Daring

by Mike Shepherd

  “You, too, small one,” she said, pointing at Abby and Cara. Kris would never have used the word “small” for her maid. She was usually moving so fast you had to give her lots of extra space. At the moment, through the petty officer’s eyes, Kris realized that Abby was of less-than-average build.

  Kris found herself with her back to Abby. When the maid and Cara pushed their feet together, Kris felt locked in place.

  “Will this hold?” Kris asked.

  “If it don’t, you can write a letter of complaint to the old chief who taught me the trick. If you all don’t intend to lay a hand if we need one, then I guess I could lash you down like you was kids, ma’am, but I was told you’re going to help if things go all to hell in a handbasket.”

  “Yes,” Kris said, “we’re here to lay a hand.”

  “Then I expect this will do.”

  The others found a place in such a line athwart the deck and settled in to wait.

  They didn’t have long.

  The Wasp started getting downright frisky very quickly.

  Sulwan was kind enough to pass The Word. “All hands, we’re getting into the outer fringe of the atmosphere. It’s not enough to give us any reaction mass, but it is enough to make the ride interesting. Hold on to your best friend and enjoy the ride.”

  Kris reached out for Jack. To her surprise, he was already reaching out for her.

  “Never argue with the navigator,” Kris muttered.

  “Never pass up a handhold,” Jack said too darn matter-offactly.

  The ride got bouncy, and Kris was glad they had secured everything in the space. Still, a bottle of Goo got loose. The petty officer caught it on the fly and gave one of her sailors a scowl that would have reduced a normal human to a puddle.

  The sailor said, “Sorry, ma’am. Won’t happen again.”

  The petty officer passed the bottle back to him to tie back down. “It better not,” was all she said.

  Then the Wasp did a hard right flip. Kris went from her rump being down to her back holding that honor. Her legs were holding Jack up, and her arms were all that kept him from falling over into her lap.

  She grinned mischievously at the thought.

  He said, “Don’t you dare.”

  “What?

  “Do what you’re thinking.”

  “Now you’re a mind reader.”

  The Wasp flipped back over and down and was once more below Kris’s bottom.

  “Thanks, Abby,” Kris said.

  “Don’t mind if I do, Your Princessship. I expect you’ll do the same for me sometime. But if you don’t mind, I do wish you’d skip the second waffle tomorrow.”

  Cara giggled. “You grown-ups are funny.”

  Kris enjoyed the happy sound.

  Fifteen seconds later, it was Kris’s turn to support Abby and Cara on her back. Jack stiffened his arms to support them, and they held in place until the Wasp managed to right herself.

  “This is fun,” Cara said from the innocence of her youth.

  “Sure is,” a young sailor agreed.

  “Hold on,” the petty officer warned as the Wasp dropped out from underneath them, leaving them hanging a good fifteen centimeters in the air. Then it slammed up, leaving Kris’s back twitching in pain.

  “Press your legs harder against each other. Get those backs hard against the bulkhead,” the petty officer ordered. “That way, when we do those ducks and poundings, you’ll go up and down with the ship.”

  “Yes, Mother,” a sailor said.

  “And you can wash your mouth out with soap when we’re done here,” the petty officer said in a very motherly voice.

  For the next forever, they bounced around like peas in a pod.

  Kris discovered that the worst wasn’t the flips that put Jack nearly in her lap . . . or her nearly in his. No, the Wasp could totally turn herself over, leaving them pushing hard against each other and the bulkhead and hoping they could hold on long enough for the ship to right herself.

  The third or fourth time the Wasp did the total flip, four of the sailors failed and ended up in a jumbled mess on the overhead below. They scrambled to untangle themselves, and ended up sliding down the bulkheads as the Wasp got herself right.

  With the petty officer barking orders, they got themselves back in place before the Wasp did anything exciting again.

  Then the bulkhead around them let out a scream like a banshee, and air started shrieking through a rent in the hull.

  “Longknife, grab some Goo and stop that leak,” the petty officer ordered.

  Being nearest the rent, Kris grabbed for the closest Goo and loosed a long dollop at the hole. The Wasp did a little jig, and Kris missed with her first two shots. For the third one, the Wasp zigged when Kris was expecting a zag, but Jack bumped into her elbow, and, miracle of miracles, she hit the hole.

  That stopped the air loss, but the side of the ship was warping in and out.

  “All of you, lay a hand getting a sheet of metal over that hole,” the petty officer snapped.

  Two sailors undid the lashings on a pile of six steel strips, Jack and the colonel slid one strip out, and the sailors tied back down the other five.

  Movement while they did this was wild; the Wasp continued on its bucking ride, leaving them weightless one moment and double their weight the next.

  Four of them managed to wrestle the sheet up without cutting off any hands or heads . . . but it was a close-run thing. The metal sheet reached from the deck to just a bit short of the overhead. The petty officer quickly welded the lower half of the sheet in place. A moment later, she’d tossed a rope over one of the hooks Kris hadn’t noticed that now circled the overhead.

  Jack boosted the petty officer on his shoulder as the colonel raised her on the rope and belayed it across his rear.

  Secured as best as the ride allowed, the petty officer ran a welding bead up the one side of the sheet, then over the top and down the other side. As she got more and more of the patch in place, the hull worked itself less and less.

  Done, she settled back to the deck. “What are all you looking at? Help me get this torch kit lashed down, and let’s get back on the deck.”

  Kris’s brain trust snapped to, and in only a moment, she was back facing Jack.

  “That was well done,” she said.

  “Look at all the fun you missed by not doing a tour as an assistant division officer,” Jack said.

  “Yes,” Kris said. “Think of the things I could have done if I hadn’t been stopping Turantic from going to war with its neighbors, or dodging battleships around Wardhaven or hurling cabers on Chance.”

  “We must all bear our burdens,” the petty officer said.

  Someone among the sailors snickered.

  “Make that two cakes of soap for you, Henderson.”

  “I didn’t say nothing.”

  The petty officer gave him the look.

  And then the Wasp did something a ship was never meant to do, and they had to do the welding drill all over again.

  And a third time.

  And a fourth time.

  Somewhere in there, one of the sailors lost his lunch. Then Cara. Then just about the entire crew, except for the petty officer.

  Kris was eyeing the two remaining reinforcement sheets and wondering if this would ever end when the ride got less rowdy and Sulwan came on the public address.

  “All hands, we’re done. I’d love to tell you that we gathered up enough fuel to get us home, but the skipper says that isn’t so. We will, however, be matching orbit with our containers, so we can get things back together and get a good meal and some sleep tonight.” She paused for a moment, and then added, “Commodore Longknife, the skipper sends his regards and asks if you will please report to the bridge.”

  48

  “I’m not sure the Wasp can take another beating like that,” Captain Drago said softly, as he and Kris put their heads together.

  “Can we modify the ship’s launches to do the next refueling run?�
� Kris asked. “That pirate ketch we captured on Kaskatos had less power than one of our launches.”

  “I don’t know,” the captain admitted. “They had a balloot designed for their size. We’d have to cut down our balloot to fit a launch.”

  “Maybe we could make two or three smaller balloots,” Sulwan put in.

  “But once we start tearing it apart,” the skipper said darkly, “we’d better hope the glue holds together. There would be no turning back.”

  “I think we ought to try doing it once without cutting up anything,” Kris said. “I’ve flown just about every kind of small craft there is. If you could rig a balloot to three launches, Nelly and I could give it a try.”

  The skipper had started shaking his head as she spoke, and he just kept on shaking it. “You saw, or at least felt, how much the Wasp was thrown around during our pass. Imagine what those atmospheric currents would do to three boats flying in close formation. You could all three end up as a blot of grease on some gas giant.”

  “I’m a Longknife. We’re always looking for a new way to get ourselves killed.”

  Jack didn’t look too happy at that, but he kept his silence.

  “I’ll have a couple of my officers and leading chiefs look at the idea,” the captain finally said. “Now, do you have an opinion on our course home? We’re about as far out on the rim as we can get.”

  “The star maps we have don’t seem to be helping us much. We have no idea from one jump to the next where we’ll end up,” Kris said.

  “The maps I have,” Nelly said, clearly defensive, “do a fairly good job of telling us where a jump will take us when we enter them at a slow speed. We can even be doing one hundred thousand klicks an hour and have a good idea where we’re heading. But it’s anybody’s guess where we will end up when you really put pedal to the metal.”

  “Where’d you pick up that phrase?” Kris asked.

  “Cara got it from some of the car racers back home. I like the sound of it,” Nelly answered.

  “If I can help it, the Wasp won’t be accelerating at over two gees until our next overhaul,” Captain Drago said. “Neither the engines nor the hull can take it. However, we could keep one gee up as acceleration and not spend half our time decelerating. That could put a lot of speed on the boat. We could probably make at least one of those seven-league jumps before we have to start decelerating to refuel.”

  “Wouldn’t we be in better shape if we fully refueled at this star, then took several long leaps?” Kris asked.

  “Yes, Your Highness, but I want to get out of here before anyone drops in. I think the Intrepid knocked those last two alien ships for a loop. I don’t think they were aware of anything going on in that last system when we jumped, but how much of the farm do you want to bet on that?”

  “Good point. How soon can we get out of here?”

  “The nearest jump point is one of Nelly’s fuzzy ones. We can reach it in a day. Assuming we don’t decelerate, we should be doing close to a hundred thousand klicks by the time we hit it. Assuming we survive the jump, we’ll see where it puts us.”

  They spent most of the next day patching the Wasp back together as well as they could. The engineers continued doing their own maintenance on the engines and reactors. The Wasp got under way as smoothly as she ever did and slipped through the next jump point right on time.

  To find themselves sharing a system with a huge reddish super giant.

  “Anyone got a guess when that dude will go supernova?” Captain Drago asked.

  No one on the bridge ventured a guess.

  “Chief, tell me the best way out of here, and do it fast.”

  “There’s another one of those new jumps pretty close by.”

  “Sulwan, get the coordinates and get us headed there.”

  “Doing it, Skipper.”

  Kris waited at her station on Weapons for the immediate hurry to calm down. “How far did we jump?” she asked Chief Beni once he was finished with navigation.

  “It looks like close to nine hundred light-years,” he said. “We’re still cruising along the outer rim of the outermost arm of the Milky Way. Nelly, do you have any idea where this next jump would take us?”

  A star map appeared on the forward screen. “I think we are here,” the computer said. A green dot appeared along the Scutum-Centaurus Arm. “We’re still about as far from Earth as we can be and not go next door for sugar.”

  “Good joke, Nelly,” Kris said.

  Captain Drago just made a face.

  “If I have us in the right system, and we took this jump at dead-slow speed, we’d go about fifty light-years over and a bit more inward. A longer jump, say with us making fifty thousand to a hundred thousand klicks an hour, would take us a lot farther, say about another eight hundred light-years.” Nelly paused for her listeners to absorb this.

  “I’ve been analyzing our long jumps, and I think I’m starting to see a pattern. If our next jump was a fast one and followed that pattern, I estimate that we’d jump to about the middle of this arm and in a line that would take us to somewhere a couple of thousand light-years along the outer rim. but at least we’d start getting back toward Earth. If that direction holds true, my guess would be that if we hit our third jump at three or four hundred thousand klicks an hour, maybe more, we could end up well into the center of the Outer Arm, and generally headed home.”

  Nelly paused for a second. “Assuming you want a guess from a computer.”

  “Just so long as you warn us that it’s a guess,” Kris said, while Captain Drago scowled.

  “This is just a guess,” Nelly went on, “but if we could maintain that speed for a second long jump, we might get as far as the Sagittarius Arm or even the Orion Arm. That would put us just a hop, skip, and a jump from human space.”

  “Who taught this computer how to use nonempirical language?” the skipper demanded.

  “Cara,” Kris said.

  “That kid,” the captain grumbled.

  “But you humans relate better to nonempirical more often than when I give you an answer to the thirteenth decimal place,” Nelly said.

  “We prefer to pick when we want it simple and when we want it precise,” Drago said.

  “And guessing where in the galaxy we are going to drop in when we are stumbling around like a drunken sailor is going to improve how if I talk about thousands of light-years using the third decimal place?” Nelly shot back.

  “The gal does have a point,” Kris said. “Precision isn’t all that useful when we’re guessing at the basic point.”

  “And you had to remind me, didn’t you?” the captain said with a sigh.

  Kris shrugged.

  “If we could make two of those long jumps,” Kris said, “before we have to slow down and refuel . . .” Kris left the thought unfinished.

  The captain clearly was also thinking along that line. “Sulwan, if we went to half a gee acceleration?”

  “The Engineering team would be delighted, and we’d still be making some two hundred thousand klicks an hour when we hit the next jump.”

  “That might get us two of those long jumps. Course, we might need to give up showers and flushing the toilet to find enough reaction mass to slow down.”

  “Our final jump might also have us dropping into the Iteeche Empire or one of those systems where their ships have been vanishing,” the skipper said slowly.

  “Choices, choices,” Kris said. “Who shall we start a war with today?”

  “That is not funny, Kris,” Jack said.

  “I didn’t mean it as a joke,” Kris said. “At least if we drop in on the Empire, we’ve got our own Imperial Representative.”

  “Who, I understand, is not in good repute at the court just now,” the skipper said.

  “Where’d you hear that?” Kris asked.

  “I know everything that goes on aboard my ship,” the captain said darkly. “And if I don’t, I have supper every once in a while with Abby, and she fills me in on what I missed.�
�

  “And here I thought I didn’t have to worry about that woman leaking now that I wasn’t going to balls anymore.”

  “It’s a fact of life with your maid,” the skipper said. “If she doesn’t leak something, she’ll pop.”

  “Now who’s cracking jokes,” Nelly said.

  “I’m a human. I get to crack jokes. You’re a computer. I worry about the jokes you might crack. I’m not all that sure they’ll be funny.”

  “I am learning from an expert.” Nelly sniffed.

  “Who?” the captain demanded.

  “Kris,” Nelly said.

  “I rest my case. Now, why don’t you two, or three, run along and get some chow and take a shower. I may be cutting back on both in the very near future.”

  “Isn’t our water recycled?” Nelly asked.

  “Yes. I’m more worried with the beer, wine, and spirits that are still on board. Is it better to allow them to be recycled into piss, or should I pour them directly into the reaction tanks?”

  “I knew there was a reason I left you in command of this wreck,” Kris said.

  “She wasn’t a wreck when you left me in command. We had to work real hard to get her into this fix.”

  Kris let the skipper have the last word. She headed for chow, only to find that even Cookie was having a hard time making what he had in his larder look all that worth eating. A request for any of the crew qualified in space to lend a hand shoring up damaged compartments got her attention, and she was about to tap her commlink and ask Captain Drago to let her get in some honest work when Jack put his hand over her commlink.

  “I know what you’re thinking, and I will not have you squished like a little green bug because some rough-cut steel gets out of control of a teenage sailor.”

  “In our situation, everyone has to do their part. I should, too,” Kris insisted.

  “That’s what worries me. Every seaman recruit who thinks they know how to handle themselves in a half gee is headed there. I know that Senior Chief Mong knows how to handle things. I’m worried about Marine Private Knucklehead or Seaman Recruit Vacuum-for-brains who has more enthusiasm than experience.”