Rogue Powers (30 page)

Pete let out a deep sigh, and fell into step besides Mac. "Thomas got out okay, but there were hundreds dead. There's nothing alive aboard the
Imp
and the other ships but the foam worms. They wanted to tow the
Imp
out of orbit before the worms shorted out an engine control and maybe rammed her into the planet, but they're afraid to get near her for fear the eggs can survive vacuum and one egg might float into an airlock. For a while there was a rumor that the eggs could survive
re-entry.
Not true, but the people on-planet are going nuts for fear that the worms might get loose on the planet.

"And now the ROK Navy brass has to admit you were right, quit pushing papers around and get on with the

0war. Except that you were warning that a big ship could be killed just as dead as a little one by a nuke—substitute worm' for 'nuke' and you were dead on target. If a few frigates had been wormed, we'd have lost nine people per ship and a pretty smallish ship at that. Easily replaceable. We lost the
Imp,
and that's a significant fraction of the League's naval power and personnel wiped out. Now they
have
to go to smaller ships. But now there's not time to
build
smaller ships."

Mac grunted. "And all this time I hoping I was wrong."

"You weren't alone in hoping that, my friend. And here we are." They came upon the entrance to the captain's quarters, and were stopped by the ROK marine on duty. "Sorry, sir, the captain—"

"You'll tell me that the captain can't be disturbed," Gesseti said in a calm voice, speaking rapidly, "and then I wave my credentials and this pretty red package marked
Secret
at you and show you the sealed letter from the Kennedy Secretary of War and you'll let me in, right? Wrong. Instead of wasting five minutes on that little scene you'll let is in
now"

"Ah, well, yes sir, but the captain isn't in her quarters."

"It's three in the morning, local. Where the hell is she?"

"In her office, with two other gentlemen."

"Then we bust in on a private party. Lead the way."

"Sir, I can't leave my post."

"C’mon, Pete, I know the way without him." Mac turned and headed down the corridor.

The marine looked uncertain about what he should do, and stepped toward Mac as if to stop him. "Hey, wait just a second, ah, sir, she's not to be—"

Pete grinned evilly at the marine. "Stay put, soldier. You're not to leave your post, remember?" Mac and Pete headed down the hall to the captain's office.

Mac was thinking more clearly by this time, and there was an obvious and frightening question. "Pete, those worms can't possibly be some natural breed the Guards found growing under a rock. Not and eat shipboard plastics."

“No.”

"And no one in the League can breed things like that."

"Nowhere near it. Been trying for a long time, too."

"And if the Guards can do that, what else can they do?"

"Don't make me think about it. I saw shots of the Imp's interior and I'm already having nightmares." They arrived at Captain Driscoll's outer office door and went in, to find another marine sentry on duty, sitting behind a desk. "Good evening, Private," Pete said. "We need to see the Captain most urgently."

' But she's extremely—"

"Not any more, she's not." Pete said, neatly stepping around the desk and opening the door to the inner officer before the marine could react.

“Hey!"

"It's all right, Eldridge, let 'em through," Driscoll said, her voice coming from behind the door. "I know that voice, and when Gesseti wants in, he gets in. Law of nature, and we might as well cave in gracefully to it."

"Yes, ma'am."

Pete grinned at Mac. "Like I always told you—never hurts to have a reputation."

The two of them went in, and Mac forgot all military bearing when he saw who Driscoll's visitors were. "Randall! George!" He shouted, giving each of them a bear hug before they were out of their seats. At least some friends of his were safe and alive. His newborn fears for Joslyn made seeing old friends all the more pleasurable. "You guys are supposed to be on Bandwidth!'

'Yeah, Mac, but
we found ‘
em!" Randall said. "I wanted to rouse you when we landed two hours ago, but George warned me you like your sleep—"

"You found 'em? The Guards? You found Capital?" Mac asked.

"Near enough," George said happily. "We got hold of an astronomer and the three of us doped out what sort of

0
star system Capital had to be in—and we're here to hand Captain Driscoll a search list, all the possible systems."

'And the odds look damn good," Driscoll concluded, grinning. "You can salute me any time you're ready, Lieutenant Commander Larson."

"Uh? Oh, yes ma'am." Mac saluted and then caught the twinkle in Driscoll's eye. "Sorry about that. Ma'am." He liked Driscoll. She was a good officer, with a style of leadership that seemed wildly informal and ramrod straight at the same time. You were never quite sure where you stood with Driscoll, and that kept you on your toes. No doubt, that was what she had in mind. Captain Gillian Driscoll, United States Navy, was a short, stocky redhead, a gray hair or two beginning to show, still fighting to keep off the fat that desk work put on a person, but still trim, firm, and ready to bite anyone's head off, should the need arise.

"Forget it," she said. "Who can remember salutes at three in the morning?"

"Besides, we've got to break the boy of the habit," Pete said. "His conviction has been overturned and he's been bumped to captain his own self. That's the one piece of good news I've got. The rest is all ..." Pete looked around and stopped talking.

Driscoll followed his glance. "Oh, yes, you might not know these gentlemen. Commander Randall Metcalf, U.S. Navy, and George Prigot..."

"Of no fixed address," George suggested. "No one has ever quite managed to figure out my status. Mac! A captain! Congratulations!"

"George Prigot. Yeah, Mac told me all about you," Pete replied slowly.

'Relax, Pete," Mac said. "They're family. Randall and George have security clearance for Secret, Top Secret, and Very Unlikely, even right up to Ridiculous. And they're in on this."

"Okay, so I bend a few more security rules," Pete said blandly. "But here's the report my boss wanted you to see, Captain," he said, handing the red envelope to Driscoll. As she opened it and started reading, he pulled a tape cartridge out of his pocket. "Is there a—"

"In the cabinet against the far wall," Mac said. "Here, I'll set it up." Mac took the cartridge, opened the cabinet, and switched on the playback unit. "I'll throw it on the big screen." He crossed back to Pete and handed him a remote control unit.

"What's on the tape?" Randall asked.

"Real bad news," Pete said flatly. "Captain Driscoll, have you read enough so you'll know what you're seeing?"

"Yeah. Jesus Christ. I've read enough so I don't want to see anything."

"I can't blame you. Okay, I'll start the tape." The lights went down and a meter-wide viewscreen on the side wall came on. After a warning that the contents were Top Secret, a line drawing of the
Impervious
came up on screen. "Okay, this is the way the
Imp
looked a week or so ago. Big cylinder. Here's a phantom view. Note the four hangar decks that take up the whole outer circumference amidships."

Suddenly, one of the hangar decks turned black, and a thick line of black bored straight through to the heart of the ship. "Blammo. A rock, launched from a linear accelerator that has since been captured, hits the
Imp
at extremely high velocity. A big rock, moving very fast. Hulls the hangar deck and keeps right on going, ripping deep into the ship, opens the bridge to vacuum and a lot of compartments in between. Kills people, wrecks equipment, tears up the ship's internal communication and life support. They lose more people before they can get backups going. And practically every Britannic line officer ranking captain or above was at a ball in that hangar. Plus many distinguished guests."

"Including my executive officer," Driscoll said grimly.

Pete Gesseti hung his head for a moment and sighed. So many losses. But there was no time to grieve them all. "I'm sorry. I didn't know. There were no survivors from

0Hangar One. But by sheer chance, Captain Thomas and Commander Joslyn Larson, his chief fighter pilot, weren't in the hangar at that moment. Anyway." More lines of black bored into the image of the
Imp
on the screen. "More rock impacts. None of them do anywhere near the damage of the first. It seems like it was chance, not planning, that made the first strike so bad. The
Imp
wasn't even in her present orbit when the rocks were launched, weeks before. The Guards just threw a lot of rocks to soften up the Brit fleet and got lucky. Crippled the
Imp.
The damage control officer, a Commander Higgins, has been recommended for the Elizabeth Cross for his work in getting her back in shape to fight. A posthumous recommendation. With all his superiors dead, Captain Thomas, quite correctly, took command of the fleet and led a brilliant defense. The enemy ships only got in a dozen shots or so at the larger Brit ships before the Guards were destroyed or chased off. A long, complex battle. And Mac, the report makes clear that Joslyn was okay to this point. Afterwards, we just plain don't know. I'm sorry.

"As I was saying, the Guards only made a few shots at the Brits. But some of those shots impacted on target, and they carried these little wonders, or rather eggs, that hatched and grew into these bastards." The meter-wide screen was suddenly filled by the image of a foam worm. Its body was a glistening, sickly pinkish-gray, the color of meat that has begun to rot, covered with thousands of stubby hairs, cilia. It had no eyes, no apparent sense organs of any kind. "That nightmare is really only about four centimeters long. It can crawl. It has a toothless mouth that secretes God knows what, but it can dissolve practically anything. It has an anus that excretes nightmares. And it can lay eggs. God can it lay eggs. Asexual. It comes close to laying before it's finished hatching from its own egg. A generation about every two hours! No one can figure out how it can have that fast a metabolism without literally burning up. They sent a robot camera aboard the
Imp,
and it radioed back these images. Before the worms ate the camera."

The scene shifted again. It was a zero-gravity charnel house, an abattoir, the signs of death all around, lit with the reddened gloom of emergency lighting. A blob of what might be machine oil, or blood, or something else, drifted into a wall and splattered there. Corpses and wreckage floated through the murky, poisoned air. The eye looked for signs of movement, life, in the bodies of the dead that drifted past the camera, and seemed to see it, strangely distorted, until suddenly it was clear
what
that movement was. Everything, everywhere, was covered with a writhing, twisting, mass of tiny gray-pink bodies that crawled and slithered and fed indiscriminately on human dead and plastic wallboard and clothing. The camera moved in on a swollen, horribly distended corpse—its skin roiling, knotting and unknotting, moving with the horrid mass of things that had eaten their way inside. The camera turned to look up at the overhead bulkhead. Blobs of the worms' foamed excrement had accumulated over and in an air vent, clogging it hopelessly. The camera found a junction box, and looked at it, its cover eaten away, the wiring inside sparking and melting, shorted out by the corpses of dozens of the worms. And live worms were feeding on the dead. One of the ghastly little destroyers lost its hold and drifted off the pile of its fellows, came floating straight at the lens, wriggling, struggling in midair to find a foothold, turning end over end, closer and closer, until it landed square on the lens, blacking out the scene—

The tape ended, the lights came up, and Pete suddenly was aware of a gagging noise coming from the office's head. George was crouched over the toilet, being hopelessly sick. Randall's skin had turned a greenish-white, and he looked close to joining George. Mac and Driscoll stared, grim-faced, at the blanked-out screen.

Pete retrieved the tape from the playback unit. "The camera lens was plastic, so the worm ate it." He shoved the tape in his pocket, turned, and faced the others. "Now

0
imagine how happy and relaxed they are on Britannica right now. It might be an official secret, but try keeping
that
kind of disaster quiet. The Guard fleet didn't get within three quarters of a million kilometers of the planet itself, but suppose, just suppose,
one
missile with those things aboard was fired at the planet, or that
one
egg got out of the
Impervious
and re-entered somehow, or got aboard a ship that landed and came out on someone's clothing—how doesn't really matter, but suppose those nightmares got loose and started breeding on the planet . . . Hysteria is barely the word for it. And the one piece of good news that makes that impossible is also the worst news. They've found out the things can't survive except in zero-gee. They caught some worms and put 'em in sealed glass containers to study in one of the orbital stations. As soon as they carried the worms into the spin section, they died. They've checked it other ways: The
eggs
can survive massive acceleration, but the worms die in anything but weightlessness."