Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Destiny

I turned to Howard. “You said you were thinking. Why’s your map wrong?”

“We don’t understand how the Pseudocephalopod propels its ships. We may be nowhere near the power plant, after all. It was just a hunch.”

I slapped my forehead. Well, my armored glove slapped my armored helmet. My palm never got within four inches of my eyebrows. “We bet the future of the human race on a hunch?”

“The future of the human race was only worth a two-dollar ticket, Jason.” He paused. “I was counting on you to improvise. That’s what you do best.”

I shook my head and muttered while I accessed Jeeb.

Howard pounded a wall, and another plate loosened by Slug fire gonged the deck. “This stuff won’t stretch. We can’t move the Bomb intact. We’ll have to dismantle the canister.”

Brumby shook his head. “Major, that’s three tons of S-51, at Earth-normal. Still a ton in here. We can roll that canister but we’re all already toting a couple hundred pounds of gear at Earth-normal.”

Jeeb hovered two hundred yards up the tunnel that headed away from the axis of assault of the Slug mob we had slaughtered. In my BAM, I saw what he saw. The passage was blissfully Slug-free. It ended at a sealed Slug hatch, big and different from anything I had seen in my prior travels through a Slug vessel. Was it the kind of hatch an alien, green hive intellect would choose to seal off an engine room? Maybe Howard wasn’t as wrong as we thought.

Howard whispered, “Uh oh.” He pointed at the dead-Slug pile.

It bulged toward us. Something strong enough to budge a couple hundred Slug carcasses, maybe a couple hundred more live Slug reinforcements, was pushing through to introduce itself to us.

I stared at the Bomb, our ball-and-chain. We had no time to break it down into totable packages.

A dead Slug got shoved out of the jam, bounced over the other bodies, and rolled to our feet. The rest of the pile bulged forward.

I pointed at Brumby’s explosives containers. “Grab those. Head down the other corridor.”

Howard stared at the Bomb. “What about that? How are we gonna blow up a mountain with no Bomb?”

Another Slug rolled off the moving pile. I hefted a container. “We’ll improvise. Move your ass, Howard.”

Howard and I had made a hundred yards, panting and cursing the containers we carried, when I realized Brumby wasn’t with us.

His voice seeped back over the Whispercom. “Sir, I’m sealing off the branch passages with Megatex as we go. The little fuckers slime through those slot doorways a couple at a time. But if we deny ’em the wide passages they can’t come at us hard enough to overrun us.”

Megatex was the duct tape of contemporary plastique. A sausage roll of explosives that Brumby could play like a Stradivarius. “Okay. But keep close to us.”

Whump!

As if to punctuate our conversation, a muffled but unmistakable Megatex detonation shook the passage. I smiled. Between Megatex and Brumby, nothing was sliming through that passage for a while.

We dropped every Slug that dared to wiggle a green pseudopod out of a door slot. But there always seemed to be more.

Howard lurched along just behind me as we ran. “Fifty yards to go, Howard.”

I picked up the pace. Two Slugs popped out of door slots to my front. Before they could aim their rail rifles, I snapped off two shots. The beauty of a flechette round is that aiming becomes a luxury.

Slugs are basically animate fluid sacks. A solid hit pops them like water balloons. I rounded the bend where those two lay and slipped on spilled mucus. One foot went from under me, I crashed down on one armored knee and gagged. Slug guts stink like rotted mushrooms.

Ahead, the passage branched, again. It wasn’t supposed to, again. But this one was big.

Panting through my mouth in the thin air, I Whispercommed Brumby. “Left at the next fork. Stay close.”

I kept moving, Howard in tow.

Behind me, firing erupted and echoed up the passage. Rail rifles whine when they fire, like angry wasps. Brumby’s answering fire rattled. Full auto. That meant lots of bad guys.

Brumby panted, too. “Sir, fifty of ’em just poured out from that big passage before I could seal it.”

I looked down the tunnel ahead, toward our goal. Beside me, Howard wheezed, his eyes alight with urgency. Seconds ticked away.

“Close up when you can, Brumby.” I stood and ran like hell to catch up with Jeeb.

I won the sprint to the closed hatch. Jeeb clung shoulder-high to the passage’s curved wall, his hide chameleoned purple, so he was invisible if you didn’t know where to look. Homeothermic circuits matched Jeeb’s temperature to his surroundings, so he was as invisible to the Slugs’ infrared vision as he was to human vision. His probes were plastered against the door, reading conditions on its other side.

“Demolition forward,” I said.

Nothing.

“Brumby? I need you here now!”

A Megatex whump shook the floor again.

Thirty seconds later, Brumby brushed past me, panting, his rucksack missing. He already had Megatex breaching-charge plastiques out of his minipack when he came alongside me. He took one breath, hands on hips, while his eyes flicked around, studying the door frame.

My BAM lit with data from Jeeb. The space on the other side of the hatch was vast. What could be vaster than a starship’s engine room? Jackpot!

Brumby jumped back from the door and brandished his trigger transmitter. The charges he had placed were generous, as big as bread loaves. I nodded. We didn’t have time to try again if he skimped on explosives. He shouted, “Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!”

Howard and I turned away from the door and crouched.

“Fire in the hole!” On the third warning, Brumby pressed the trigger, even as he ran back down the passage.

FORTY-TWO

HOWARD AND I KNELT CLOSEST to the door, so the explosion flattened us. Air whooshed across us as pressure equalized between the passage and the chamber beyond.

Before the explosion’s echoes died, I heard rail rifles zing and felt rounds whiz above my back like swarming wasps.

Brumby’s answering fire chattered back.

Pinned down, I twisted my head. Howard lay beside me, eyes closed. Cracks spiderwebbed his face shield and, as I watched, blood trickled from one nostril across his cheek like a tear.

Firing stopped as I switched my BAM display to check his vitals. A green circle indicated healthy, a green blinker meant wounded. Howard’s blinker turned solid green.

I touched his shoulder. “Howard?” No answer.

I Whispercommed. “Brumby?” No answer. I switched nets, for the hell of it. “Mimi?” No answer. We had expected hull interference.

My ears rang like firebells. Howard, Brumby, and Mimi could be talking but I might not be hearing.

Beyond the open hatch, through drifting explosion smoke, I saw vast darkness.

I stood and realized I’d sprained a knee. Limping back down the passage, I found Brumby tearing at debris, flinging Slug bodies and twisted metal aside.

It hadn’t been fifty Slugs that jumped him, more like one hundred, by my casual body count. Warriors, in that black armor of theirs, and naked ones as well. One of their kamikaze charges, more extreme even than the first one that had hit us. That made me think that whatever was beyond the hatch we’d blown was something they didn’t want us to control.

I stood in that passage a long time listening to Slug vital fluids drip. The smell of gunsmoke mingled in my nostrils with the stink of spilled Slug.

Brumby stood and swore.

“What, Brumby?”

“The container I was carrying. I had to drop it to get forward when you called. Then the charges I set blew.” He thrust his hands at the mess that plugged the passage, floor to rounded ceiling. “The Megatex. The Microdets. All our best stuff was in there.” He shook his head. “It’s gone.”