Six Bits (11 page)

As Kinjie turned to look toward the comm-ports, a tremendous flash of light from the opening of Yaitan’s rescue portal nearly blinded him. Recognizing it for what it was, Kinjie immediately launched himself toward it. The blast of wind blowing out of the rescue portal into the low pressure of Zoaden’s bridge pushed him back. Kinjie caught himself on a desk and relaunched toward the portal, harder this time. The rescue port’s airlock chamber was now nearly empty so the resistance of the air current had died down. Kinjie sailed through the rescue portal, only to crash agonizingly to the floor in the normal gravity field beyond the portal.
Mother! What a mess!

A noncom lifted Kinjie in the necks of both of her head-hands and carried him to the lock as others scurried into Zoaden to search for other kranes to rescue. Kinjie’s functioning left head-hand turned and maneuvered close to the ear on the noncom’s right head where it was supporting the front of Kinjie’s own carapace. “Take me to the bridge,” he said, the sound coming out as a whispered croak.

Kinjie found himself lulled by the sound of the noncom’s claws as they clattered down the long passageway toward the bridge. He was again strangely disturbed by the receding, rolling, out-of-focus view behind him that came from his flaccid right head-hand. With a supreme effort, he found that he could pull that head-hand around and get it looking forward. To his relief, the view from that eye cluster, though tilted and still out of focus, merged into the dominant picture from the left head-hand and even gave him some fuzzy sense of binocular depth.

Jenkoit was not sure whether he was dismayed or amused at the picture Commander Kinjie made as he was carried onto the bridge. He lay on a noncom’s carapace, cradled by the noncom’s necks. His left head-hand wove drunkenly in the air and the right head-hand lolled on his own carapace. When the noncom slid him off onto the floor it appeared for a minute that the commander might tip over onto the back of his carapace to lay helplessly with his legs waving in the air like some kind of bug. At the last moment the noncom caught and righted him, getting smeared grossly in the process by some of the yellowish circulatory fluid leaking from a crack on the right side of Kinjie’s carapace. Jenkoit wondered for a moment whether Kinjie’s injuries were permanent. Before he could speak however, multiple sensors on the bridge recorded Yaitan’s shift-ring flash.

Kinjie’s left neck became suddenly rigid at full extension and he managed to look imperious despite his drooping right head-hand. “Why are you shifting? You’ve lost the rescue port on Zoaden!”

“Yes sir,” Jenkoit found himself responding before he remembered Kinjie had been seriously injured and didn’t deserve such respect anymore. “We were in a bounce trajectory on the back side of their moon and had to shift before we struck.”

“Where have we shifted to?”

“Sir, we re-bounced.”

“You what?” Kinjie’s voice was incredulous. “A bounce is
occasionally
a good trick. Once! Do you really think you are going to surprise someone as sharp as that captain on Exceltor twice with the
same
trick?!”

Jenkoit’s heads lowered a fraction and his cilia developed a slight droop. He didn’t respond. His crew looked on in amazement to see him dominated by an
injured
krane!

Kinjie turned on the bridge crew next, barking commands in the odd tone that his use of a single head-hand produced. “Get the crew working on an emergency reload for a new shift-ring! What the
space
are you looking at! Have you located the humaniform cruiser and you’re just standing there with your mouths open waiting to tell me?”

“No sir,” a chorus.

“Well then get
moving
for the
Mother’s
sake! Have the gunroom detail someone to reestablish a rescue port on Zoaden. Also see if we can open a port on the stern fragment of Xajion. Maybe we can use some of its weaponry. Target a safety transfer behind P5. Target a maximum accumulator escape shift back toward Kaldon. Start destroying those ground based microwave antennas. How many shift-rings do we have left for this boat?”

“Five, sir.”

“Mother’s Mother! So, after we shift out of this damned bounce, we’ll only have one shift to play with if we’re to save three for an escape back to Kaldon?!”

“Yes sir,” Jenkoit said weakly, feeling totally humiliated.

BRIDGE—HUMANIFORM CRUISER EXCELTOR—COMETARY EARTH ORBIT

1421 EST

Azimus broke out of his reverie and became motionless for a moment. “Sir, the numbers say that the krane stealthing is not good enough for us to have missed them coming out from behind the moon. They may, of course, have had a high enough velocity for us to have missed them, but a velocity that high would not produce an orbit around either that moon or P3.”

“So what do you think? Are they launched out from behind that moon at a high velocity? Could they have landed back there?”

“Sir, this is a
big
moon. Its gravity may be low but it’s still
way
too high to land a ship.”

Suddenly the ensign working with Azimus shouted. “Sir, double shift-flash behind that moon! Ring diameters both about 6 meters, probable krane destroyers. Flash brilliance low, they didn’t come from very far sir.”

“How close?”

“No more than a few light seconds sir.”

“What? Did anyone else pick up their origination flash?” Leis looked around the bridge to see a lot of shaking heads.

“They bounced!” Azimus leapt out of his own chair and pumped a fist with his proclamation. “That’s why we didn’t find them! The bastards bounced!”

“Could they have re-bounced?!” A dawning light of amazement crossed the captain’s face as he shouted, “Get a vertical view on those last two shift-sites! If they re-bounced, they’re toast.”

JOHNSON SPACE RADAR STATION—WHITE SANDS, NEW MEXICO

1425 EST

Specialist Juan Gomez was about a mile away from the station on his way home when it happened. Because of all the excitement he’d stayed way past the end of his shift that morning. First they’d been called on to try to locate, resolve, and identify the object that had produced that big flash directly overhead at 0206 their time. He’d been outside on break to smoke a cigarette at the time and the flash had startled him. He’d been running back into the building within seconds, trying to get the attention of everyone for what he’d thought was an aircraft explosion. To his amazement over the next few hours it became obvious not only from their own radar, but on feeds from other sites, that the flash had come from orbit; had come from an impossibly large object; and had left the object intact. This morning another big flash and a series of smaller ones had obviously damaged the object. It was like there was some kind of space war going on up there! Then they’d been tasked to sweep near space for other such objects. In the excitement, he’d just kept staying there at work. At noon his supervisor had seen him and sent him home, “To get some sleep because they were surely going to need some fresh people tonight.”

He initially thought the blinding flash in his rearview mirrors was brilliant sunlight off the windshield of a car right behind him. A microsecond later his mind caught up with the fact that the flash was
way
too bright
and
that he knew there wasn’t a car behind him. He slewed off the road and looked back. “A-bomb,” was all that went through his mind as he slashed the car back onto the road and began trying to put some distance between himself and the huge cloud of destruction back at the radar site
. What in God’s name was going on!

BRIDGE—KRANE DESTROYER YAITAN—EARTH ORBIT

1432 EST

Kinjie was now in Jenkoit’s command saddle. Jenkoit skittering nervously about on the deckplates behind him, wondering in dismay how he had let an
invalid
usurp command of
his
ship,
and
amazed at Kinjie’s sheer level of dominance in this bizarre situation. In an odd voice, for his right head-hand, though functioning better, continued to slur his speech, Kinjie barked, “Is the ship’s shift-ring loaded yet?”

“Yes sir.”

“Did you successfully disable the superconduction on its outer half?”

“Yes sir.”

“Okay everyone, we’re making a shift to the backside of P5 and this disabled shift-ring is gonna make it radiate like we’re shifting several light months…
if
it lasts long enough for us to complete our transit. May the Mother bless us all. Begin shift.”

BRIDGE—HUMANIFORM CRUISER EXCELTOR—COMETARY EARTH ORBIT

1430 EST

Azimus spun in his seat, “Captain! I’ve found them! They did re-bounce! I sent a viewport to the site of their last shift-flash, looked straight up, and there they were! I’m feeding the gunroom now. We might get
another
one!”

Leis felt his pulse hammering. How could they be so lucky? There
must
be something about to go wrong. He must have overlooked something! He found himself nervously rubbing his bald pate beneath his comm ring. “’Puter, gunroom… Guns, it looks like a destroyer from its shift-flash, blow it away as soon as you possibly can! This is no time for finesse, go for it now, now, now!” Leis found himself fiercely gripping his seat arms as if the force of his hands could somehow hurry the ports along.

Suddenly Azimus shouted, “They’re shifting! They’re shifting! Dammit! They shifted! Looks like a big shift too, way out of the system. Dammit! We didn’t even scratch ‘em.”

Many of the crew on the bridge were looking around wildly, as if they could locate the enemy with their eyes. Leis found himself doing the same thing. He took a deep breath, blew it out slowly and then, surprised himself with the apparent calm in his voice as he said, “’Puter, all hands… OK crew, we did
great
, we hurt a light carrier and a destroyer, we didn’t get hurt ourselves, and we ran another destroyer out of the system. That’s good work, but we can’t breathe the big sigh of relief yet. They might have another destroyer or even a cruiser in system. They
might
jump right back. We need to keep alert, do our level best to be sure this system is really clear, and get organized to jump out and get some help!”

Leis turned, “Azimus. Get your team organized. Tetrahedral viewports on every planet in this system. I don’t want them sneaking back in and surprising us the way we surprised them.”

“Swayze. Start plotting a jump back home. While we’re waiting, fire off a bunch of trial jump locator ports and hope you hit one
really
close to Avajan.”

“’Puter connect me to Snellen… Snellen! How goes it down there? Have you set us up a diplomatic team yet? We might need to make a fast run to Avajan.”

Snellen’s voice sounded a little odd in the mask she wore down on P3, nonetheless, Leis could hear a tone of frustrated amusement. “Captain, they’re still working on radiating space with their radars. Let me tell them that you won the battle for now.
Then
I’ll start talking to them about a diplomatic team.”

SITUATION ROOM—WHITE HOUSE

1450 EST

Speaking to his Chief of Staff, President Rayland said, “Get me a list of foreign ambassadors who
are
here in town. Tell the Secretary of State we need her here immediately.” President Rayland turned to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, “Admiral, I’d like you to find the most tech savvy upper-level general or admiral you have and send him with our diplomatic team. Oh, and General Price says we should assign a hot-shot submarine captain to the team too.” He looked at Lt. Snellen, “We’ll have you a diplomatic team here in the next few hours.” He lifted his chin interrogatively, “Now, what the hell happened to our three radar installations?”

“I can’t, of course, be sure Mr. President. From what I’ve heard of the reports you’ve received, it would appear that the one in New Mexico was destroyed by a star-port. The other two sound like ‘gas giant dumps.’”

“Good Lord, what in the devil’s name is a ‘gas giant dump’?”

“If you open one end of a double port deep into the atmosphere of a gas giant such as your 5
^th
planet and the other end opens at a target site, high pressure atmospheric gases pour through. The gases are toxic, rapidly expanding due to their pressure, cold and, usually quite flammable in an oxygen atmosphere. Gas giant dumps can be nearly as destructive as a star-port and often the rings for the double port are quite salvageable afterwards, unlike the complete destruction of the rings that occurs when you use a star-port.”

“Damn...” President Rayland said, trailing off with a thoughtful expression on his face. He looked back at Snellen, “But, you say you’ve beaten the krane?”

Snellen looked uneasy, “We think and hope so, Mr. President. We can’t be sure.”

The president gave her an incredulous look, “What do you mean, ‘you can’t be sure’? I thought you’d nearly destroyed two of their ships and the other one turned tail and ran?”

Snellen waggled her head from side to side, the equivalent of a shrug on her home world. “It’s
very
easy to hide in deep space, Mr. President. The kranes could have had more than the three ships we know about in your solar system. We
know
we’ve cut their light carrier in half. We’re
sure
we’ve severely damaged one of their destroyers. The other destroyer made a shift jump which emitted a very bright flash suggesting that it jumped all the way out of your system…” she hesitated, “but it hasn’t been damaged. It could just jump back.”

President Rayland stared at her for a minute, “Or, couldn’t it be on its way back home to get reinforcements?”

Snellen sighed, “Yes it could. So, Captain Leis has an extremely difficult decision in front of him.”

Rayland’s eyes narrowed, “What decision?”

She waggled her head again, “Stay here to try to protect you if that destroyer returns… or, go for reinforcements.” She glanced away, then turned back to look the President in the eye. “He’s
got
to do one or the other… but either decision could doom every living thing on your planet.”