George Washington’s hatchet. One hundred percent original equipment, except for six new handles and four new heads.
But Jeeb, for all the humanity I saw in him, was so immortal that he could survive a near-miss nuke, and he was selfless in the way that only machinery can be. We humans were all too mortal and all too selfish. And that, my life had taught me, was the essence of being us. We understood our mortality, yet we sacrificed everything for others, the way Jude’s father and then his mother had, the way Audace Planck had, the way Bassin was prepared to, and the way countless others had over the course of this war.
Sometimes the calculus of sacrifice was simple, one life for six thousand, or for all mankind. Sometimes the calculus was one arm for nothing explicable. I feared that only more sacrifice would win this longest and broadest of wars for us. I believed that we would overcome the Pseudocephalopod because, in our best moments, we overcome our selfishness.
From the speaker in the handrail, the bosun’s whistle lilted. I grumbled because it never stopped calling me. I sighed, then somersaulted, and floated aft, in the direction from which I came. “Let’s go, Jeeb. We’re not done yet.”
Jeeb and I drifted, then walked, back to infantry territory. As I stepped through the Bulkhead Ninety hatch, it slammed me in the back like a bulldozer.
SEVENTY
DEPRESSURIZATION KLAXONS HOOTED. I shook my head to clear it. Behind my back, the hatch locked down, separating Bulkhead Ninety and aft from areas forward. Had I been in the hatch, instead of through it, it would have snipped me in two like a salami.
I was still breathing, so the problem had to be with the deck forward, not with where I was. I swiveled around, then laid my cheek against the hatch. That way, I could peer through the eye-level quartzite peephole in the hatch to see what was wrong on the other side, between Bulkhead Ninety and Bulkhead Eighty-nine.
I swore and wiped the peephole, but it was black. Something on the other side had smeared the peephole so I couldn’t see through it.
I blinked, then squinted through again. Little points of light swam in the blackness, and something the size and shape of an old beer can with its top peeled back tumbled, weightless.
I blinked, then squinted again. “Crap.”
The Abraham Lincoln forward of Bulkhead Ninety rolled slowly in space, a mile away and drifting farther from me by the second.
“Crap, crap, crap.” I ran to my cabin and punched up my wireless library patch to Eddie Duffy’s computer. “Eddie?”
Silence.
“Goddamit, is anybody left up front?”
“Jason? Where are you?” Eddie!
“In my cabin. What the hell happened?”
“Dunno. Viper, maybe.”
I swore. As little as we understood about Slug tools and motives, we understood the Viper least of all. The Spooks figured that Vipers were dense lumps of Cavorite-powered matter, maybe no bigger than refrigerators, that the Slugs left loitering in space near things they thought were important, like mines afloat in vacuum. Vipers were triggered by sensors that looked like Slug-metal footballs that also were sprinkled around strategic points, like electronic trip wires. When a football sensed something it was programmed to dislike, the Viper accelerated to a speed in excess of.66 C, being two-thirds the speed of light, homed on the little football sensor, then smashed the living crap out of whatever the football had detected.
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.