by Paul Chafe
“Precognition then.” The dolphin seemed excited. “Very rare, but there have been cases.”
“Then how does she know what people are thinking?”
“It could be ordinary intuition providing a confounding factor.”
Tskombe shook his head. “She doesn't beat you with intuition.”
“This is a pertinent fact. However, she can only beat me in short games.”
“I don't think it's either telepathy or precognition. If she were reading your mind, she'd do better in long games where you had the board position more thought out. Precognition wouldn't do her any good. Knowing a chess master's next move isn't going to help you when they're planning two or three or fourteen moves ahead in the game. Even knowing all of them wouldn't help, if you didn't understand where they were leading.”
Curvy chirped and whistled a sound-stream that Tskombe had learned indicated puzzlement. “It could be a wild talent. They are even rarer than precognition, perhaps one in a billion.”
“So what is the talent that lets her know what people are thinking and be ready to move at the right time and guess cards and win at chess against the world grandmaster, but only if the games are fast?”
“I cannot guess.”
Tskombe pondered. “Maybe she's just lucky.”
“She defies the odds too consistently for that.”
“What else defines a lucky person?”
“She is adolescent; her brain is going through tremendous changes. This is the developmental period when psi talents start showing up. The Blind Spot has awakened something up in her, triggered something that was ready to blossom. Our statistical sample is large enough to rule out luck. She is developing a psi talent.”
“Khalsa told me you study people who consistently beat the odds, even granting them tremendous skill. What if blind luck is a talent?”
Curvy had no answer for that, and they left it there.
Trina herself had no insight into whatever it was. She didn't understand how she beat Curvy, or why she was better at quick games than long ones. She didn't know how she knew when it was time to leave at all the critical moments in her childhood when leaving was a matter of survival, didn't know how she guessed the right cards. Curvy's opinion was that she made the right chess moves when it was critical that she do so, less good moves when it was less critical. She didn't so much win the games as stave off defeat long enough to turn it into victory. She was adamant that she didn't know what people were thinking, or what was going to happen; she just acted on her feelings and, more often than not, they turned out to be correct.
The rest of the trip passed uneventfully, and five days later they dropped out of hyperspace on the outskirts of the Centauri system. It was when Tskombe tried to get the cockpit running again that the full extent of the damage the cruiser had done was clear. Both main polarizers were off line, and both out-coms and the transponder were down. The ship's automanual had procedures to use the cabin gravity polarizers for drive. They produced under a gee of thrust, which meant it would take five weeks to reach Wunderland, but that was only an annoyance. The lack of communications wouldn't be a problem; Valiant had power and supplies for three months. Once they got into Wunderland's defensive sphere without a transponder they would be intercepted, identified, and rescued, which was good enough. Tskombe wasn't eager to try docking the ship wearing a vac suit in the airless cockpit, and without the main polarizers they couldn't make a surface landing.
That plan fell apart when the cabin polarizers failed three days later. Suddenly Valiant was drifting, and they had a problem. Trina helped Tskombe strip down the system, which revealed that the superconductor coils were thawed. The liquid nitrogen pump system checked fine, and the valve indicators showed the system was sealed, but the main reservoir was empty. Calling up the maintenance history showed the tank pressure spiking during the battle, then holding steady until it dropped immediately to zero when the main polarizer superconductors went out. There was battle damage, and a weakened link had given out all at once. The cabin gravity polarizers had been running on what nitrogen was left behind the backcheck valves, until slow leakage left too little to keep the coils cold. The pilots would have caught the problem right away. Tskombe, operating well out of his element, hadn't. His first instinct was to valve over some nitrogen from the fusion reactor, which was on a separate loop and still had pressure, but when they actually opened up the cabin gravity polarizer coils he saw that the superconductors had quenched and burned out. That left the chance of repairing the main polarizers. The drive compartment had been spaced, which wasn't a good sign, and when Tskombe suited up and went in to look he could see they'd been shredded by fragments sprayed from the hull by whatever it was that had hit them. Their bulk had shielded the hyperdrive from immediate destruction, which was, at least in retrospect, a good thing.
Communications now became a major issue. If they couldn't call for help they would starve. They could stretch their supplies somewhat, but without thrust their five-week infall orbit profile turned into fifty-six years. Wearily they stripped down the outcom transmitters, following the automanual's instructions. One had been switched on during the battle and had been fried by the electromagnetic pulse of the cruiser's missile, but the other was putting out a signal. They traced it, found the feed cables intact, but the signal wasn't making it out of the ship. There was an antenna problem, and given the battle damage the likely solution was that the antenna array itself was wrecked. Someone was going to have to go outside and fix it, and that someone was Tskombe. He sighed and looked up at Trina, who was watching him with concern as he worked. What does it mean for her luck if she wins chess games and guesses cards but dies of slow starvation on a crippled starship?
He suited up and went into the emergency airlock. Through the tiny transpax window the starfield revolved slowly. The cabin polarizers had tumbled them as they failed, and the ship was spinning fast enough to give an appreciable sense of down, which was out through the airlock. Once he left the ship he would fall into space, untethered. That was a frightening thought, despite a polarizer belt that would let him fly himself back to Valiant in free flight. Running out of power was one danger, being struck by the tumbling hull as he maneuvered was another. He took a deep breath. It had to be done. Without at least one antenna functioning there was no communication between the ship and anyone outside it.
He picked up the replacement array he and Curvy had jury rigged in the hold, and put it at his feet so it wouldn't fly around on its short tether when he jumped. Once he got positioned on the hull properly he would try to connect it to the hull mount. He turned around to give Trina the thumbs up through the airlock's internal viewport. He got a thumbs up back, and a brave smile, and then pushed the purge lever. There was a rush of air, quickly fading to silence as the lock pumped down to vacuum.
There was a checklist on the arm of his suit, things to do to verify it was in fact space ready now that the lock was in vacuum. He ran down it. Air feed off, pressure steady for a count of sixty, air feed on, verify air flow, check polarizers, rotation and thrust, verify power, check coolant, check communications. Checklist complete. He was completely unqualified to do this, but it had to be done. I wasn't qualified to fly a ship off Kzinhome either. Tskombe unsealed the airlock and pulled the heavy door in and up, balancing himself against the gentle outward acceleration so he wouldn't simply tumble out. Vertigo. The stars were waiting, and it was harder to let go than he thought it would be. He closed his eyes and opened them again, and fell.
He let himself fall for some seconds, then triggered the yaw control to spin him around facing Valiant, triggered it the other way again to stop the rotation when he was. The port side of the ship seemed fine, but as it turned slowly beneath him he could see the starboard side was melted and glassy, the ablative armor deeply pitted from the thermal flux of the cruiser's warhead. He applied thrust to stop his fall, taking Curvy's advice to do everything gently. The dolphin would have been a better choi
ce for the job — her three-dimensional instincts and the dexterous power of her dolphin hands would have made the job easy — but Curvy had no vacuum gear.
The antenna mounts were in the sensor bay on the courier's back, halfway between the navigation blister and its sharply angled twin tails. As that part of the ship rotated past Tskombe got an idea of how difficult the job was going to be. The sensor bay doors had been sheared off by the blast, or more accurately, by the tremendous thrust caused by their ablative armor flash-boiling away. The ship's hull in that area was basically intact, but there were no handholds but the lip of the bay itself. The acceleration given by the ship's rotation was gentle, but it was constant, and he would have to hold on with one hand and work with the other. If he slipped he'd fall away again, which wasn't a big deal, but Valiant's rotation made down the rear of the ship, and if he hit the tail assembly it could be fatal.
There was no way to match rotation with the ship; he simply had to judge the spin and go for it, like jumping onto a three-dimensional merry-go-round that was already spinning. The airlock, thankfully, was on the ship's side, close to the center of rotation, but more importantly, not exposed to the long axis of the ship's spin. Missing an approach on the way back would be annoying, but not as dangerous as falling from the sensor bay to the tail. He tried out the thruster controls, spinning, thrusting, spinning again to brake. They were simple enough, but his maneuvers lacked finesse. He was overcontrolling and wasting power. Enough of that — he didn't have it to waste.
Nothing to do but do it. Trina is a lucky girl. If I don't get the antenna fixed, she won't get rescued. The thought gave him little comfort, if only because he wasn't convinced of the theory. Still, she had come through the attack without so much as a bruise, which was better than the rest of them. He timed the ship's stately motion, once, twice and… thrust, gently but not too gently. Better to come in hard than get sliced in half by one of those razor-sharp leading edges. He ignored the looming tail, concentrated on the sensor bay. He had to grab it on the first try; if he failed he had to instantly rotate and thrust back out the way he'd come to get out of the way as the tail came around.
Do it right first and he wouldn't have to handle any problems. The bay came up, faster than he'd expected, and he toggled the polarizer. As he came in he grabbed on hard to some projecting connection inside the bay. An instant later he bumped into the hull and rebounded, but his grip held and he didn't bounce off into space again. A gentle acceleration tried to push him off into space, stronger here than it had been at the airlock. Down had changed direction, to point along the ship's back to the huge tail section, stationary now against a starfield rotating with stately majesty. A deep breath, and he was suddenly aware of the pounding of his heart in his ears. Step one complete.
The bay was a mess. The doors had shielded the equipment inside from the blast, but when they'd been torn off everything projecting through them had been taken with them, both omnidirectional antennas, the long com dish, the radars, everything, torn out by the roots, with cables and components spilling haphazardly into space. He'd gone over the layout with the automanual until he had it memorized, but it still took him awhile to recognize the com array mounts in the mess.
It was immediately obvious he was going to be unable to do the work while holding on to the bay with one hand; it was a two-hand job. Perhaps he could swing upside down and wedge his feet beneath the bay door mounts. He tried it, awkwardly, nearly slipped and fell, but managed to get them secure. Valiant wasn't big enough to carry extensive spares. The unit he was attaching now had its gain control section improvised with components stolen from the cockpit and lashed together with his limited electronics expertise and a lot of advice from the automanual. A length of coaxial cable, stripped of its outer shielding, served as the actual antenna. It dangled beneath him by its tether now and he pulled it up.
Attaching it should have been simple, but it wasn't. The sensor bay wasn't very big, and because he had to use it as a foothold he had to half squat, uneasily balanced, and work between his knees. The procedure would have been absolutely impossible under full gravity. He immediately found he couldn't lean his head forward far enough to see clearly what he was doing, so he had to work by touch. The suit gloves were thick enough to make what should have been a simple operation difficult, and the long, whippy antenna length continually got in the way. He dropped it three times just trying to get the threads to line up, and once nearly fell backward, saving himself with a desperate grab. Heart pounding, he steadied himself. There was no way he was going to be able to thread the connector without seeing what he was doing.
Maybe if he held on to the connector with one hand and leaned back… The cables looked strong enough to hold his not-so-large weight. He let the antenna go and tried it, gingerly, ready to grab with his free hand if the cable suddenly gave way.
It held. He breathed out, and slowly, carefully pulled the antenna back up and positioned the screw threads. It was still awkward to rotate with the length of the wire whipping around, but he managed to get the first thread mated, and after that it was easier. He took his time, screwing down the mounting a turn at a time. Finally it was threaded as tightly as he could get it by hand. Mission accomplished, time to go back. He stood, dancing carefully around the now mounted antenna, to get himself in position to launch out and away far enough that he could clear the tail while he maneuvered back to the airlock.
Something slipped and all of a sudden he was falling, slowly at first. He twisted, and punched wildly at the polarizer controls. Thrust hit him in the back and something snagged, then tore. He bounced painfully off of the courier's hull, and spun, sliding over the top of the ship. He went right between the tails and fell off into space, spinning wildly with the polarizer still on full thrust. The centrifugal force of his spin made it difficult to operate the controls and it took him some time to get the thruster switched off. Awkwardly, he killed his rotation. Valiant was now five hundred meters distant and receding rapidly, so thrust again to come to zero relative and coast. It took a lot of thrust to stop; he'd picked up a lot of momentum from the ship, plus whatever the uncontrolled surge had given him. He was trembling. That had been a near thing, and if he'd hit the tails he would have been injured, and he could have torn the suit. He took a deep breath and steadied himself. He was drifting slowly toward Valiant, and they should be able to hear him now.
He keyed the transmitter. “Tskombe to Valiant.”
Nothing.
“Tskombe to Valiant.”
Silence. On instinct he reached behind to his service pack to where his suit antenna should be. His hand found only empty space, and remembered the momentary snag he'd felt. The antenna must have caught on some jagged piece of hull, and torn off when he'd hit the polarizers to clear the tail. He adjusted his heading slightly to carry him past the airlock, then hit the polarizers gently to increase his closure rate.
An amber light blinked in the corner of his vision. He turned his head to the suit readouts projected on the visor. Low power. He breathed in and out again. He'd used a fair bit getting the feel of the polarizer, wasted a lot in the fall, and a lot more in killing the momentum he'd picked up from it. Nothing to worry about, he was on his way back. I just need to nail the approach…
He didn't nail it, though he came heartbreakingly close. He was off a couple of degrees as he came in and overcorrected. He corrected back the other way as the airlock handholds came close, grabbed for them and missed. He drifted past, rotated to line up again, and hit the thruster. There was a second of thrust, and then it cut out. The amber icon flashed to red, and he was still drifting away at perhaps a half a meter per second. No power. Cold horror seized him as he realized the situation had switched from risky to fatal in that split second. Desperately he keyed his transmitter again, but there was still no response. Inexorably Valiant got farther away. His suit still had power, but the thruster had its own batteries, and they were dead. The suit was good for forty-eight hours, give or
take, and he was going to die a slow and lonely death.
Hours later Valiant had faded to a pinprick and then finally vanished. Time dragged. He slept and woke, and slept again. Occasionally, and without much hope, he keyed his transmitter. His air was becoming heavy, saturated with CO2 and his thinking was fuzzy and unclear. This is what it is to die. He had nightmares then, about Ayla at the spaceport. She was taken by the kzinti, and when he tried to save her the kzin who nearly killed him at Vega IV screamed and leapt, fangs bared for the killing bite. I never should have left her. Sleep blended with delirium and he barely recognized the warship when it occulted a quarter of the sky, black on black, bristling with sensors and turrets, a weapon tube large enough to destroy worlds running down its lower spine. They sent a flitter for him and he wondered if they'd eat him alive. It wasn't until they vented pressure into the hangar and the medics ran in to strip his suit off that he realized it was a human ship. His legs wouldn't support him, and his rescuers held up him.
“Colonel Tskombe?” The man was tall and broad-shouldered, with iron gray hair and beard, and an air of command in his Wunderland-accented English.
“Yes.”
The man offered his hand. “I'm Captain Cornelius Voortman, and you're aboard the battleship Oorwinnig. You're lucky to be alive.”
“Thank you, sir.” Tskombe took the hand and shook it, doing the expected thing and saying the required words. “Sir, my ship…”
“Your dolphin and the girl are safe aboard. We responded as soon as we got their distress call. You are the hero of the day, I understand.”
“Commander Khalsa fought the ship, sir.”
“And you saved it. My report to the UN will be clear on your role, and on the kzinti's treaty violation in attacking you.” Voortman's voice hardened. “The ratcats will pay dearly for this attack.”
Kzinti. Tskombe controlled his expression. Whatever story Curvy had told the Free Wunderland Navy didn't involve an illegal flight from Earth and attack by a UNSN cruiser. They pinned the attack on the kzinti, which is exactly who the Wunderlanders would expect. It was a logical and necessary move, but it made his position difficult. He spoke carefully. “Sir, this mission…” There was no way to explain the situation. “…Sir, I would rather you hold back your report.”