Энн Маккефри: The Ship Who Won

Quick perusal of her starchart showed the migration of an ion storm only a couple of thousand klicks away. Carialle made for it. She skimmed the storm's margin. Then, letting her computers plot the greatest possible radiation her shields could take without buckling, she slid nimbly over the surface, a surfer riding dangerous waters. The sensation was glorious! Ordinary pilots, unable to feel the pressures on their ships' skins as she did, would hesitate to follow. Nor could their scopes detect her in the wash of ion static. Shortly, Carialle was certain she had shaken off her tails. She turned a sharp perpendicular from the ion storm, and watched its opalescent halos recede behind her as she kicked her engines up to full speed.

Returning to the game, she found Keff studying the floating map holograph over a cold one at the «village pub.» He glanced up at her pillar when she hailed him.

«I take it we're free of unwanted company?»

«With a sprinkling of luck and the invincibility of our radiation proof panels,» Carialle said, «we've evaded the minions of the evil wizard. Now its time for a brew.» She tested herself for adrenaline fatigue, and allowed herself a brief feed of protein and vitamin B-complex.

Keff tipped his glass up to her. Quick analysis told her that though the golden beverage looked like beer, it was the non-alcoholic electrolyte-replenisher Keff used after workouts. «Here's to your swift feet and clever ways, my lovely, and confusion to our enemies. Er, did my coffee come aboard?»

«Yes, sir,» she replied, flashing the image of a saluting marine on the wall. 'The storesmaster just had time to break out a little of the good stuff when Simeon passed the word down. I even got you a small quantity of chocolate. Best Demubian.» Keff beamed.

«Ah, Cari, now I know the ways you love me. Did you have time to load any of my special orders?» he asked, with a quirk of his head.

«Now that you mention it, there were two boxes in the cargo hold with your name on them,» Carialle said.

Clang. BUMP! Clang. BUMP!

The shining contraption of steel that was the Roto-flex had taken little time to put together, still less to watch the instructional video on how to use it. Keff sat on the leatherette-covered, modified saddle with a stirrup-shaped, metal pulley in each outstretched hand. His broad face red from the effort, Keff slowly brought one fist around until it touched his collarbone, then let it out again. The heavy cables sang as they strained against the resistance coils, and relaxed with a heavy thump when Keff reached full extension. Squeezing his eyes shut, he dragged in the other fist. The tendons on his neck stood out cordlike under his sweat-glistening skin.

«Two hundred and three,» he grunted. «Uhhh! Two hundred and four. Two . . .»

«Look at me,» Carialle said, dropping into the bass octave and adopting the spiel technique of so many tri-vid commercials. «Before I started the muscle-up exercise program I was a forty-four-kilogram weakling. Now look at me. You, too, can . . .»

«All right,» Keff said, letting go of the hand-weights. They swung in noisy counterpoint until the metal cables retracted into their arms. He arose from the exerciser seat and toweled off with the cloth slung over the end of his weight bench. «I can acknowledge a hint when its delivered with a sledgehammer. I just wanted to see how much this machine can take.»

«Don't you mean how much you can take? One day you're going to rupture something,» Carialle warned. She noted Keff's respiration at over two hundred pulses per minute, but it was dropping rapidly.

«Most accidents happen in the home,» Keff said, with a grin.

«I really was sorry I had to interrupt your tryst with Susa,» Carialle said for the twentieth time that shift.

«No problem,» Keff said, and Carialle could tell that this time he meant it. «It would have been a more pleasant way to get my heart rate up, but this did nicely, thank you.» He yawned and rolled his shoulders to ease them, shooting one arm forward, then the other. «I'm for a shower and bed, lady dear.»

«Sleep well, knight in shining muscles.»

Shortly, the interior was quiet but for the muted sounds of machinery humming and gurgling. The SSS-900 technicians had done their work well, for all they'd been rushed by circumstances to finish. Carialle ran over the systems one at a time, logging in repair or replacement against the appropriate component. That sort of accounting took up little time. Carialle found herself longing for company. A perverse notion since she knew it would be hours now before Keff woke up.

Carialle was not yet so far away from some of the miners' routes that she couldn't have exchanged gossip with other ships in the sector, but she didn't dare open up channels for fear of tipping off Maxwell-Corey to their whereabouts. The enforced isolation of silent running left her plenty of time for her thoughts.

Keff groaned softly in his sleep. Carialle activated the camera just inside his closed door for a brief look, then dimmed the lights and left him alone. The brawn was faceup on his bunk with one arm across his forehead and right eye. The thin thermal cover had been pushed down and was draped modestly across his groin and one leg, which twitched now and again. One of his precious collection of real-books lay open facedown on the nightstand. The tableau was worthy of a painting by the Old Masters of Earth—Hercules resting from his labors. Frustrated from missing his close encounter of the female kind, Keff had exercised himself into a stiff mass of sinews. His muscles were paying him back for the abuse by making his rest uneasy. He'd rise for his next shift aching in every joint, until he worked the stiffness out again. As the years went by it took longer for Keff to limber up, but he kept at it, taking pride in his excellent physical condition.

Softshells were, in Carialle's opinion, funny people. They'd go to such lengths to build up their bodies which then had to be maintained with a significant effort, disproportionate to the long-term effect. They were so unprotected. Even the stress of exercise, which they considered healthy, was damaging to some of them. They strove to accomplish goals which would have perished in a few generations, leaving no trace of their passing. Yet they cheerfully continued to «do» their mite, hoping something would survive to be admired by another generation or species.

Carialle was very fond of Keff. She didn't want him anguished or disabled. He had been instrumental in restoring her to a useful existence and while he wasn't Fanine—who could be?—he had many endearing qualities. He had brought her back to wanting to live, and then he had neatly caught her up in his own special goal—to find a species Humanity could freely interact with, make cultural and scientific exchanges, open sociological vistas. She was concerned that his short life span, and the even shorter term of their contract with Central Worlds Exploration, would be insufficient to accomplish the goal they had set for themselves. She would have to continue it on her own one day. What if the beings they sought did not, after all, exist?

Shellpeople had good memories but not infallible ones, she reminded herself. In three hundred, four hundred years, would she even be able to remember Keff? Would she want to, lest the memory be as painful as the anticipation of such loss was now? If I find them after you're . . . well, I'll make sure they're named after you, she vowed silently, listening to his quiet breathing. That immortality at least she could offer him.

So far, in light of that lofty goal, the aliens that the CK team had encountered were disappointing. Though interesting to the animal behaviorist and xenobiologist, Losels, Wyvems, Hydrae, and the Rodents of Unusual Size, et cetera ad nauseam, were all non-sentient.