Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

I slid on my belly toward the too-slowly-closing hatch, clutching the cargo sling I hadn’t looped through the tie-down ring. “Crap. Crap, crap, crap.”

Ahead of me, sandwich wrappers, dust, screwdrivers, and Kleenex got sucked into space. Through the narrowing opening between the closing hatch segments, I saw the Tech Sergeant and the MP tumbling head-over-heels, back up the severed tube toward us, as the air outflow sucked them to the breach.

Air rushing from the Firewitch hurled me against the lower hatch segment, then rolled me up and across the closing lip.

I pulled myself back inside, until I clung, spread-eagled, across the hatch opening, while the wind tore at me.

The MP hurtled toward me, now close enough that I could see her bulging blue eyes, and count the white-gloved fingers on her flailing hands.

The hatch segments seemed to close in slow motion. My hands, then my feet, slipped, until just fingers and toes held me back from spinning out into the vacuum. Wind roared around me as loudly as if I had fallen beneath a speeding train.

The fingers of my left hand slid off the hatch lip. “Oh, no.”

Something grabbed my waist and held me.

The airtight hatch lips joined and sealed.

Wind howl stopped as though chopped by a cleaver, and I hung in mid-air, safe inside the Firewitch.

Thump. Thump.

The hurtling MP and the Tech Sergeant bounced off the outside of the closed hatch.

With luck, the impacts knocked them unconscious. Before my heart could beat, they became debris adrift in frigid nothing, along with the Kleenex, dust, and screwdrivers.

Behind me, the Cargo’Bot that Ord had ordered to snatch me back from the brink whined and lowered me to the deck.

I shivered, as much because the air remaining in the Firewitch had turned thin and cold as from shock.

The decompression had snuffed the fires and cleared the smoke. I got to my knees, shaking, and turned away from the closed hatch.

I lay with my cheek against the floor plates, panting.

Ord knelt beside me. “You all right, Sir?”

“I couldn’t do it.”

“Sir—”

“You had to pull the trigger for me. I couldn’t even subtract two from five thousand and get the right answer.”

Ord touched my shoulder. “We’re past it now, Sir.”

I shook like an out-of-tune Electrabout. “Is it cold in here, or is it me, Sergeant Major?”

Ord rolled me onto my back, tucked a crate plank under my feet to elevate them, and covered me with my uniform jacket. “Mild shock, Sir. Your replacement parts aren’t quite up to this yet.” He tugged the end off a syrette with his teeth, then rolled my sleeve up to expose a forearm vein.

I shook my head. “No drugs, Sergeant Major.”

Ord patted my cheek. “Sir?”

I shook my head again. “Put the syrette away. I just need to catch my breath.”

He smiled. “You’ve been out two hours, Sir.”

I flexed my arm. Better. I rolled onto an elbow and sat up.

Twenty yards away, Howard stood, knees shaking, silhouetted against the Firewitch’s transparent bow plate, thirty yards in front of him.

He breathed, “Holy moly.”

In front of him, where the Airpool dome had dangled from its connecting tube, the Firewitch’s six forward-pointing arms, tipped with Mag Rail cannon, had unfolded like an inverted umbrella frame.

Dead ahead of us loomed a white, pock-marked disc. It grew larger and larger, until it seemed to fill the bow plate.

The disc flashed past us to starboard. Ahead now lay only blackness and stars.

I said, “What was that thing?”

Howard turned to me, his eyes wide. “The Moon.”

FIFTEEN

I SHOOK MY HEAD. “No. Howard, the Moon is, like, a quarter million miles from us. Three days away if we were boosting like a Clipper. And we’re barely moving. Where’s New Moon?”

“No. It just feels like we aren’t moving.”

Above us, something clanked on the Aluminex scaffold.

“Jason!”

I looked up as Jude clambered down the scaffold stairs on shaky legs.

Howard, Ord, and I ran to him.

Howard said, “What happened?”

Jude shrugged. “I saw the big thing coming at us. I steered left. Next thing I knew, the clamps released.”

Howard nodded. “That big thing was the Moon. Obvious.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. Obvious.”

“The Pseudocephalopod sees in the infrared spectrum. We see in what we call — appropriately for us — the visible spectrum. The pilot couch mount stretches into the forward dome so the pilot has a clear view. He reacts to visible-light images of objects in the Firewitch’s path.”

“Then why is Jude walking around down here?”

Howard said, “The ship wouldn’t release Jude while it was near Earth. Planetary gravity pulls in too much floating junk. The ship requires a pilot close to planetary masses, like a sailing vessel requires a harbor pilot. Clear sailing now that we’re past the Moon. No pilot required.”

Jude jerked his thumb toward the ChemJon bank, behind MAT(D)4’s crate pile and the employee lunch cart. “Then I can go pee?” He didn’t wait for an answer.

I walked to the bow and laid my nose against the transparent Slug metal. The surface was cool, vibrating as faintly as an old-fashioned wind-up watch. I craned my neck. Through the clear dome, I had to admit, I saw no sign of Earth, or of New Moon, or of the old one.

I turned back to Howard. He ransacked an admin bubble’s wreckage, then straightened up, holding a salvaged drive as big as stacked pancakes.

I said, “When I floor my car, I get slammed back against the seat. When the Clipper boosts, the tourists weigh six hundred pounds for a couple minutes. If we just went from zero to a hundred twenty five thousand miles per hour, we’d be squashed against the rear bulkhead like tomato paste.”

Howard waved his arms at the hull pulsating all around us. “That’s the elegance of it. When we started moving, the vessel channeled Cavorite’s properties all around us.”

“We’re in a gravity cocoon?”

Howard nodded. “We’re so insulated from G-forces, we don’t even feel that we’re moving.”

“So, how fast are we going?”

Howard shrugged. “No idea, really. We did Earth-to-Moon in under two hours. I’m sure we’re still accelerating. But we’ll never exceed light speed, of course. So we can’t go fast enough.”

Pop.

I turned toward the sound. The therm tab on the wrapped Burrito in Jude’s hand poked up red, where it had popped. My godson sauntered back toward us, Jeeb perched on his shoulder.

I asked Howard, “Not fast enough for what?”

He shrugged. “To arrive wherever this ship is programmed. Before we starve.”

Jude paused, steaming Burrito halfway to his lips. “Where are we programmed for?”

“I don’t know.” Howard extended his elbow like a falconer. Jeeb telescoped out his wings and fluttered from Jude’s shoulder to Howard’s. “But Jeeb can help us find out.”

Jude asked through a mouthful of queso, “Why would we starve?”

Howard walked toward the bow, then dropped his shoulder and Jeeb fluttered to the deck. “Even if we’re going two-thirds light speed, we’re decades away from the nearest star with a planetary system. Probably farther still from any habitable destination.”

Jude said, “Can I turn us around?”

“I don’t know. But if you could, we’d need to know where we wanted to get back to.” Howard felt around Jeeb’s belly until he popped Jeeb’s output access panel and sprung it. He hardwired the drive to Jeeb, then stood back as Jeeb bugged out his opticals. “Jeeb will record star positions as we travel. If we ever figure out how to turn around, we’ll have a road map.”