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 Abe and onto another cruiser.”
“Once you stabilize the battle.”
“Now. Both halves of the Abe are getting sucked into the jump.”
I swallowed again. A cruiser, or, theoretically, a modified Scorpion, dove into a jump, dodged other debris, slingshot past the ultradwarf star mass core, then powered safely out the other side in new, folded space, light-years away.
An unpowered cruiser, or a piece of a cruiser, that got sucked in didn’t power out. It would simply crush in upon itself, until it became part of an ultradwarf star mass smaller than a golf ball.
“Can’t somebody come take us all off?”
“They’re busy. Whether we all get off the Abe’s unimportant. But that Scorpion back there with you’s got to find a home on another cruiser. So a pilot can fly it through the jump and deliver the bomb.”
“You said there was a pilot alive back here, somewhere.”
“I said-never mind. Who’ve you seen alive back there?”
I shrugged, to no apparent purpose. “ Me. Jeeb. I can’t get to the impeller rooms.”
Eddie paused, and I heard his breath through the speaker. “You ever fly a Scorpion, Jason?”
“Hell, no!” I paused. “Actually, kind of.”
“It’s a very forgiving ship. All you gotta do is ease it off the rail and slide it over to a cruiser. Then somebody can talk you through maneuver and docking.”
“Can’t they talk me through it first?”
“Jason, we have four cruisers left healthy enough to receive that Scorpion. Pretty soon, we may have none.”
Boom.
The back half of the Abe shuddered so hard that Jeeb wobbled, perched above the flatscreen.
Waiting here for the fleet to ride to the rescue was no option.
“Crap!”
“Now what?”
“Eddie, I have to cross a hundred feet of vacuum to get from the bay hatch into the Scorpion.”
Eddie’s breath hissed out again.
Thumps and shudders shook the deck every few seconds now. The Slugs could be potshotting the Abe’s carcass, or the hull could just be breaking up.
Above the flatscreen, Jeeb swiveled his head at every thump and whined, like he wished he could hide himself in a suit of armor.
I leaned my head on my palm, with my elbow on the shelf in front of the screen. “Okay. I have an idea.”
SEVENTY-TWO
THE INFANTRY ARMORY aboard the Abe hadn’t been stripped just because she was carrying no infantry this trip. A half-dozen Eternad infantry armor suits hung from racks behind a repair and refit bench. With the ship’s rotation now virtually stopped, the weightless suits’ legs bounced every time a new impact shuddered the ship’s dying carcass, like a robot chorus line. Eternads are made airtight and oxygen-generating principally to protect a GI from chemical and biological agents, but as a field-expedient space suit, they had worked for me in the past.