Firewitches dove on her, singly and in pairs, head-on, at her flanks, and from aft.
We closed in on the black rectangle that marked the open bay in Big John’s slowly rotating hull, and her turrets spat a protective steel tunnel around us.
Clang.
The attending Scorpion detached as Silver Bullet and I floated into the open bay as slowly as a man walks. In the transparent bubble on the bay wall, the bay boss bent over his control panel. Alongside him a pilot in coveralls, helmet in the crook of his arm, waited to take Silver Bullet back out and through the jump.
I sat back and sighed to Jeeb, “Whew!”
I punched up the aft screen to glimpse my tow truck’s departure.
The feminine voice purred in my ear as the Scorpion rotated back toward the fight. “Curbside delivery, Silver Bullet. You can leave the rest of the driving to a profess-”
The Scorpion exploded in the instant that the purple flash of a Slug round flickered.
Boom.
I pitched forward against my shoulder straps as my Scorpion struck the bay’s back wall and tumbled.
A male voice. “Silver Bullet! Get the hell out of there!”
“How do I-”
“Now!”
Ahead, the wall disappeared as the tumbling Scorpion pointed out toward the black rectangle of space.
I yanked the banana throttle. I blinked, saw blackness ahead, and slammed the throttle closed. The little nudge I had given the Scorpion felt like no motion whatever inside the ship’s gravity cocoon. I looked around to see what happened.
There was nothing there.
The male voice said, “Silver Bullet!”
“Yeah. What happened?”
“You did well to get the ship out of the bay.” The voice turned flat. “You may as well switch on the jump-guidance box.”
“Huh?” I couldn’t see a thing. It finally dawned on me that this was because I was hurtling into a black hole.
“You’ve traveled fifty thousand miles and counting. A Scorpion’s impeller’s not strong enough to back you out now.”
“I’m gonna die?”
Pause.
“Switch on the box. Let it try to guide you through the jump and out the other side.”
“Then what?”
“Then you’re on your own. In a few seconds radio waves won’t be able to reach-”
SEVENTY-THREE
I’VE JUMPED WITHIN THE GRAVITY COCOON of a captured Slug Firewitch, which hurt. I’ve jumped within the cocoons of a half-dozen different cruisers, which was always a nonevent. I don’t recommend jumping inside the cocoon of one of the only two Scorpions modified to jump a Temporal Fabric Insertion Point, unless you enjoy nosebleeds, blood in your urine, a head that feels like it’s been in a punch press, and nausea.
On the other hand, the jump itself is over before you can blink.
If the Pseudocephalopod had mined the backside of Its front door like it had the front, I should have been dead, or at least attracting attention the way the fleet had.
But the way things were supposed to work, the Silver Bullet Scorpion was supposed to be too unexpected and too undetectably small to attract attention.
I had the throttle wide open-why not? Never slow down, something might be gaining on you. The Scorpion flashed through the emptiness of new space at thousands of miles per second. Flying a Scorpion in atmosphere, as I had with Jude, was not only slower, and therefore easier, it provided a frame of reference. I didn’t know where I had been, or where I was going. However, I was making great time.
Theoretically, I could turn this crate around, jump back through the T-FIP, and let the fleet figure out how to deliver the bomb that filled the bay behind me. But there was no way of knowing whether the jump-guidance box worked for a return trip, or how to work it, with no one to talk me through things. I didn’t know how many, if any, back-to-back jumps this Scorpion could withstand. I didn’t know whether the fleet, if there was anything left of it, could make use of this ship if I returned it.
I clipped out of my harness, stripped out of the Eternads to make elbow room, then bent over the controls, searching for whatever a Scorpion carried that corresponded to the Navex in a rental car. I rooted around behind the pilot’s couch, under the second couch where Jeeb perched, and in the stores locker, for water and survival ration packs.
A day later, I woke to Jeeb’s whistle. He stood tiptoed on all six locomotors while his optics bulged forward, toward the windscreen.
I looked up and saw a pale yellow star, growing visibly brighter as we plunged toward it.
Twenty-three hours later, the star looked as bright as Sol did from Mars, and a dark shape the size of two poppy seeds, one large and one small, became visible with the Scorpion’s forward optics, silhouetted as it inched across the star’s disk.
Hair rose on my neck.
It could be nothing. Or it could be the end of a journey that had begun for me as a civilian when the first Slug Projectile struck Earth in 2037 and that was now ending for me as a civilian four decades later.
After another twenty hours, the Scorpion’s ranging optics measured the planet as ninety-six percent the size of Earth. Its equatorial mean temperature was fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, but the planet was cold enough at its poles to sport white polar ice caps. Its rotational period was twenty-four point four hours. North and south of the poles, blue ocean glistened beneath white cloud swirls. The continent that girdled the planet at the equator showed from space grass-green.
It could be just another Earthlike planet. They were rare enough, but not every one was a guaranteed Slug nest.
Except that the satellite that orbited the planet, in an orbit barely higher than the planet’s exospheric atmospheric shreds, was red, smooth, and familiar.
I stared for thirty minutes as the Scorpion shortened the distance between me, the planet, and the transplanted Red Moon.
The planet’s continent, eight thousand miles long, stretched four thousand miles from the planet’s arctic to antarctic circles. The Scorpion’s spectrometer said the whole thing, eight thousand miles long, four thousand miles wide, and at least a half mile deep, was all organic compounds.
I shuddered. It was no continent. It was a living thing. It was the unseen enemy I had fought against all of my adult life.
But more than frightened, I felt cheated. Howard’s Spooks had predicted that the organism at its center would look like this. But somehow I expected some Moby Dick-sized Slug in a cape, slouched on a throne. Something that I could stab through its black heart with a fixed bayonet. Or at least something that I could finally ask, “Why?”
I didn’t know what plans lay within the Pseudocephalopod’s vast mind, now that It possessed the Red Moon. But I knew what mankind had in mind for the Pseudo-cephalopod. I whispered, as though It could hear me, “Hello after all these years, you bastard.”
I raised the red-striped, hinged lid on the Scorpion’s weapons console.
SEVENTY-FOUR
I HAD STUDIED THE SCORPION’S modified weapons console for hours on the flight in. The normal controls to deploy weapons rearward, from the stinger pod, remained unchanged but were useless with no weapons in the pod.
Three simple switches had been added to deploy the Silver Bullet munition. The first was a red one-finger toggle that armed the munition and opened the rear hatch. The second toggle, labeled “Deploy,” ejected the weapon. The third was a removable wedge, shaped like a grip exerciser or an oversized spring clothespin, labeled “Abort.”
I flicked the first switch and armed the munition. Behind me, hydraulics whined as the bay opened and exposed the bomb cluster.
Jeeb whistled, and in the same moment the “threat” buzzer sounded. Up from the planet’s surface, a half-dozen Firewitches hurtled toward me, growing from gnat-size to bird-size in a breath. The threat ’Puter crackled. “Defensive armament unavailable.” The Scorpion’s weapons pod was filled with Silver Bullet, instead of something that could shoot down an onrushing Firewitch.