The Escape Orbit (21 page)

They went up the zig-zag companionway fast, but carefully so as not to spring a leak in their suits—Kelso, Sloan, the two pilots and Warren trying hard to keep up with the younger men. They had to reach the control-room before the Bug had time to think, time to realize that its friends were dead, that there were no survivors from the crash-landed ship and that the present attack was so well timed that the whole thing had to be an elaborate ambush. They had to get there before it decided to hit the emergency takeoff button. It could even wreck the Escape by putting an Emergency Lock on the air-tight hatch leading into the control-room, by making it impossible for Kelso to operate the manual controls…

But the hatch was wide open when they reached it, the big, circular cover standing at right angles to the control-room floor. Kelso banged home a wedge so enthusiastically that he overbalanced and just kept himself from falling by grabbing the edge of the opening with both hands. He was still hanging there and trying to get his feet back onto the companionway as Sloan carefully withdrew a heavily padded bag from his pouch and from the bag took even more carefully a large, lumpy ovoid of glass. The glass container held nothing more harmful—to humans, at least—than oxygen under pressure, and the glass was much thinner than that used in the suit air-tanks. He lobbed the glass container into the control-room, waited for five seconds and then went charging up through the hatch with one of the pilots hot on his heels.

There was a soft, red explosion in the region of Sloan’s stomach and the Major folded violently in the middle and rolled from sight. The pilot toppled backwards a second later, his helmet and head inside it blown open. The Bug up there had a sidearm, too, Warren thought sickly, of the type which fired explosive bullets. But the Bug had no business being alive, with an oxygen bomb bursting beside it!

The second pilot was going up and Warren had to restrain him. He couldn’t talk to the man, but by dint of hanging onto one of his arms and climbing above him he made the officer realize that the reason they’d had two pilots was in case one had an accident, and since one of them
had
had an accident the second pilot was no longer expendable. By the time the other was convinced of this Warren was himself part-way into the control-room and the Bug was shooting at him. But Warren was covered by the upright hatch seal which rang loudly with each hit of an exploding pellet, and he was additionally fortunate in that the Bug was trying to do two things and watch three places at once.

One of its manipulators held the sidearm, the other worked the machine-gun covering the prisoner well while its head jerked heavily from the hatch to the machine-gun to the control panel behind it and back to the hatch again. A few feet from the Bug the oxygen bomb lay unbroken where it had fallen into the deep padding of an acceleration couch. Warren swore and flung his knife, but it didn’t hit a vital spot and it landed handle first anyway. He backed away hurriedly, using the hatch for cover until a projecting metal cabinet gave him slightly more protection.

Kelso’s head rose suddenly above the rim of the opening, and Warren began frantically drawing triangles in the air with his forefinger. Kelso’s bewilderment was plain even through the small area of helmet not covered by his wicker-work.

A wedge!
Warren screamed silently at him, trying by sheer telepathy to make the other understand.
Something hard and heavy to throw at that gas-bomb! A wedge, you stupid idiot—a wedge with the padding off!

Looking puzzled, the Lieutenant began knocking another wedge into the hinged side of the hatch cover.

Sloan was still moving. The Major was humping himself along the control-room deck like some grotesque snail, with agonizing slowness, leaving a trail that was bright red rather than silvery. He was not moving directly toward the couch with the oxygen bomb on it or towards even the Bug, but was instead inching along a course which could only take him against the metal supports of the communications desk—perhaps he had no idea where he was going. Despite the tight fit of the battledress suits, chlorine must be already seeping into his helmet from the tear caused by the pellet, and the Major’s abdominal wound was the worst thing Warren had ever seen in a lifetime of war service. The Major was
dead!
Warren wished fervently that he would admit the fact and stop moving. But he did not stop until he bumped into the communications desk supports and then he struggled and heaved weakly until he was on his side. Warren didn’t see what he did then because for a few seconds he couldn’t bear to look at him, but when he did look back Sloan was gripping one of the supports with both hands. With a sudden, convulsive effort the Major pulled the unprotected section of his helmet against the metal strut.

He must have opened the air taps because the contents of both his tanks went whistling out through his smashed helmet. The Bug jerked back, dropped his weapon and began tearing at his gills. Warren climbed to his feet and snatched up the unbroken gas-bomb and smashed it with totally unnecessary violence at the Bug’s feet. It shriveled visibly, wrapped its six limbs tightly around itself and died. Major Sloan had finally stopped moving, but somehow Warren could not stop looking at him.

He became aware suddenly of a lance smashing through the machine-gun blister and of cross-bow bolts smacking off the control-room ceiling. Of the pilot checking the positions of essential controls, and of Lieutenant Kelso tearing the padding off a wedge and handing it to him.

Warren took it and on the nearest bulkhead he hammered out the signal “All Secure.”

The shuttle took off twenty-eight minutes after it had landed and twenty-two minutes after the four Bugs had died at the farmhouse. Almost two hundred men were packed every possible space in the ship, the dead as well as the living. Speed had been the prime essential. The shuttle could not be allowed to stay concealed by the smoke for too long a time without the guardship becoming suspicious, so there had been no time to unload the casualties. The overloaded shuttle had staggered off the ground with an acceleration that was barely two G’s.

But the reduced acceleration would not in itself arouse suspicion, because on the site below the smoke was clearing to show the wide-open lock of the dummy and nothing moving for miles around. They might be worried by the radio breakdown—but the shuttle had after all, been grounded for less than half an hour, which was short enough time to conduct a rescue operation in the smoke. And the slow ascent might well be attributed to possibly injured survivors being unable to take high G. Warren moved his gaze from the viewport to the shattered machine-gun blister in the floor and through it to the men packed tightly on the prisoner’s decks. He was waiting for the next batch of casualties to appear and wondering if one of them would be himself.

There had been no time to free the wedged-open seals before takeoff, and as the vacuum hardened around the climbing ship its atmosphere rushed out of the open locks. Chlorine was just as lethal to the human organism as vacuum, but the drop in pressure would uncover any damage to the helmets or hose connections caused by the violent activity of the assault. From Warren’s position in the control-room the prisoners’ decks looked as if they were covered with an even layer of up-ended wastepaper baskets, and as he watched some of them began to jerk wildly, and there was a definite fogginess about the place. Warren gritted his teeth as he thought of those men slowly, or not so slowly, strangling to death while their friends within inches of them could do nothing to help. His feelings were so intense that when it became obvious that he himself was not to become a similar casualty his relief was mixed with a definite feeling of guilt…

Acceleration ceased. For the next sixty-one minutes they would coast up to the guardship. There would be time to return the damaged antenna to its recess and remove the wedges from the outer seal of the airlock so that outwardly the shuttle would appear in all respects normal. Time also for the pilot to practice on the fine controls prior to making the actual approach, for the lock chamber to be cleared of casualties and for the men to get used to weightlessness.

The Escape site, Andersonstown and the smoke pall all around them shrank to a small gray smudge. In the blackness above, the guardship hung like a bright star.

Larger by far than the
Victorious
, at one time a first line battleship of a class which held the record of being the biggest mobile fabrication in space, the guardship was tremendously impressive despite its being forty years obsolete. Lit both by the sun and the dayside of the planet below, it hung like a fat, silvery torpedo whose sleek outline was broken only where the shuttle’s dock gaped open to receive them and by the planetary observation platform in the nose. This was a larger glassed-in structure housing the telescopes and detection gear which, in normal operation, remained motionless in relation to the planetary surface, while the remainder of the ship rotated for the purpose of supplying the Bugs not on observation duty with artificial gravity. Since the shuttle was coming in to dock, however, all spin had been killed on the ship.

They crept up to the recessed dock—staggered up was more like it, Warren thought—and magnetic clamps shot out and drew them in. The vast outer seal of the dock folded shut. Several years seemed to pass before pressure built up around their ship and the inner seal opened to allow a crowd of about twelve Bugs to come through. The Bugs had magnets on their feet and four of them were floating stretchers ahead of them, and except for the medics with the stretchers, all wore sidearms. But Warren got the impression that they wore them because it was regulations to do so and that most of them were present simply because nothing much ever happened on the guardship and this was a break in routine.

They didn’t know how right they were, thought Warren grimly as he banged his wedge with all his force into the bulkhead beside him.

Immediately the escape hatch of the control-room blew open, the reactor inspection panels and all the other emergency exits large enough to allow egress to a man blew also. The main lock and the cargo hatch opened, too, but it was several seconds before he could emerge, the reason being the howling gale of chlorine which rushed to fill the vacuum inside the ship. But finally the men came kicking and struggling and almost swimming out of all the exits, and Warren, because he had farther to go than the men leaving by the main lock, arrived when the melee was well under way.

The Bugs had the initial advantage of being held magnetically to the deck, which allowed them to take a steadier aim and to wreak terrible havoc among the attackers with their explosive bullets. But the advantage was short-lived because the human attackers had mass, inertia and velocity, and they retained these attributes even when they were dead. Warren narrowly avoided being hit by an officer whose head and chest were a cratered ruin and who was spinning slowly and inexorably towards the Bug who had killed him and who, apparently panic-stricken, was pumping more bullets into him in a vain attempt to halt his approach. The ghastly wreckage of the man collided with the Bug and both of them were left spinning helplessly a few feet off the deck. The Bug kept shooting wildly in all directions.

The dock airlock and the corridor beyond it seemed to be solid with struggling, kicking and spinning figures of men and Bugs, with the two stretchers twisting like a pair of fantastic mobiles in the thick of it. It was a mess, an utter shambles. Several times Warren collided violently with men or Bugs and once he felt a sudden, agonizing pain in the calf of his leg, but there was no smell of chlorine in his helmet and the pain grew duller after a few seconds. Explosive pellets flared and cross-bow bolts flickered past everywhere. He kicked past a Bug who had stopped an explosive bullet with its head and three Committee bolts with the rest of its body. He fended off a man with another bolt protruding from the front of his shattered helmet and he fought his way past the grisly remains of both species until he reached the corridor wall. A section of the ship’s plumbing ran along the wall and Warren grabbed for it and began pulling himself along it hand over hand until he was in the clear.

He stopped to catch his breath, to curse the pain in his leg which the bulky shield kept him from seeing, and to wipe away the sweat from inside his helmet with his forehead pad. The pad was already saturated so that it left foggy streaks on the glass instead of drying it clean, but Warren could see that other men in steadily increasing numbers were also getting clear. Singly and in small groups they drifted past him, heading towards Control, Communications, the main reactor or to guard the all-important prisoners section. He realized suddenly that the obstacle he had just come through had ceased to be a menace, expect possibly to navigation. The great mass of bodies still twisted and spun and rebounded off walls and each other—but lifelessly. The shooting had stopped.

He returned briefly to pluck a cross-bow from the air and take a quiver of bolts from an officer who would no longer need them. Feeling sick, Warren set off for the section of the great ship assigned to him to be searched. Five other officers had been given the same duty and he had no way of knowing how many of them were still alive; he knew only that there was very little time to find what he was looking for.

By Warren’s reckoning the assault men had about forty minutes’ air in their tanks. On the average, anyway, because the tanks, hose and valves were handmade and were therefore subject to unavoidable variations in performance—some would have more than an hour left, some considerably less. Inside either of these time limits they might succeed in taking the ship, only to die a few minutes later as their air gave out. Many would be able to make it to the prisoners’ sections where, because it involved so much time and trouble and waste of oxygen to evacuate and replenish it each time prisoners were transshipped, there was an atmosphere breathable by humans. But that would simply have meant that they were prisoners again. There would have been no way of escaping from that single bubble of oxygen in a chlorine-filled ship, and without the Bugs to work the food synthesizers they would starve.