Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Destiny

Nothing.

A Slug wave surged at me. I dropped Slugs with M-20 flechette until I ran out. My ammo pouches were bare. Three more surged forward. I drew Ord’s.45 and hit all three, but one got off a round that whacked my thigh. But for my armor, it would have torn my leg off.

I rounded the last bend, limping. The yellow plastic plug that sealed the six-foot-diameter breach point remained in place. That proved nothing. The docking procedure left it in place, whether Mimi had rescued Howard and Jeeb or not.

I drew up to the breach point, panting, rested my shoulder against its pillow, and read my ’puter.

If Brumby did his job, he and I had five minutes to live. And if Howard and Jeeb had done theirs, the human race might have forever.

I glanced down at the deck plates and my heart skipped.

FORTY-NINE

I KNELT AND PICKED UP A SQUARE of paper a bit bigger than an old postage stamp, but nothing else.

I smiled. The paper was a Howard Hibble nicotine-gum wrapper. He and Jeeb had made it this far, in fact had paused long enough for Howard to have a chew. If Slugs had caught up with them, there would be spent brass on the deck, if not blood or a body. Howard when cornered became a wildcat with 20-200 vision. He wouldn’t have gone down without firing a shot.

So they had made it.

I popped the magazine out of the pistol butt, awkwardly, since I had to do it three-fingered. Then I reached for a fresh magazine and found nothing. I tried Brumby on squad net and got nothing, which I expected, considering the interference between us.

Debris from the earlier fighting still littered the little chamber where we had entered this ship and begun this battle. The Semtex canister we had left behind was gone. Slugs weren’t stupid. Without ammunition, the best I could do to delay any Slugs that tried to get to Brumby was barricade the passage. I dragged debris and flung up a ratty barrier.

I slumped, and slid down the plastic plug until I sat on the deck plates, sprawled my legs and rested my head against the plug’s cushion. I turned the.45 to hold the barrel in my good hand, to tomahawk Slugs with the gun butt. Why I bothered, I didn’t know. The Slugs and I would be tiny bits of interplanetary flotsam in four minutes. Or not, in which case, with odds of one hundred thousand to one against me, I wouldn’t last long anyway.

It had, all things considered, been a fine twenty-five years. I had known my parents, though not for so long as I would have liked. I had grown up. I had known good people. The best, in fact. I had experienced the one great love of my life, albeit for just 616 days. Oh, and, depending on which version of history one read, I had saved the world.

My ’puter beeped. Three minutes.

They say contemplation of death comes in phases: denial, anger, some other stuff, then, finally, acceptance.

A mile beneath me was Brumby, too, taking the opportunity to accept his death?

Maybe that was the thing I had been luckiest about, compared to the other orphans I had known. It is a soldier’s destiny to die young and unexpectedly. They may die for noble causes. They may die for others’ hubris or stupidity. But it is rarely a soldier’s destiny to have the time to accept his death.

That, I supposed, was the thing that would stand clear to me for what remained of my life.

“—stand clear.”

My own thoughts echoed in my helmet. In my last moments, I had begun talking to myself.

“Jason? Come in. There’s no time to dock this thing.” Mimi squawked inside my helmet. “I’m just gonna poke the docking bridge through the plug. Stand clear, then dive in through the bridge hatch fast. ’Cause I gotta reverse out in fifteen seconds.”

Across the chamber, my debris barrier fell.

Slugs boiled through, so thick I couldn’t count them.

I scrambled to my feet and spun around.

The plug bulged inward, like a giant, yellow bubblegum bubble.

Blam!

The explosion as Mimi stung the docking bridge through the breach hurled the plastic plug and me, somersaulting like a crimson bowling ball, twenty feet back down the passage. Slugs scattered like tenpins.

“Jason, I hope you heard me. ’Cause if you’re not inside that bridge when I pull out, explosive decompression will shoot you into space like a watermelon seed.”

I kicked the plug off me like blankets on Christmas morning and scrambled to my knees.

Slugs swarmed around me. I pounded one, pistol-whipped another, and wondered why I hadn’t been shot a dozen times already.

Slugs ignored me as they surged around and past, headed toward Brumby and our makeshift bomb. They ignored me because I couldn’t kill their invasion. But they had figured out that Brumby could.

The bridge hatch beckoned, twenty feet away.

I crawled forward. And my web-gear harness caught on the plug’s torn surface. I tugged and dragged the plug behind me.

Ten feet to the bridge hatch.

Beyond the hull breach, I heard thrusters fire, their sound conducted through the contact between the hulls of the V-Star and the Troll.

The gap between me and the bridge hatch widened to twelve feet as Mimi backed the V-Star away.

My ’puter beeped. Two minutes to detonation.

I popped the buckle on my harness. It fell away from my body and flopped to the deck, along with the deflated plug.

I dove for the bridge-hatch handle, caught it, and got dragged toward outer space as the V-Star backed away from the Troll. I twisted my body and the hatch fell open. I scrambled in, the hatch snapped shut behind me, and the rush of atmosphere exploding out of the open breach thundered against the docking bridge’s skin.

Armored Slugs got sucked out through the breach into vacuum like spilled black marbles. The passage became impassable. The Slugs couldn’t cross vacuum and get to Brumby in time to prevent detonation, now.

I lay there in the docking bridge’s white metal tube and just breathed, listening to thruster nozzles fire as Mimi rotated the V-Star so she could fire the main engine.

I weaseled around inside the docking bridge and pressed my helmet faceplate to the quartz porthole in the hatch.

We were five hundred feet from the Troll’s vast surface, and backing off fast.

“Jason? You in?”

“In.”

My ’puter beeped. One minute.

“Hang on.”

Mimi lit the main engine and acceleration crushed me against the docking bridge’s rear hatch like a musket ball rammed down a flintlock’s muzzle.

I don’t know how many Gees we pulled, but my helmet faceplate got measled red from my nosebleed.

I was jammed against the rear inspection plate, a quartz port like the front hatch porthole. Behind us, the city-sized Troll already looked as small as a basketball. I chinned my faceplate dark.

My heart beat and I thought of Brumby.

The Troll seemed to wiggle, growing smaller by the second, then it turned into a miniature sunrise.

The yellow explosion raced at us.

In my helmet, Mimi muttered, “Go. Go, you mother!”

Flame engulfed us in seconds. The ship rocked and spun. Debris banged against us like the start of a rain.

I tumbled inside the bridge as the ship yawed.

Then space was black again. The roar of the main engine cut off and weight lifted off my chest as the V-Star coasted through space.

“Jason? You okay?”

“Bruised. But glad to be here. I owe you.”

Mimi asked, “Howard?”

“Holy moly!”

I dragged myself through the inner bridge hatch and floated in the troop bay, where Howard was strapped in, helmet off, his head poking up out of his armor like an undernourished turtle’s. I popped my helmet and let it float in the bay.

Mimi Ozawa wormed her way back from the flight deck. This time I watched.