“Let me guess. It’s armed with torpedoes?”
“Exactly. The Omniscience pointed this out to me.”
“He won’t want to kill me.”
“No, Adam. But some of the torpedoes have EMP explosive devices. They won’t kill you, but they’ll disable your ship so he can catch up with you easily.”
“Then it’s best to just leave my freighter’s profile as it is.”
“I hate to say so, Adam, but you’re right.”
Darknight 23, 3890
“Good morning, Adam.”
Eve’s voice didn’t sound as cold as it had the day before. Maybe she’d forgive him by the time he got back? If he managed to get back at all.
“Good morning,” he replied. “Is there any news from Marchenko?”
“No, but the Omniscience has pointed out another asteroid belt that you should be reaching in half an hour.”
“Thanks for the warning, Eve. There’s a lot of debris flying around here. You’d almost think that there were other humans here before us.”
Eve laughed, and it warmed Adam’s heart.
“It’s obvious,” she said. “The second brown dwarf’s gravitational influence certainly meddled in the formation of the planet. The main star only has the absolute upper hand in the orbits that are very close. It’s a miracle that two planets were born at all.”
“If not, I wouldn’t have to look for Marchenko now.”
“And Groni, too, don’t forget.
“He goes by Ragnor now.”
“Yes, yes. The Draght’s scanners indicate that this asteroid field is a little thicker than the first one.”
“What are my chances of a quick death?”
“Don’t talk like that, Adam.”
“Okay, how high is the risk?”
But it was true that a quick death would sooner be an opportunity than a risk. This was because once he started preparing to land on the planet, what awaited him was likely a slow death.
“About twice as high as last time,” said Eve.
“Oho, that’s impressive.”
“This system is like a miniature version of the solar system. The number of asteroids isn’t higher, but they’re distributed across a much smaller orbit.”
“Okay.”
“You can reduce your risk to one-third if you—”
“I won’t. The reasons for this haven’t changed.”
“I knew you’d say that. Then I’ll just tell you to break a leg.”
“Thank you—Adam, over.”
* * *
An alarm sounded. The big screen focused automatically on the culprit, a gleaming-red chunk of rock that had been turning slowly on its axis for billions of years in its orbit around the brown dwarf. It was unaware that it was an obstacle that had dared get in Adam’s way. It didn’t care, either, although its existence was now just as endangered as Adam’s was.
“Did you see that?” said Eve.
“The ship warned me, yes. But I can’t do much about it. There are some messages, but I can’t decipher them.”
“Wait,” said Eve.
So Adam waited. His fingers fiddled with the buckle of the belt. Strangely, the mechanism seemed entirely familiar to him, though this freighter wasn’t built for human beings. The Grosnops had seven fingers, but the number of fingers didn’t seem to factor into the construction of a buckle.
“Adam? The Omniscience translated the data for me. It took a little while to locate the fragment with the Draght’s scanners since it’s only about one and a half meters in size.”
“That doesn’t reassure me. With expected relative speeds of—”
“I think I can reassure you. You won’t get much closer to the asteroid than you are now. You’re moving significantly faster than it is and are already crossing its orbit. You would have to stop and wait for it to get hit.”
“Thanks, then I can go back to the dragon.”
“The dragon?”
“If only you were here, Eve. The star is so close that I can see all the details on its surface. It looks alive, like the skin of a dragon.”
“Yes, if only I were there,” Eve snapped. “But you threw me out.”
She cut the connection.
* * *
“General? There’s a problem.”
Gronolf rubbed his stomach one last time, grunted loudly, and straightened up in his seat.
“Have we lost him?” he asked.
“No. In the infrared, the freighter’s engine is brighter than any star. Adam is flying at full power. Even in the asteroid belts, he didn’t turn to lower the risk of collision.”
“Then what’s the problem, Numbark?”
“The second belt. The freighter just left it.”
“Come on, out with it. What is it that you want to say?”
“There are a few obstacles that could be dangerous for us. I have access to everything registered by the freighter.”
“This is... surprising. He could hide the data from us instead of passing it on to the Draght.”
“Maybe he’s hoping that we’ll turn to minimize the risk. That would increase the lead he’s got on us.”
“We won’t pull in our touch-arms because just because of a few rocks like that. They wouldn’t even scratch the surface of a robust stomach flap!”
“General, I must draw your attention to the fact that the collision risk in this case has been calculated at thirty-five percent. Our chances of getting hit are about one out of three. It’s a real danger.”
“But Adam didn’t slow down, did he?”
“He’s two hours ahead of us. This fragment couldn’t be a danger for him. But our ship has a bigger profile than his does. I would advise shutting the engine down for at least fifteen minutes. This reduces the risk to one out of forty-five.”
“That’s out of the question, Numbark. A Grosnop doesn’t even fear a whole family of carrionteeth.”
“Yes, General.”
* * *
He’d been dreading this somehow. It hadn’t been his day. He hadn’t gotten the chance to give his stomach the attention it deserved. And why was this blasted alarm going off again?
“General, there...”
“The 35 percent boulder?”
Crap. Now the boy would certainly get his head start.
“Yes, the...”
“Braking operation, immediately!”
Gronolf held on as he felt a force push him from the side. The shuttle was tossing its back end around like a stubborn swamp buffalo. The engine accelerated at full force in the opposite direction. This wouldn’t cost them their lives, but it would take up half an hour and valuable fuel. Carriontooth and thorn onion!
This really should have been enough to avert the danger. But the alarm sounded again.
“What’s going on, Navigator?” he roared.
“That rock wasn’t alone,” Numbark answered.
“Crew the gun rack and fire at everything that comes at us.”
This flying chunk of a carriontooth. Why hadn’t anyone told him?
“Numbark, why didn’t we see this earlier?”
“Too small, general. These fragments were created a long time ago when a larger rock collided with a smaller one.”
“Hit,” called out the gunner. “And another.”
Gronolf leaned forward. Crosses—a handful or two—were flashing on the main screen.
“Hit,” the gunner called again.
Now only thirteen remained. The screen refreshed. No, fifteen. The hit had split up the fragment. But the remnants were still big enough to penetrate the hull.
“Cease fire,” ordered Gronolf. “If we had more time, we could blast all this stuff to smithereens, but this would only increase our risk of getting hit. How much time to impact, Numbark?
“One minute. Actually less.”
“Suggestions, anyone?”
Nobody answered. On the screen, there was an area that turned pink. This was where the probability of a hit was 100 perce
nt. The shuttle was right in the middle.
“I could fire an EMP torpedo at the freighter,” the gunner suggested. “Then at least he can’t get away from us.”
“Denied,” said Gronolf.
It seemed wrong to him. Unfair.
“Thirty seconds,” said Numbark.
“Possible effect of the impact?” asked Gronolf.
“A hit to the engine will make us unable to maneuver,” Numbark replied. “If it hits the cabin, we’ll lose our breathable air.”
Gronolf didn’t want to have to vote. In any case, they’d lost Adam.
“Five seconds,” said Numbark.
“Hold on!” Gronolf called.
Then the wind came.
* * *
The sound of the whistling was louder than the alarm siren. Gronolf looked around. It was the air escaping from the cabin. At first glance, he saw three holes the size of load-hands. There had to be four. Where had the second fragment gone back out? Then he saw the gunner. He was sitting twisted in his seat. He was dead. Carriontooth! The chunk had smashed him on the left side. Gronolf followed the line to the cabin wall, then visualized it reaching to the other side. That was where the fourth hole had to be, over there in the darkness.
“Numbark?”
“Yes, General?”
“We won’t be able to seal that.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, too. The damage is too severe.”
“That gives us twelve hours.”
“Yes, General.”
He couldn’t hear Numbark very well because the air was already too thin. A Grosnop could survive for up to twelve hours in a vacuum. He pulled the keyboard toward him. The system still had energy, which gave him hope. He queried the status of the engine. The power unit was working! But one of the fuel tanks had a leak.
Gronolf typed, “We’re turning and accelerating again,” and sent the message to Numbark.
“We’ve got to return to the Majestic Draght,” Numbark answered. “It’s our only hope.”
“We could never do that in twelve hours. We have to keep going.”
“But to get to the planet, we still need at least one day!”
“I’m aware of this. We’ll be rescued before then.”
* * *
The alarm again! Adam was startled. The screen showed the swirling mist of the star. He’d grown used to it, so it didn’t scare him anymore.
“Adam, do you read me?”
“Yes, Eve? The next asteroid?”
“No, you’re safe. You’ve crossed the dangerous area now.”
“Then why is the alarm waking me up?”
“I asked the Omniscience for it. You weren’t answering my calls.”
“I was asleep.”
“Adam, something terrible has happened.”
Marchenko. They’d found his shattered robot body somewhere. Marchenko had never left the Draght. He’d been chasing a ghost.
“Yes?”
He didn’t dare say the name.
“The asteroid you came across earlier hit Gronolf’s shuttle.”
Oh. Gronolf had always seemed as immortal to him as Marchenko. He’d saved them.
“Is he... ?”
“There’s been a casualty on board, but he’s still alive.”
“Good.”
“The engines are still working.”
“Good.”
“There’s just one problem. There are holes in the shuttle’s cabin, and they haven’t managed to seal them back up. That gives them about another twelve hours.”
Adam did some quick mental calculations of the time. He’d left two days before and had been accelerating continuously. Gronolf had always been about two hours behind him. So it would take Gronolf at least 40 hours to fly back to the Majestic Draght. This meant that Gronolf was already dead, even if he was still alive.
“That’s awful,” he said.
“There is a way to save him,” said Eve. “But it won’t be easy.”
“The planet?”
“He’s too far from it. No. But you can save him and his crew.”
“I... of course. Yes, tell me what I’ve got to do. Or wait. Do you understand what this means? I’ll lose another day or at least half a day of looking for Marchenko. And what’s more important to you—if I find Ragnor, Gronolf will see, and there’ll be no saving your hatchling.”
“I know, Adam. I thought about it before calling you. But I don’t see any other way out. It feels like I betrayed Ragnor for Gronolf, as if I’d weighed my decision and decided that Gronolf was more important.”
“So did you?”
“Yes, I did. Is it bad, is it immoral? Gronolf’s done so much for us!”
“And you’ve done so much for Ragnor. Without you he’d be dead, Eve.”
“Okay, so this is how it is. We don’t know what’s happened to Marchenko or Ragnor. Maybe the whole trip has been for nothing. But you can almost certainly save Gronolf.”
“You’re right, Eve. So, explain to me what’s got to be done.”
* * *
The Draght moved slowly out of his field of vision, and inertia pushed him slowly to the left. Adam swung the freighter in the opposite direction. He had to allow Gronolf’s damaged shuttle to catch up with him.
Then he straightened back out, and before him lay a black abyss. Thousands of white points of light kept his gaze from getting lost in its depths. The Majestic Draght was circling in orbit somewhere out there, invisible to the freighter’s scanners. And one step closer, which the infrared was sure to detect, there was a shuttle with three passengers approaching.
* * *
“There it is,” Gronolf read on the screen.
Numbark sat next to him and typed. Gronolf was focusing on the main screen that his navigator had switched to infrared. Indeed, there was a bright spot directly in the path of their trajectory.
“It looks like he’s trying to escape from us,” Gronolf typed.
Then he quickly put his hands back in his stomach fold. The most significant problem was the cold. His skin was thick enough to protect him on the inside, but his temperature receptors still reported extreme cold, and in his brain this translated into pain.
“He has to accelerate. Otherwise we have no chance of getting aboard,” Numbark typed.
He was aware of this, of course. With everything in motion, there were no fixed points in space. Just like Adam’s freighter, they were in a transfer orbit. Nobody could afford to stop. It would take hours to bring their speed down to zero, and even then they would still be moving.
But it didn’t matter in the long run. Only the relative speed was critical. For the switchover to work, the difference had to be as low as possible. It’s impossible to jump out of a moving bus safely, but if there’s a bus of equal speed driving beside it, this changes things. The fact that their ships had the same point of departure and the same destination made the orbital mechanics especially simple. It was as if they were traveling along parallel tracks. This made Gronolf hopeful. Initially, Numbark hadn’t wanted to believe that Adam would help them, but Gronolf had trusted him from the get-go.
If only it wasn’t so cold. He’d made fun of Marchenko before departure because he’d wanted to make special suits for Adam and Eve that they could wear in a vacuum. “A Grosnop wouldn’t need anything like that,” he’d said to Marchenko. “We can be submerged thousands of meters deep for hours, so we can undoubtedly tolerate pressure differences!” But in the deep sea, temperatures never dropped below freezing. The real secret to those spacesuits was the heating. If they made it back, he’d make sure that there was one made for each crew member.
* * *
The shuttle bucked, startling Gronolf from his half-sleep. What had happened? His navigator! It looked like he’d slumped forward against the desk.
Gronolf jumped up and called out, “Numbark?” But he was unable to hear himself.
The shuttle was braking. But that wasn’t right—they’d never reach Adam’s ship that
way. Numbark must have dragged down one of the control levers. He pulled him to the side as gently as possible and reached for the sector mechanism himself.
And now the inertia changed direction. The route was still marked in red on the screen. The radio operator, the fourth Grosnop aboard, came and lowered Numbark to the floor, where he started to resuscitate him. Gronolf accelerated the ship until the red line matched with the green one and then knelt beside his navigator. The radio operator had both his touch-hands in Numbark’s first stomach. This was the best place to massage the primary heart.
Gronolf reached behind Numbark’s neck and moved his right touch-hand downward a bit. A powerful bone plate protected the second heart, which was responsible for supplying the upper parts of the body. Because of this, it couldn’t be accessed for a simple cardiac massage. He’d have to try to start it back again using the chokehold. Gronolf focused and brought up his second touch-hand, which was the third vertebra. Jerking it upward would push the protective plate down like a lever until it pressed on the heart from above. The hold had its name for a reason. If he pulled too hard on the vertebrae, he might crush the heart. How forceful was too forceful all depended on a Grosnop’s age and physical condition. The chokehold led to death especially quickly for adolescents. Numbark was well over 90. For a Grosnop in his prime, Gronolf would have to use all his strength for the maneuver to be effective. But every individual had a somewhat different bone structure.
The radio operator stopped massaging the main heart, then moved back somewhat. And rightly so—when a chokehold was performed, the victim often convulsed. The radio operator could be seriously injured if he were struck by Numbark’s powerful spring-legs.
Well, Gronolf, that’s your cue. He adjusted his knees so they steadied Numbark’s head. Then he closed all four eyes, feeling his way with his hands—the first vertebrae, then the second, and the third. The bones were robust, and could be felt even through a Grosnop’s thick skin. Numbark’s body temperature had already significantly decreased, and his skin was damp from the condensed cabin atmosphere. The brain and nerve cells were able to survive for up to ten minutes without oxygen. Grosnops were tough. They’d been the masters of the deep sea until one of their ancestors had gotten it into their head to go ashore.
Proxima Logfiles 1: Marchenko's Children: Hard Science Fiction Page 9
