Free Short Stories 2013 Page 6

  “Well, we’ll have to pull in the sensor and comm array or it will fry. No reason to leave it out, anyway: anything but laser-based comm and nav is going to be awash in static-soup.”

  Grim shrugged “And it’s not like we have much to scan except the Mars trash.”

  Mendez obviously tried to keep a frown from wrinkling his brow: he failed.

  Grim glared at him. “What? Now you’re worried about the Mars trash, too?”

  “Well, the brass is, Sarge. Seems like the other blocs are not dumping the trash anymore—at least not the way they were right after we posted Eureka as a no fly zone. Word is that just last week, Earthside HQ got on the horn with Admiral Riggen and tore him a new one. Threatened him with additional proctological modifications if he didn’t find where the trash was coming from and pronto.”

  “God almighty, Mendez: it’s space. How hard can it be? You track back and—”

  But Mendez was shaking his head. “The trash has changed, Sarge. Nothing too big, and no metals: all composites and plastics. Just a bunch of black bodies by the time it reaches us.”

  The command circuit toned twice: coded traffic from Eureka Base, which was perpetually twelve kilometers behind them. The inevitable Junior Grade Lieutenant on the other end didn’t sound as bored as usual: “Shack Four, we are updating you on Priestley’s replacement. We’ve got a clearance snafu on our end; won’t get it resolved before the end of your watch.”

  As Grim heard the first indignant words come out of his mouth, he realized that he was now shouting at an officer— as had happened too often throughout his career. It did not matter that the officer was a J.G. and therefore the service equivalent of pond scum: this pond scum still ranked him and could pull a “rocker” off the bottom of his stack of sergeant’s chevrons. Grim’s realization of this trailed a crucial second behind his shout of: “We’re going to be a man short because of a ‘clearance snafu’? What the hell kind of bullshit is that...sir?” Grim could hear the insincerity in the lagging honorific; knew the J.G. had heard the same. Oh well, Grim hadn’t really liked being a Master Sergeant anyway: too much paperwork.

  “Sergeant Grimsby,”—the voice was markedly colder than the outside temperature—“Priestley can only be replaced by another member of his special duty team.”

  “Special duty? What special duty?”

  Mendez tapped his junk-rifle, muttered: “Sarge, he means the Cochrane. Carrying a field prototype of a weapon is special duty: along with Priestley, they only cleared five of us for—”

  Grim rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ. Sir, are you telling me you won’t send out a replacement because you don’t have anyone else who’s permitted to carry around another of these dumb-ass guns?”

  “Sergeant, I’m telling you I can’t send anyone who’s not a part of the field trial: the protocols are quite explicit.”

  “Great: so we’re down to two men for the rest of the watch.”

  Grim was surprised when the affirmation lagged, and then did not come. Instead, the J.G. said, “No; you’re down to one man.”

  Grim looked at Mendez, who was already looking at him. Eyes narrowed, Grim asked the console coolly. “Say again, sir. Sounded to me like you said the duty watch in this shack is to be reduced to one.”

  “That is correct, Sergeant.”

  “That is a violation of our standing orders, sir. One man can’t oversee all the critical systems in the event of an attack. So—with all due respect—I am not going to leave Private Mendez out here on his own. He’s only been on station for—”

  “Sergeant: you’re not leaving Private Mendez. He’s leaving you.”

  Oh. Well. How very wonderful for me. “On whose order am I losing Mendez, sir?”

  “Doesn’t say, Sergeant: the order to pull him off the line comes straight from Mars HQ. And he’s got to start back now. Otherwise he won’t make it inside before the hard weather hits.”

  Mendez raised his chin, seemed ready to resist; Grim shook his head at the newbie once, sharply. “Understood, base. Mendez is on his way. Rad Shack Four out.”

  The light that indicated a live carrier signal hadn’t winked out before Mendez launched into his protests. “But sir—”

  “Mendez!”

  “I mean, ‘but Sarge,’ this order just isn’t right—”

  Grim was touched. “Listen, Esteban; I’ll be fine out here on my ow—”

  “No, no: I mean that my recall order sounds fishy—and besides, it will invalidate the Cochrane’s field test.”

  It made Grim all warm inside to realize that Mendez’s commitment to an experimental weapon was immeasurably greater than whatever concern he had for the continued well-being of his senior NCO. “Ah. The Cochrane.” That flimsy piece of shit. “Listen: if they were about to invalidate their precious test, they would have told you to leave it behind for me to babysit.”

  “No, Sarge, something’s wrong with all this: no one has told the J.G. that, by ordering me in, he’ll invalidate the current trial phase. It makes even less sense that my recall order comes all the way from Mars HQ. And leaving you out here on your own? That’s blatantly against standing orders.” Mendez frowned. “I’m gonna look into all this back at base.”

  “Which is where you’re heading now.” Grim snagged and handed the Cochrane up toward him.

  Mendez, distracted, took a moment to realize what Grim was doing: then he shook his head. “No, Sarge: you keep it.”

  I’d rather have a piranha in my pants. But Grim said: “Mendez, as you pointed out, I’m not cleared to—”

  Ever-respectful Mendez interrupted, almost violently. “Sarge: keep the Cochrane. If—well, if anything happens out here, you might need it.”

  Like I need a hole in my vacc suit. “I’m better off with my old—”

  But Mendez had snatched up the weapon Grim was about to mention—an Armalite six millimeter caseless. “No, Sarge: I’m taking this one. You keep the Cochrane.”

  “Mendez, you stop this nonsense. I’ve been using that Armalite since—”

  But Mendez smiled an apology as he snugged his helmet, faceplate still up, over his head. “Sarge, the Cochrane is state of the art: liquid propellant, variable munitions and velocity. That makes it extremely versatile, and great—great—in zero-gee. Do you remember everything I told you about it?”

  I hear your endless gushings in my sleep. “Some of it.”

  “Then please: do this for me.” He checked the clock. “Mother of God; I’ve gotta go. Via con Dios, Sarge.”

  Grim answered with a softer-than-usual grunt.

  The airlock squealed open, and then complained once more as it was shut.

  Leaving Grim quite alone in Rad Shack Four.

  * * *

  Forty-two minutes later, the external environment monitor started chiming. Grim pushed himself into a slow drift toward the console, looked at the radiation sensors, inspected the rem numbers on the real-time dosimeter—and blinked. As he reached over to silence the alarms, he kept his eyes on the unprecedented readings, and settled in to watch their equally unprecedented rate of increase.

  —and bumped into the XM-1 Cochrane’s oddly vented flash-suppressor, which nudged cheekily against the side of his thigh. Grim scowled at it; okay, so it was cool to look at: a sleek, unipiece design. And, although he had refused to admit it to Mendez, he had read the specs on the weapon. If the hype had any resemblance to the truth, its nanyte-reinforced composites made it light and extremely rugged. But it still looked like some flimsy piece of crap out of a sci-fi B-movie of about a hundred years ago.

  But, to hear the brass tell it, looks were apparently deceiving. With the liquid propellant stored separately from the warheads, the bullpup magazine held three times the usual number of rounds. No shell casings meant it was a sealed action, without breech or bolt: the liquid propellant was simply injected into the combustion chamber, making velocity—and therefore recoil—a function of how much was injected at any one time. The same combustion
chamber was also used to boost bigger munitions out of the integral, underslung launch-tube. Grim wanted to call that a “grenade launcher” but every time he did, Mendez corrected him: apparently this miracle weapon was capable of launching a variety of other, rather exotic submunitions. The Cochrane could probably turn water into wine, too, given half a chance. Grim sneered down at it: yeah, you look fancy, and the specs look impressive, but you just won’t cut it as a sturdy tool. You look like—and probably are—a kid’s toy, not a real gun: all bells and whistles, but no balls for business.

  The short-range radar emitted a strangled squawk: a partial contact, just at the edge of the system’s threshold. It was probably a marginal object that, tumbling, had presented a momentarily bigger cross-section for the radar to bounce off. But the system squawked again, and this time Grim saw what had tweaked it: a faint signature, range established at seven kilometers—no, six. Then the range indicator plummeted to three, jumped up to ten, and finally zeroed out for a recalibration as the whole screen surged brightly for a moment. As it faded back into its normal contrast ratios, Grim looked up at the external weather sensors: a corresponding surge in charged particles was dying down. Which suggested that the contact was maybe just an anomalous interaction between the storm and the trash, since the blip had been closing at the same rate, and along the same vector, as today’s unusually dense sampling of debris.

  The radar pinged the object again: no doubt about it, now; something was out there. At the same moment, the rad indicators spiked, but this time, remained bright: the sensor’s overload alarm system chirped and an orange warning light glowed on the board. The automatic protection software had activated: in ten seconds, unless overridden, it would yank the combined sensor/comm mast back into a hardened Faraday cage. Grim watched the countdown ticker erode toward zero—but when it hit “4,” he reached over and turned the system off. The program hooted at him, asked him—in bright red block letters—“Do you wish to override the automatic safety?”

  Did he? Really? Grim rubbed his stubbly chin. Well, of course he didn’t: if he kept the mast extended, there was a reasonable chance that its sensitive electronics would fry, and an equal (indeed, directly proportional) chance that the brass would fry him. That, along with the duty SOPs, should have decided the matter. But this situation—-with a mystery bogey inbound—was not the one envisioned by the armchair jockeys who had written the “standard procedures.” And that meant that Grim’s adherence to them was about to “fluctuate.”

  Fluctuate. That was the term he had used during his first disciplinary hearing twenty-eight years ago, and had been using ever since. And he’d probably get busted another stripe for leaving the mast out today.

  And what for? Was there really-–really—any danger? Even if a basketball-sized package of plastique slipped past his metal-obsessed sensors, and headed toward the Big Secret on Eureka, how could it engage a target with any precision? It would have to be invisible to radar, which meant there could be no metal in it, which meant no terminal guidance: if something was inbound, it would—-quite literally—-be nothing more than a shot in the dark. And with all the EMP activity, there’d be no way to command-detonate such a package, unless some mad scientist had come up with a strange new piezo-electric initiator, or maybe a switch activated by timed biological decay—

  Like iron filings suddenly exposed to a magnet, Grim’s thoughts swiftly collected around the term “biological,” just as the short-range radar let loose a full squawk, and showed the same junk-blip still approaching—but on a slightly altered vector. Grim added the terms and concepts together: Biological. Change of vector. No reliable electric systems.

  God damn, it was a live attack; in the midst of this solar typhoon, there were living, breathing saboteurs inbound, who had just corrected their course—

  Grim reached out and tapped the dynamic button that would open the link back to base. Which produced no results. He tapped it again, then harder, then hammered at it. Nothing. He turned to the hardwired auxiliary console to his immediate right, flipped the toggle for the command line: a sudden wall of cat-scratch static prompted him to shut off the volume.

  So: thanks to the weather, communications were out. Which meant he had no way to call for help, or send a warning, and, reciprocally, base would no longer be receiving automated status updates from the rad shacks and therefore would not check to discover why he had failed to retract his sensor/comm mast. He was alone—and only he had the knowledge, and therefore the opportunity, to act.

  Grim leaned back slowly, checked the range and speed of the blip: given the one meter/second closure rate, he had about ten minutes to consider the problem, decide on a plan, and carry it out-—whatever it happened to be.

  Grim turned to his tried-and-true first maxim of planning: know thy enemy—and he had to admit that he knew next to nothing about the approaching attackers. So, using what little data he had, could he induce or deduce any tactical intel from it?

  First, given the detection range of Eureka’s main arrays, and the attackers’ rate of approach, they had not been inside any metal hull—shielded or otherwise—for at least a week. That meant that the attackers had floated in with the junk, using it as a moving smoke screen. And that, in turn, meant that this was a suicide mission: given the wholebody rem dosage the attackers had accrued during that extended approach, this solar storm meant their death from radiation sickness would be as certain as it was swift.

  As peculiar as that conclusion seemed, Grim discovered that it was consistent with the emerging pattern of careful and meticulous planning evinced by his opponents. The timing of the attack indicated that it was designed to take advantage of the rising solar activity cycle, which had surprised the experts when it began a year ahead of its eleven-year cyclic schedule. Indeed, the attack unfolding now had probably been held in readiness for weeks, possibly months, until solar meteorology indicated the first, turbulent signs of an imminent coronal mass ejection. In the meantime, Eureka’s security forces had been lulled into a slow and inevitable complacency regarding the camouflaging trash flow, ultimately seeing it as just another part of their routine operating environment. And in retrospect, Priestley’s absence, and now Mendez’s, had probably been achieved by hacking, bribery, or both.

  Given the attacker’s evident commitment and preparation, it was probable that their equipment was purpose-built for this mission, meaning that from weapons to vacc suits, it was almost entirely nonmetallic. However, complete thermal equalization and diffusion was more difficult to achieve in space, and might become a further problem due to the exclusion of all-metal components.

  Which, Grim realized, meant that the attackers’ thermals might still be visible. He quickly snapped over to the slightly more robust thermal sensors. And there, mixed in with the slowly oncoming stream of trash, was a diffuse, almost invisible thermal bloom above the background, pointing inward toward Eureka like a finger.

  It was also pointing straight at Rad Shack Four. Grim rechecked, confirmed the vector of approach. Although their target was unquestionably the Big Secret being built on Eureka, they were heading straight at him. Why?

  The answer followed hard on the heels of the question: because the saboteurs surely knew about the rad shacks, and therefore knew that they needed to eliminate whichever one sat astride or closest to their point of penetration as they crossed through Eureka’s spherical security perimeter. Which meant that Rad Shack Four was no longer a haven: it was a coffin.

  Oh, it still protected Grim from the rads, but that wasn’t the imminent danger, now. Thinking like the attackers, he somberly concluded that, in their place, he would certainly take out at least one rad shack to open a hole in Eureka’s outer defenses, and would do it with something quick and decisive. A high-explosive, armor-piercing missile would be the weapon of choice: it would easily penetrate the shack’s shielding and would bust it open like a pickaxe smashing through the shell of an unsuspecting mollusk.

  Grim returned f
rom his thoughts, facing down into the sensor screen over which he was perched. He placed both of his hands on its wildly flickering surface. Despite the pronounced veins and sturdy wrists, his lightly pebbled and very dark brown skin looked suddenly fragile as he concluded, I’ve got no choice: I’ve got to go out there, too.

  Which seemed like suicide, on the one hand, because in this storm, EVA ops was the radiological equivalent of going outdoors during a hailstorm of razor blades. But if he remained inside his EMP-crippled rad shack, he could not defend himself or fight back: he could only wait to die.

  Grim rose carefully from the seat, picked up his helmet, reached for his Armalite—and closed his hand on empty air. Oh. Right. Slowly, he turned to look at the Cochrane. Okay, then: you and me, bitch. And—for your sake—you’d better perform to spec, or you’re going to get very lost in deep space.

  He reached down, picked up the weapon and moved toward the airlock, slaving the rad shack’s shaky sensor feed into his HUD relays as he went.

  * * *

  Exiting the airlock, Grim controlled the first, transient wave of nausea that always surged up when he went EVA: no up, no down, and the black forever all around him. The stars only made the distance and solitude more absolute. Why so many people—from the earliest astronauts to the current day—were thrilled by “space-walks” was beyond him.

  The distant sun—a small, painfully incandescent nickel—peeked into his helmet, rising up over the lower rim of the faceplate as he manually dogged the hatch and resteadied himself. He had a full MMU on his back, but the less activity and motion he engaged in, the better. Right now, surprise was an advantage, so high-energy maneuvers of any kind were out of the question.