* * *
Whatever else you might say about Baedecker, he’s one hell of a pilot, Corbin thought. After two more orbits, he brought the ship to a path parallel to the large moonlet and no more than twenty meters above it, then held the ship steady as Corbin and Tyne went OTS. Neither man wore a tether; they pushed off from the airlock and sailed toward the surface of the moonlet in a cloud of frozen air. There was some gravity, not enough for walking, but Corbin felt a slight bit of tug as he reached the surface.
They were just inside the terminator line on the dark side of Pc-Prime. Corbin saw a bright flash of yellow-white light erupt against the dark planet. He pulled himself along the ground and tapped Tyne on the shoulder. They touched helmets so they could talk, not wanting to risk their suit radios.
“What was that light?”
“Falling rock burning up, most likely. These orbits are probably decaying pretty fast.”
“Yeah. You don’t suppose this one is going anytime soon?”
“I doubt it. Be a waste of mining gear.”
“I hope you’re right. Let’s get moving.”
The two space-suited men flew over the ground, pulling themselves along with their hands, and correcting with their CO2 guns when they drifted too high. It only took a minute to reach the dome.
“Where’s the hatch?” Corbin asked.
“Fuck the hatch,” Tyne said. He pulled a wrench from his tool kit. Holding onto one of the dome’s external support struts for stability, he hit the fabric with the wrench. The thin stuff tore, and a blast of yellowish gas flared out from the rip and froze into a crystalline fog. Using their hands, the two men opened the small hole until they could fit through it. The gas froze around them and clouded their helmets, and they had to wipe it away.
“You think this is what they breathe?” Corbin asked.
“Probably not. This is probably just to keep the machines running right. Maybe a byproduct of smelting or something.”
Inside the dome it was dark. If the machines needed to see, they did it in a spectrum outside man’s range. Corbin and Tyne flicked on their torches and widened the halogen beams.
“We’ve got ten minutes left,” Tyne said. “Come on.”
It was eerie, floating around in the dead-quiet darkness through the still-running machines, many of which Corbin could not begin to identify. The escaping gas tended to pull the two of them back toward the hole they’d made. Every time they would let go of the ground or a machine, the breeze would blow them toward the tear in the dome.
In the end, it was that tear that saved them.
“Look!” Tyne said.
Corbin followed the pointing finger and saw a box about the size and shape of a suit’s air tank rolling on a kind of wide tractor tread toward the rip in the dome’s fabric. The box was hung with three jointed arms} each of which ended in a different hand-sized device. The two men followed the drone and watched as it found the rip. The drone clamped two of its arms to the vertical tear and pulled the edges together; with the third arm, it began to seal the edges together with what appeared to be heated glue.
“How about that? It’s a little tailor drone. Come to Daddy, son,” Tyne said. With that, he grabbed the drone and pulled it away from the fabric. He pushed himself through the rent, and Corbin was right behind him.
* * *
“I’m taking us out of orbit,” Baedecker said. “The alien ships will be right on top of us in a few minutes. We’ll never get up enough speed to stay ahead in the same plane.”
Corbin pulled himself flown into his chair and strapped in. “Affirmative, Commander.”
“Will the drone work?”
“I don’t know. If anybody can do it, Tyne can.”
Corbin grinned, but the smile faded as he looked at his screen. “Company. I’ve got blips coming up behind us.”
“I’m kicking in the rockets. Prepare for acceleration.”
“Tyne, you strapped down back there?” Corbin yelled.
From the workroom, Tyne yelled back: “Affirm that.”
“Go,” Corbin said.
Baedecker hit the Em rockets and an invisible hand pushed Corbin into the hard foam seat. The pressure grew stronger.
“Kind of heavy there, aren’t you, Tony?”
“We’re only eight thousand klicks ahead of them,” Baedecker said. The Argo I moved off at a right angle directly away from Prime, emergency rockets on full.
“Think they’ll see us?” Corbin asked.
“Better hope they don’t,” Baedecker replied grimly.
* * *
Apparently their luck was holding, for the alien armada stayed in orbit as the Argo I sped out toward deep space. After the last alien had circled from sight, Corbin went to check on Tyne.
“How’s it going?”
Tyne had the alien drone partially disassembled, with pieces velcroed to various surfaces in the work area. “This guy is really built,” he said. “They’ve got a plastic that is as strong as stacked carbon but twice as flexible. And a battery that’s three times as efficient as anything we’ve got. Look.” He held up a disk about the size and shape of a small coin. “This powers the whole unit. I can’t even begin to tell you how it works.”
“This is all wonderful, Tyne, but can you use the drone?”
“What? Oh yeah, sure. I can’t figure out how it sees, but I’ve cannibalized one of the hull video pickups, that’ll give us eyes, and I’m wiring in radio control circuits for the arms. This arm can be modified to use a Phillips screwdriver, see? And this one will mount a socket, if I can borrow a small motor from somewhere . . .”
“How long will it take you to get the drone operational?”
“Four, five hours.”
“Good. If we can stay out of the gunsights of the aliens for another three orbits, we’ll be in business.”
* * *
Baedecker, despite Corbin’s protests, had turned the ion engines back on. The rockets were used up, and he wanted to put as much distance between them and the aliens as possible.
“All we know is that they have a minimum effective firing range of nine thousand-plus kilometers,” he said. “Maybe they can reach twice that far. We don’t even know what they are using.”
“All done,” Tyne said, floating into the cabin with the drone under one arm.
“Will it work?” That from Baedecker.
“Should. The little tailor here is capable of popping the hatch on the slave comp. We still don’t know exactly what the problem is, though.”
“Let’s find out.”
Tyne moved to his control hoard and began tapping in commands. “Put the drone into the engine access shaft,” he said.
Corbin hurried to do that.
“Can it move in zee-gee?” Baedecker asked.
“I put Velcro on the treads and the shaft is lined with it for our own service drones. It should work. Once it gets there, I can use the arms to pull it into place.”
Corbin moved back to his station to watch the monitor, trying not to let his nervousness show.
* * *
“There’s the problem,” Tyne said. Corbin looked at the screen.
“Where?”
“See that bank of biogel, to the left?”
Corbin saw it. The hard plastic cover over the bluish gel had ruptured, and the electronic molecular substance had oozed up through the hole and shorted out a circuit board next to it.
“That’s not supposed to happen,” Baedecker said.
“So send the computer people a nasty note.” Tyne tapped in commands on the keyboard.
“Can you fix it?” Corbin asked.
“Not from here. Our little tailor is good, but we don’t have the spare parts.”
“Shit,” Baedecker said. “That’s it, then.”
“Not necess
arily,” Tyne replied. “There’s one last thing to try. I can dump the core program from here.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means if we wipe out about half of the mainframe’s current memory, I can reprogram it to run the Jump engines.”
Corbin found himself filled with hope where before there had been none. Even Baedecker was smiling.
“Soon as our little tailor can open the modem lines, we’re in business.” Tyne’s fingers danced over the keyboard.
Corbin glanced up at his external monitors. “How long, Leon?” His voice was tight.
“Another twenty minutes. Why, we in a hurry?”
“Yes. Company.”
On the doppler, three of the alien ships were leaving the formation in orbit around Prime—and heading right toward the Argo I.
* * *
“They will be in range in ten minutes,” Baedecker said.
“Shit!” Corbin said. “Tyne, can you hurry it up?”
“No. I download this file wrong, I’ll dice up the main computer. Wipe out stuff we have to have to run the ship.”
Corbin sat staring at the screen, watching the three alien vessels close.
“Seven minutes,” Baedecker said. “And we’ll need a minute of that to put the main engines on line before we Jump.”
“I’m going as fast as I can!”
* * *
“Four minutes.”
“Leon . . .” Corbin said.
“I can’t do it. I don’t have the space.”
“Make the space!”
“Three minutes,” Baedecker said.
“Tyne!”
“All right, I’ve got most of it in. I’ll have to wipe a file. “
Corbin heard the clicks as Tyne’s fingers flew over the keys. The copilot started talking, kicking in the VA input. “Take out nearest ROM, ten to the fifty bytes.”
“This will destroy essential operating data,” the computer’s voice chip said.
“Override! Do it, now!”
“Two minutes. We’re about out of time,” Baedecker said.
“It’s in. It’ll either work or it won’t. But I don’t know where it will take us,” Tyne said. “Because I just wiped out the navigation program.”
Corbin jerked around to stare at Tyne. “What?!”
* * *
On Level Five, Dan Corbin sat next to one of the big tanks, sobbing. He was lost. He didn’t know how to get home. He was going to die here because he had been stupid!
He was still sitting there when the maintenance supervisor found him. The drones had alerted him to the small crying intruder, and the man smiled at Dan when he bent to pick him up. “I guess you’ll know better than to do something like this again, won’t you son?”
Dan nodded, the tears flowing. He would never, ever go anywhere again without knowing the way to get back.
* * *
The ship shook as Baedecker put it into the tightest turn he could manage on ion power.
“Jump engines on line,” Tyne said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Baedecker said. “We might find ourselves in the middle of a star if we Jump. Or lost forever!”
“They’re shooting at us. My sensors show a beam of charged particles just missed us by less than half a kilometer,” Tyne said. “I guess that means they don’t want to be friends. So do we fry or Jump blind?”
Corbin shoved his panic down. His fingers danced over his keyboard. The coordinates flowed from his hands into the board and into the computer.
“What are you doing?” Baedecker asked. “Taking us out of here.”
“How?!”
“I remember the coordinates.”
“That’s impossible! You are talking about more than fifty coded numbers in sequence!”
“I memorized them. Habit I developed, from something that happened to me as a kid. I don’t like to be lost.” Corbin tapped in the last number. “Do it,” he’ said.
“If you’re wrong . . . !”
“We’re history either way! Do it!”
Baedecker took a deep breath and jabbed the activation sense pad.
They Jumped.
* * *
When Corbin opened his eyes, his screen was blank. But his radio came to life with familiar calls in languages he knew.
“We did it!” Baedecker screamed. “That’s Sol, we’re back in the System!”
Tyne launched himself from his seat and-flew into Corbin, nearly knocking Corbin from his chair. The copilot hugged him. “You did it! Sonovabitch, you did it!”
Dan Corbin grinned. Yes. He had done it. He had remembered the way home.
At last.
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