The display tank sparkles to life.
"Damn! Brown. Turn that thing all the way back up."
Clickety-clack nearly deafens us.
Floating red jewels appear where none ought to be, telling a tale none of us want to hear. We've been englobed. The trans-solar show is a distraction.
"Oh, shit!" someone says, almost reverently.
They aren't certain of our whereabouts. The moon is well off center of their globe.
"Commander." Chief Canzoneri beckons. The Old Man goes to look over his shoulder. After a moment, he grunts.
He says, "They're beating the piss out of an asteroid. Must be nice to have missiles to waste." He strolls toward Fisherman, his face almost beatific. "Fooled us, didn't they?" he tells me. "Wasted a few missiles and locked the door while we sat here grinning."
The distant firing ends.
The Old Man stares steadily at the craft Fisherman has in detection.
Yanevich mumbles, "They reckon we've got it figured up now and didn't panic." There's agony in his eyes when he meets Nicastro's gaze.
Varese, you prick. I could choke you.
The swiftest reaction would've done us no good. They've had half a day to tighten the net. What the hell can we do?
I don't like being scared.
The Old Man takes a pen from his pocket. He taps the end against his teeth, then against one of the feathers on Fisherman's screen. "It's him."
Fisherman stares dumbly. He grows more and more pallid. Sweat beads on his upper lip. He murmurs,
"The Executioner."
"Uhm. Back from his holiday with Second Fleet. I'll take the conn, Mr. Yanevich."
"Commander has the conn." Yanevich doesn't conceal his relief.
I want to say something, to ask something. I can't. My gaze is fixed on that tachyon spray. The Executioner. The other firm's big man. Their number one life-taker. They want us bad.
The Old Man grins at me. "Relax. He's not infallible. Beat him patrol before last. And Johnson, she had the hex sign on him."
I feel awfully cold. I'm shivering.
"Engineering, bring CT systems to full readiness."
This is a state of readiness midway between standby and actual shifting. It's seldom used because it's such a strain on personnel. Apparently the Commander does appreciate the fuel problem.
"All hands. Take care of your personals," he says. "General quarters shortly." He sounds like a father calming a three-year-old with nightmares.
I'm so nervous my bladder and bowels won't evacuate. I stand staring at the display tank. A dozen rubies inhabit it now. Flight would be suicidal. Amazing that they'd devote so much strength to one Climber.
We have to stay put and outfox them.
Outfox the Executioner? His reputation is justified. He can't help but find us...
"Mr. Westhause, bring up the data for Tau and Omicron."
"Got it already, Commander."
"Good. Program for Tau with just enough hyper to give it away. Once we're up, zag toward Omicron, then put us back inside this rock."
"It's mostly water ice, Commander, with a little surface dust. There seems to be a real rock surface several thousand meters down, though."
"Whatever. I trust you've resolved its orbitals? Can you hold us deep enough to shield the point?"
"I think so, sir."
"Can you or can't you?"
"I can, sir. I will. Might have to run high Bevs to get the cross section down so we don't take core heat if we go deep."
"This rock isn't that big. But keep gravity in mind. Don't let it upset your calculations."
"Maybe we shouldn't go down more than a couple klicks. Just deep enough to escape their weaponry."
"Can you hold it that fine?"
"I did on Rathgeber. Finer."
"On Rathgeber you had a century's worth of orbital data. Go down twenty-five. Hell. Make it fifty, just to be safe. They might try to blast us out."
They're doing this out loud to let the men know there's a plan. It's an act. I try not listen. It doesn't sound like much. I check the time. Still got a chance to piss before strap-in.
The alarm sounds. "To your stations. They've found us. Missiles incoming. Prepare for Climb. Lift off, Mr. Westhause."
The lighting fades to near extinction as the drives go from minimum to maximum power.
"Vent heat, max," Yanevich orders.
Back in Weapons now, I commence firing. My unit survives, though not without protest. The air gets colder and colder. The hyper alarm howls. I push my bug plugs into my ears.
"Secure the gravity system, Mr. Bradley," the Commander orders. "Secure all visibility lighting."
What? We're going through this in the dark? I feel the caress of panic. Blind panic. That's a joke.
"Climb."
The visibility lights aren't necessary. The glow of Climb, complemented by the luminescence of the idiot lights, provides adequate illumination. So. A little more Climb endurance won.
The Commander shuts down systems till it seems nothing but the Climb system remains on-line.
Internal temperature is so low frost forms on nonradiant surfaces and men exhale fog into their clasped hands.
The first salvo arrives and delivers enough applied cross-sectional kinetic energy to rattle bones and brains. I gasp for breath, fight a lost bug back into my right ear.
Down in the basement Varese is frenetically trying to catch up on a million little tasks he let slide during ready. The last hint of refinement has fled him. His cussing isn't inventive, just strong enough to crisp the paint off every surface within three kilometers.
The Commander continues securing systems. Even all delectors and radios, which, normally, would be maintained at a warm idle.
Piniaz taps my shoulder. "Shut her down," he says. "Then go kill the cannon." His dark face makes him hard to read. As if catching my thoughts, he whispers, "I think he's going a little far. We ought to be ready to slash and bite if we have to do down."
"Yeah." It'll take time to bring everything back to ready. Frightened, I close the systems down.
Up in Ops Yanevich and the Old Man are running and rerunning Fisherman's tapes, assembling the details of a cautionary message to the rest of the Fleet.
Six hours. For every second of them the Climber has whispered and stirred in response to forces acting on her Hawking point. Twice the Commander has ordered us deeper into the moon. We're down nearly three hundred kilometers. We're running a hundred Bev, the most I've ever seen, giving our point a diameter smaller than that of a hydrogen atom. We're gulping CT fuel----- Yet we're being buffeted. Continuously. I don't know what they're doing up there, but... the whole surface has to be boiling, throwing trillions of tons of lunar matter into space.
The buffeting gradually increases. "Take her down another hundred kilometers, Mr. Westhause."
I didn't pay much attention to the moon when I had a chance. Is it big enough to have a molten core? Are we trapped between fires? Does the Executioner have the firepower to tear the moon apart?
Waiting. Thinking. Always the fear. What if they blast away till there's nowhere left to go?
God. They must have brought a Leviathan. Nothing else has so much firepower.
Suppose they destabilize the moon's orbit? The Commander and Westhause are betting on its stability. What if the moon can't take it and breaks up? What if? What if? Will there be any warning when it sours? Or will internal temperature just shoot up too fast for us to react?
Maybe they're punching their missiles deep by throwing them in in hyper. Their sudden materialization and explosion would crack the mantle to gravel—except that that massed energy weapon fire will have turned it to a sea of lava. The water ice, surely, has boiled off into space by now.
Why are they so damned determined to skin this particular cat? I never did anything to them.