The Escape Orbit (22 page)

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…”

The first thing Warren did after transferring the Bug prisoners to their quarters in Hutton’s Mountain was to move Peters and Hubbard to the guardship. He had a long talk with the political officer, during which Hubbard came to see his way, then released him safe in the knowledge that the other would not talk out of turn. With Peters it was different. Warren saw to it that the Fleet Commander had every possible comfort except that of conversation, but he had no intention of talking to Peters until he was good and ready. He could not risk having Peters throw a spanner in the works at this late stage. And with the Commander rendered harmless he was able to devote all of his attention to the ship and to the officers who would run her.

He made it quite clear from the first that the ship would be
manned
.

Warren himself did not leave the ship, although he kept in touch with Fielding and Hynds by the Bug radio equipment taken from the battleship. He needed Hynds to track down information on obsolete Earth and Bug weapons and control-systems and Fielding, perhaps unknown to herself, was supplying the psychological know-how which was helping him to separate the sheep from the wolves. Hutton visited the ship many times.

The Major expressed deep concern over the age, appointments and general condition of the vessel, at the same time giving forth with a constant stream of suggestions as to how the hopelessly obsolete equipment might be thrown away, modified or completely rebuilt to the best advantage. It was his considered opinion that the great, fat sow of a ship would disintegrate the moment thrust was applied and that its weapons were a deadlier menace to the ordnance officers than to any target, but at the same time the hints he let drop to Warren about wanting to go along were many and quite unsubtle. Knowing that Hutton was merely reacting to the magnitude of the technical challenge of making the ship operational again, and that the Major had become too much of a pacifist to fit into the ship’s crew, Warren’s treatment of these hints was equally unsubtle. He said, “No.”

And so the days passed into weeks, with the shuttle plying between the ship and the surface as often as twice a day. Going down it carried Bug provisions for their prisoners, all the Bug literature, records, charts, electronic and optical equipment together with all the machine tools and mechanical oddments which could be spared. Coming back up it brought food, the chosen Committeemen and hundreds of trays of the weed which Hutton had developed to supply the ship with air. Gradually the chlorine was bled into space, and deck by deck it was replaced by oxygen-rich air until the entire circulation system carried a human rather than a Bug atmosphere. The work of modifying and provisioning the ship accelerated rapidly after that.

Interior lighting was toned down to a comfortable intensity. Where necessary the Bug controls were reshaped to suit human hands and, so far as was possible considering their present close proximity to the planet, their weapons were tested. The men were fast getting used to ceilings which gave only a few inches of head-room, to sitting cross-legged in Bug chairs and to sleeping in the big oval beds which were like over-padded hammocks. Warren had given permission for anyone who needed them to have necessary items of furniture brought up in the shuttle, but he discovered that there was a widespread feeling among the men that anyone who couldn’t sit in a Bug chair or sleep in a Bug bed was something of a sissy.

Morale among the entire crew was very high and it was clear that no good purpose would be served by remaining in orbit around the ex-prison planet any longer, so on E-Day plus eighty-four Warren went down in the shuttle to give his final instructions and to say goodbye.

He took Peters and Kelso with him, and when they landed he told the Lieutenant that he would be back in an hour and to wait for him in the ship. He had a lot to tell the Fleet Commander and none of what he had to say was for the ears of Kelso or any of the other hidebound Committeemen on the guardship, so Warren talked a lot during the walk from the shuttle to the ruins of Andersonstown. But the Commander did very little talking back. Perhaps the reason lay in the devastation around them and the acrid, burnt smell which still hung in the air, or maybe it was simply that the Commander was too shocked at what the Marshal was confessing to for him to discuss it just yet.

They entered the building chosen for this final meeting, a storehouse near the harbor which was one of the first to be rebuilt. Inside, the benches were filled with the more active anti-Committee officers, the high level technicians from the mountain and the other members of Warren’s staff. He knew that his face looked grim as he took up his position with the Fleet Commander behind the table before them, and set the fishbowl he had been carrying down on the table. The prospect of a confession is never a pleasant one, and Warren alone knew how much he had to confess.