“Sounds good to me.” He closed his eyes and held still as Lin took a needle-tipped tube from the railing of the bed and inserted it into the hollow of his elbow.
“What's your name?” Bain asked.
“Gray.”
The green flashing light slowed and the rhythm grew slow and regular. Bain sat back on his heels, not quite sure what to do.
“That's good,” Lin whispered. She glanced up from the little screen above the bed and smiled at Bain. “He's going to be all right. Once we wipe out that infection, he'll be up and around in no time.”
“Do you hear that, Gray?” Bain asked. The Ranger didn't answer—he was already asleep.
“Ready to launch, Ganfer?”
“Ready. Sensors show two children are still outside the ship.”
“I'll get them.” Bain groaned. He got up off his knees and ran through the hatch, down the access tube, through the cargo hold and down the ramp.
They were two of the Cooversy girls, of course, the ones who screamed during the whole trip from their farm to the Danimoore farm. The ones who wanted to go back up in the air as soon as they landed.
“You have to go back inside,” Bain told them as soon as he found them, hiding behind the house. The creek was only a few meters away, sparkling silver and bubbling over rocks with a sound like chimes. For two seconds he wanted to pull off his boots and go wading.
“Why?” the older girl asked. She looked like she was only five years old, with frizzy red hair and big gray eyes and a dress too big for her.
“Because it's time to launch.”
“Don't want to.” She took hold of her little sister's hand and headed for the creek.
“You have to!” Bain sighed and started to follow them. He wondered if he would have to pick up the littlest one and carry her back to the ship. Would her sister hit him? He was pretty sure she would. He didn't want to touch her—she had a runny nose.
“Don't want to!” The five-year-old started running. Her little sister, who couldn't have been more than three, immediately fell in the dust and got left behind.
“The pirates will get you if you don't get into the ship!” Bain shouted.
That stopped the older girl immediately. She let out a shriek and ran for the cargo bay ramp. That left Bain alone with the crying, dirty little three-year-old who lay on her back in the dust and kicked.
“Hurry up, Bain,” Ganfer said from the collar link.
Bain thought of several things to say, words his parents never would have let him use. Ganfer was listening, and that meant Lin would find out if Bain said those words.
Gritting his teeth, Bain bent down and picked up the little girl. She wiggled like a fish in his arms, but she stopped crying and kicking. He settled her on his hip and hurried for the ship. The ramp started to rise into the ship when he was only halfway up.
“Telling whoppers again?” Master Cooversy said. He came and took his granddaughter from Bain's arms.
“No, sir. The pirates are coming. Gray said so.” Bain brushed the dust and muddy tears off his clothes. He had the awful feeling the little girl had wiped her runny nose all over his shirt while he was carrying her.
“Oh, is that what you told her?” The elderly man grinned. “From the way she's screaming, we can't understand a word she's saying.”
“Well, at least she got back into the ship.” Bain shrugged and hurried to run up the tube to the bridge.
“Launching,” Ganfer announced before Bain had stepped through the hatch into the tube.
Sunsinger lurched. The engines screamed and strained. Bain fell to his knees and nearly hit his head on a support rib for the tube.
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Chapter Ten
“Everybody get strapped in!” Lin shouted through the intercom system. Her voice barely cut through the rumbling and screaming of the straining engines. “We're being chased, and I'll have to make some hard turns and drops.”
Bain ran up to the bridge, bent over to keep his center of balance low, his arms held out to brace himself. He stumbled through the hatch and threw himself into his seat at the control panel.
“Pirates?” he gasped.
“Three.” Lin reached over and yanked his safety straps into place. “I've bragged that Sunsinger is the fastest ship of her size in the entire Commonwealth. Let's see if I'm right.”
“Optimum altitude in fifteen seconds,” Ganfer said.
“Forward thrusters in ten,” she ordered. “Bain, I don't know how well this trick will work in atmosphere.” She grinned, baring her teeth. “Transfer controls from the observation dome to your side of the panel, and be ready to throw dust at those pirates.”
Bain looked at his panel and the screens that showed three little dots flying across a computer-generated map of the planet below and behind them. He choked and tried to think of what buttons to push, what command codes to type into the shipboard computer. He couldn't remember!
Stellar dust. The controls were linked to his panel up in the observation dome.
Guessing, praying he was right, Bain called up computer access to the dome control panel. The computer told him the link was clear.
His fingers shook a little as he called up the particular control program for the hatch that released the stellar dust.
Sunsinger lurched sideways, dipped down, then up. Bain tried to remember how to breathe. He felt like his lungs had been pushed down into his stomach and his stomach shoved up where his throat was supposed to be.
“Sorry,” Lin muttered. She concentrated on the screen between her and Bain. It showed the three dots of light that were the pirates. They separated and flew around a long black streak in the middle of the map.
“What was that?” Bain gasped.
“I skimmed a little too close to a plateau, hoping to make the bigger ships crash. Didn't work.” She glanced over at him. “How about that dust?”
“Almost.” He told the computer to transfer the control program to his panel on the bridge and slaved it to the first auxiliary button. The button blinked green, three long flashes and two short, meaning it was ready. “Set.”
“Good.” Her fingers danced over the control panel, flicking buttons, pounding commands into the keyboard. A large red warning light began blinking. Lin frowned at it, hit two more keys and the warning light stopped flashing.
“What was that?”
“The stupid-alert.”
“What?” He choked on a nervous giggle.
“It's a warning that what I told the ship to do could be dangerous. I know that already.” Lin nodded and tapped a place on the map on the screen between them. “See this canyon?” It was a dark brown smear on the screen. “We're going to play hide and seek.”
“What if it doesn't work?”
“Then we go into orbit. I'm betting those bigger ships need more time and longer calculations to break atmosphere and shake loose of gravity. We'll do a fast, steep rise and slingshot around the planet and use the force of gravity to throw us back down to the spaceport.”
“Everybody better get in stasis chairs, huh?” Bain said. His stomach felt like it had lead weights in it as he thought about the dangerous maneuvers Lin contemplated.
Lin's mouth dropped open, and she stared at him for three long seconds. Then she grinned.
“Better go take care of it, then.”
Bain reached the cargo hold before he realized what had happened: he had thought of something Lin hadn't thought to do. It made him feel good, but odd.
“Stasis chairs?” one of the Danimoore sons yelped. Bain didn't look to see which one. “Why?”
“We're being chased by the pirates, and the stasis chairs will protect you if Lin has to do some fast maneuvers.” Bain felt very proud of himself for thinking of that explanation. It sounded much better than saying everybody could get thrown around the hold like rocks in a barrel.
“That sounds very sensible,” Mistress Danimoore said. She made shooing
motions, generally directing all her sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren toward the row of stasis chairs.
“Makes sense to me,” Master Cooversy drawled. He winked at Bain. “How do we get into these things, boy?”
Sunsinger jerked sideways four times, dropped twice and leaped almost straight up once before Bain got everybody into the stasis chairs and their safety belts buckled. The children laughed at the wild ride. A few adults looked sick. Mistress Cooversy's parents went paper white. They clamped their jaws shut and held onto the arms of their seats and closed their eyes. Bain felt sorry for them. He remembered little Ronny throwing up into another stasis chair, the first time he was in Sunsinger at launch.
“It'll be all right in a couple minutes,” Bain promised, as he helped a Danimoore grandson finish buckling his belts. He stepped back and surveyed everybody in his or her place. Nodding, he started toward the hatch to the access tube. “All right, Ganfer!” he shouted, and broke into a run.
Sunsinger lurched to the right, and Bain skidded into the wall. He caught himself, but hit his knee against a wall strut. His leg buckled and he fell, hitting his head. Behind him, someone let out a yell. Someone asked if he was all right.
Then a greenish-yellow light filled the cargo hold as the stasis field came on. Bain wiped blood out of his eye and looked back over his shoulder. Everyone was frozen into place. The stasis field would hold them still, protect them in all the rolling and tumbling and jerking Sunsinger would do as it fled the pirates. If something damaged the ship, the stasis field would provide life support.
For the first time since coming on board Sunsinger, Bain felt completely afraid. What if Lin and Ganfer couldn't fly the ship fast enough, pull enough tricks, to get away from the pirates?
“Please, Fi'in, protect us,” Bain whispered, as he grabbed onto the wall struts to support himself and ran up the access tube to the bridge again.
“Hold on!” Lin shouted as Bain ran onto the bridge. She turned around in her seat and reached out a hand to him. The entire ship tilted up, nose to the sky.
Bain jumped, grabbed hold of Lin's hand, and struggled into his seat. He felt the familiar, hard hand of gravity smashing him down. His lungs didn't want to work. His eyes tried to close just when he needed to see everything. An invisible wall pressed against his face, pulling on his skin. Bain yanked hard on his safety belt. He had a sudden, horrible image of what would happen if the belt broke and he fell out of his seat. He would hit the far wall of the bridge hard, splatting like rotten fruit on hot pavement.
“Atmosphere edge in two minutes!” Lin shouted against the growing roar of the engines.
Bain held onto the control panel and tried to tip his head enough to see the computer simulation screen. The splotches of color that represented the landscape below them kept shifting, shrinking and changing shape as Sunsinger rose higher in the skies above Dogray. He strained his aching eyes to find the three dots that stood for the pirate ships.
There they were—at the far left corner of the screen. A red triangle appeared on the screen, enclosing the dots. It blinked slowly, with rapidly changing numbers under the base. Bain wracked his brains to remember what the triangle meant, and the numbers. They grew larger with every second.
Then he laughed. The triangle meant the dots were too far away from Sunsinger to be represented to scale. The growing numbers stood for the distance between Sunsinger and the pirates. They were escaping!
“They're still trying to catch us,” Lin said. “It looks good for us, but I wouldn't throw a party just yet.”
Bain nodded and held onto the control panel tighter. He finally gave in and closed his eyes and waited for the hard, squeezing hand of gravity to give up on him.
It seemed to take forever. Had it been this long when they were leaving Lenga for the first time? Bain didn't think so. They were traveling at a slower speed that time, too. Not this fast, not this frantic. They were only escaping gravity the last time, not pirates.
“I sent a message to Gil,” Lin said. She didn't shout this time. Bain grinned when he realized the engines weren't roaring quite as angrily now. “If I could have kept the pirates far enough behind me, I would have tried to lead them straight to the Rangers.” She shook her head and took her eyes off the control panel long enough to grin at Bain. “Sunsinger can handle atmospheric work, but she was made for space maneuvering. Remember that Bain: always stick with what you know you do best when you're in trouble. Don't try something new, or something you're not totally sure of, if people's lives are at stake.”
“What if there's no other way to help them?” he couldn't help asking.
“Then you do the best you can, and say a lot of prayers.” She turned back to the control panel, hands constantly shifting. Lin raised one hand and brushed a few strands of hair out of her face. They had come loose from her braid in the strain of launch.
When they broke free of the last dragging fingers of gravity, Bain expected to feel the lightness of free-fall to take over. Instead, Sunsinger lurched and the engines took on a different pitch. He tried to push against the safety strap and realized there was still a sense of gravity holding him down.
“We're still accelerating,” Lin said, before he could ask. She grinned. “When we stay at a constant speed in space, then you get free-fall. When we accelerate, there's still a sense of gravity. We're moving forward, so if you tried to walk around you'd get pushed up against the wall instead of holding down to the floor.”
“More physics lessons?” Bain said with an answering grin.
“All the time. Life is physics. Not that we're going to spend much time on philosophy right now.” She chuckled. “Stay in your seat for a while. I'm not going to settle on a steady speed until I know what those three uglies behind us can do.”
“What if they can fly faster than us in space?”
“Then we do some tricky maneuvers. I didn't use the dust back there in the canyon, so we still have that trick in reserve.”
“Good.” Bain brushed his fingers over the green button still waiting to be pressed.
* * * *
An hour later, Sunsinger settled into a steady speed, and Lin let Bain unbuckle his safety belt. The pirates weren't catching up with their ship. Lin even admitted she thought the pirates were falling behind. Slowly. Just enough to make the numbers on the screen flicker—but that encouraged Lin. She cleaned and disinfected the cut near Bain's hairline and put a thin strip of bandage over it. Then Bain flew in free-fall down to the hold to check on their passengers.
The stasis field was still strong. Everyone was frozen in the positions they had been in when the field first came on. Bain checked all the equipment and asked Ganfer to run a diagnostic on the power flow, just in case.
When he flew back up to the bridge, Lin was kneeling on the floor next to the medical bay and the drawer bed. Lt. Gray sat up, holding his head. He didn't look as pale as he had been when they put him in before launch.
“Bain—hot coffee.” Lin pulled a hand-held medical scanner out of its slot in the wall of the medical bay and slowly ran its beam of light across Gray's face, then down his body.
Bain flew to the galley and hurried to heat a cup of coffee for the Ranger. He wondered why Lin had brought the Ranger out of his healing sleep. He couldn't be completely well already, could he? It had only been four hours, maybe a little more, since they put him into the healing bed.
“The infection's almost gone, fever's down. I'd like to avoid using stimulants. Besides the coffee, that is,” Lin added with a grin. She nodded thanks and took the cup from Bain when he drifted over to her side.
“I think I feel better.” Gray took the cup in both hands and sucked at the tiny hole that let the hot liquid out. He winced and took a deep breath, then blew across the hole where steam tried to seep out. “Better coffee than they usually give us.”
“Spacers have connections.” She put the diagnostic scanner back into its slot. “Ganfer can watch you, but I'd rather have all
his concentration on the ship and our friends out there.”
“Friends?” The Ranger opened his eyes a little wider and looked around the ship. He noticed Bain floating nearly a meter off the deck. “What are we doing in space?”
“What we do best,” Bain said. His face got hot when Gray stared at him, and Lin chuckled.
“We got jumped by three pirate ships almost before we finished launching. I sent out the distress call, but your captain couldn't get anybody to us fast enough. Sunsinger is a lot better and faster at launching than any of those clunky pirate rigs. We've taken a good, strong lead, and we're holding it.” Lin tugged open a storage drawer and pulled out two patches. “I woke you to get any advice you can give me on handling the pirates.”
“I don't know much about them,” Gray said. “It sounds to me like you're handling them pretty well without me.” He tried to smile, but Bain thought the man looked ready to be sick all over the floor.
“Well, that's a matter of opinion.” She tore open the clear wrapper for the first patch. It was blue with little silver wires running across the top and a tiny, round black dot of computer chip. “This will keep watch over your progress,” Lin said, and pressed the sticky side of the patch against the back of Gray's neck. “This one will give you a steady dose of antibiotics and a good, strong vitamin-mineral compound to enhance your healing.” She tore open the wrapper of the green patch and pressed it into the hollow of his right elbow.
Bain decided Gray liked the patches. They were much better than getting stuck with needles and having to wear a heavy radio band to watch over his condition. Bain knew he much preferred patches to needles. It was good to know Lin used them, too. He hadn't gotten sick yet on Sunsinger, and he hoped he never would, but he felt better just knowing Lin wouldn't stab him with needles.
“What do you need to know?” the Ranger asked.
“Can the pirates go through Knaught Points?”
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