Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

Fourteen days later, we found out that a map was the least of our worries.

SIXTEEN

WE SPENT THE FIRST FOURTEEN DAYS of our ride to nowhere discovering surprises.

Howard was a paranoid geek, but he was still a genius. He used Jeeb’s optical spectrometer to calculate Red Shift as we sped away from certain stars. From this, Howard estimated that, by Day Two, we had settled in at a cruising speed of a hundred twenty thousand miles per second.

The Firewitch’s six splayed, forward-facing tentacles were more than just gun mounts. They leaked enough Cavorite influence forward to make an invisible umbrella in front of us. This buffed aside the rare debris of interstellar space. Without that umbrella, at that kind of speed, collision with debris smaller than a lima bean would blow the Firewitch into rubble.

In the lima bean department, Ord determined that between the preservable stores in the lunch wagon, which was provisioned to feed two hundred people, plus MAT(D)4’s Meals Utility, Dessicated, the four of us could survive for months. The ChemJons recycled what our bodies didn’t need any longer into potable water, and the Firewitch seemed to manufacture fresh-enough air.

The difference between our situation and a life prison sentence was that a convict could always dream of parole.

Our problem quickly became morale. That meant I had to keep my troops busy.

Howard and Jude worked together each day, trying to refine Jude’s flight skills, get the Firewitch off autopilot, and turn it for home. So far, no dice. But it kept them busy.

We also devised less weighty diversions. Ord broke out the SAFS and taught Jude marksmanship. A firing simulator was really a glorified hologame.

Ord also taught Jude hand-to-hand combat. On Day Fourteen, in the central bay, Ord, silver drill whistle between his lips, refereed Jude’s pugil stick bout with a Cargo’Bot.

Howard now released Jeeb from astrogation duty one hour of each forty-eight, so Jeeb could perform self-maintenance. Jeeb perched ringside on a crate, extending and retracting antennae while he wiped them with his forelimbs.

On paper, no clumsy Cargo’Bot can last even a round with a Vegas Kick’Bot, but I wouldn’t bet against the Cargo’Bot Ord had reprogrammed. The ’Bot could grip the padded pugil stick in its two forward manipulators but still stand stable on three legs — and sweep at its opponent with the fourth.

The only sounds echoing in the vast bay were the clack of pugil against pugil, the rubber squeak of Jude’s slips across the deckplates, and the electric whine of the ’Bot’s motors. The air smelled of sweat and ’Bot-joint Synlube.

The ’Bot thrust its stick at Jude’s jaw. My godson dodged easily, but in the same instant, the ’Bot’s right center ambulator kicked forward, so fast it blurred, toward Jude’s padded kneecap.

I’m fair with a pugil, even with all my replacement parts. But that leg sweep would have caved my knee joint like a hammer whacking a drinking straw.

I said “toward” Jude’s kneecap because the ’Bot leg swept through empty space.

Jude sidestepped, lunged, and thumped the ’Bot’s carapace with his stick end.

Ord tweeted his whistle. Then he stepped in, touched Jude’s shoulder, and announced, “Point. Match.”

Jude grinned and wiped sweat with a wristband.

I swear Jeeb’s optic lids drooped when his dumb but muscular cousin went down for the count. Synlube is thicker than water, I suppose.

I jerked a thumb toward the control chamber and said to Jude and Jeeb, “Howard says break time’s over.”

Jude nodded, still grinning. “You see that? Want next?”

I shook my head.

Ord and I watched Jude meander toward the control room, peeling off pads and strewing them on the deck. Jeeb clattered behind on four legs, plucking up the sweaty laundry with the remaining two, diagnostics clicking like a fussy nanny.

The Sergeant Major shook his head. “Never seen anyone so fast, Sir.”

“Come see him in a soccer game. He—” My stomach tightened.

Activity helped me forget where we were. But when I remembered, the nearest soccer goal was still dropping a hundred twenty thousand miles further behind us every second.

Ord crouched alongside the inert ’Bot, and flipped up its program panel. “Care to tangle before I wipe the fighting program, Sir?”

I shook my head. “What’s the point? I could plug in to Jeeb and learn a language, too.” Overnight, a TOT could teach even a grunt enough of any language to get into brothels and out of coups d’état. A TOT could even decipher a language it didn’t know, as easily as it cracked codes in signal intelligence it intercepted.

Ord said, “If anybody can turn this ship around, it’s Colonel Hibble, Sir.”

I nodded. “He’s suited for his job.” Whereas I sucked at mine.

Ord paused, cocked his head. “Sir, the detonator hesitation was nothing. A split second.”

I sighed, and waved my hand. “It doesn’t matter any more, does it? I’ll never have to command anybody again.”

Howard’s voice crackled from my uniform mike. “You two better get up here!”

SEVENTEEN

ORD AND I HIT THE CONTROL CHAMBER entrance on the run, panting.

Jeeb had resumed his station front-and-center in the ship’s transparent bow, Howard kneeling beside him. Above us, Jude swung a leg into the toadstool, then disappeared as he lay down in the pilot couch.

We jogged to a stop alongside Howard, and I asked him, “What?”

He pointed at the stars with the antique yellow writing pencil that he had taken to chewing in lieu of cigarettes. The stars along our flanks were no longer the points of light we had become accustomed to over the past fourteen days. They stretched out in elongate streaks.

Dead ahead, the stars were gone.

Howard pointed at the discarded pugil pads mounded above Jeeb’s thorax like an inverted pyramid. “Get all of those we have up here.”

Ord voiced a ’Bot with his lapel mike, and it scurried away.

“What’s going on, Howard?” I said.

“You remember I said we were moving too slow?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re accelerating.”

“That’s why the stars look stretched out?”

“No. Their light is being bent.”

“By what?”

Howard pointed at the black void in front of us. “That.”

The Spooks had always assumed the Slugs transited interstellar space by short-cutting through Temporal Fabric Insertion Points, places where the gargantuan gravitation of collapsed stars tacked folded space together.

“We’re so close that black hole’s bending light?”

“Sucking it like gravity sucks water down a drain.”

I swallowed. “Us too?” The central mass of a black hole packed matter bigger than the sun into a golf ball. I didn’t want to die as a piece of a golf ball.

Ord’s Cargo’Bot dumped a pugil-pad wad as big as a mattress at Howard’s feet.

Howard said, “I think this ship’s designed to transit the hole by skirting the central mass so fast that the ship slingshots out the other side.”

I eyed the toadstool. “Jude?”

“The closer we get to the central mass, the more inbound matter, like the ship itself, the ship has to avoid. Jude’s reactions to what he sees in the visible spectrum will dodge the ship around anything too big for the bow array to deflect.”

“Why the pads?”

Howard hunched on hands and knees, spreading out a chest protector across the deck plates. “Jude will make the transit in a form-fitting, reclined couch. But insertion-point gravity may be so strong that, even in a Cavorite cocoon, an unsupported human body would be crushed.”

I pointed at the pads, so flimsy that they nearly floated in air. “And those will help?”