Гарднер Дозуа - The Good Old Stuff

His patrolboat was swinging away. Tethered to it was the phage-runners’ pod.

He was stranded on Ragnarok.

Rage exploded him back to the bridge consoles. He managed to send one weak spit from Ragnaroklasers after them as they picked up gees.

Futile. Then he pulled the phager’s head over his knee and clouted it and turned to setting up Topanga with an i.v. in her old cobweb veins.

How in hell had those claws held a jolter? He wrapped a gel sheath over her burns, grinding his jaw to still the uproar in his stomach.

He completed his cleaning by towing the phager and the foot to the waste lock.

With one hand on the cycle button he checked frowning. He could use some information from Leo—what were they into in his patrol sector?

Then his head came together and his fist crunched the eject. His patrol sector?

If the Companies ever got their hands on him he’d spend the rest of his life with his brains wired up, paying for that patrolboat. If he were lucky. No way, no where to go. The Companies owned space. Truly he was two thousand light-years from home now—on a dead driveship.

Dead?

Gollem threw back his lank hair and grinned. Ragnarok had a rich ecosystem, he’d seen to that. Nobody but the phagers knew she was here and he could hold them out for a while. Long enough, maybe, to see if he could coax some power out of that monster-house without waking up the sector. Suddenly he laughed out loud. Rusty shutter sliding in his mind, letting in glory.

“Man, man!” he muttered and stuck his head into the regeneration chamber to check the long trays of culture stretching away under the lights. It took him a minute to understand what was wrong.

No wonder the phagers came back so fast, no wonder he was laughing like a dummy. They’d seeded the whole works with phage culture. A factory.

The first trays were near sporing, the air was ropy. He hauled them out, inhaled a clean lungful and jettisoned the ripe trays.

Then he crawled back in to search. On every staging the photosynthetic algae were starting to clump, coagulating to the lichen-like symbiote that was phage. Not one clean tray.

In hours Ragnarok would have no more air.

But he and Topanga wouldn’t care. They’d be through the walls in phagefreak long before.

He was well and truly shafted now.

He flushed some oxy into the ventilators and kicked back to the bridge.

Get some clean metabolite or die.

Who would give him air? Even if he could move Ragnarok, the company depots and franchises would be alerted. He might just as well signal Coronis and give himself up. Maybe Quine wouldn’t bother to reach him and Topanga in time. Maybe better so. Wards. Wires.

Topanga groaned. Gollem felt her temples. Hot as plasma, old ladies with a leg shortened shouldn’t play war. He rummaged out biogens, marveling at the vials, ampoules, tabs, hyposprays. Popping who knew what to keep alive. Contraband she and Val had picked up in the old free days, her hoard would stock a ... Wait a minute. Medbase Themis.

He tuned up Ragnarok board. The Themis woman was still calling, low and hoarse. He cranked the antennae for the narrowest beam he could get.

“Medbase Themis, do you read?”

“Who are you? Who’s there?” She was startled out of her code book.

“This is a spacesweep mission. I have a casualty.”

“Where—” The male voice took over.

“This is Chief Medic Kranz, spacer. You can bring in your casualty but we have a rogue headed through our space with a gravel cloud. If we can’t get power to move the station in about thirty hours we’ll be holed out. Can you help us?”

“You can have what I’ve got. Check coordinates.”

The woman choked up on the decimals. No use telling them he couldn’t do them any good. The gee-sum unit he had in Ragnarok wouldn’t nudge that base in time for Halley’s comet. And Ragnarok drive—if it worked it would be like trying to wipe your eye with a blowtorch.

But their air could help him.

The drive. He bounced down the engineway, knowing the spring in his muscles was partly phage. Only partly. A thousand times he had come this way, a thousand times torn himself away from temptation.

Gleefully now he began to check out the circuits he had traced, restored the long-pulled fuses. There was a sealed hypergolic reserve for ignition. A stupefying conversion process, a plumber’s nightmare of heat-exchangers and back-cycling.

Crazy, wasteful, dangerous. Enough circuitry to wire the Belt.

Unbelievable it had carried man to Saturn, more unbelievable it would work today.

He clanked the rod controls. No telling what had crystallized. The converter fuel chutes jarred out thirty years’ accumulated dust. The ignition reserve was probably only designed for one emergency firing.

Would he be able to ignite again to brake? Learn as you go. One thing sure, when that venerable metal volcano burst to life every board from here to Coronis would be lit.

When he got back to the bridge Topanga was whispering.

“Id,3 left the haven hanging in the night—0 thou steel cognizance whose leap commits—”

“Pray it leaps,” he told her and began setting course, double-checking everything because of the phagemice running in the shadows. He wrapped Topanga’s webs.

He started the ignition train.

The subsonic rumble that grew through Ragnarok filled him with terror and delight. He threw himself into the webs, wishing he had said something, counted down maybe. Blastoff. Go. The rumble bloomed into an oremill roar. Gees smashed down on him. Everything in the cabin started raining on the deck. The web gave sideways and the roar wound up in a scream that parted his brain and then dwindled into silence.

When he struggled back to the board he found the burn had cut right.

Ragnarok was barreling toward Themis. He saw Topanga’s eyes open.

“Where are we headed?” She sounded sane as soap.

“I’m taking you over to the next sector, Themis. We need metabolite, oxygen. The phagers ruined your regenerators.”

“Themis?”

“There’s a medbase there. They’ll give us some.”

Mistake.

“Oh, no—no!” She struggled up. “No, Golly! I won’t go to a hospital—don’t let them take me!”

“You’re not going to a hospital, Topanga. You’re going to stay right here in the ship while I go in for the cores. They’ll never know about you. We’ll be out of there in minutes.”

No use.

“God hate you, Gollem.” She made an effort to spit. “You’re trying to trap me. I know you! Never let me free. You won’t bury me here, Gollem.

Rot in Moondome with your ugly cub—I’m going to Val!”

“Cool, spacer, you’re yawning.” He got some tranks into her finally and went back to learning Ragmarok. The phage was getting strong now.

When he looked up the holographs were watching him drive their ship.

The old star heroes. Val Orlov, Fitz, Hannes, Mura, all the great ones. Sometimes only a grin behind a gold-washed headplate, a name on a suit beside some mad hunk of machine. Behind them, spacelost wildernesses lit by unknown moons. All alive, all so young. There was Topanga with her arm around that other spacegirl, the dark Russian one who was still orbiting Io. They grinned past him, bright and living.

When they start talking, we’ve had it ....

He set the gyros to crank Ragnarok into what he hoped was attitude for the retro burn. If he could trust the dials, there was enough ignition for braking and for one last burn to get out of there. But where would he go from Medbase? Into the sky with diamonds ...

He heard himself humming and decided to lock the whole thing into autopilot.

No matter what shape that computer was in it would be saner than he was.