Chapter Thirty-Three
“We are ready,” Kamara transmitted from the pilot’s seat. He turned his helmeted head to look at Bowden in the copilot’s position. “I hope this works.”
Me too. “It should,” Bowden said. “Attaching it directly to the rear of the fuselage and at the center of mass lets the main structural members absorb the force of the acceleration.” He’d had to figure out another way to do it after looking at the nose gear of the packet again. The ship—in general—was on the spindly side, and there was no way the nose gear would have survived the railgun launch. The fuselage was marginally sturdier, assuming the mounted CONEX boxes didn’t tear off.
He clicked the mic twice to let the commandos know of the impending launch, then pushed the button several times that controlled their warning light. The railgun ride is going to provide a lot of “fun” for the commandos. During the installation of the catcher’s mitt, he’d had a wire attached to the command CONEX box that led to the bridge of the ship. Then, when he’d had a few unobserved minutes, he’d passed the word to them about the launch so that they knew to be lying down so they wouldn’t get hurt. They hadn’t come running out of the boxes in disapproval, so Bowden figured that their silence meant their consent.
Shitty deals for shitty SEALs.
Harry looked around and contemplated his predicament. He’d chosen the acceleration couch with the best view of the control panel. About him, five more couches, each holding a recumbent member of his assault team, were arranged in three ranks. He checked the launch warning light again. The LED sloppily epoxied onto the control panel was still green, just as it had been the last hundred times he’d looked. The abbreviated “control panel,” the merest sketch of what should have been a purpose-built piece of equipment, was a joke. Comms were limited to the ship ferrying the habitat modules that housed the team. Mismatched gauges and idiot lights for the environmental control system plus a single airlock control rounded out the tools at his disposal. In fact, the construction of the entire module reeked of a “use once and recycle” philosophy that reminded Harry uncomfortably of his initial descent to R’Bak in a one-man, self-propelled tin can. They’d glued that little gem together, too.
The builder had gotten the lighting right; he’d give them that much. The feeling was akin to being in an operating room, right down to the added patient’s-eye perspective, free of charge. There was the easy-to-clean blue vinyl floor, the racks of flush-mounted lockers that held their individual equipment, the abbreviated armory container fabricated from pierced steel sheeting and the small, bright red Faraday cage for the blasting caps packed in anti-shock foam. A small table-and-bench combination was permanently attached to the deck next to the ration station, which wasn’t much more than a source of fresh water and a meal-warming unit. A tiny closet hid the one commode they’d be sharing.
Harry really hoped it worked as designed.
The assault force had sealed themselves into the two habitat modules hours ago, with the promise they’d launch in “thirty minutes, max!” With that guarantee, Harry had foregone the installation of the relief catheter and was now contemplating the bleak future of peeing into his Maximum Absorbency Garment, or MAG, which was a fancy name for an oversize diaper.
At last, the green launch warning light flashed three times and then dimmed before finally glowing a ruby red.
He chinned his radio switch, positioned for operation during high acceleration.
“Major, thirty-second warning,” he sent over the hardwired intercom that connected him to the second hab. “Let’s hope these tin cans hold together.”
“I saw it, Major Tapper,” Korelon replied, seemingly unconcerned. “Thank you. But there is no need for concern. And, Major?”
Harry sighed. What chestnut was Korelon going to deliver now?
“Yeah, what’s up, Korelon?”
“I’m glad you are with us,” Korelon said, and clicked off.
Well, what do you know about that?
“All hands stand by for acceleration,” Harry announced to his own crewmates, still pleasantly puzzled over the unexpected change in the phlegmatic RockHound. “Twenty seconds. Lower your faceplates. I’d say brace yourselves, but that doesn’t quite cover it.”
Nonetheless, after sealing his own helmet, he pressed himself firmly into the stiff contoured padding of his couch.
“Hey, Major!” Rodriguez said on the intercom, preparing to deliver the age-old, pre-drop ritual common to those on the sharp end. “I think I changed my mind. Where do I get off?”
Nervous laughter greeted this sally.
Officially, they would experience acceleration “in excess of eight gees.” Harry had asked for a more precise figure. The catapult launch control officer—whom Harry had noted with no small sense of disquiet was the same man with whom he’d exchanged words while appropriating the central hangar for his team’s exclusive training use—had sidestepped the question. The acceleration figure wasn’t just about the comfort of the team. The habs were temporarily affixed to the outside of an oversize mining craft while they were being ferried to the rendezvous. Harry had seen the holdfasts brazed to the hull. Eight times the mass of the hab was a lot of force to be exerted against ad hoc fasteners that connected their habs to the little ship.
It was not an inconsequential issue, but when Harry pressed a second time, the launch control officer had merely smirked and assured him the installation was quite secure, adding, “The construction is well within the limits of launch stress and design error.”
Bowden expected, but still loathed, the pause as the SpinDog inside Outpost waited for the railgun to get to its optimal position, then, without another transmission, pushed the button—or however he initiated the railgun launch system—and the ship was hurled from the station. “Hurled” probably wasn’t the right word, as the forces involved were more violent than an aircraft carrier catapult launch, and it certainly induced more stress than the packet was designed for.
The sounds of metal under stress filled the cockpit, and a number of caution lights flashed on the packet’s dashboard, but none of the red warning lights illuminated. After a few seconds, the acceleration fell off, and Bowden began breathing again. It worked!
What had been called “acceleration” during all the mission preps slammed into Harry like a baseball bat to his entire body. He immediately stopped daydreaming about welds and instead imagined exploring the launch officer’s guts with his Ka-Bar.
Mercifully, the launch impulse was brief, though, and Harry reflexively wiggled a bit in his bucket, checking for injury. Nothing appeared to have fallen off.
“Everybody all right?” Harry called to just the men in his hab. “Alpha, sound off.”
Stunned language, colorful even by Harry’s jaded standards, informed him the team was alive.
“Y’all okay over there, Korelon?” Harry commed over to the second hab. “Any exciting warning lights?”
“Situation nominal, Major,” Korelon responded promptly with a familiar phrase. “As I’ve said, these modules are constructed well within the limits of launch stress and design error.”
Huh. Must be a RockHound thing.
“All hands, that was the only big one,” Harry informed the team. “We’re going to stay suited for a while longer while they send a few more love taps our way. They won’t be anything like the first big shove, but we stay buttoned up, just in case. Then we get to do some good training.”
“The actual fuck?” seemed to be the consensus answer.
“Well, we’re still alive and in one piece,” Kamara said as he pushed several reset buttons. Most—but not all—of the caution lights went out. “I even think we can fix most of the failures you induced…”
“But…?” Bowden asked when Kamara left the statement dangling.
“But now we will see what happens when the gun shoots thousand-kilogram slugs at my poor ship.”
While Bowden hadn’t been oblivious to the dangers inherent to his plan, his scheme to catch the slugs hadn’t sounded quite so dangerous until it was phrased like that. “It’ll work,” he said simply. Or people will die as giant bits of metal rip through the improvised mechanism and crash through the ship. Bowden swallowed. Please, dear God, let this work.
“Is the ship ready?” Kamara asked.
“As ready as it is ever going to be,” Raptis said as she monitored the catching mechanism from her position in the back. “The glove is aligned.”
“You may commence,” Kamara reported to Outpost.
“Firing,” the man replied.
A few seconds later, the craft jerked forward as the glove sequentially caught and then dumped the first six slugs the system on Outpost fired.
“It worked!” Kamara exclaimed, surprise evident in his tone, as the mitt rotated to the side to dump the slugs out of the way and realigned for the next round.
Those were the easy ones, Bowden thought. By the time Outpost rotated into position again, they would be a lot farther from the station, making the shot more difficult. A good computer system could have made the shot from the spinning platform…but they only had the jury-rigged laser system. “Hopefully, they can do that six more times,” he said.
And hopefully, the rockets will work, too. A set of discrete solid rocket boosters had been added to the rest of the slugs. It gave the rounds a little more velocity and a limited terminal correction capability—including the ability to abort the round if there was a malfunction that would lead to an impact outside the mitt.
“The glove is aligned for the second set of shots,” Raptis said, having confirmed that the mechanism was secured in its “catch” position.
“Ready,” Kamara transmitted.
“Firing.”
The technician at Outpost was on the money with the first several shots of the next group, but on the fourth, Bowden felt a brief moment of acceleration and then slam!
“What was that?” Kamara asked as a number of caution lights snapped on. This time, some of the red warning lights illuminated, too.
“The camera is out, so I can’t see,” Raptis said, “but from the brief glimpse I got, it looked like the fourth round tried to abort. It turned a catastrophic impact into a glancing blow, but the slug still hit the ship.”
“Shit,” Kamara said, pushing the button that jettisoned the device they’d been using to catch the slugs. He pointed to one of the red lights. “It looks like it must have hit the port aft thruster. I’m going to have to go out and check it.”
“What do you want me to do?” Bowden asked.
“We didn’t get enough velocity to get to the second planet,” the RockHound said, “but we got too much to return to Outpost. I need you and Raptis to figure out where we can go from here without being seen by the Kulsians.”
“Korelon, this is Tapper,” Harry commed his nominal second-in-command. “Everybody can unstrap and move around.”
“The acceleration maneuvers worked, I take it?” Korelon replied. “One of the last impulses was different. Is the ship damaged?”
“Not as far as I can tell,” Harry said, moving toward the rack where his EVA gear was secured. “Not our problem; everything on my board that’s supposed to be green is green. Ship repairs are strictly the province of the ship’s crew.
“But don’t get too comfortable; the first of the cargo pods will be heading for us pretty soon. Alpha will take the first set of them, then unsuit. Should give you time to let your guys eat comfortably before you go out to get the second. The base personnel will stagger the launches as the Outpost rotates through the best geometry for an accurate shot. Then we can alternate, watch on watch, till the loadout is complete.”
“Major, I understand,” the RockHound answered somewhat diffidently. “But I feel I must point out despite the improvements in Terran micro skills, we are still much more adept in freefa—”
“Negative,” Harry answered, cutting off further discussion. “We’ve already been over this. The point is these guys need more time in micro, not less. Plus, we’re going to spread the cumulative radiation exposure across the entire team so no one goes over the maximum amount. Let your guys get out of their gear. We’re going to be in it a lot, and your turn is coming up.”
“As you say, Major.”
* * *
“The good news,” Kamara said when he came back in two hours after the last, abortive pulse of acceleration, “is that I can replace the thruster. I have a spare and—with a bit of work by Hrensku and me—we can fix it and a couple of other problems the slug caused. I also just saw some of the water in the shielding being replenished, so our ‘cargo’ has obviously picked up the first pod on schedule, and the transfer system is working. The bad news, however, is that we’re not going to be able to rendezvous with the other pods without using a good bit of thrust—so much that the signature is sure to be detected, and none of us want that to happen.”
Kamara looked around the small group gathered in the galley. “The worse news, of course, is that we’re headed further in-system without a way to return to Outpost without a similar thrust signature, which would be sure to bring the Kulsians to investigate. I don’t see any way for us to get home or to accomplish the fool’s errand we were on.”
“I thought the same thing,” Raptis said, “but then Bowden had an idea.”
“Is this one going to be as good as your catcher’s mitt idea, which worked out so well?” Kamara asked. “Or is it something equally dangerous and unpredictable?”
Bowden shrugged. “It’s not without risks, but—like you said—we’re pretty much out of options.”
“And this plan is…?”
“Well, the problem, as you articulated, is that whatever we do, we have to do it without being seen.”
“Correct. Leading the Kulsians to Outpost would result in the destruction of our society.”
Bowden nodded. “As you also articulated, though, we’re not going to make it to our rendezvous without using additional thrust. That means we need to have a burn, but we have to do it without the Kulsians seeing it.”
“And the closer we get, the more likely they are to see it, so if you could just explain your plan…”
“Right. Remember when we were on the comet together?”
“Yes, but I don’t see how that’s going to help us.”
“Bear with me. Remember how it was outgassing?”
“Yes.”
“That would hide our thrust bloom if we did it on the other side of a comet from the planet, but we’d need to be very close to the comet.”
“And there is a comet we could use to hide our signature?”
“Well, yes,” Bowden said. Raptis raised an eyebrow. “Okay, there’s an ice-teroid headed inbound, but it isn’t currently outgassing.”
“An ice-teroid isn’t a comet. It’s just a conglomeration of rock and ice. It doesn’t have the outgassing we need. How does that help us?”
“The formation of comets and such isn’t uniform. Just because it isn’t outgassing yet just means the star hasn’t shed enough light on it to raise the temperature to the point at which the outgassing process begins. I’m suggesting we rendezvous with it and focus our thrusters on it to get an outgassing event, then we use it to conceal our thrust as we boost for the second planet.”
Kamara shook his head once as he thought it through, then looked up at Raptis. “You’re the expert; what do you think?”
“I think it’s our only chance. Just because it’s not outgassing doesn’t mean it won’t. I’ve been to dozens of comets, and a number of these have had their surface ice melted off, so it takes them a while to heat up enough for the ice inside to sublimate. Ice-teroids are similar…somewhat. It’s possible we can do this, but we won’t know until we get there and take a look.”
“Where is ‘there’?”
Raptis winced. “The ice-teroid is still behind us, but it’s catching up quickly. We would have to start accelerating soon to match its velocity as it overtakes us.”
“Won’t we be seen by the Kulsians if we do that?” Fiezel asked.
“No,” Raptis said. “We can use the compressed gas thrusters to speed up without tapping the main engine. I think it’s possible. Once we’re in the shadow of the comet, we could tap the main engine once or twice if we needed to.”
“It might work,” Hrensku said. “If one of the surveyor ships came over the horizon and was looking our way, they wouldn’t see the thrust signature; all they’d get would be a heated particle trail. Something that would be easily passed off as comet outgassing.”
“I’ve never thought about using one for cover that way,” Kamara admitted. “It’s risky, especially with Kulsians close by. Normally, we’d just snuggle up to it, go quiet, and try to hide behind it. I mean, who’d be dumb enough to try to get a body to outgas while you’re flying in formation with it? I mean, the material spewing forth could potentially destroy the craft as easily as a Kulsian ship-to-ship missile.”
“That’s the greatest risk,” Raptis agreed. “We’re going to have to get really close because we’re going to have to use the main engine to create the heat we need. It’s going to take focusing the burn down onto the ice-teroid while using the forward thrusters at full throttle to match and counteract the main engine, maintaining our station keeping. Then, once it’s going like we want, we spin the ship and use a few heavy pulses of main thrust.”
“But you think it’s possible?” Kamara asked.
“I never would have thought of it on my own,” she said, “but I think it could work. If we can find the right area on the ice-teroid. Besides, we don’t have any other choices.”
“You’re right.” Kamara shrugged. “We can’t make it back to Outpost without being seen, so I don’t see how we can do anything else. A small chance of success is better than none at all.”
“All right, last review of pod retrieval,” Harry explained, addressing Alpha. “The name of the game is good training. I know you’ve been briefed, but some of you have been a little too fond of RockHound beer to reliably remember everything you’ve been told in the last week.”
Grave de Peralto looked especially bleary. Harry caught Pham staring disapprovingly. The other members of the team had amused themselves challenging the Flea to successive drinking contests; for that matter, all hands smelled as though they’d smuggled the product of another homemade still along on the mission. Yet, the others wore the same expression of professional indifference as Harry, save Roeder, who wore his perpetual grin.
“Between the first push and the little love taps since, we’re moving as fast as we can go without burning fuel. But we need to bring on board enough supplies to keep us fed and, more importantly, shielded,” Harry reminded them. “We’ll alternate with the RockHounds, EVAing to secure the pods, connect them to the hab’s systems, and improve our overall skill moving in freefall. Just like the real thing, we’re going to rely on hand signals, so the enemy isn’t warned by our radio signals. Keep your tethers on and work with your battle-buddy. Any questions?”
“That launch felt like hell, actually,” Grave de Peralto spoke up from where he sat on the edge of his acceleration couch. “Why does good training have to be like that, I ask you?”
“If it didn’t suck, you wouldn’t love it so much,” Harry announced. “Besides, you get to watch me go first, Flea.” He looked over his shoulder at Rodriguez. “And by me, I mean you and I, Marco. Off and on. Let’s show the Hounds how we roll.”