I shook my head. “No drugs, Sergeant Major.”
Ord patted my cheek. “Sir?”
I shook my head again. “Put the syrette away. I just need to catch my breath.”
He smiled. “You’ve been out two hours, Sir.”
I flexed my arm. Better. I rolled onto an elbow and sat up.
Twenty yards away, Howard stood, knees shaking, silhouetted against the Firewitch’s transparent bow plate, thirty yards in front of him.
He breathed, “Holy moly.”
In front of him, where the Airpool dome had dangled from its connecting tube, the Firewitch’s six forward-pointing arms, tipped with Mag Rail cannon, had unfolded like an inverted umbrella frame.
Dead ahead of us loomed a white, pock-marked disc. It grew larger and larger, until it seemed to fill the bow plate.
The disc flashed past us to starboard. Ahead now lay only blackness and stars.
I said, “What was that thing?”
Howard turned to me, his eyes wide. “The Moon.”
Fifteen
I shook my head. “No. Howard, the Moon is, like, a quarter million miles from us. Three days away if we were boosting like a Clipper. And we’re barely moving. Where’s New Moon?”
“No. It just feels like we aren’t moving.”
Above us, something clanked on the Aluminex scaffold.
“Jason!”
I looked up as Jude clambered down the scaffold stairs on shaky legs.
Howard, Ord, and I ran to him.
Howard said, “What happened?”
Jude shrugged. “I saw the big thing coming at us. I steered left. Next thing I knew, the clamps released.”
Howard nodded. “That big thing was the Moon. Obvious.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. Obvious.”
“The Pseudocephalopod sees in the infrared spectrum. We see in what we call—appropriately for us—the visible spectrum. The pilot couch mount stretches into the forward dome so the pilot has a clear view. He reacts to visible-light images of objects in the Firewitch’s path.”
“Then why is Jude walking around down here?”
Howard said, “The ship wouldn’t release Jude while it was near Earth. Planetary gravity pulls in too much floating junk. The ship requires a pilot close to planetary masses, like a sailing vessel requires a harbor pilot. Clear sailing now that we’re past the Moon. No pilot required.”
Jude jerked his thumb toward the ChemJon bank, behind MAT(D)4’s crate pile and the employee lunch cart. “Then I can go pee?” He didn’t wait for an answer.
I walked to the bow and laid my nose against the transparent Slug metal. The surface was cool, vibrating as faintly as an old-fashioned wind-up watch. I craned my neck. Through the clear dome, I had to admit, I saw no sign of Earth, or of New Moon, or of the old one.
I turned back to Howard. He ransacked an admin bubble’s wreckage, then straightened up, holding a salvaged drive as big as stacked pancakes.
I said, “When I floor my car, I get slammed back against the seat. When the Clipper boosts, the tourists weigh six hundred pounds for a couple minutes. If we just went from zero to a hundred twenty five thousand miles per hour, we’d be squashed against the rear bulkhead like tomato paste.”
Howard waved his arms at the hull pulsating all around us. “That’s the elegance of it. When we started moving, the vessel channeled Cavorite’s properties all around us.”
“We’re in a gravity cocoon?”
Howard nodded. “We’re so insulated from G-forces, we don’t even feel that we’re moving.”
“So, how fast are we going?”
Howard shrugged. “No idea, really. We did Earth-to-Moon in under two hours. I’m sure we’re still accelerating. But we’ll never exceed light speed, of course. So we can’t go fast enough.”
Pop.
I turned toward the sound. The therm tab on the wrapped Burrito in Jude’s hand poked up red, where it had popped. My godson sauntered back toward us, Jeeb perched on his shoulder.
I asked Howard, “Not fast enough for what?”
He shrugged. “To arrive wherever this ship is programmed. Before we starve.”
Jude paused, steaming Burrito halfway to his lips. “Where are we programmed for?”
“I don’t know.” Howard extended his elbow like a falconer. Jeeb telescoped out his wings and fluttered from Jude’s shoulder to Howard’s. “But Jeeb can help us find out.”
Jude asked through a mouthful of queso, “Why would we starve?”
Howard walked toward the bow, then dropped his shoulder and Jeeb fluttered to the deck. “Even if we’re going two-thirds light speed, we’re decades away from the nearest star with a planetary system. Probably farther still from any habitable destination.”
Jude said, “Can I turn us around?”
“I don’t know. But if you could, we’d need to know where we wanted to get back to.” Howard felt around Jeeb’s belly until he popped Jeeb’s output access panel and sprung it. He hardwired the drive to Jeeb, then stood back as Jeeb bugged out his opticals. “Jeeb will record star positions as we travel. If we ever figure out how to turn around, we’ll have a road map.”
Fourteen days later, we found out that a map was the least of our worries.
Sixteen
We spent the first fourteen days of our ride to nowhere discovering surprises.
Howard was a paranoid geek, but he was still a genius. He used Jeeb’s optical spectrometer to calculate Red Shift as we sped away from certain stars. From this, Howard estimated that, by Day Two, we had settled in at a cruising speed of a hundred twenty thousand miles per second.
The Firewitch’s six splayed, forward-facing tentacles were more than just gun mounts. They leaked enough Cavorite influence forward to make an invisible umbrella in front of us. This buffed aside the rare debris of interstellar space. Without that umbrella, at that kind of speed, collision with debris smaller than a lima bean would blow the Firewitch into rubble.
In the lima bean department, Ord determined that between the preservable stores in the lunch wagon, which was provisioned to feed two hundred people, plus MAT(D)4’s Meals Utility, Dessicated, the four of us could survive for months. The ChemJons recycled what our bodies didn’t need any longer into potable water, and the Firewitch seemed to manufacture fresh-enough air.
The difference between our situation and a life prison sentence was that a convict could always dream of parole.
Our problem quickly became morale. That meant I had to keep my troops busy.
Howard and Jude worked together each day, trying to refine Jude’s flight skills, get the Firewitch off autopilot, and turn it for home. So far, no dice. But it kept them busy.
We also devised less weighty diversions. Ord broke out the SAFS and taught Jude marksmanship. A firing simulator was really a glorified hologame.
Ord also taught Jude hand-to-hand combat. On Day Fourteen, in the central bay, Ord, silver drill whistle between his lips, refereed Jude’s pugil stick bout with a Cargo’Bot.
Howard now released Jeeb from astrogation duty one hour of each forty-eight, so Jeeb could perform self-maintenance. Jeeb perched ringside on a crate, extending and retracting antennae while he wiped them with his forelimbs.
On paper, no clumsy Cargo’Bot can last even a round with a Vegas Kick’Bot, but I wouldn’t bet against the Cargo’Bot Ord had reprogrammed. The ’Bot could grip the padded pugil stick in its two forward manipulators but still stand stable on three legs—and sweep at its opponent with the fourth.
The only sounds echoing in the vast bay were the clack of pugil against pugil, the rubber squeak of Jude’s slips across the deckplates, and the electric whine of the ’Bot’s motors. The air smelled of sweat and ’Bot-joint Synlube.
The ’Bot thrust its stick at Jude’s jaw. My godson dodged easily, but in the same instant, the ’Bot’s right center ambulator kicked forward, so fast it blurred, toward Jude’s padded kneecap.
I’m fair with a pugil, even
with all my replacement parts. But that leg sweep would have caved my knee joint like a hammer whacking a drinking straw.
I said “toward” Jude’s kneecap because the ’Bot leg swept through empty space.
Jude sidestepped, lunged, and thumped the ’Bot’s carapace with his stick end.
Ord tweeted his whistle. Then he stepped in, touched Jude’s shoulder, and announced, “Point. Match.”
Jude grinned and wiped sweat with a wristband.
I swear Jeeb’s optic lids drooped when his dumb but muscular cousin went down for the count. Synlube is thicker than water, I suppose.
I jerked a thumb toward the control chamber and said to Jude and Jeeb, “Howard says break time’s over.”
Jude nodded, still grinning. “You see that? Want next?”
I shook my head.
Ord and I watched Jude meander toward the control room, peeling off pads and strewing them on the deck. Jeeb clattered behind on four legs, plucking up the sweaty laundry with the remaining two, diagnostics clicking like a fussy nanny.
The Sergeant Major shook his head. “Never seen anyone so fast, Sir.”
“Come see him in a soccer game. He—” My stomach tightened.
Activity helped me forget where we were. But when I remembered, the nearest soccer goal was still dropping a hundred twenty thousand miles further behind us every second.
Ord crouched alongside the inert ’Bot, and flipped up its program panel. “Care to tangle before I wipe the fighting program, Sir?”
I shook my head. “What’s the point? I could plug in to Jeeb and learn a language, too.” Overnight, a TOT could teach even a grunt enough of any language to get into brothels and out of coups d’état. A TOT could even decipher a language it didn’t know, as easily as it cracked codes in signal intelligence it intercepted.
Ord said, “If anybody can turn this ship around, it’s Colonel Hibble, Sir.”
I nodded. “He’s suited for his job.” Whereas I sucked at mine.
Ord paused, cocked his head. “Sir, the detonator hesitation was nothing. A split second.”
I sighed, and waved my hand. “It doesn’t matter any more, does it? I’ll never have to command anybody again.”
Howard’s voice crackled from my uniform mike. “You two better get up here!”
Seventeen
Ord and I hit the control chamber entrance on the run, panting.
Jeeb had resumed his station front-and-center in the ship’s transparent bow, Howard kneeling beside him. Above us, Jude swung a leg into the toadstool, then disappeared as he lay down in the pilot couch.
We jogged to a stop alongside Howard, and I asked him, “What?”
He pointed at the stars with the antique yellow writing pencil that he had taken to chewing in lieu of cigarettes. The stars along our flanks were no longer the points of light we had become accustomed to over the past fourteen days. They stretched out in elongate streaks.
Dead ahead, the stars were gone.
Howard pointed at the discarded pugil pads mounded above Jeeb’s thorax like an inverted pyramid. “Get all of those we have up here.”
Ord voiced a ’Bot with his lapel mike, and it scurried away.
“What’s going on, Howard?” I said.
“You remember I said we were moving too slow?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re accelerating.”
“That’s why the stars look stretched out?”
“No. Their light is being bent.”
“By what?”
Howard pointed at the black void in front of us. “That.”
The Spooks had always assumed the Slugs transited interstellar space by short-cutting through Temporal Fabric Insertion Points, places where the gargantuan gravitation of collapsed stars tacked folded space together.
“We’re so close that black hole’s bending light?”
“Sucking it like gravity sucks water down a drain.”
I swallowed. “Us too?” The central mass of a black hole packed matter bigger than the sun into a golf ball. I didn’t want to die as a piece of a golf ball.
Ord’s Cargo’Bot dumped a pugil-pad wad as big as a mattress at Howard’s feet.
Howard said, “I think this ship’s designed to transit the hole by skirting the central mass so fast that the ship slingshots out the other side.”
I eyed the toadstool. “Jude?”
“The closer we get to the central mass, the more inbound matter, like the ship itself, the ship has to avoid. Jude’s reactions to what he sees in the visible spectrum will dodge the ship around anything too big for the bow array to deflect.”
“Why the pads?”
Howard hunched on hands and knees, spreading out a chest protector across the deck plates. “Jude will make the transit in a form-fitting, reclined couch. But insertion-point gravity may be so strong that, even in a Cavorite cocoon, an unsupported human body would be crushed.”
I pointed at the pads, so flimsy that they nearly floated in air. “And those will help?”
Howard shrugged. “I dunno. It’s my first time. We might get squished anyway.”
Ten minutes later, I lay flat on the deckplates, my body’s hollows shored up by air bubbled into petroleum-based plastic. Nothing shored up my confidence. Howard and Ord lay alongside me, and above us Jude lay in the toadstool couch.
The stars were all gone, now. Their light was being sucked parallel to us, into a cosmic garbage disposal that whirled us closer every second.
The Firewitch, massive as it was, shuddered.
I gasped; it felt like the bar had dropped on my chest during bench presses. Howard cautioned that the slightest movement risked serious injury and told us to stay as motionless as possible during the transit.
That was like putting up a “Wet paint—Don’t touch!” sign, for me anyway. Naturally, I tried to lift my little finger. It was just an organic prosthetic that dated back to a wound during the Slug Armada days, and it dislocated.
I’ve never been an orange, so I don’t know what it feels like to get juiced. But now I have a pretty good idea.
I think I felt the ship juke a time or two, but that could have just been one of my joints popping.
According to Howard, at this point, the ship’s Cavorite was pushing back against the gravity of the densest mass in this universe. One of the four basic forces of this universe was battling dead-even with our power plant, something that tumbled in here from a universe next door, across the eleventh dimension.
I sweated. Or maybe water was just being squeezed out of my tissues. Howard predicted that the transit would be “elegantly simple.” Maybe when a Slug crew flew this ship off the showroom floor, that would have been true. But Jude was our only crew, and he didn’t even have his learner’s permit. And Howard’s Spooks had been tampering with the Firewitch for years. What if they had broken something?
If—if—everything worked, the ship would retain just enough angular momentum to slide around the core mass with sufficient oomph to pop out in what Howard called “new space.”
“New space” was apparently not the same as breathing space, because, much as my chest tried to expand, I took no air in.
Howard never said whether gravity would get so strong that light sponging would blind us.
So when everything went black, I didn’t know whether I was blind—or just suffocated.
Eighteen
We toted up the damage next day. The net cost to us of transiting a temporal fabric insertion point, as Howard called it, was one dislocated finger (mine), intermittent blood passed in urine (Howard and Ord), and thirty Fakon, lettuce, and tomato braninis squished when a lunch cart tray buckled.
Plus everybody, even Jude, popped enough eyeball blood vessels that we could have passed for ten-day drunks.
Sometime during the first post-transit day, the stars returned. Well, not the stars. Some stars.
Two days after the transit, Howard calculated that we had resumed cruising speed of a hundre
d twenty thousand miles per second. We didn’t know where we were going, but we were making great time. He stood in the bow, stargazing, bloodshot eyes aglow. “Fabulous.”
“How is nearly killing five thousand people and press-ganging us onto this Flying Dutchman fabulous?”
Before us, a band of stars swept like spilled diamonds. Howard said, “I’m not even sure this is the Milky Way, Jason! No man ever dreamed of seeing this!”
Howard had had no luck turning the ship around before we shot through the hole in space. Now, even if we turned around, there was no certainty we could find the hole again, retransit safely, or come out where we originally went in. “Howard, why do I care what stars I’m looking at when I finally starve?”
He said, “That’s the downside.” He touched the screen wired to Jeeb, looked at it, then raised his eyebrows. “Holy moly!”
I had given up trying to teach Howard to swear like a proper grunt. “What is it?”
Howard pointed dead ahead. A star among millions seemed brighter than the others, yellowish, and swelling bigger each second. He fingered the screen to display the position of his marker stars from the prior sampling compared to current. He said, “Don’t worry about starving.”
“Why not?”
“I still don’t know where we’re going, but we’re slowing down. We’ll be there before lunch tomorrow.”
Nineteen
Howard was wrong. We sped through the orbits of the outer planets of the big yellow star’s system. Then we trailed along behind the fourth planet out from our new sun, following in its orbit. Not just before lunch, but before Ord even finished his morning coffee.
From space, the planet looked Earthlike, blue with white cloud wisps and polar caps and brown landmasses. As we closed in, we saw that the largest continent was actually one, a landmass connected by a narrow isthmus, like North and South America rotated from North-South to East-West, to lie along the equator like a dumbbell.
Orphan's Journey Page 7