Ship's Boy

by Phil Geusz

rolled and rolled, then suddenly the ride roughened as Broad Arrow left the taxiway and sought a clean patch of grass to take off from. Meanwhile, something very strange happened on the tactical display. All the blue— and therefore friendly— pips were racing towards us! It was a stupid thing to attempt on some levels; even as I watched half a dozen or more of our fighters vanished from the display as they attempted to turn away from their enemies in mid-dogfight and concentrate in order to clear a patch of sky for the Arrow to fly thorough. Men were willingly accepting death in order to save milord, I suddenly realized. For the first time in my life, I wondered why anyone would do such a thing.

  Then a new voice spoke up from Dad’s intercom speaker. It was Captain Saunders. “Tobias,” he asked softly. “How’re we doing?”

  Father bared his incisors for an instant before replying. “As well as can be expected,” he admitted eventually. “We’ll either fly or collapse into a quantum black hole, one or the other.”

  “You run a tight engine room, Tobias,” the pilot replied. “Obviously, there’ll be no verification checks.”

  “Yeah,” my dad said, nodding. “I’m liking what I’m seeing so far, all but number five rod. And that’ll do, unless we’re damned unlucky indeed.”

  “Good,” Captain Saunders agreed. There was a long pause while he conversed with the control tower. Then his attention returned to Dad. “In that case, I suppose you won’t mind if we also unship ‘A’ turret during the initial translation.”

  My father’s mouth dropped wide open, and so did mine. A hyperfield’s natural state was to project itself skin-tight over the entire outside of the ship; while it was indeed possible to create small holes at the muzzles for the guns to fire through, each such exception complicated the engineer’s task enormously. Out in flatter space it wasn’t so bad. But during a takeoff, and an emergency one at that…“Are you… I mean…”

  “We won’t make it without at least some of the guns,” Captain Saunders explained. “And the Imperials won’t be expecting them either.” He sighed. “You’re good, Tobias. The best I’ve ever seen. Wing it; that’s an order. I don’t expect the results to be pretty. And if you can’t manage, well…” He left the rest unsaid.

  Suddenly Father’s eyes were wide and the stink of lapine terror filled the engineering spaces. It wasn’t all Dad’s—some of it was mine, too. His jaw worked once, then a second time as if he were about to object. Then his fingers began flying across his control board like I’d never seen before and I knew better than to interrupt him even for an instant. So I looked at the tactical display again—the blue dots were still converging on us, and sure enough a red-free area was developing as the Boyens were forced out of the developing kill-zone. Then the ground shook again and the crimson dot nearest us vanished.

  “Sync navigation to Field core… Mark!” Captain Saunders declared as Father ignored the command to verify the automatic hookup. Clearly he had other fish to fry, and just this once I thought our commanding officer might forgive him. I turned all my attention to the control rods—they were doing fine, just like always, but looking at them was the only way I could help Dad.

  “Energize your Field, David,” Dad muttered, and my ear-linings flushed a deep red—in the excitement I’d almost forgotten. Engineers always turned on their Fields during takeoffs and at other key moments for protection from possible radiation surges.

  “Five,” the First Officer declared as Father continued to punch keys and change screens and otherwise attempt to make a week’s worth of complex adjustments in mere seconds. “Four, three, two, one…”

  Then the lights dimmed and Broad Arrow screamed in agony, her poorly-adjusted coils twisting her in directions that no living mind could perceive. And I screamed as well, nightmare visions of contorted space and a collapse into forever slashing across my own suddenly deformed soul. Then Father was screaming too, though he didn’t slow down a bit, “A” turret was blasting away at something…

  …and we were at last lurching across the sky.

  4

  I’d been inside an unbalanced Field before; Dad had rigged a little setup in the back of the hanger so that I could pass the adaptation test before being formally approved as an apprentice. A few unlucky individuals went temporarily insane under chaotic warp conditions and therefore couldn’t be held responsible for their actions. These poor souls had to be strait-jacketed during all translations for everyone’s safety, even as mere passengers. In order to pass my test I’d undergone total disorientating misery for over an hour while performing a task that required my total attention—playing a complex videogame, in my case—and while my score had suffered a little I’d passed easily. But even that experience was poor preparation for what I was undergoing now; Dad’s testing-Field hadn’t been rigged nearly so far out of true as this one, and I also hadn’t been scared out of my wits going in. As it was I tested the sick-tube in my suit for the very first time—it worked amazingly well—and tried to focus my wayward, ever-shifting consciousness on the Field coils. Even as I did so, number five edged up into the amber.

  “Dad!” I cried out, though through my warped perceptions it sounded more like deep-voiced giant saying Dard-de! There was a prescribed way of phrasing reports to avoid confusion due to the distortion, and I used it even though it probably would’ve sounded funny to an outsider. “Double-ewe cee! Rod! Fiv-ver! One-Oh-Thu-ree!”

  My father nodded, but otherwise didn’t respond at all. A hundred and three—one hundred was the yellow area’s border—wasn’t all that bad. Probably the unit was stressed as could be due to the out-of-balance condition, and since he was already doing all he could to fix that, well…

  Just then I heard a series of rapid-fire explosions above my head—they were amazingly sharp and loud. It was ‘A’ turret, which was located only a few feet above us. I’d never heard it fire before, and the sound rather frightened me until I realized what it was. What scared me even more, though, was the way that number-five rod’s temperature shot skyward as the Field warped even further out of true at the insult. “Dad!” I cried out again!”

  “I already know,” he replied, deceptively calm as his hands flew over the keyboard. “Compensating now.” And sure enough, the temp dropped almost as quickly as it’d risen…

  …until suddenly a new string of explosions raced down the hull, this time well forward of us. “Shit,” Dad observed, his voice calm and flat. Once more, the temps shot skyward.

  “We’ve been hit, Tobias,” Captain Saunders informed us unnecessarily. “Compensate with everything you’ve got! I can’t afford to reduce power— we’re borderline on making orbit and I expect we’ll need every erg.”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” Dad responded as all the core-rod indicators soared into the red. “Understood.” Then he turned to me. “David, I’m going to need a spare EVA tank; I fear that we’re going to have to open up the engine room to vacuum. Go get one for me, and another for yourself.”

  My jaw dropped. I’d never heard of letting vacuum into an engine room on purpose before, not for anything!

  “Do it, son!” he urged. “I’ve no time to argue!”

  I nodded; orders were orders and this was hardly the time to question them. “Closing board,” I acknowledged. “All rods are in the red, sir.”

  “All in the red,” he acknowledged. There was something terribly sad in his voice, though I couldn’t quite grasp what or why. “Go get me those tanks, son! On the bounce now!”

  There were spare EVA cylinders stashed here and there all over the place; if Dad had only asked for one I’d have had to go no further than the engineering spaces lock. But because he specified two I had to make my way into passenger country, where a dozen of the things were stowed near the main lock. It was a long, difficult trip even under ideal conditions; Broad Arrow was pretty large as personal VIP spacers went, though of course any space-to-space cargo vessel would dwarf her. Even worse, as in most passenger vessels there were only a handful of
places where the ship’s “working” corridors intersected with those frequented by the civilians. So I had to go well-for’ard before working my way back to the lock, then make the same round-about trip on the return leg carrying the cylinders. Fortunately no one challenged me for being away from my station; either Dad had let folks know I was coming, or more likely everyone was just too busy just then to worry much about a mere stray apprentice.

  I was right in the middle of passenger country with an EVA tank in each hand when the artificial gravity failed. Suddenly the half-gravity that was ship’s standard during takeoff transformed itself into the five or so gees of actual acceleration we’d finally worked up to after our no-hardpoint liftoff. I was lucky as could be in that I was caught at the bottom of the main companionway instead of halfway up it, and when the two normally hefty but manageable tanks suddenly turned to lead I simply released them and let myself flop forward, just as the training manual advised. The impact hurt, yes. But I was still a kid and it wasn’t so bad. For heavier and less-flexible adults, I knew, such a fall could often be deadly. Then and only then the klaxon that should’ve gone off before the system failure began to sound. “Catastrophic Field failure imminent!” an