Six Bits Read online

  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 5th 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.”

  A single tear tracked down her cheek.

  The End

  Inspired (distantly) by the Hunt for Red October

  MACOS

  The night was ill-lit by a sliver of moon. The moon itself lay partially obscured by high, drifting cirrus clouds. The air was beginning to cool, but the earth remained hot from a scalding summer day. “It’s a great night for this,” Steb puffed as the three young men struggled up the embankment.

  “You’ve got to be kidding!” Jos, as usual, disapproved. “Any night is an insane night for this kind of madness! I can’t believe you two idiots talked me into this! Why can’t we stick to the little stuff like we’ve been doing? Flat tires and sugared tanks cause the Stossa plenty of trouble without getting us into things they’d kill us for!”

  Nigel turned. “Hey Jos, cool down. We’re not gonna get caught, but you can go on home if you want. Steb and I can do this by ourselves.”

  “Sure, you and the ‘war hero’s’ nephew. Of course. You can do anything by yourselves,” Jos muttered.

  Steb stopped short of the top and shrugged out of his pack. He was thinking that Nigel’s words “Steb and I” had effectively cornered him with no way to agree with Jos’s assertion that this mission was a little bit too dangerous. Steb used his boot to kick a small depression for the heavy bucket full of icy water that he and Nigel had been carrying.

  While Nigel and Jos continued to argue, Steb shucked his slender frame out of his clothes, extracted his wire cutters and lighter, then dropped the clothes into the bucket of cold water. Pulling on a stocking cap soaked in the ice water made him wish he hadn't cut his hair so short. He picked up their low light goggles and crawled to the top
of the embankment. Peering over the edge, he searched for and found the infrared motion sensors just inside the fence and picked a spot midway between them. With a grimace he skidded back, gave the goggles to Nigel and pulled on his icy cold shirt and pants. Then he crawled forward over the warm ground to carefully cut a window in the chain link fence.

  Jos, apparently giving up the argument, but unable to bring himself to “weenie out,” also put his clothes in the bucket. He then dragged his equipment twenty feet to the left to set up the six inch pipe that was their "mortar.” The bottom had been capped and a small hole drilled in it. Two empty cans cut into skeletons kept the bottom 10 inches of the pipe open. The top part of the pipe had been lined and wadded with paper. Hundreds of small glass vials found behind the hospital had been filled with fuel, plugged with rag wicks to make little Molotov cocktails, and stacked into the top end of the pipe. Jos squirted more of the volatile fuel through the hole and onto the rag in the bottom section so that the skeletonized can would fill with explosive vapor. Then he inserted the remote controlled wires into the hole that were supposed to spark and fire off the mortar. He stretched out the antenna wire and threw one end of it up onto a bush.

  Nigel put on his low light goggles and laid out the rest of their equipment. He checked the pressure in their alcohol canisters and attached them to the tubing that had been painstakingly sewn into their clothing.

  Slowly, Nigel moved up to look over the edge. He used his hand to shade his low light goggles from the guard shack's bright lights and carefully surveyed the rest of the grounds. Ah! There was actually a guard out patrolling. A hand held up told Steb and Jos to wait. When the guard started to wend his way back to the shack, Nigel scrambled back down to fill the others in on the situation.

  As they forced their bodies into the ice cold clothing, Nigel restrained his chattering teeth and described the layout of the compound. As they’d hoped, the tanks and armored personnel carriers were closer to the barracks; the general transport vehicles were distributed around the periphery.

  A few seconds after the guard got back to the shack, they pulled the icy stocking caps over their heads. Freshly doused with the remains of the cold water from the bucket the three young men moved down the hill and climbed through the hole in the fence one at a time and walked slowly out amongst the vehicles. As they had hoped, midway between detectors, their cold images failed to set off the infrared motion recognition system.

  They gathered at the first transport and Nigel climbed under the fuel tank. He placed his triflanged punch near the corner to prevent a boom from impact on a flat surface. Nigel wrapped the point of the awl with a piece of towel to dampen the sound, and with a sharp blow to the base, punched a hole in the tank with only a muffled thump. He removed the punch but to his dismay only a slow dribble began from the hole. However, with another blow and a wiggle, fuel began to stream out at a satisfactory rate. Each of the three filled a bottle with fuel, capped it and put it in a pocket. They spread out and soon fell into a routine, crawling from truck to truck, punching holes while puddles of fuel slowly grew under the vehicles.

  In the guard shack Yasso nervously tugged at his thin, wiry beard. He was a small man of sudden quick movements. He’d been nicknamed “Bug” because of these, insect-like movements. He stepped to the open window and looked out, then cocked his head to one side. Finally he turned to Moman. "Do you hear thumping noises?"

  "Dammit Bug! You hear those sounds every night, when it gets colder, the trucks settle." Moman scratched at his crotch and thought, Yasso’s such a damned weenie, worry, worry, worry!

  "But there are more tonight!"

  Moman waved his hand and turned back to his magazine.

  Yasso turned to the door. "I'm going out for a look around." He stepped out and pulled on his low-light goggles. Then he swore in a clipped fashion as they whited out with light from the nearby window. He flipped the goggles to infrared and began surveying the compound.

  When the door of the shack opened Nigel was rounding the front of a truck and froze in his crouched position. He reached slowly for his alcohol valve and flipped it open, gritting his teeth at the shock of cold fluid spraying into his clothing.

  Yasso halted abruptly. There was a warm object at the front corner of one of the trucks! His brow furrowed as he stared at it, but it slowly faded away to a few small splotches. He stepped away from the shack to use his goggles on the low light setting.

  When Nigel saw the guard's head bob down to check the guard shack’s steps before descending, he darted back behind the truck. He dropped to the ground and crawled under the truck to look for the guard's feet. Nigel still had on his low-light goggles, but the damn things were useless since he was looking toward the lighted shack.

  He lifted the goggles. There! He could see the guard's boots outlined in the light from one of the windows. They stood motionlessly for a while, then began to walk his way.

  Nigel felt his pulse booming as his body demanded that he do something—anything! The excitement and the cold from the rapidly evaporating alcohol made it so he had to clench his teeth to keep them from chattering. With dismay he realized that the boots were fading from view as the guard got further from the lighted shack. He inched backward toward the far side of the truck.

  He couldn’t see the boots anymore! But, now he could hear their tread. They stopped and he could imagine their owner listening with his head cocked. For a moment, he was grateful that he had yet to puncture a fuel tank in this row of trucks. The wind was blowing away, so you couldn’t smell the fuel spilling. Then, to his dismay he heard a ping and high pitched whine as the superconductors of the guard's kalsaw (Kinetic And Laser Superconducting Attack Weapon) charged. When the boots moved again, Nigel began to back out farther. He bumped his head and felt the padding of the strap from the low light goggles, forgotten on his head! Silently cursing himself, he pulled them down and saw the guard's boots at the back of the truck. Moving toward Nigel’s own feet which were hanging out from under the truck's left rear corner! Nigel pulled his feet in and clutched his awl.

  The damn guard stopped right beside his feet! Did he see a scuff? Did he see my boot? Did he smell the fuel?

  The guard suddenly resumed his deliberate pace around and back toward the front of the truck. Once again he stopped... After an eternity, the guard slowly headed back to the shack.

  Breathing a collective sigh of relief, the three young men resumed punching holes. Finishing the trucks, they reached the armored vehicles. The fuel tanks on the armored vehicles were fully proof against an awl, but the caps on the tanks were not proof against a few lumps of sugar. After sugaring the tanks, they snapped back the lids on the compartments full of charged superconductors that powered the tank's electrical weapons. Uncapping their bottles they dribbled the solvent fuel onto the plastic that insulated the superconductors.

  And so it went for seven of the ten tanks and twelve of the armored personnel carriers.

  Suddenly the guard shack door slammed open! Both guards appeared, pulling their goggles into place and trotting ten paces from the shack.

  The Macos immediately opened their alcohol valves, but Nigel felt only a small trickle of the cold fluid! He’d used up almost the entire can in the previous episode. Fortunately he was on the far side of an APC.

  The guards moved out into the lane between the nearest vehicles. Their goggles were on infrared, looking for the man-sized infrared blob that Yasso had seen through their open window a few seconds ago. Moman had already begun to berate “Bug” for wasting their time when Nigel became visible as a splotchy blob crouched behind an APC. Thumbing his kalsaw to laser/infrared he shouted, "Who goes there!" To his embarrassment his voice broke. "Who goes there!" he said again.

  He brought his weapon to bear while thumbing it to infrared. The blob disappeared around the corner of the APC. Depressing the trigger, he began walking toward the APC while waving the kalsaw back and forth over the area where he had last seen the blob. Yasso, he n
oted with satisfaction, was moving toward the other side of the APC.

  It was probably the Lieutenant running one of his surprise checks, Moman thought, but if so, the infrared codes on the Lt.'s helmet and uniform would keep the kalsaw from firing. He quickly rounded the corner and came face to face with the blob! The damn kalsaw didn't fire as he convulsively crushed the trigger. Oh, it’s Yasso!

  Where’d the intruder go?!

  The two guards spun away from each other.

  Steb saw the guards turn toward Nigel, shout and then move toward him as Nigel darted, first behind the APC, then under it. Steb stepped behind the tank he’d been working on. He pulled out the rag he had in his back pocket and jammed it into his bottle that was now only half filled with fuel. He frantically spun the wheel until his lighter flared. A second later the rag was on fire. He heaved the Molotov cocktail hard at a truck in the next row, but it struck the canvas side and fell to the dirt without breaking!

  As Moman spun away from Yasso his kalsaw lased a burst of three! The target was a small hot object on the ground near a truck. He lifted his goggles to look at it in real light. It was a small torch wobbling across the ground! There were glowing laser burns in the dirt to either side of it, but the torch apparently hadn't been damaged by the beam that had hit it. Suddenly more fire blossomed at the end of the left laser burn where it went under the truck! In a flash, flames engulfed the whole truck! Shit! How did that happen? The Lieutenant’s gonna have my ass!

  Jos stabbed frantically at the remote control button for their "mortar.” Why wasn't it working?! He ran for the fence to fire it manually.