Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

Cross sighed. “I guess.” She didn’t see how the hell she was going to fly this thing if the captain couldn’t, though.

“All hands,” the captain announced throughout the ship. “If you have not eaten, I suggest you do it now, then secure everything loose throughout the ship. At the fifteen-minute mark I will sound an alarm indicating that you are to go to your assigned places and strap in. I will then cue you up until we emerge. At that point, deduction suggests that there may be some periods of brief power fluctuations, weightlessness, and/or severe movement of the ship beyond the abilities of the inner core to compensate. Just hang on until Lucky or I tell you it’s safe to move about.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am,” Sark grumbled. “Me, I don’t care what happens by this point, just so long as it’s something .”

Nobody ate a meal, although a couple of them drank a little bit and nibbled on some energy bars, mostly to settle nerves. There was a lot of loose stuff to pick up and store, but they all knew they’d miss some of it anyway. Nobody was really thinking of anything but the end of the trip that everyone else had spun stories and legends about, and many had died trying to get to and from. And there wasn’t one damned thing they could do except wait for it.

At fifteen minutes, the emergency alarm sounded and the captain said, “All hands to rough-condition stations and strap in.”

Everybody except Cross went for their quarters with one last look around to make sure they weren’t forgetting the obvious. Lucky headed down and aft to C&C, only to find Eyegor waiting for her there.

“You better find a way to hold on or you’re going to get smashed against this equipment,” she told the robot.

“I will use internal energy beams to secure myself to the bulkhead,” Eyegor told her. “I have determined that nothing critical runs through it, so I should not disrupt anything. I must be here and active to record this historic event.”

Lucky Cross sat in the command chair and belted herself in, then reclined, triggering two command panels next to her right and left hands and activating voice control. It would have no effect unless the captain were cut off from the controls, but if that happened she would have complete command of the ship in nanoseconds. It was the last thing she wanted, nor was she trained for it, but she was the best qualified of the group if it came to that.

“Comm check,” she said in as cool a voice as she could manage.

“Comm check aye,” responded a more mechanical-sounding version of the captain’s voice from the panel in front of her.

“Emergency backup power.”

“Backup power at one hundred three percent of nominal,” the board assured her. “Connection time three nanoseconds.”

“Very well. Display on, forward, wide.”

The big display board came on and showed… nothing. There was as yet nothing really to see that any of the instruments could pick up other than constantly fluctuating energy surges.

And then there was the clock. The simplest, most primitive device on the board, it was the one that interested Cross the most. It read “00:00:05:35:16,” and it was counting down.

Five and a half minutes.

She felt a curious detachment now, as if she were cut off, watching from some safe and far-off place and time Eyegor’s recording of the moment rather than experiencing it. It was often like that, when push came to shove. It also somehow caused five and a half minutes to go by in a kind of agonizing slowness that physics would never explain.

“Five minutes,” the captain’s voice said throughout the ship. “I will call each minute now until one, then count from ten seconds.”

Lucky Cross wanted a cigar, but she knew it would be some time before she could have one. She sat there now, watching the timer crawl down, and she found some personal satisfaction in the situation as tense as it was.

Big, fat, foul-mouthed, coarse lowlife Gail Cross, she thought. They’d laugh and tease me, they’d call me names and make me the butt of their jokes, and they’d go off to their fine places while I went home to a ramshackle junk house built from yesterday’s disasters. Nobody ever gave me nothin’, but I didn’t take like An Li. I learned and I earned, and look who’s sittin’ in the C&C chair now ready to set eyes on the Three Kings!

“Thirty seconds.”

C’mon, c’mon! If we’re gonna die, then let’s do it. Either that, or a share of the biggest pie in creation!

“Ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… two… one… egress! ”

The board came alive with so many things it was impossible to make them all out, but that wasn’t the thing that Cross and the others thought of just then. The vibrations, the crashing sounds, the objects they’d missed shooting lethally around them as they lay strapped in, the ship’s lurching, nearly out of control movement in all directions for what seemed like several minutes, all combined to give them a carnival ride and a sea of sensations, mostly unpleasant.

The captain’s warning hadn’t been the half of it, and even the lights, the blowers, everything except the flying and clanking junk around flickered on and off and they felt themselves growing sick and disoriented.

But the captain definitely had control of all engines and energy controls and stabilizers, and although it took some time the ride eventually smoothed out and the noises, smells, and spinning sensations ceased.

Cross hit the intercom. “Everybody check in! An Li?”

“Here! I’ve got strap bruises and a small cut, otherwise okay.”

“Doc?”

“Bad bruise on my right arm above the elbow. At least I hope it’s just a bruise. Something hit it with tremendous force. Still, I’ll live.”

“Jerry?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. Something put one hell of a dent in the bulkhead here, though.”

“Sark?”

“Broke one of the straps and got tossed a little, but I’m okay. Just feel like I’ve had a few back-alley brawls with some ghosts from my growing up years.”

“Well, I seem to be no worse for wear, but I had more protection. Cap? I don’t have to fly the damned ship, do I?”

“Not yet,” the captain responded. “Damage control reports a great deal of minor damage but nothing that can not be attended to by self-maintenance systems. I believe we made it in very good shape, although it will take a little bit of skill and a lot of power to navigate in this system.”

They all immediately forgot their bruises and turned to the hologram of the primary C&C screen in front of Lucky Cross. Cross gave a low whistle.

The G-class star was slightly larger than average but not outside the range of such suns in the database of known systems; what was spectacular was the fact that there was a series of debris rings where solid planets might be expected, and, beyond, well out from its star, was a single gas giant so massive that had it ignited there would probably be nothing else around at all. At a diameter of almost three hundred thousand kilometers, it dominated everything, and it had not one spectacular ring but two, eerily paralleling one another above and below its equator. But the oddest thing about it was that, even beyond its terminator, on the half turned away from its sun, it had an eerie but bright luminescence that transferred a good deal of light and even some heat from internal forces to the moons. It was what made at least three of those moons capable of life support in spite of long periods when the moons hid from the primary source of their energy.

There were three more gas giants farther out, none nearly the size or complexity of the massive inner one, and a number of very thick asteroid belts that might well have been other planets if the gravitational forces of the monster planet and its interaction with the others had permitted them to form.