Bud Sparhawk: Primrose Rescue

“Let her have her head! Stop fighting her,” Rams raged at the big woman as she struggled with the wheel. He lifted himself on one elbow on the low bunk.

“What the hell do you think I’m doing,” Louella shot back. “You try steering this damn overgrown tub with one arm and see how easy it is!” She lifted her sling to emphasize her words.

“Let me get over there…” Rams said weakly. He tried to push himself up and failed. He flopped back onto the pallet Pascal, Louella’s navigator, had rigged for him.

“Don’t bother trying to get up. You’d fall right on your ugly face even if you ever did manage to get your ass in gear,” Louella said nastily. “With that smashed leg you probably couldn’t make it to the pilot’s seat, even if you weren’t so doped up. Now, be quiet and let me concentrate; I’ve gotten ships home in worse weathers than this. Trust me: I know what I’m doing!”

The Primrose was a huge whale of a vessel. Her crew quarters were nestled deep within a bulbous pressure hull. Beneath her hull hung a kilometer-long diamond fibre keel and on her upper deck were the enormously strong sails that harnessed the howling winds of Jupiter. Lashed securely to her side was a smaller ship, Thorn ; a barque that, until recently, had been JBI’s sole entry into the Great Jupiter Race. It was this tow that made handling of Primrose so difficult.

Rams was still struggling weakly when Pascal arrived with three mugs of steaming tea. He placed one mug where Rams could reach it and held out another cup out for Louella. “If you want to drink this you’ll have to let me take the wheel. You’ve only got one arm.”

“Don’t wreck my ship,” Rams mumbled as he fumbled with the spill-proof cup, trying to put the nipple to his lips.

“Fifteen years of handling large sail, Captain. I think I can keep her on track while Louella sips her tea,” Pascal replied affably. “Now drink your tea. It will make you feel better.” “Sure, long as she didn’t make it,” Rams grumbled. During Rams; infrequent conscious periods he always complained about the food. Of course, on that matter, Pascal could only agree. The one skill that neither of them had mastered in all of their years of ocean racing was cooking. On their two person races they’d usually eaten prepackaged food, which required no cooking and could be eaten wherever and whenever necessary. Pascal’s own mastery of the culinary arts was limited strictly to a properly brewed “cuppa tea” and the boiled or microwaved pouch of whatevers when he had the time.

He couldn’t understand this ship’s advanced food preparation technology. No matter what he did, the best he could turn out were slabs of tasteless, tough, and practically indigestible generic foodstuffs (the package said it was meat, but he still wasn’t sure about that — it tasted too much of wood pulp to come from an animal). Foolproof, that’s what the instructions said; absolutely foolproof. Ha!

The only thing that was worse than his attempts at cooking were Louella’s cinders of burned organic matter, offerings, no doubt, to her unknown teacher in the culinary arts.

A week earlier Pascal had given Rams pain blockers for his smashed and broken leg. He had administered as much emergency treatment as he could with the limited medical supplies he found within Primrose , using medical skills that had been acquired in his years of ocean racing, when competent medical help for an emergency was, more often than not, hundreds of miles away.

He’d stabilized Rams, stanched the bleeding, evacuated the wound to prevent infection, and splinted the broken leg to prevent any further damage from inadvertent movement. More extensive treatment than that required a well-equipped medical center and trained staff who knew more than he, and that meant that they had to find their way to a station soon, before they ran out of pain killers.

The Great Jupiter Race had started out so well, a sailing concept of intense interest on the part of sailing enthusiasts throughout the solar system. Although the great sailing vessels of Jupiter had been plying the endless red seas of Jupiter’s atmosphere for decades it was only the race sponsored by the corporate giants that turned atmospheric sailing on the giant planet into a sport.

Jerome Blacker, head of JBI industries and one of the men who built the Jovian industrial empire, had sent his best captain and navigator, a team that had won most corporate races on Earth’s seas, to win the Great Jovian for the corporation. Not only would the race provide a way to use the JBI funds the Jovians had tied up in their banks, but it would provide an opportunity for unmatched publicity.

But the hurricanes and typhoons that Louella and Pascal had faced on Earth’s tiny oceans were nothing in comparison with the swirling monsters that spun out of Jupiter’s great heat engine. Eight days out of the start their barque, Thorn , had been hit by a monstrous hurricane that left them helpless and floundering in the great dark.

By sheer good fortune Primrose , the sailing ship they were now on, had managed to rescue them, although at great cost to Rams, Primrose ’s captain, who broke his leg while trying to save them.

Rams’ ship, like every sailing vessel on Jupiter, held a complete data base of every station. The data bank’s information allowed the ships to venture into the fierce winds of the giant planet with assurance that they could reach their destination. The inertial continually calculated each station’s relative bearing.

According to the inertial they had been several hundred hours north and west of the nearest floating station when Rams had rescued them. Since they came on board they had been steering as tight a course as they could to intercept that station’s projected track.

Pascal knew that each station was stabilized to stay at a particular latitude. They maintained their track by manipulating huge drogues — bucketlike sea anchors — to maintain a constant and predictable velocity as they were blown along the belts by the winds of Jupiter. The floating and stationary hub stations were the only stability a sailor had in the maelstrom that raged at this level of the atmosphere.

For the first five days they had hoped to intercept Charlie Sierra Twelve as she followed the steady fifteen meter per second track in the data bank. Now it appeared that they would not intercept it as planned. They were falling farther and farther behind with each passing hour.

Primrose lumbered heavily with Thorn under tow: Louella could only bring her to within sixty degrees of the wind. What made it even more difficult to keep to the schedule they had set was that Primrose showed a definite tendency to try to turn downwind every time attention flagged. As a result they were moving slower than planned. According to Rams’ careful calculations they would miss the station by two days, and possibly more. So close and yet so far. It was frustrating.

Pascal and Louella constantly fought the ship’s desire to reach. If she did so they would slow to wind speed. Such a turn could easily spell disaster. With Thorn tied to Primrose ’s side the force of the wind could easily smash the two ships against one another and cause extensive damage to both.

It wouldn’t take much damage to an outer pressure envelope to send them to their doom in the endless drop below. A rupture of either ship would drag the other down.

So they had to fight the weather and their own ship. They had to hold to a line that held a possibility of finding refuge and aid. They had to try for the next station in line.