“In a second.” He hurried to make notation of everything Lin and Ganfer had just said. “Ganfer, can you give me all the data in a compressed burst?”
“Transferring now,” the ship-brain said. A green light on the data pad lit for three seconds. “Recorded.”
“You think that's how they get the energy to run their ships?” Bain said.
“That's the only thing we haven't been able to unscramble from the wreckage of the ships we've found. See, if we can tap or block their energy source, that's valuable information that could save lives. It's more important than figuring out a way to deflect those energy bursts that destroy our ships.”
“More important even than these shields?”
“Well...” Lin chuckled. “We're going to need hours more of watching and analyzing and recording every tiny flicker of energy, every bit of asteroid dust that escapes that behemoth, before we have anything besides theories to hand to Gil and his team.”
“Hours.” Bain realized he had hoped, just a little, that with this important information they could try to slip away from the Mashrami while it was occupied, and head back to join the Ranger ships. “We're going to be here for hours, aren't we?”
“Can't put the engines back on-line until the Mashrami is out of sensor range.” Lin studied the screen, which showed another green line reaching out for another black blob of asteroid. “I'm going to get washed up and dressed, then I'll relieve you with the recordings.”
“All right.” Bain checked the chronometer, and saw he still had half an hour left to his watch duty. He watched the green line between Mashrami and asteroid grow shorter. While watching the alien ship drag in and destroy asteroids might be interesting the first three or four times, he suspected it would get very boring after three, four, maybe five hours of it.
By the time Lin had dressed and gone to the galley to fix something for them both to eat, the Mashrami ship had dragged in and destroyed three more asteroids. She ran through a few quick calculations, using the mass of the asteroids destroyed, the time it took to drag each one close enough to the ship, and the amount of energy expended and gained with each operation. Lin calculated the Mashrami ship would be up to full energy capacity in a little under eleven hours. Bain washed up and returned to the control panel with his reading screen, and studied for an hour before he started getting sleepy. Lin kept busy running calculations and comparing her estimates to the actual increase of energy in the Mashrami ship. She smiled a little distractedly as she calculated and recalculated and adjusted, and then figured in differences made by different measurable mineral ratios in the destroyed asteroids.
“That's fun for you, isn't it?” Bain asked, just before he pushed off from his chair to go to his cubicle and sleep.
“It's a challenge. Mathematics gives you the best puzzles to play with, and the rules never change. You just have to find all the data, and know all the variables. That's the fun part.” She grinned at him before turning back to tap a few more changes into her newest calculation. “You like math, don't you?”
“I'm still learning new things.”
“It's fun when you've grasped the new rules, and you know how to make them work, right?”
“I guess.” Bain yawned wide enough to make his jaws ache.
“Go to bed, will you? Yawns are contagious, and they're the last thing I need.” Lin gave him a shove toward his cubicle.
Bain looked back to make a face at her, and nearly ran into the side frame of his cubicle with his shoulder. He caught himself at the last minute, hooked his hand around the corner, and flung himself into his cubicle. He bounced on his mattress and headed for the ceiling and barely managed to catch himself with two fingers hooked into the netting over his blankets.
“Be careful,” Lin said, with a sigh. She shook her head, lips twitching as she fought a grin, and turned back to studying the screen next to her.
Bain was too tired to do more than grin back. He crawled to the end of his bunk and grabbed hold of the curtain's guide rod to yank it closed. He was asleep only seconds after lying down.
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* * *
Chapter Nine
Bain felt something. He didn't know what, but something had changed on board Sunsinger. It dragged him out of a deep sleep and a dream where he flew with his parents in the shuttle, and his father had announced the shuttle would take them out into deep space. They would be Spacers again, traveling between the stars, and his father needed Bain to teach him how to travel the Knaught Points.
For a moment, Bain lay still, eyes open in the dimness of his cubicle, and couldn't remember where he was. He didn't recognize anything.
“We can still break free?” Lin said, her voice almost a whisper.
“If the magnetic beam doesn't strengthen by more than seventy-four point oh nine percent of its present strength, we shouldn't have any trouble breaking free.” Ganfer didn't sound concerned, but Bain sensed the ship was in deep trouble.
That tore the last sleepy cobwebs from the boy's mind. He sat up and pushed the curtain aside, and looked out onto the bridge.
Lin sat perfectly still, her hands pressed flat against the control board. Every single screen on the bridge was lit with information that kept flickering and scrolling, and half the numbers and scientific symbols were highlighted in red. They flashed for attention, and the after-images made Bain's eyes ache. He rubbed at them, and then reached backwards behind himself to snatch up his pants. He wriggled out from under his sleeping net, and into his pants, still watching the data on the screens.
Then one piece of information jumped out at him. Bain blinked and rubbed at his eyes, and stared at the screen. It stayed the same.
“We're not tumbling anymore!” he blurted. A second later he launched himself out of his cubicle toward his chair.
“I know.” Lin didn't raise her gaze from the screen next to her. She still didn't touch any buttons or levers or dials on the control panel.
“Have the thrusters stopped working?”
“They work fine. We just aren't allowed to move.”
“Why?” Bain didn't like the flat tone of Lin's voice. It wasn't her distracted voice; when she used it, he knew she really wasn't listening, but concentrating everything she had on the problem. This was something worse than Lin being distracted.
“Our disguise is working too well.”
“Huh?” He stared at the screen in front of him, and tried to decipher the information. “We're moving—in a straight line. And we're moving faster. We can't do that. We should be tumbling like an asteroid.”
“We're being dragged. The Mashrami think we're a big, juicy asteroid full of minerals.” Now Lin looked away from the screens. She gave Bain a crooked smile. Her eyes didn't have their usual sparkle of challenge.
“But—” He swallowed hard, fighting a sense of fear that made him feel nauseous. “What about all those asteroids between us and them? Why didn't they go through all those before getting to us?”
“They're picky about what they drag in and convert into energy, I suppose. I'm still working on a program for calculating what they use, what they need, and how much energy they get out of the asteroids. I guess we have what they need.”
“But—Lin—” Bain thought he sounded like a mangled data disk that could only play back the same words, over and over. “They blow up asteroids for energy.”
“I know. Ganfer is trying to calculate how close in we can get before we're in danger. I'm going to try to turn their magnetic beam against them by changing our deflector screen's polarity and energy flow around. Right now, it's a waiting game.”
“Not a very fun game.”
“No, it isn't.” She managed to get both sides of her mouth curved up this time. “Have you been saying your prayers regularly?”
“Yes.” Bain had no idea why Lin asked that.
“Keep it up.”
“Is there anything else I can do?”
“Prepare another message
drone for Gil. It won't be able to break free of the magnetic beam until we make our try. The timing will be pretty tricky. In case something goes wrong, we have to make sure this information gets to the Rangers.”
“How much time do we have?” He pressed shaky hands together to steady them, before he started tapping the commands in on his side of the control panel.
“A little more than an hour. I've been keeping up your recording. Gil should have a field day with all the data we've found on the Mashrami.”
An hour. Bain wondered if he could get all the programming done in an hour. His hands still wanted to shake, and that meant he had to double and triple-check everything he did to catch all his mistakes. He tried to slow down, but that only gave him more time to think about what was happening to Sunsinger, to him and Lin and Ganfer.
The Mashrami were towing Sunsinger in, to tear it to pieces like an asteroid, and use it for energy for their ship.
Bain listened, as Lin and Ganfer worked, measuring every minuscule change in the Mashrami beam, announcing every hundred meters closer to the ship, postulating different ideas for breaking free or warping the magnetic beam.
“We should be grateful they grabbed us this soon,” Lin said. She tapped a series of buttons, and studied the mathematical equation appearing on the screen on the opposite wall.
“Why?” Bain's voice cracked with surprise.
“They're still low on energy. If they had simply worked through the asteroid field until they reached us—maybe five hours from now—they'd be at high enough energy to bring up that energy beam of theirs without any trouble. The magnetic beam could be strong enough that we couldn't break it. Their speed might be higher with an increased energy gradient. Those Mashrami got greedy and a little reckless. We should be grateful they were impatient.”
Bain nodded and kept working. He had never considered someone else's stupidity something to be grateful for before. He supposed it made sense—someone else's mistake was to his benefit.
“Increase in magnetic field,” Ganfer reported.
“One-time jump, or continuing?” Lin snapped.
“Unsure.”
Silence, while they waited for Ganfer to record and analyze. As they waited, every second brought them that much closer to the Mashrami ship and the ripping, twisting conflict of magnetic fields that would destroy their ship in a burst of energy that the Mashrami would absorb. Bain didn't like the idea of dying so that the Mashrami could have the energy to attack another world like Lenga or Dogray or the dozen others he had visited.
“Another increase,” Ganfer said. “By the same percentage as the previous increase.”
“How does that change our time scale if it keeps doing that?” Lin said.
“Thirteen minutes and twenty seconds until break-away is necessary.”
“Bain, is that message ready?”
“All set.” He grinned in shaky relief as he punched the last command into the control panel. A tiny purple light blinked, showing the message for the Rangers was set to go.
“Be ready. Maybe you should have the dust release ready, too. Just in case.” Lin shrugged.
She didn't look at Bain as she spoke, but concentrated on the screen that showed the increases in the magnetic beam and their decreasing distance to the Mashrami ship. To one side was a long string of numbers, down to the fifth decimal point, that showed how close they could get to the ship before they absolutely had to break free—the point at which if they didn't break free, they would become just so much more asteroid rubble and energy in the Mashrami's system.
Bain called up the command to make the stellar dust release available. It hadn't helped the last time they ran into trouble with the Mashrami. Maybe with all the dust and rubble around the aliens’ ship because of the destroyed asteroids, it would work. Tracking had to be difficult, if not impossible, with all the space-borne debris. Bain tried to remember his lessons on debris and magnetic qualities and electrical interference patterns. His mind felt strangely blank. He even doubted he had ever learned such information.
“Ganfer?” Lin's voice cracked. “Are they moving?”
“Confirmed.” The ship-brain sounded too calm. Bain knew that was a danger sign.
“Away?” Bain asked.
“They're moving back toward their original course,” Lin said, as her fingers resumed dancing over the controls. “But they're taking us with them.”
“Did anything different happen?”
“Everything is different!” She let loose a choked laugh. “Good question. Ganfer?”
“Sensors show a momentary burst of uneven electromagnetic energy just before they started moving,” the ship-brain said after half a second. “Memory shows the same burst just before the first increase in the magnetic beam.”
“What do you mean, the same?” She sat perfectly still. Bain watched her, trying to guess her thoughts from the way her eyes lit, and then she half-closed them. Her hands clenched on the board, and Lin slowly nodded as Ganfer continued speaking.
“The same pattern, down to the frequency fluctuations and duration of spikes and valleys.”
“That's how they communicate,” Lin whispered. She nodded again. “Bain—”
“I'm adding it.” Bain nearly laughed as he hurried to take those records from the ship's ongoing log, and add them to the beacon for the Rangers.
Sunsinger lurched suddenly. Bain gasped as gravity grabbed him and tried to wrench him out of his seat. He held onto the edge of the control panel with one hand and his seat bottom with the other. For two agonizing seconds, he was sure Sunsinger was falling.
“They threw us away!” Lin crowed. “Like a big wad of space-junk.” She laughed and nearly lost her own grip on the control panel. The gravity started decreasing. “Thank you, Fi'in, for small mercies.”
“Small?” Bain squeaked.
“Bain, start getting the engines back online.”
“But—”
“At the rate we're traveling, by the time we're up and moving, we'll be far enough away that the Mashrami won't notice. And if I'm right, they're traveling in the exact opposite direction at top speed. Once the sensors get things straightened out,” she added, pointing at the wildly fluctuating numbers on two of the forward screens. “Not only did they release us, they gave us a hard push in the right direction.”
“Why?”
“That's what I'd like to know. You work on the engines, and I'll work on trying to track those ugly lumps before they're out of range.”
“Can we switch from passive sensors?”
“Do it, Ganfer!”
“Switching,” the ship-brain responded a little too quickly. Bain laughed, suspecting Ganfer had been waiting eagerly for the order.
Immediately, all the previously blank screens lit up. Information spewed across the screens, and the ship's data banks clicked and whirred and beeped quietly as the new, intense information processed.
“Ah ha!” Lin pointed at a screen to the right. Before Bain could focus his eyes on the data it held, she tapped a few buttons, and brought the information onto a screen between them on the control panel. “There's a whole fleet of Mashrami out there. I bet our junk man was called in for a meeting.”
“Why did he push us away? He could have just let go and left.”
“Who knows?” She continued staring at the screen. A slight smile quirked up one corner of her mouth. “Maybe he got yelled at, or maybe he pushed us away in a fit of temper because he didn't want to go to the meeting. Who can tell, with the Mashrami?”
“Why won't they ever communicate with us?”
“Maybe they can't, or maybe they won't. We'll know when we get that energy fluctuation analyzed. Ganfer, are we far enough to go back to engines?”
“Twenty minutes to the safe zone,” Ganfer responded.
“What are the Mashrami doing?”
“Still heading further away, at increasing speed. There are many energy fluctuations like the two we recorded.”
�
�Keep recording.” Lin nodded and went back to studying the screen. “This has been a very interesting day, don't you think?”
“Sometimes I like boring,” Bain muttered. He blushed when Lin burst out laughing and reached over to tousle his hair.
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* * *
Chapter Ten
“Lin, if three is supposed to be the charm, what's the fourth time supposed to be?” Bain asked. He concentrated on the reading screen propped up between his lap and the edge of the control panel.
“What?” Lin stared at him, forehead wrinkled and mouth hanging open for five long seconds. Then she burst out laughing. “Where did that come from?”
She pushed off from her bunk gently, giving herself enough time to reach back and tug the curtain of her cubicle closed before she drifted over to the control station.
Sunsinger's sensors had sighted the Mashrami ship an hour ago, in the middle of the ship's night cycle. Bain had gone to work on shutting down the engines, while Lin prepared the thrusters to correct their course so that they appeared to be an asteroid to the Mashrami's sensors. After the debacle of the second shield test, Lin was very careful to check all the shield tile monitors before letting their ship get close to the Mashrami. Lin made a very early breakfast for the two of them, and Bain decided to work on his lessons. Both knew it was impossible to get back to sleep, even if the Mashrami were more than seven hours away from the intersect point of their flight paths. Lin had just gone to her cubicle to change from nightshirt and blanket to daytime clothes.
“This unit on cultural changes.” Bain tapped his reading screen. “It was talking about all the phrases and folk sayings, and how they come in and out of fashion, depending on the technology and societal shifts. I remembered my father saying three was the charm. We were lucky last time we tested the Mashrami shields.”
“Not lucky,” she corrected, as she slid into her chair next to him. “Fi'in was watching over us. Spacers know there is no such thing as luck or coincidence.”
Dead World [Sunsinger Chronicles Book 3] Page 8