Free Stories 2021 by Baen Books

Author:Baen Books
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2022-01-18T05:00:00+00:00

Molly touched her enormous bubble helmet to Theo’s. “Stop. There.”

Theo followed her finger. Just over the horizon, a point of light moved, pulsing erratically. “Check my numbers.”

They’d smeared their Ectoderm with a pattern of gray-and-white streaks, resembling the ice they walked on as best they could. But there was no way to prevent their breaths from heating up the bubble helmets, and they had to talk. If Expedience was looking their way with a thermograph, the first Molly and Theo would know of it was a hyperkinetic slug slamming through their flesh.

Of course, they’ll probably be looking out for Molly’s “minefield” instead of at us.

Molly peered through the instrument Theo had cobbled together. “Tangential motion . . . 23 arcminutes per second. Angle from local horizon . . . 5.4 degrees.”

Theo did some mental math. “Twenty-three meters clockwise from right here?”

“I check that.” He ran through the computations in his head. “Get to the massdriver, we don’t have much time.” Molly blew him a kiss, leaped backward and vanished through one of the blasted-open airlocks.

Theo paced off the twenty-three meters. Then he ran in a series of leaps toward the rising star of the Expedience, just kissing the rock’s surface with his feet. Now came the most dangerous part: getting their attention. He switched on the drone camera and speaker that he had bonded to the side of his bubble helmet.

When they noticed, their voice was tinny through the crysteel and canned air. “Did you want to talk, or were you just helping us track you down?”

“I doubt you bubbleheads can really figure out where I am through this feed,” Theo answered, though they could. “I just thought I’d show you something.”

Theo sailed over the lip of a shallow, bowl-shaped crater. An openwork gantry of metal and carbon nanotubes extended about three meters out of the ice. “See, there’s a lot you can do without electronics. Like this chemical laser. Got your drones with it. Think we can’t get some of you?”

“Very creative,” rasped the speaker. “Let us show you something.”

Theo leaped aside. A hammer punched into the ice six meters away.

“Not very accurate at your distance.” As long as I don’t stay in the same place more than about five seconds. But Ectos danced on the surface of asteroids whenever they could. He leaped while he spoke. “We’ve got more than guns.” He faced the gantry. “You know what that is?”

“Core drill mount,” said the voice. Another slug slammed down. Four meters this time. Theo leaped farther. “Probably the way you Ectos discovered this rock was worth calling a claimgather over.”

“Good: you know how deep it goes.” Theo brought a thick disc of carefully-machined metal into view of the camera. “And of course, you know metastable metallic hydrogen,” he said.

“You’re going to blow yourself up?” asked the voice. “Excellent. Good-bye.”

“Oh, there are hundreds more at the bottom of this shaft,” said Theo. “Funny, there’s a truly enormous fault, there. One of them has a contact detonator attached. So when I drop this one down, well .

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