Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit (16 page)

“This is like no other gun system you’ve ever seen,” Rajat said. “You can control everything from that one seat with those handles. On full manual, like she is now, you can shoot from all six sides of the ship at once, or separately. The controls are built into the handles. Options are: First, rockets with high explosive warheads able to take out whole sats, Second, laser beams that can slice through a space vehicle at a thousand miles in less than a hundredth of a second, Third, smart computer- and laser-guided missiles that can be sent out tens of thousands of miles in curved orbits and can track down their targets independently, Fourth, for close-range fighting, you can have magnetic mines that will float over and clamp onto anything metal, various detonation times can be set by that digital clock control to your right.”

Rock kept looking around nervously. It was all a little overwhelming.

“Where do you suggest we get some target practice?” Rock asked. “I can’t start shooting up at the galaxies.”

“There’s a belt of satellite debris and other space junk not too far above us,” Connors suggested. “Why don’t we test her steering system to its edge—and you can check out the lasers?”

“Lead on, Capt. Bligh,” Rock winked at Rajat. They were all in mortal danger every second they were up here. But
damn,
if they weren’t living a fantasy—flying a
spaceship!
An experience most teenagers throughout the twentieth century would have given anything for.

The two whiz kids started shouting more incomprehensible numbers and readouts to one another as Rock fiddled with the gun unit. He saw how responsive it was, at least in switching from screen to screen, enlarging the image, or giving him full six-sided viewing.

He began examining the panel in front of him and saw that the readings were clearly marked for easy and quick reference. The number of bombs of each type remaining. Full now. There were grids and graphs and orbital trajectory calculators waiting to be told where to send what little piece of hellfire. All the lights were green, the little digital readouts reading READY FOR COMBAT.

Rajat played with every mini-rocket nozzle on the ship’s delta wings—wings that had to be deployed for atmosphere re-entry—sending out little bursts from all different angles to see just how responsive the ship was. The answer was very. It seemed to be able to maneuver almost like a dolphin in water, so finely tuned were the rockets. The only hard thing was getting the nozzle-firing rockets to work in full coordination with each other. But after a while, Connors and Rajat broke up control of the system with each other. They began getting their act together, started being able to make the ship soar, stop on a dime, turn ninety degrees and then suddenly speed up again as they headed up to higher orbit.

Rock saw it first, the huge ring of debris swirling like a dark cloud about ten miles above them. It was incredible that there was this much junk up here, pieces of rockets, broken satellites, boosters, all turning in weird quick orbits, everything out of symmetry with everything else so it all kept banging into each other in a churning flood of debris.

“You could open a junkyard up here, sell used parts to ships from other star systems,” Rajat joked.

The whiz kids steered the ship up until she was only a couple of miles from the outer edge of the orbiting junk ring. Some force, perhaps a slight gravitational field generated by the mass of junk itself, was holding it all together in a fifty-mile-wide band. It was quite amazing really.

“See that big long girder-shaped chunk of metal coming in at three o’clock?” Rock asked. “I’m going to try something small on it.”

“Go to it, gunner,” Rajat shouted with enthusiasm. “We’ll hold her dead steady awaiting further orders, sir.”

He pushed a button on the side of one of the gun handles to mode Monitor 1 and the video screen filled with the image of the metal beam. All Rock had to do was turn his own controls and a red circle in the middle of the monitor showed him exactly what he was targeted on. He got the thing dead center and set the Firing Mode to Mini-Missile, then pressed fire.

The red circle turned bright red and before he’d even had a chance to wonder if the damned thing worked or not, the beam was gone. It wasn’t like he really
saw
it explode, although there was a red blur for a second—but then it disappeared. Shot apart with such speed into fragments that no human eye could track it.

The computer could. TARGET DESTROYED, a panel read out in dancing green letters which ran across his view. COMPLETE DESTRUCTION. TARGET BREAKING INTO 1,789 FRAGMENTS TRAVELING AT ANGLES, A-158, A-157 . . .” Rock slammed the CANCEL READOUT button and sat back with a look of satisfaction on his face.

“All right, Rock,” Connors laughed, his cheeks flushing with excitement. “Too bad there aren’t sound effects.”

“There are.” Rajat said clicking some switches. “We got measuring devices for sonar, audio, video, you name it. The whole electromagnetic spectrum can be used to probe things with the Dynasoar’s equipment. They had to be able to know what was really a threat up here and what was just an empty shell sent to cause confusion. It’s one of the features of the ship, aside from the armaments, that made it cost so much,” Rajat went on, sounding like a professor lecturing his slow-witted class on history.

There was a muffled kind of sound like a giant coughing in his sleep as the onboard system played back the sound of the explosion—or rather a compu-recreation. Space is silent.

“Of course that’s too fast for human ears—so we’ll just slow it down a little.” He turned a dial and the sound replayed back. This time it was drawn-out, sounding a little more like an explosion—but still strange. Not like the explosions he was used to. Then the visual image was played back in ultra-violet mode and the video monitor turned bizarre combinations of reds, oranges, and yellows.

“It picks up heat. What you’re seeing is hot. If it’s red—engines still working. The blue ones are dead, cold, the corpses of this graveyard.”

On the replay Rockson could see the heat generated by the explosion, a sudden burst of red which instantly dissipated into nothingness in the cold of space. There were lots of glowing shapes throughout the orbital dump in infra-red.

“It looks like there’s a lot of hot stuff out there,” Rock noted.

“Probably just some mini-atomic engines—they put them in lots of these suckers, tiny ones designed to power their functions for up to a thousand years in some cases. I doubt most of them work. There do seem to be a lot though, don’t there?” He whistled as a whole little school of red came into view.

“Let me try a few more shots. Why don’t you swoop along the underside of the garbage ring, we’ll see if it changes at all.”

“Will do, Captain,” Rajat said, slamming his hand onto the main rockets, which burned for three seconds sending out what looked like a spume of white foam behind them though it was actually rocket fire. The Dynasoar took off like a surfboard skimming the waves of space, crewmen grabbing for handholds.

“All right, slow her down,” Rock said, his hands getting itchy on the high tech controls.

“Roger,” Rajat barked back, and he and Connors threw their reverse throttle engines on full for a half-second. The ship came to an almost dead stop, vis-a-vis the debris, and Rockson sighted up and fired almost immediately on a madly revolving booster from an old U.S. ICBM rocket that had somehow made it up here.

This time he used laser from twenty miles. And again it was instantaneous when he fired. There was a brilliant pencil-beam of white light that was suddenly suspended between the Dynasoar and the ancient USAF booster. It cut along the spinning metal dissecting it in two, and then flicked off, the entire operation lasting about two seconds.

The old ship didn’t explode—it had no engines or fuel anymore, but the parts moved quickly apart, headed off into different orbits, bumping into other pieces of junk. This time, even with the audio-effect re-creation on full, he heard almost nothing. The laser worked silently like a snake striking in the dark.

“I’m going to try one of the smart missiles,” Rock said, getting more impressed by the second by the amount of weaponry. The fact that he was in control of it all was just a little awe-inspiring. He could feel the sheer power of it through his hands. Could see why a man, an
evil
man would want to resurrect the Space-Wheel and use it for his own nefarious ends. The feeling of an almost godlike power at one’s fingertips was overwhelming.

“Look there, Rock,” Rajat said. “There’s a whole string of garbage balls that look almost linked together. Weird, isn’t it?” Rockson zeroed in on the thing. It almost looked like a string of beads, space debris that had been strung along, nearly a dozen blobs of them, each about a hundred feet in diameter and perhaps the same distance apart. He couldn’t begin to imagine what they had been. Maybe plastic globes containing refuse thrown away by a Saturnian Space Liner?

This time he pressed the Magnetic Floating Mines mode, wanting to try out all the firepower. Radar locked onto the target and began reading out distance, orbital path, and other vital information.

Rock leaned forward and aimed the red target dot on his monitor screen at the center of the lead space sphere, and his eyes widened in horror. For a flag was waving out the side of the thing. It was unmistakable. A
white
flag. And by the strange way it moved, it was clear that
someone
was waving it!

And even as Rajat pressed the video zoom, and the camera magnified the scene a hundredfold, all three men seated at the controls gasped simultaneously. For a spacesuited human figure was hanging onto the side of the garbage sphere, waving the white flag for all he was worth.

Twenty-One

“I
’m getting a radio frequency pick-up. Low level,” Connors said, turning some dials in front of his unit. “Yeah—it’s from the guy with the flag—gotta be. Really low power, like they’re running a comm unit on old batteries.”

“Boost it,”
Rock said urgently, taking his hand away from the trigger.

“Allo, sil vous plais, non firez pas. Non boom boom.” A voice crackled over the speaker system in the command console like the scratchy recording of some old record.

“What the hell is—” Rockson began.

“It’s
French,”
Rajat replied before Rock could finish his question. “A mixed-up French, anyway. Let me try—I’ve matched the frequency band they’re using. Let’s see if—”

“Nous sont le—CRACKLE—Dynasoar. Et vous?” The voice on the other end grew excited and began yelling. “Je t’aime! Je vous amie! Mon cher! Sacre bleu! Non, non, mais,
please
ne pas fire les
boom booms.
Les enfants and men are livez in
them!
Tu connais?”

The voice was hysterical and Rock could see that simultaneously the man lost hold of the white flag. It broke free from his hand and floated off spinning slightly sideways as it headed off toward the Perseus Quasars, twelve quadrillion zillion miles away.

“Tres bien, we ne firez pas les missiles,” Rajat replied over the microphone. “Ne firez pas.” That seemed to cool the gesticulating spacesuited fellow at least for a moment. Suddenly he began jabbering away again and after a few moments Rajat turned to Rockson.

“He wants permission to come aboard,” the Asian youth said.

“Granted, as long as it’s just him,” Rock said. “I want to find out what the hell’s going on out there. This sure as hell is mystifying—unless he’s from the Wheel.”

“Le Captain desire for vous visitez le spaceship, Dynasoar. Comprendez-vous?” Rajat was pretty good in languages, too!

“Oui, oui, absolutement,” the French-speaking space man shouted back, so that his voice turned to pure static for a few seconds. But as the Dynasoar matched speed with the string of space garbage balls and closed to about two hundred yards, the guy suddenly pushed himself from the lead sphere. Taking a can from a utility bag at his side, he began spraying it so that it propelled him along. He made the distance separating the two ships in under a minute and the Frenchie was banging at an airlock along one side. Rajat opened the thing automatically, letting him come inside and then recompressed the chamber.

The inner door slid open and they were staring at what could only be described as a space bum. The guy’s spacesuit looked like the vehicles he had been hitching a ride on—a piece of conglomerate junk composed of numerous disparate and not-quite-fitting elements. He wore what looked like an old ocean-diving helmet over it, and beneath a thick rubber wet suit with tubes and junk all over. Plus thick plastic magnetic-bottomed boots that came to his knees. It was not your typical spacesuit.

“Enchante,” the man said as he walked inside and spotted the three of them. He rushed over and Rock started to reach for his shotpistol. But the fellow was just being effusive in his wanting to show them all that no harm was meant by him. He hugged each of them long and hard. Then he stood up straight, removed his bizarre headgear and looked at them.

The Frenchman had penetrating blue eyes set in the middle of a bearded grease-covered face that looked like that of a chimney sweep of olde England, so filthy and dirt-streaked was it.

“Who ze hellez sont vous, askez, may I?” the man said in a strange exaggerated
Franglais
accent that drew out the vowels as if he were reading for a Shakespearean play.

“Nous sont Americans from downez under,” Rajat said, pointing with his thumb in a downwards direction. “Et vous?”

“Nous are les Astro Frenchies,” the man said with a friendly smile. He took in a few deep breaths of air from within the ship and got a big smile on his filthy face. “Le air sont
vunderful.
Tastez like le perfume.”

He breathed in again, like he was in some wonderful mountain range. It tasted okay to Rock and the whiz kids, too, but nothing to write home about. If anything the cabin air was too compressed and dry. Then the Frenchie looked at them with a suddenly suspicious gleam and around at the control module. He seemed to think for a few seconds and then made up his mind about something, relaxing noticeably as he continued to breathe hard like he wanted to take in all he could like a squirrel storing up nuts for the winter.