DEPRESSURIZATION KLAXONS HOOTED. I shook my head to clear it. Behind my back, the hatch locked down, separating Bulkhead Ninety and aft from areas forward. Had I been in the hatch, instead of through it, it would have snipped me in two like a salami.
I was still breathing, so the problem had to be with the deck forward, not with where I was. I swiveled around, then laid my cheek against the hatch. That way, I could peer through the eye-level quartzite peephole in the hatch to see what was wrong on the other side, between Bulkhead Ninety and Bulkhead Eighty-nine.
I swore and wiped the peephole, but it was black. Something on the other side had smeared the peephole so I couldn’t see through it.
I blinked, then squinted through again. Little points of light swam in the blackness, and something the size and shape of an old beer can with its top peeled back tumbled, weightless.
I blinked, then squinted again. “Crap.”
The Abraham Lincoln forward of Bulkhead Ninety rolled slowly in space, a mile away and drifting farther from me by the second.
“Crap, crap, crap.” I ran to my cabin and punched up my wireless library patch to Eddie Duffy’s computer. “Eddie?”
Silence.
“Goddamit, is anybody left up front?”
“Jason? Where are you?” Eddie!
“In my cabin. What the hell happened?”
“Dunno. Viper, maybe.”
I swore. As little as we understood about Slug tools and motives, we understood the Viper least of all. The Spooks figured that Vipers were dense lumps of Cavorite-powered matter, maybe no bigger than refrigerators, that the Slugs left loitering in space near things they thought were important, like mines afloat in vacuum. Vipers were triggered by sensors that looked like Slug-metal footballs that also were sprinkled around strategic points, like electronic trip wires. When a football sensed something it was programmed to dislike, the Viper accelerated to a speed in excess of.66 C, being two-thirds the speed of light, homed on the little football sensor, then smashed the living crap out of whatever the football had detected.
Kinetic energy is a product of velocity and mass, so a single refrigerator-sized Viper can put a hole in central Florida bigger than Cape Canaveral. In fact, one had, and I still bore the physical and mental scars.
“Then why are we still here, Eddie?”
During the First Battle of Mousetrap’s opening moments, a Viper had smashed headlong into the Nimitz and vaporized it.
“The Viper took us abeam, not head-on. Sliced us clean. I dunno how many we lost. Gotta go.”
The Slugs hadn’t figured out what cheap human gangsters had figured out centuries ago. A high-velocity bullet may pass through a body wreaking less havoc than a fat bullet, or than a bullet that fragments. So, I was alive, albeit a castaway, because the Slugs weren’t diabolical enough to invent the dum-dum bullet.
An hour later, while Eddie Duffy tended to the catastrophe that afflicted his crew of over two thousand, most of whom had been forward of Ninety when the Viper split the Abraham Lincoln, I inspected the life raft upon which I had been cast adrift in space.
My first discovery was the worst. I ran, Jeeb clattering across the deckplates in my wake, until I reached the flight deck. The starboard launch bays, where all the Early Birds and their crews had been, had been crushed. The port side was little better. The red lockdown light flashed above Bay One’s hatch.
I peered through the hatch peephole. The Abraham Lincoln’s hull, and the bay bulkheads, had peeled away, so the bay deck and the Silver Bullet Scorpion on its launch rails stood naked against space’s blackness, like a house chimney left standing after a Kansas tornado. There was no sign of the bay crew, the Scorpion’s canopy was up, and the harness straps of the empty pilot’s couch dangled up in a windless vacuum.
I pounded my fist on the sealed hatch. The Viper had struck during watch change, when the bay crew were milling around, and both incoming and outgoing pilots were exposed.
Whether it was Rommel on D-day eve, traveling home for his wife’s birthday, or Nagumo’s aircraft caught on deck rearming and refueling at Midway, or a Hessian picket who might have been satisfying a natural need when he should have been looking for Washington crossing the Delaware, military history often turned because somebody took an ill-timed break.
Mankind’s saving grace in this catastrophe had been Howard Hibble’s preparation of two Silver Bullets, not just one.
I returned to my cabin and punched up Eddie on my flatscreen. He didn’t answer. I tapped into the video feed that, as captain, Eddie could access to view his bridge displays from his cabin.
Damage Control reported two hundred dead or missing, among them the Air Wing pilots who were meeting in their wardroom, starboard. But the ship’s forward section was airtight and fire-free, although drifting as dead as a log.
Evidence of the status of my end of the ship was circumstantial, mostly what had been observed from the forward section and was now reported on the main ’Puters. The impeller rooms, far aft of me, appeared to be split open like pea pods. The ship had shut down the drive faster than a human could think, so inertia kept the two pieces in motion at a similar speed and trajectory, which was why the Abe’s dismembered parts remained within sight of each other.
Seated in front of the screen, I paused and breathed. In the billions of cubic miles of interstellar space that the fleet occupied, the Abe’s passage close to some unseen, drifting Slug football, and the Viper attack that passage had triggered, must have been pure rotten luck. Clearly, the Slugs had laid a Viper minefield in front of the final Temporal Fabric Insertion Point that separated us from the Pseudocephalopod homeworld, which in retrospect seemed only logical. But the chance of a football drifting into a cruiser in the three-dimensional vastness of space had to be as remote as a collision between two dinghies drifting from opposite sides of the Pacific.
I toggled over to Eddie’s externals to see what progress the rest of the fleet was making in coming to our aid.
There was static, so I had to squirm in my chair, lighter than I had been as the ship’s aft section slowed its rotation, while I waited for the link.