War Games (23 page)

The blast flattened trees in a hundred-meter circle at ground zero. A concussion wave lifted Grychn and me, then tossed us tumbling to ground. Luckily, we were half a klick away from ground zero.

We picked ourselves up.

“You OK?” I asked.

She nodded.

Combat armor had kept us from being hurt by the blast.

“How far to your ship?”

“Ten or twenty kilometers.”

“Can you find it in the dark?”

“Of course.”

“Then let’s get going before they send another APC.
I’m out of minimissiles. It’s almost dawn.”

We ran again through the forest of glass.

AT DAWN,
we
reached the spaceship.

I probably wouldn’t have been able to find it by myself—it was suspended in an old mine shaft in an isolated mountain range. The mouth of the shaft had been covered with camofilm. You almost had to step on it before you knew it was there. Grychn found it with no difficulty. I was glad I had her with me.

We crawled under one side of the cover and down into the shaft, where we climbed down the side of the ship on rungs recessed into the hull. The craft was painted with camopolymer, so it was difficult to see clearly, but the lines appeared sleek. Three one-meter thruster tubes were attached to a central hull with struts. Bow and stern both tapered to needle points. The ship would do well in atmosphere as well as deep space.

We came to the air lock. Grychn punched in an unlock sequence—the hatch opened. We swung ourselves into the air lock, closed the hatch, and waited for the air lock to cycle. By the time the inner door opened, the ship’s synthebrain had warmed things up for us.

There were three compartments. The forward one was the control room—two acceleration chambers lay side by side, surrounded by holographic displays. The nose of the ship was transparent one-way, providing good visibility to about 120 degrees. The middle cabin was a stateroom with galley and bath. Hammocks pulled out of recessed niches and snapped to rings. The rear cabin was a cargo hold. I rummaged through it. It was still well stocked.

In a few minutes I was making breakfast—I was famished for real food.

We had crêpes and reconstituted fruit, sausages, and a bottle of white wine. I’m afraid I stuffed myself. I became bloated and a little drowsy.

We pulled out hammocks to take a nap, having decided to wait until dark to leave. I fell asleep quickly. From the wine, I suppose. But I must have been tired as well. I didn’t wake until after sundown.

Grychn was not in her hammock. I rolled out of mine and went to the forward cabin. Grychn stood there, going through preflight checks. Green nav light shone from her naked body. Her muscles had filled out a little. She was looking better every day. In fact, she was looking damn good right now.

She had already gone outside and removed the cover from our “silo.” Stars glittered between wisps of fog through the transparent nose of the ship. Display lights began changing from red to green as systems checked themselves. I came up behind her. She stood up. I hugged her from behind. She turned and kissed my mouth, slipping her tongue past mine. I put my hands on her buttocks, lifting her off the deck.

I carried her back to the stateroom and lay her on a hammock. “Do we have time?” I whispered.

“All the time in the world.”

So I laid her. And she laid me. With some interesting variations in between. It only took until midnight—we had time to spare.

* * *

We lay in acceleration chambers, immersed in shock gel. Oxygen bubbles covered our noses. We each wore a nav helmet, connecting our brains to the electronic physiology of the ship. By doing so, we became an integral part of the ship, forming a macrocyborg. The ship’s sensors became our senses. The ship’s servo mechanisms were under our motor control. Afferent neurons collected data. Efferent neurons innervated effectors. Grychn’s mind shared my body and mine shared hers, causing the distinction between the two of us to become blurred—our flesh melded into one and felt comfortable that way. That sharing of flesh was more intimate than any sexual act had ever been. And just as satisfying.

Yet my self remained distinct from hers, as her self did from mine.

I had never flown in a ship before, but I knew how to do it. Good old hypnotraining. The Corps called it “other duties as assigned.”

Grychn whispered in my mind: “Ready?”

“Anytime.”

We nudged a flicker of p-grav out of the three thrusters. We, the macrocyborg spaceship, rose out of our silo. As our stern cleared the ground, we increased our thrust. We accelerated upward at a comfortable ten G’s. Hydrocarbon clouds streamed past our skin—friction warmed us like a summer breeze. Forests of glass receded; mountains dwindled to anthills.

We broke free of the clinging fingers of atmosphere. Clouds rolled beneath like orange sea swells. Ahead, stars shone steady and cold. Sunlight flared in a corona around the edge of Titan. But we stayed in the safety of shadow. As we traveled farther from Titan, Saturn appeared, expanding out from the disk margins of the Moon. The rings faced edgewise to us, appearing as black bands against the planet’s ocher surface. Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, and Rhea gleamed like cyclops’ eyes in black space. Mimas was on the other side of Saturn. Janus was hidden somewhere against the face of the planet. Hyperion and Phoebe hung directly overhead, separated on a north-south line; Iapetus was fifteen degrees to the west.

Iapetus was our destination.

The cone of shadow narrowed. More of Saturn came out of eclipse. We stayed in darkness, like a ghost prowling the night. And we were a ghost ship—camofiIm had darkened to match ambient light, making our albedo almost zero. We were nearly invisible to photosensors. Nor did we reflect any other of the electromagnetic spectrum. Naturally we were silent—sound was not propagated in vacuum. The only trace of our passage was a slight disturbance in the gravitational flux—a cone-shaped wake of p-grav trailing behind us, soon broken up and lost among the myriad gravitational vectors produced by Saturn and his nine children. Normally we would not have been detected. Space was too big and patrols too few.

But these were not normal times.

We’d forgotten about the fleet from Earth, which now hung in orbit around Titan. But now we saw them coming around the edge of shadow, drifting like a shark pack: four heavy cruisers, ten troop tugs with their trains of personnel pods, and a half-dozen destroyers. One of the destroyers led the pack.

Sensing spectra pinged from our hull. They couldn’t “see” us—camofilm didn’t reflect back any radiation. But they “heard” us—gravmeters detected the variance our passage made in the gravitational flux. They knew a ship plied the void.

P-grav flared behind the lead destroyer as it accelerated toward us. The rest of the fleet stayed in their orbits. We were no menace to them. One destroyer could easily take care of a gunrunner or smuggler.

The hailing frequency hissed: “Heave to, bogey ship, and prepare to be boarded.”

“What do we do?” I asked Grychn. “It won’t take much of a check to figure out who we are.”

We turned away from the pack, curving around Titan. Saturn lay below us. “We run for it, then,” she answered.

“Heave to, and be inspected.” A pulsar beam stabbed out, crossing our bows.

Grychn laughed. “I had this ship built to run blockades. Edbryn installed three of his finest thruster tubes on her. Let’s see what she’ll do.”

P-grav roared from our stern, forming a swirling vortex in the space behind us. A hundred G’s smothered our bodies. Even through shock gel, the force was oppressive. Air squeezed out of our lungs, which couldn’t be reexpanded. Oxygenation had to occur extracorporally. No problem for me—I had an hour’s worth stored in brown adipose. But even if I hadn’t, like Grychn, oxygen was pumped into the shock gel at high concentrations, there to diffuse into our naked skins. Carbon dioxide was likewise removed by the gel. The problem was that blood circulated sluggishly, if at all, limiting the effectiveness of cutaneous exchange. Nutrient media was pumped directly into our brains, so we could think, but the rest of our internal organs were put on hold. They could only go about two hours before permanent damage resulted.

I found I couldn’t move a single muscle—I couldn’t even hold my eyes open. Not that I had to—we could “see” with other sensors.

We lunged forward, streaking around Titan. A salvo of pulsar fire came, but the destroyer’s targeting computer underestimated our acceleration, so the beams only sliced through our p-grav wake. The rest of the fleet disappeared behind Titan. The destroyer pursued, but it could never hope to catch us, so it did what it had to do. P-grav flared from two launching bays—two sleek fighters darted out ahead of the destroyer.

“Can we outrun them?” I asked.

“We can try.”

We rolled downward, toward Saturn. Titan receded to our stern. We made random zigzags in our course. Pulsar beams occasionally zipped past, too close for comfort. The two fighters kept pace, but couldn’t gain on us. That meant we couldn’t gain on them either, because we were already going flat out. But maybe we could elude them.

Saturn came ever closer. We passed by his other moons—there was no safety for us on them. The rings cast black shadows on the planet. Storms raged in the upper reaches of his atmosphere.

Still the fighters chased us. Still pulsar salvos stabbed around us. Sooner or later they’d get lucky and score a hit. Gravity’s hand still smothered us. I noticed that my heart had stopped beating. It would start up again when the acceleration lessened. Provided that happened soon. But my body was an incidental part of me. I was aware of Grychn’s body also, and it too was mine. So was the ship. P-grav roaring from thruster nozzles sent a thrill along electronic neurons. Guidance thrusters were my arms and legs. Permaplastic skin felt the cold of space and the warmth of a distant sun. Bits of space dust hit my meteor shield like bugs smashing against a windscreen. I could “hear” gravity. I “saw” with extended frequencies. I “spoke” with spectra other than sound, and louder.

Saturn loomed below. We were deep in his gravity well now. He would always be beneath us. The rings approached, shining with sunlight. We saw them on edge, wavering like a mirage with light reflecting from crystals of frozen ammonia and hydrocarbons. We slipped beside them, skimming close. Stray bits of ammonia ice pattered against our meteor shield like hail on a tin roof. That close, the rings appeared as a translucent band of haze—stars were visible behind them. They were only fifteen km thick. I had the urge to duck into them to hide from the pursuing fighters. But I knew the rings were dense enough to tear us apart at our present velocity. Some of the chunks of ice were hundreds of kilos in mass. How did I know that? Grychn told me. I believed her.

But we got as close as we could to the rings. Ice crystals from them swirled into the vortex of our thrusters, forming clouds behind us. That would interfere with the fighters’ aim, as well as slow them down, as they would have to take a path farther away from the rings. They could no longer follow directly behind us. But that would only delay them a little. All they had to do was keep following us. We couldn’t hide next to the rings forever.

“Do we have a plan?” I asked us.

“Oh yes indeed,” we answered, and I saw the plan. It just might work.

The fighters kept shooting. Quite bothersome of them. Pulsar quanta ricocheted from ice particles in our wake and gleamed like red searchlights within the rings. The hail storm on our roof increased its frenzy, sending a vibration deep into our structural frame. If it continued, eventually we’d shake apart. So we slowed our acceleration. Fingers of Saturnian gravity tugged at us. The fighters closed the gap. Their shots came closer, close enough to raise blisters on our skin.

We had reached the midpoint of our curve past Saturn—in a moment we’d be flying away from the planet.

Now was the time.

We reversed the polarity of our thrusters, and forced them into emergency override. Two hundred gravities pushed from the front, slowing forward velocity. The two fighters flashed past, still accelerating; our relative velocity was too great for them to train their guns on us.

We dropped closer to Saturn. There was a 1,400-kilometer gap between the innermost ring and the fringes of the planet’s atmosphere. Of course, “gap” was a relative term. There was still lots of junk there.

We continued to slow.

The fighters had begun decelerating, too. They were still above and ahead of us. Soon they would shed enough velocity to drop down to us. There was only one thing to do.

We entered the gap.

Have you ever been in a bunker that was being shelled by heavy artillery? Well, that’s what our meteor field sounded like as fist-sized chunks of ice bounced off it. Frozen ammonia shattered into snow. A cloud of vapor formed around us. But in a second we were through and sailing in clear space. The fighters were now on the other side of Saturn’s rings. We were safe from both pursuit and pulsars.

We cut our thrusters. A giant hand stopped crushing our bodies. Our hearts started beating. We gasped air into our lungs.

Our residual velocity was just right, just what we’d calculated it should be—slow enough that we were briefly caught in Saturn’s gravity, which caused us to curve in an ellipse around the planet, but more than escape velocity, so instead of being pulled into orbit we climbed away as we came around the planet-like a comet going around the Sun. Our path had been carefully plotted. On the way out we’d intercept Iapetus. On a dead drift. Without any power. Get it? Now we were completely invisible. We’d have to collide with a patrol ship to be detected.

Pretty clever, huh?