Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Destiny

She drifted into the bay, tugged off her own helmet, and smoothed back sweat-plastered hair with both hands. It struck me that she had never looked more beautiful.

She said, “This thing flies itself.”

Howard narrowed his eyes until she smiled at him. “But can we get home in this thing?”

“We’re pointed in the right direction and close enough that the Earth’s gravity will help reel us in after about three days. If you mean all that un-aerodynamic thruster piping and tankage? Easy on, easy off.” She pointed at a mushroom-shaped red button, shielded and mounted alongside the backup gauge panel set in the forward bulkhead. “Before we insert into the atmosphere, we hit that. Explosive bolts blow it all off and we’re clean as a whistle for reentry.”

She said to me, “General Wander, this is the second time you’ve been late for a bus I was driving.” Then she grinned again, as warm as pre-war sunshine.

“Nice driving, too, Major. One invasion transport the size of Toledo blown to pieces. Not to mention one hundred twenty-one really ugly fighters.”

While I spoke, she swam herself up into the Mercury system’s crystal blister and let herself spin slowly, enjoying a non-viewscreen look out at space.

Her next words rang cold. “Make that one hundred twenty.”

FIFTY

“HUH?”

Mimi scrambled down from the observation blister and dog-paddled along handholds toward the flight deck. “Firewitch Alpha. Dead astern and closing.”

“But—”

Howard said, “Most of the Firewitches had docked with the Troll. It had pickets out. One must’ve survived.”

The survivor would be very grumpy.

I called to Mimi. “We’ve been coasting. Can we outrun it?”

She called back as her boot soles wriggled at us from the flight-deck access tube, “Not likely. Even if we had fuel to spare. Which we don’t.”

Howard drifted alongside the redundant gauge bank set in the forward bulkhead. He looked at one, then tapped it with his finger. “This says eighty-five percent.”

“You’re looking at the auxiliary maneuvering-thruster fuel. That’s no help. If we burn the main engine too much, when we reverse we won’t be able to decelerate. If we can’t decelerate, we enter the atmosphere too fast. Either we skip off and slide out to an orbit beyond the moon, where we suffocate, freeze, or starve, or we plunge right on in and burn to cinders.”

I tugged my helmet back on. “So, what do we do?”

“You game to shoot ’em up with the Mercury again?”

I heard no other option. I swam up into the blister again and twisted into the fighting chair. It seemed like home, now. I flipped the power-up switch and the cage whined and vibrated around me. I hit the foot treadles, swinging left, then right and elevated, then dropped the chair relative to the horizon. I spun the turret rearward and punched up magnification. I didn’t need to.

Blue against space’s blackness, its navigation lights flaring in patterns only a Slug could decipher, the Firewitch had already closed to firing range and its ordnance arms spidered open.

Up front, Mimi had to be looking in her rearview. “Jason?”

Range was really not an issue with ballistic weapons in space. For practical purposes, the Mercury’s cannon rounds wouldn’t slow down. Aim wasn’t a factor either, with a target as big as the closing Firewitch in my sights.

I depressed the trigger. The gun shrieked. Flame spit from a half-dozen rotating barrels.

And stopped.

Yellow tracer flew downrange and a hundred 37-millimeter rounds exploded in a hundred harmless orange-poppy blooms on the Firewitch’s nose.

“Jason? Why’d you stop?”

“I didn’t!” I looked down. My gloved thumb pressed the trigger so hard it shook. I ran my eyes across the gauge bank, then groaned at a flashing red light. I had ripped away, trigger-happy, on the first Firewitch we disabled. Now I wished I had a few of those rounds back. “The ammo light was green. But we only had a hundred rounds.”

The Firewitch snapped off a first round. It burned toward us like a crimson comet, then passed over my left shoulder, a hundred yards away.

“They won’t take long to target us.”

We shot through space at ten thousand miles per hour. The Firewitch pursued even faster. It was occupying the space we were in mere seconds later. It would all be over in moments.

I pounded the cage frame with my three-fingered hand and yelped. We had come so far! Beaten such impossible odds! I had given up a literal piece of myself. Brumby had given up his life.

Brumby, who could make a bomb out of nearly anything.

I paused and stared at my reflection in the dome, then asked Mimi, “What’s the auxiliary thruster fuel?”

“Why?”

“Goddammit, what’s it made of?”

“Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.”

“Is it explosive?”

“Yeah.”

“How much we got?” I was already unbuckling from the fighting chair.

“Four, five thousand pounds.”

Another Firewitch round bore in on us and shot past. It screamed above me, noiseless, but so close that I saw Slug hieroglyphs etched on its blue, spinning side.

I looked up. The Firewitch’s arms twitched small adjustments. The next salvo would be “fire for effect.”

I slid down into the troop bay and launched myself at the redundant gauge bank, floating, it seemed, as lazy as a Thanksgiving-parade balloon.

I tore open the safety cover and punched the red JETTISON button with my bad hand. Weightless, my fist didn’t strike the Earth-standard spring-loading hard enough to depress the plunger.

What idiot engineer didn’t think about that?

I pulled myself against the panel, braced my feet, and swung again.

Click.

The explosive bolts thumped, not all at once, as piping and tankage peeled away from our skin, piece by piece, and drifted back into our wake.

I made it back up into the dome as the silver tangle of discarded equipment tumbled toward the Firewitch’s vulnerable, cyclopean, purple eye.

“Mimi, better spend a little juice, or we’ll blow ourselves up, too.”

But the Firewitch didn’t explode like the Troll had. The eye exploded satisfyingly, then the ship’s lights went out in a finger snap and it slowed and drifted.

Howard poked his head up into the bubble and looked back as the derelict began to tumble, its momentum carrying it slowly behind us, toward Earth. “Holy moly. Jason Wander, the three-fingered buccaneer.”

“Huh?”

“You just captured our first capital prize of this war.”

Howard wedged himself into the fighting cage alongside me and I rotated it so we faced forward.

Earth hung peaceful and blue in space, the moon silver, and off her shoulder, the Milky Way’s swath powdering the blackness behind them.

I pointed toward the stars. “We’re not alone in this galaxy. Is our destiny out there?”

“You mean ‘destination.’”

“No, I don’t.”

FIFTY-ONE

“GENERAL?” My command sergeant major knocks on the hatch frame of my stateroom as he opens the hatch.

“Time, Sergeant Major Ord?”

“Yes, sir.”

I stand up at my desk and rub my hand. “I already knew.” Organic prosthetic fingers are indistinguishable from original, they say. But the change in atmospheric pressure when a Metzger-class cruiser accelerates to make Temporal-Fabric Insertion always makes mine throb.

The swabbies don’t really need the embarked-division commander on the bridge at insert. It’s routine now. But it’s also tradition. And tradition counts with Space Force as much as it did with the old wet-Navy.

Ord strides beside me, holding a Chipboard for me to sign, clicking from document to document as we walk. Genius may be ninety-nine percent perspiration but commanding a division is ninety-nine percent paperwork.