The Best of Jim Baen’s Universe by Eric Flint
Sparks flew as forceblade met trident field. Gillies caught the two main attacks, but was too slow on the third, and a trident skewed off his blade to sink into the left side of his armor. It didn’t penetrate to skin, but it didn’t have to. The Xene twisted the handle, and the remaining field charge earthed itself, shorting out most of Gillies’ systems. His whole left side locked up, and his sinister beam faded to nothing. Desperately, Gillies fired his back pulsors, throwing himself forward in a mad lunge with the functioning forceblade, expecting to feel the other tridents in his chest.
But the Xene toppled over, smashed into the floor, and rebounded with Gillies on top of him. Before the alien could recover, Gillies thrust his forceblade through its chest exhaust, the savage blow sending him into a spin that he couldn’t control. Out of the corner of his helmet, he saw the DOG propel itself out from under the Xene’s anterior limbs, where it had struck as he’d shoved.
“Well done,” Gillies sent, remembering the order codes Sublight had sent down. But there was no answer: only an ominous vibration deep in his cheekbones. Quickly, Gillies flipped through the other channels, without success. He couldn’t get a full damage control readout, but the emergency telltales inside his helmet told him his motor controls were shot, there was significant loss of suit environment, and the trident charge was still ravaging his suit systems. He’d probably be dead inside twenty minutes—with everyone else from his own platoon and Two Platoon as well, if he couldn’t get to the drive controls and shut it down.
The controls were little more than five meters away, and there were no Xene defenders in the way. But Gillies was unable to move, his arms and legs twitching uselessly, bound in armor that had effectively lost its nervous system. He was writhing uselessly on the notional floor under 0.2 g, but even the low gravity couldn’t help him.
Quickly, Gillies assessed his options. The DOG unit looked to be fully functional, but it couldn’t receive his commands. He looked down at it, and it looked up at him.
“Come here!” Gillies tried, but there was no response. Desperately, he tried again. Still, the DOG just stared up at him. He tried gesturing to it to come closer, but only a few of his fingers moved. He tried again, with his other hand. No fingers, but the wrist flopped backward and forward, like a clockwork obscene gesture.
The DOG seemed to understand that, because it unwrapped its tail, and jetted up to Gillies, doing an elegant flip-over halfway that put its tail next to Gillies’s helmet. He wondered what the hell it was doing, till his damage control telltales showed one restored com circuit. The DOG’s tail was its antenna and input fiber, and it had just plugged into his suit phone.
“Well done!” Gillies exclaimed again. The tail wagged a little, but not too much. Praying that his message log wasn’t destroyed, Gillies summoned up Sublight’s message again. It worked, and this time he ran through all the codes, using up a precious five minutes of his remaining life support. But it was worth it. The DOG’s command language was surprisingly sophisticated when groups of words were used, and it hinted at equally sophisticated capabilities.
“DOG! DESTROY . . . ENEMY . . . ENGINE . . . CONTROL . . . PANELS . . . IN . . . VISUAL . . . RANGE . . . AND . . . RETURN!”
The DOG detached itself, and sped over to the engine room. Gillies watched in fascination as it moved to each panel, and a cutting lance shot out of its nose, melting through the armored covers of key fiber junctions. Then, a blue claw went in, and came out festooned with broken fibers and the Xene’s curious half-sentient chips, their metallic blood boiling out into vacuum. Luminescent trails on the panels died. When the second-last panel dimmed, Gillies skin crawled as the ship’s screen pulsed and died. When the last panel faded into darkness, his stomach told him he was in zero g. The artificial gravity was off and the ship was no longer accelerating.
The DOG jetted back, and reconnected. Gillies smiled and nodded at it.
“GOOD . . . DOG! Very good!”
The rest of the battalion shuttles would intercept all the sooner now, maybe even soon enough to save Gillies’s platoon. They could even be landing now, for all he knew. But it was too late for him. The suit said he had less than five minutes of atmosphere left, and they’d never get to him in time. Wearily, he tried to think of something he could do, something to add to the simple equation of not enough air and a broken suit. Salvage atmos tanks from one of his dead marines back in the hold? He couldn’t get to them. He was too tired, and he couldn’t move anyway. He might as well just go to sleep . . .
With a jerk, he twitched himself awake, and checked the telltales again. The suit had cut him to half pressure he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. He couldn’t think. There was the DOG, maybe it could get him the atmos tanks, but once again, he couldn’t think of the commands. His head felt like he’d just gone through a gravity flux. He couldn’t remember the commands, the commands. Only the one Sublight thought was funny, though Gillies didn’t know why. Maybe it was Sublight’s joke, and it wasn’t a real command, but it sounded like just the right thing for the situation.
Half unconscious, Gillies muttered the command that would save his life.
“Lassie. Get help.”
“Look, Roy, I’m telling you”
“Yeah, Mike, I got it. A really hot redhead who shoots laser beams out of her eyes.”
Jodie looked up from the guest register she was filling out intending to make a scathing comment about sexism in the workplace and men who treated women like sex objects, but the two men who were talking weren’t even looking in her direction. One was a tall man with graying brown hair and the other was a shorter man with thick curly brown hair and olive skin. Both men seemed completely oblivious to anything but their conversation, at least if the flailing arms were any indication.
“Dude, don’t start.”
“Start?” the taller man said. “Mike, we’ve been having this same conversation for years. You can’t see the future.”
The shorter one, Mike, raised his index finger. “Then how do you explain Amber?”
“If that makes you able to see the future, then our entire high school qualifies. I’m the only person in the school who didn’t think she’d cheat on me.”
“But—” Mike said.
“And then there’s football.”
“Don’t go there,” Mike said in a warning tone.
“We’ve made the same bet every year for sixteen years . . . ”
“Dude, this is Buffalo’s year.”
” . . . and every year you lose.”
“But” Mike said.
“You owe me twelve hundred bucks.”
“That much? Really?”
“Yes!”
“But”
“I don’t even watch football!”
The conversation trailed off as the two walked through the security checkpoint. Jodie shook her head, trying to get rid of the headache that had been building steadily through the bureaucratic nightmare that was the last two days, and turned back to the latest bit of paperwork. Once she finished signing her life away, the guard handed her a visitor’s badge with a small, blurry, reddish picture of her printed on it.
“Just follow the green line, darling, and Special Agent Peterson will meet you,” the guard said.
Jodie started to bristle but she stepped on it. In the last forty-eight hours, she’d been called “honey,” “darling,” “baby,” and “sugar” more times than in the entire rest of her life, but mostly it had been by women who were either older, African-American, or who had a heavy Southern accent. Near as she could tell, it was just normal around Atlanta. Knowing that didn’t do anything for her headache, however.
“Thank you,” she said, doing her best to take it in the spirit in which it was offered. She picked up her purse and headed for the security checkpoint.
The checkpoint was the usual elaborate affair with thick walls, lots of guns, and even more guards. She extended the visitor’s pass to an armored man who was about six foot six and built like a professional football player.
“Energy projector, huh?” the guard said as he read her badge. He pointed at the blast tank off to the side. “Try not to punch through the gizmo.”
File Size: 1129 KB
Print Length: 688 pages
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Publisher: Baen Books; 1 edition (July 1, 2007)
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Language: English
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