"The captain has nothing to do with it," I snapped. "It's—it just happens to make the most sense this way."
"Aha," he nodded, an entirely too knowing look on his face. "So you're trying to con the captain along with the rest of us, are you? I should have guessed that.
He wouldn't have been able to send us out to get fried on his behalf. Not with a
straight face, anyway."
I gritted my teeth. Somehow, I'd thought I'd covered my intentions better than that. "You're hallucinating," I snarled. "There's not a scrap of truth to it—and you'd sure as hell better not go blabbing nonsense like that to the rest of the team."
"Don't get so mad—it's working, isn't it? The Volga's going to come out okay, and you're going to get to go out in a blaze of glory. Along with six more of us lucky souls."
I gritted my teeth some more and ignored him, and we covered another half corridor in silence. "There wasn't really any Services list of hive mind weaknesses, was there?" he said as we maneuvered through a tight hatchway.
"You made all that up to justify this plan."
I exhaled in defeat. "No, it was—it is—an actual list," I told him. "It's just that—look, it was a long time ago. The two I gave you are real enough. And there's one more—an important one, I'm pretty sure—but I can't for the life of me remember what it was."
"Uh-huh. Sure."
Or in other words, he didn't believe me. "Waskin—"
"Oh, it's all right," he interrupted. "If it helps any, I actually happen to agree with the basic idea. I just wouldn't have picked myself to be one of the sacrificial goats."
"I'm hoping we'll come out of it a bit better than that," I told him.
"Uh-huh. Sure."
We finished the rest of the trip to the bay in silence, to find that the captain had already had the other five members of the team assemble there.
I tried giving them a short pep talk, but I wasn't particularly good at it and they weren't much in the mood to be pepped up, anyway. So instead we spent a few minutes checking one last time on our equipment and making as sure as we could that our specially equipped suits and weapons were going to function as desired.
Afterward, we all sat in the boat, breathed recycled air, and sweated hard.
And I tried one last time to think. One: hivies don't form small groups. Two: all members of a hive mind have the same experience level. Three:...
Still no use.
I don't know how long we sat there. The plan was for the captain to take the Volga as close in as he could before the Drymnu's inevitable attack became too much for the ship to handle, but as the minutes dragged on and nothing happened, a set of frightening possibilities began to flicker through my already overheated mind. The Volga's bridge blown so quickly that they'd had no time even to cry out... the rest of us flying blind toward a collision or to sail forever through normal space...
"The Drymnu's opened fire," the captain's voice crackled abruptly in our headsets. "Antimeteor lasers; some minor sensor damage. Get ready—"
With a stomach-jolting lurch, we were dumped out through the bay doors... and got our first real look at a Drymnu hive ship.
The thing was huge. Incredibly so. It was still several klicks away, yet it still took up a massive chunk of the sky ahead of us. Dark-hulled, oddly shaped, convoluted, threatening—it was all of those, too, but the only word that registered in that first heart-stopping second was huge. I'd seen the biggest of the Services' carriers up close, and I was stunned. God only knows how the others in the boat felt.
And then the first laser flicked out toward us, and the time for that kind of thought was thankfully over.
The shot was a clean miss. We'd been dropped along one of the Drymnu's flanks, as planned, and it was quickly clear that lasers designed for shooting oncoming meteors weren't at their best trying to fire sideways. But the Drymnu was a hive mind, and hive minds learned fast. The second and third shots missed, too, but the fourth bubbled the reflective paint on our nose. "Let's get moving," I snapped.
Kelly, our pilot, didn't need any coaxing. The words weren't even out of my mouth when she had us jammed against our restraints in a tight spiraling turn that sent us back toward the stern. Not too close; the drive that could actually move this floating mountain would fry us in nano-seconds if it occurred to the Drymnu to turn it on. But Kelly knew her job, and when we finally pulled into a
more or less inertial path again, we were no more than two-thirds of the way back toward the stern and maybe three hundred meters from the textured hull.
This close to a true warship, we would be dead in seconds. But the Drymnu wasn't a warship... and as we flew on unvaporized, I finally knew for a fact that my gamble had paid off. We were inside the alien's defenses, and he couldn't touch us.
Now if we could only turn that advantage into something concrete.
"Fromm, get the laser going," I ordered. "The rest of you, let's find some targets for him to hit. Sensors, intakes, surface radiator equipment—anything that looks weak."
My headset crackled suddenly. "Volga to Travis," the captain's voice said.
"Neutrino emission's suddenly gone up—I think he's running up his drive."
"Acknowledged," I said. "You out of his laser range yet?"
"We will be soon. So far he seems to be ignoring us."
A small favor to be grateful for. Whatever happened to us, at least this part of my plan had worked. "Okay. We're starting our first strafing run—"
Abruptly, my headset exploded with static. I grabbed for the volume control, vaguely aware of the others scrambling with similar haste around me. "What happened?" Kelly's voice came faintly, muffled by two helmets and the thin atmosphere in the boat.
"It's occurred to him that jamming our radios is a good idea," I shouted, my voice echoing painfully inside my helmet.
"Took him long enough," Waskin put in. "What was that about the drive? He trying to get away?"
"Probably." But no matter how powerful the Drymnu's drive, with all that mass to move, he wouldn't be outrunning us for a while, anyway. "We've still got time to do plenty of damage. Get cracking."
We tried. We flew all the way around that damn ship, skimming its surface, blasting away at anything that looked remotely interesting... and in the process we discovered something I'd somehow managed not to anticipate.
None of us had the faintest idea what Drymnu sensors, intakes, or surface radiator equipment looked like.
Totally unexpected. Form follows function, or so I'd always believed. But there was clearly more room for variation than I'd ever realized.
Which meant that even as we vaporized bits of metal and plastic all over that ship, we had no idea whatsoever how much genuine damage we were doing. Or even if we were doing any damage at all.
And slowly the Drymnu began to move.
I put off the decision as long as possible, and so it wound up being Waskin who eventually forced the issue. "Gonna have to go all the way, aren't we?" he called out. "The full plan. It's either that or give up and go home."
I gritted my teeth hard enough to hurt. It was my plan, and even while I'd been selling it to the others I'd been hoping like hell we wouldn't have to use it.
But there was literally no other choice available to us now. If we tried to escape to the Volga now, it would be a choice of heading aft and being fried by the drive or going forward and giving the lasers a clean shot at us. There was no way to go now but in. "All right," I sighed, then repeated it loudly for everyone to hear. "Kelly, find us something that looks like a hatchway and bring us down. Anyone here had experience working on rotating hulls?"
Even through two helmets I could hear Waskin's sigh. "I have," he said.
"Good. You and I will head out as soon as we're down." The hatches, fortunately, were recognizable as such. Kelly had anchored us to the hull beside one of them, and Waskin and I were outside working it open, when the Drymnu seemed to suddenly realize just what we were doing. Abruptly, vents we hadn't spotted began spewing gases all over the area. For a bad minute I thought there might be acid or something equally dangerous being blown out the discharge tubes, but it registered only as obvious waste gases, apparently used in hopes of confusing us or breaking our boots' pseudoglue grip. Once again, it seemed, we'd caught the Drymnu by surprise; but Waskin and I still didn't waste any time forcing the hatch open.