James White: The Escape Orbit

There was a soft, red explosion in the region of Sloan’s stomach and the Major folded violently in the middle and rolled from sight. The pilot toppled backwards a second later, his helmet and head inside it blown open. The Bug up there had a sidearm, too, Warren thought sickly, of the type which fired explosive bullets. But the Bug had no business being alive, with an oxygen bomb bursting beside it!

The second pilot was going up and Warren had to restrain him. He couldn’t talk to the man, but by dint of hanging onto one of his arms and climbing above him he made the officer realize that the reason they’d had two pilots was in case one had an accident, and since one of them had had an accident the second pilot was no longer expendable. By the time the other was convinced of this Warren was himself part-way into the control-room and the Bug was shooting at him. But Warren was covered by the upright hatch seal which rang loudly with each hit of an exploding pellet, and he was additionally fortunate in that the Bug was trying to do two things and watch three places at once.

One of its manipulators held the sidearm, the other worked the machine-gun covering the prisoner well while its head jerked heavily from the hatch to the machine-gun to the control panel behind it and back to the hatch again. A few feet from the Bug the oxygen bomb lay unbroken where it had fallen into the deep padding of an acceleration couch. Warren swore and flung his knife, but it didn’t hit a vital spot and it landed handle first anyway. He backed away hurriedly, using the hatch for cover until a projecting metal cabinet gave him slightly more protection.

Kelso’s head rose suddenly above the rim of the opening, and Warren began frantically drawing triangles in the air with his forefinger. Kelso’s bewilderment was plain even through the small area of helmet not covered by his wicker-work.

A wedge! Warren screamed silently at him, trying by sheer telepathy to make the other understand. Something hard and heavy to throw at that gas-bomb! A wedge, you stupid idiot—a wedge with the padding off!

Looking puzzled, the Lieutenant began knocking another wedge into the hinged side of the hatch cover.

Sloan was still moving. The Major was humping himself along the control-room deck like some grotesque snail, with agonizing slowness, leaving a trail that was bright red rather than silvery. He was not moving directly toward the couch with the oxygen bomb on it or towards even the Bug, but was instead inching along a course which could only take him against the metal supports of the communications desk—perhaps he had no idea where he was going. Despite the tight fit of the battledress suits, chlorine must be already seeping into his helmet from the tear caused by the pellet, and the Major’s abdominal wound was the worst thing Warren had ever seen in a lifetime of war service. The Major was dead! Warren wished fervently that he would admit the fact and stop moving. But he did not stop until he bumped into the communications desk supports and then he struggled and heaved weakly until he was on his side. Warren didn’t see what he did then because for a few seconds he couldn’t bear to look at him, but when he did look back Sloan was gripping one of the supports with both hands. With a sudden, convulsive effort the Major pulled the unprotected section of his helmet against the metal strut.

He must have opened the air taps because the contents of both his tanks went whistling out through his smashed helmet. The Bug jerked back, dropped his weapon and began tearing at his gills. Warren climbed to his feet and snatched up the unbroken gas-bomb and smashed it with totally unnecessary violence at the Bug’s feet. It shriveled visibly, wrapped its six limbs tightly around itself and died. Major Sloan had finally stopped moving, but somehow Warren could not stop looking at him.

He became aware suddenly of a lance smashing through the machine-gun blister and of cross-bow bolts smacking off the control-room ceiling. Of the pilot checking the positions of essential controls, and of Lieutenant Kelso tearing the padding off a wedge and handing it to him.

Warren took it and on the nearest bulkhead he hammered out the signal “All Secure.”

The shuttle took off twenty-eight minutes after it had landed and twenty-two minutes after the four Bugs had died at the farmhouse. Almost two hundred men were packed every possible space in the ship, the dead as well as the living. Speed had been the prime essential. The shuttle could not be allowed to stay concealed by the smoke for too long a time without the guardship becoming suspicious, so there had been no time to unload the casualties. The overloaded shuttle had staggered off the ground with an acceleration that was barely two G’s.

But the reduced acceleration would not in itself arouse suspicion, because on the site below the smoke was clearing to show the wide-open lock of the dummy and nothing moving for miles around. They might be worried by the radio breakdown—but the shuttle had after all, been grounded for less than half an hour, which was short enough time to conduct a rescue operation in the smoke. And the slow ascent might well be attributed to possibly injured survivors being unable to take high G. Warren moved his gaze from the viewport to the shattered machine-gun blister in the floor and through it to the men packed tightly on the prisoner’s decks. He was waiting for the next batch of casualties to appear and wondering if one of them would be himself.

There had been no time to free the wedged-open seals before takeoff, and as the vacuum hardened around the climbing ship its atmosphere rushed out of the open locks. Chlorine was just as lethal to the human organism as vacuum, but the drop in pressure would uncover any damage to the helmets or hose connections caused by the violent activity of the assault. From Warren’s position in the control-room the prisoners’ decks looked as if they were covered with an even layer of up-ended wastepaper baskets, and as he watched some of them began to jerk wildly, and there was a definite fogginess about the place. Warren gritted his teeth as he thought of those men slowly, or not so slowly, strangling to death while their friends within inches of them could do nothing to help. His feelings were so intense that when it became obvious that he himself was not to become a similar casualty his relief was mixed with a definite feeling of guilt…

Acceleration ceased. For the next sixty-one minutes they would coast up to the guardship. There would be time to return the damaged antenna to its recess and remove the wedges from the outer seal of the airlock so that outwardly the shuttle would appear in all respects normal. Time also for the pilot to practice on the fine controls prior to making the actual approach, for the lock chamber to be cleared of casualties and for the men to get used to weightlessness.

The Escape site, Andersonstown and the smoke pall all around them shrank to a small gray smudge. In the blackness above, the guardship hung like a bright star.

Larger by far than the Victorious , at one time a first line battleship of a class which held the record of being the biggest mobile fabrication in space, the guardship was tremendously impressive despite its being forty years obsolete. Lit both by the sun and the dayside of the planet below, it hung like a fat, silvery torpedo whose sleek outline was broken only where the shuttle’s dock gaped open to receive them and by the planetary observation platform in the nose. This was a larger glassed-in structure housing the telescopes and detection gear which, in normal operation, remained motionless in relation to the planetary surface, while the remainder of the ship rotated for the purpose of supplying the Bugs not on observation duty with artificial gravity. Since the shuttle was coming in to dock, however, all spin had been killed on the ship.