The Rescue Page 9

  Plus there was the curvature of space to consider. If there were any fast or slow spots between the two ships, that would make accurate targeting impossible. The missiles would have to rely entirely on their onboard homing devices.

  He checked the value of pi again: 2.8604. Space was tight here.

  “I think we should coast,” he said.

  Raedawn looked over her left shoulder at him. “Why?”

  “Because there’s no way in hell they can hit us ballistically with the physical constants of space as mixed up as they are around here. And if we shut down the engines, they can’t track our heat signature.”

  “That still leaves radar. We’ve got a radar cross section as big as a truck.”

  “So let’s give them something even bigger to shoot at.” David swiveled partway around and said to Boris, “Screw the missiles. Toss out live radar beacons.”

  Boris was still struggling to get his spacesuit over his shoulders. “We have beacons?” he asked.

  “Not designed as such, but we’ve got half a dozen self-powered range finders. They put out a hell of a signal. If you aim them at the oncoming ship when you toss them out, the missiles will go for them instead of us.”

  “That might work,” Raedawn conceded. She shut down the engines, and their weight slipped away again. “Okay. Get on it. They’re coming up fast.”

  “How many should I set out?” Boris asked.

  David tried to guess. How many shots would the Neo-Soviets take at them? He looked toward the two other ships, one Union and one Neo-Sov, but they were already disappearing around the curve of the planet. Neither one of them would affect the battle here. “Toss ’em all,” he said. “We can get more on Earth.”

  “Right.”

  Harxae said, “I can help release them.”

  “Go for it,” David said. He got up and helped Boris dig the radar units out of the pile of electronic equipment while Harxae finished putting on his suit.

  “Five minutes to contact,” Raedawn called. “Less than that for missiles.”

  “Time to do it,” David said, shoving them both into the airlock.

  “I may be able to help more if you will give me back my talisman,” Harxae said as he squeezed in. On impulse, David took the pendant out of his pocket and shoved it into Harxae’s hand. If the alien had wanted to kill them, he’d have done it by now. And they needed all the help they could get.

  It was a tight fit, but Harxae bent nearly double and Boris leaned over the six suitcase-sized radar units, which let them get the door closed. A moment later the air rushed out, and the outer door opened.

  David went back to the copilot’s seat, buckling himself in just in time to see the Neo-Sov ship launch the first of its missiles. “One away,” he reported. “Two.”

  “One radar unit away as well,” Boris replied. “Dva. Tre.”

  “Hang on a second,” Raedawn said. “I’m going to brake a little so they get out ahead of us.”

  “Da, good idea. We are holding on.”

  Light thrust pushed them against their harnesses for a few seconds. “Okay, ditch the other three,” David said.

  “Adeen . . . dva . . . tre.”

  “Braking again.”

  “Go ahead.”

  This time she used the side thrusters as well, shoving them well away from their previous flight path.

  The Neo-Soviet ship launched a whole flurry of missiles now that they saw what David’s crew had just done. He counted six more launches. “We’re two decoys shy,” he said. “Let’s hope the last ones home in on the first ones’ explosions.”

  He waited, watching the tactical display as the missiles approached. The Neo-Soviet ship was firing its engines laterally now, either for the same reason that Raedawn had, or simply to make itself harder to hit.

  “You going to shoot back, or just sit there?” Raedawn asked.

  “Is there any point in wasting ammunition?” David said. “They won’t be able to take another shot at us.”

  “We’re at war,” she reminded him. “When you’re at war, you kill as many of the enemy as you can. Even if they can’t shoot at us again, we don’t want to leave them alive to shoot at anyone else.”

  “Good point.” David zeroed the crosshairs in on the oncoming ship and fired one of their three missiles.

  “Hey!” yelled Boris. “That almost hit me!”

  David tried to imagine the two spacesuited figures hanging on to handholds just outside the airlock. That would put the missile tubes right behind them, wouldn’t it? “Sorry. Watch out for two more.”

  “We are ducking. Very low.”

  David centered the crosshairs on the oncoming ship and fired a second missile, then on a hunch he diverted his aim behind the enemy craft and fired his last shot.

  “What the hell happened to that one?” Raedawn asked. It was clearly not headed in the right direction at all, and at this distance it would be another fifteen or twenty seconds before it locked on to the target. By then the Neo-Sov ship would have already passed it.

  “Space is fast here,” he explained. “The targeting computer corrects for the relative velocity it sees, but it doesn’t know about conditions out there. Our missile is going to get there half a minute faster than the computer thinks it will.”

  She frowned. “Then so will theirs, won’t they?”

  “Right.”

  “So we shouldn’t have slowed down, should we?”

  “Yes, we should. We’re going almost straight at them, so we want our decoys to hit the missiles before we do. They’re running sideways to us, so we want to shoot behind them.”

  “That makes no sense,” Raedawn said. “You always lead a target in motion.”

  “No,” said Harxae over the radio. “He is correct. The faster your projectile, the less you need to lead. Observe.” An intense beam of near-ultraviolet light shot out from the flank of the ship, and a moment later one of the oncoming missiles burst into a fiery red cloud of plasma.

  David and Raedawn exchanged a brief look of amazement. “He could’ve vaporized us at any time,” she said softly.

  Two more missiles zeroed in on the debris cloud and made an even bigger fireball. Four more exploded in a dotted line as they each hit a radar beacon.

  “Where’s that last one?” Raedawn asked nervously.

  “I don’t see it,” David said. “The first couple of explosions must have thrown it off course enough to miss the beacons, so it’s still coming. Trouble is, the tactical screen’s tracking hundreds of pieces of debris now, and at least a dozen of them are heading straight for us. It could be any of them.”

  “Should I take evasive action?”

  “No! If you use the jets, it’ll home in on us for sure.”

  The violet light lanced out from the side of the ship twice more, but the targets it hit merely scintillated with reflections as fragments of metal vaporized.

  “Come on, hit it,” David muttered. The missile had to be nearly upon them by now.

  “I’m trying,” Harxae said, firing three more times, but he only hit more debris.

  “I knew I should have stayed on Mars,” Boris said.

  In the upper left corner of the tactical display, the first two missiles David had fired swept past the Neo-Soviet ship, but the third one drew closer. The two dots merged, and a moment later space lit up with a huge flash as the explosion ripped the enemy to bits.

  David shouted in triumph; but an instant later Harxae fired one last time, and another brilliant fireball blossomed right in front of them. They barely had time to flinch before the ship rang with impacts. A big star-shaped crack blossomed in the front window.

  “Aaaa!” someone screamed, but David couldn’t tell if it was Boris or Harxae. Both of them were shouting at once as the ship rang with more impacts.

  “Someone’s hit,” he said, unbuckling his harness and leaping out of the seat toward the back.

  “Duh,” said Raedawn, reaching for the emergency patch kit under he
r seat.

  The outer airlock door slammed closed, and the air pressure in the ship dropped as the emergency spill valve flooded the lock with interior air instead of filling it from the storage tank. David yanked open the inner door and saw a mess of bright blue blood jetting out of Harxae’s left thigh and filling the leg of his spacesuit. The alien was squeezing tight with his hands above the puncture, but he didn’t seem to be doing much good. By the looks of it, whatever had hit him must have cut a major artery, and the Kalira apparently had blood pressure like a hydraulic line.

  “Should we use a tourniquet?” he asked.

  “Blaxafi!” the alien yelled. He tried to squeeze harder, but screamed again and fell back.

  “Shit,” David said. “Harxae, what do we do? Can I use a tourniquet on your leg?”

  “Tranakit?”

  “I don’t think he can read our minds when he’s in pain,” Boris said.

  “Doesn’t look like it. Dammit we’ve got to do something.” David yanked a cargo strap loose from the wall, praying that he was reading Harxae’s intentions correctly. He wound it around the part of the leg he’d been squeezing, then made a double loop with the end of the strap and cinched it tight in one hard yank. The blood flow stopped.

  Harxae screamed loud enough to hurt their ears even through his helmet. He jackknifed forward, clawing at his leg, but stopped when he saw what David had done. His arms quivered, but he clenched his fists and lay back. “Naraxe,” he whispered.

  “You’re welcome.” David glanced over at Boris. “Are you all right?”

  “He was in front of me,” Boris said softly. “He shielded me.”

  David measured the height of Harxae’s leg against Boris’s torso. “You’re lucky. If you were standing side by side, the shot would have hit you in the gut.”

  “Pravda.”

  Out the front windows, Earth was a flat wall of blue and white. “Raedawn, how long till we get there?”

  “Atmosphere in . . . maybe five minutes? Dirt in ten. Assuming we don’t get shot at any more.”

  “Radio ahead and tell ’em we need a medical team waiting.”

  “Roger.”

  David looked at the green-gray alien stretched out before him, his skin more gray than green now. “And tell ’em to bring a veterinarian.” A vet wouldn’t know any more about Harxae’s physiology than a doctor would, but maybe they would have more experience guessing how to treat unusual animals. And by the look of that bright blue blood, Harxae was going to be about as unusual inside as they came.

  While Raedawn got on the radio, he and Boris carried Harxae into the cargo bay and helped him lean against the aft wall. They strapped him down this time, knowing it might be a rough trip if Raedawn had to take more evasive action. When Harxae was secure, Boris started to remove his spacesuit, but David shook his head and pointed forward at the cracked window. “Leave it on. We could blow out at any moment.”

  Boris swallowed hard and slipped one arm through another cargo strap, then with the other hand he reached for the emergency patch kit by the wall and began to repair the hole in the clear fabric over Harxae’s leg.

  “You want your suit?” David asked Raedawn.

  “No time. Get up here. I need a navigator.”

  David looked at his own suit hanging in the airlock. It would take him only a minute to put it on.

  “Now!” Raedawn screamed. “Shit!” The ship shuddered as she hit the attitude jets, throwing David against the bag containing Harxae’s food. He pushed off from it toward the control room. A spacesuit wouldn’t do him a bit of good if the ship didn’t survive.

  When he got into his chair, he could see what Raedawn was worried about. Low Earth orbit was filled with debris. It took him only a moment to realize where it had come from: one of the orbital battle stations had been totally destroyed. The tactical screen was full of blinking lights denoting the pieces’ various probabilities of being weapons or targets. He zapped the display away with a swipe at the control panel and replaced it with the navigation grid. The same debris there, but this time with vector arrows showing their trajectories. Much more useful. Three lines blinked red where they crossed the ship’s path.

  “Left,” he said. There was a gap there, but it only lasted a few seconds. “Up,” he said, finding another gap. “Right. Hard right!”

  He actually saw the piece of docking hatch flash past, but it didn’t hit them. A few seconds later something small did, putting another star in the window right in front of Raedawn.

  She didn’t flinch. She faced straight ahead, the control stick gripped in both hands and her eyes glued on the planet.

  She had put a clear patch on the window in front of David while he was in back. He reached for the kit to patch this new crack, but she said, “Leave it! We don’t have time for that.”

  He looked back to the nav screen. She was right. Another red line swept toward them. “Up!” he yelled.

  She dodged. He called out another obstacle. She dodged again. Eventually they left the debris field behind and touched atmosphere.

  “Now the fun starts,” Raedawn muttered as flame began licking back from the nose of the ship.

  13

  The shuttle had the shape of a watermelon seed with a bump on top. That bump was the control cabin, set a quarter of the way back to form a bubble like the cockpit of a jet fighter. It was supposed to be far enough back that a shock wave from the nose would direct oncoming air over the top, providing a cool pocket of safety for the pilot while the rest of the ship heated to incandescence.

  Trouble was, the ship was entering the atmosphere at nearly double its normal speed, and the shock wave was much closer to the hull than usual. The top few centimeters of the control bubble were right in the flow of the ionized plasma, which hit it like a cutting torch.

  David watched the high-temp glass begin to bubble on its outer surface. It was a hand’s-width thick and designed to carry excess heat away by ablation, but there was a limit to how much of it could vaporize before its strength was compromised. Both panels were already cracked; if they shattered, the shards would slice off his and Raedawn’s heads. Of course a millisecond later the pressure wave would slam through the shuttle and blow it to shreds, but somehow it was the threat of decapitation that made his breath come short and his heart pound.

  “Angle us upward,” he said. “Let the underside take the heat.” The layer of foamed ceramic insulation that lined the bottom of the lifting body could withstand thousands of degrees more than the windows.

  “If I do that, we’ll skip off the atmosphere.”

  “Better that than burning up.”

  “If we skip, we’ll come down again halfway around the planet.” She didn’t have to say anything more. That would put them directly over the Neo-Soviet heartland, and there was no way they could fight their way back to friendly territory from there.

  They both stared at the shock wave streaming back from the shuttle’s nose, trying to think of a third option. They were decelerating hard, their harnesses digging into their shoulders and hips, but not hard enough. The windows were already a third of the way gone, and the cracks were extending steadily outward.

  “Can we at least shift from side to side a bit? Vary the angle of attack to spread out the heat a little?”

  “Oh, sure. Yaw back and forth at mach thirty. Do you understand anything about dynamic instability?”

  He did. They were riding a knife blade; the moment they tilted it the least bit out of true, it would start to flutter. Fighter jets flying at a tenth their speed could be ripped to pieces that way; there was no way the shuttle’s airframe would withstand it. “Okay, dumb idea,” he said. Desperation had a way of clouding logical thought.

  The windows’ outer surfaces were bubbling now like water on a stove. “We’re going to burn through!” he shouted.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Bank us upward!”

  “We’ll skip.”

  “I don’t
care! Bank us up.” Even if they died at Neo-Soviet hands, they would have another few precious minutes of life first.

  She nudged the nose upward, and the shuttle creaked ominously as the blast of air shifted from straight-on to slam into the underside. The windows quit bubbling, but the nose kept trying to pitch up even harder, and she had to struggle to keep it down. They were still going way too fast for flight. The shuttle behaved more like an arrow at this speed, but it didn’t have enough fletching to make it dynamically stable. The center of pressure was way forward of the center of mass. If it tilted more than a few degrees, the weight of the engines in the back would flip the whole works end-for-end and send them screaming backward out of control.

  David envisioned that just as clearly as the window failure, but in his mental picture, the flame was shooting the other way.

  “Wait a sec,” he said. “Let it go.”

  “Let what go?”

  “Let us flip end-for-end.”

  She couldn’t afford to look away from the flight controls, but he could see from her expression that she thought he’d gone totally insane. “Oh, that’d be smart. The back of the ship isn’t designed to withstand any heat at all. We’d fry within seconds.”

  “Not if we fire the engines at full thrust. It’s the Coanda effect. The drive flame will actually suck some of the oncoming air backward with it. We’ll plow through our own exhaust, but it’ll be coming at us a lot slower than what’s hitting us now.”

  “This shuttle was never designed to descend under thrust.”

  “It wasn’t designed to hit the atmosphere at mach thirty, either.”

  She dithered, clearly not trusting his crackpot idea, but she couldn’t come up with anything better. In the end it was fate as much as volition that decided her; the shuttle pitched upward again and she tried to correct for it, but she hesitated a moment too long and lost her chance.