The Escape Orbit

Chapter 20

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.

The next Bug ship to visit the place would be confronted by a terrifying enigma. Their solution to it might very well be to drop a planet-buster on the prison world.

At the thought all the scenes of the past hour returned again in shocking, sickening detail. The bloody shambles inside the shuttle and at the dock, where weightlessness had added a slow-motion, nightmarish quality as well as tripling the casualties, and the relatively quiet and undramatic sight of dozens of men dying because their helmet seals had cracked. Self-doubt as well as self-disgust rose in him again and he had to tell himself sharply that all this had happened exactly as he had planned it—the long preparation and development work, the careful sifting of psychological types, even the casualties. The cost of the success, if it came, was high, but the price was well worth it.

Warren moved in a succession of zig-zag dives along the wide, low, brilliantly-lit corridors of the ship, looking into the rooms which opened off them and then hurrying on. The particular section of the guardship was unfamiliar in that only the main corridors had been reproduced as tunnels in Hutton’s Mountain, because no amount of psycho-stimulation of memories or peripheral images had succeeded in gaining data on the purpose or content of these rooms. Some of the corridors had not been reproduced at all.

A Bug appeared suddenly from one of them to crash softly into the wall a few yards ahead of him. Warren jerked up his cross-bow, then relaxed again as he saw the number of bolts already in the target. He kicked himself past the dead Bug and went on with his search.

There was a distinct smell of chlorine in his helmet now. Apparently the blow he’d received on the back of his leg had torn his suit, but the battledress was so tight-fitting at his legs and waist that it had taken some time and a lot of physical activity for the chlorine to begin penetrating to his helmet. As well, his suit wasn’t radiating nearly enough of his body heat. He was drowning in his own scalding sweat, his skull seemed ready to crack under the savage pounding of his headache, and the constant jumping and fending off with his legs and arms was tiring him badly. He had trouble focusing his eyes and he was rapidly slowing down. For minutes at a time he couldn’t see where he was going. He diagnosed the trouble as a combination of age, imminent heatstroke and possible oxygen starvation, and blundered on.

An unguessable time later he opened a door into a large, unlighted storeroom, the fan of brightness from the corridor illumination showing that the compartment seemed to be filled with giant bubbles. Warren began pounding out a signal with his wedge on the nearest metal wall, noting as he did so that the symptoms which had been troubling him were still present, but sharply diminished in severity.

Twenty minutes later he had a relay set up between the storeroom and the POW quarters and was pushing helmets, air-tanks and med-kits along it as fast as he could. As many as eight helmets were drifting down the corridor at any one time, to be picked out of the air by the man stationed at the other end of it and given another push along the next leg of their journey. There were several hundred fishbowls and regulation attachments for service battledress in the storeroom, and Warren knew that if he had time to check serial numbers he would find his own in the pile, because every prisoner who was processed by the guardship had to leave his helmet behind. The Bugs must have had thousands of helmets left with them since the prison planet had been initiated, and it had been natural to assume that they would stack them somewhere until sheer numbers made them a nuisance and they were destroyed. The Committee had taken a gamble on this, but it had come off. By the look of this storeroom the Bugs didn’t spring clean too often.

Kelso and two other officers arrived, and while the others relieved Warren in the storeroom the Lieutenant proffered a Bug pad on which he had written with a Bug stylus the news that the main centers of the guardship had been secured. As a postscript he had added that the Marshal’s air must be running low and respectfully suggested that he conduct him to the prisoner’s quarters. Warren scribbled out his approval both of the Lieutenant’s report and suggestion, and together they launched themselves along the corridor.

It happened at the third intersection. Warren had just checked his last jump with his feet against the wall when there was suddenly no air to breathe. He sucked desperately but his lungs weren’t getting anything. His chest was on fire, a throbbing, black cloud cut off his sight of the corridor, even of the sweat-smeared interior of his helmet, and his head began to pound louder and louder until the sound became a series of monstrous, thudding explosions.

After all I’ve come through, he raged silently, what a way to die!

He felt Kelso grip his arm and he twisted frantically, the instincts of a drowning man making him kick and claw and hold on for grim life. He felt his fingers sink into the wickerwork of Kelso’ suit, felt the thin canes bend and break under his frenzied grip. A tiny, sane portion of his mind told him that he was endangering the Lieutenant’s seals with his struggles, had perhaps already condemned Kelso to death with him, but the tiny area of sanity was overwhelmed and obliterated by sheer panic…

He came to with the slightly sour air of the prisoners’ section rushing into his lungs, its progress only slightly impeded by the fingers being held loosely over his mouth. Kelso was astride his chest, his helmet was smashed open in front and the Lieutenant’s fingers were there to prevent Warren breathing in broken glass which was floating about. He tapped Kelso’s arm to let him know that he was all right, and grinning the Lieutenant let go and carefully smashed in the front of his own helmet with a wedge. Together they began chipping at the seals.

It was sheer bliss to wriggle out of the ungainly contraption of basketwork and glass and to be able to twist and to bend at the waist again. All over the vast room the men were struggling out of the baskets and reveling briefly, very briefly, in their freedom before clamping on service helmets and six-hour tanks to rush away again to relieve men still holding vital positions in wicker suits, or to search the area for people who had run out of air on the way in. There were a lot of cases like that, Warren saw; men who had to be broken out of their armor and given artificial respiration, or have their hearts shocked back into motion with a shot from the med-kits. And there were those who did not respond. They drifted weightless and outwardly unharmed about the room, having missed victory and life by only a few minutes. Warren felt particularly bad about them.

He became aware that Kelso was staring at his leg. Warren twisted around to see what the other was looking at and discovered a cross-bow bolt neatly transfixing his left calf. He began to laugh and found that he had to make a tremendous effort to stop. He drew the injured leg up to where he could work on it, then carefully removed the flights from the bolt and pulled it free. He wanted to yell out loud with the pain of it, but he kept his face impassive and the only sound he made was caused by heavy breathing through his nose.

After his shameful display of panic in the corridor and his fit of hysterical laughter in here, Warren felt that he had to do something to retrieve his reputation in Kelso’s eyes. His behavior in the corridor had been bad, even cowardly. It wasn’t as if he were the only man to run out of air today. And now he had to pretend that he wasn’t the gutless individual that he knew himself to be.

He held the bolt where the Lieutenant could see it, then he said drily, “And all the time I thought the men liked me…”

“Oh they do, sir!” said Kelso.

Warren looked away from the Lieutenant’s face quickly, feeling embarrassed. It was wrong that a mature, intelligent, resourceful and very brave man like Kelso should look at him the way a dog would look at its master.

An hour later Warren, in service lightweight suit with long-duration tanks, sound diaphragms and a measure of air-conditioning, was searching the ship again. His party included Kelso and the officer who had piloted the shuttle. On the surface it looked as if they had won, but the guardship was a very large vessel and somewhere inside it there might be a Bug desperate with the knowledge of defeat who was planning something calamitous in the way of destruction for itself and its ship, not to mention the prisoners it contained. This time the ship was being searched. Thoroughly.

It was Warren’s party who found the last Bug survivors. There were two of them in the compartment, spacesuited but unarmed. Around them floated three pressure litters, the type of stretcher with a plastic envelope used for transporting casualties in airless conditions, and in each of them there was an oily, pallid, twitching something. It took a few seconds for them to realize what it was they were seeing.

“If there’s anything in the Galaxy more horrible-looking that a Bug,” said Kelso finally, “it’s a young Bug…”