Blood Sabers

by Burbaugh, MF;

  The gases were full; we separated only for the few drops of water and the couple atoms of heavy elements we could collect. Bill kept moving the gen.

  Three more days, we had enough of everything. Bill tore down and stored the equipment; the second robot’s power pack had been returned and appeared to be holding a charge. There was talk about good luck. A short spin up of the ship’s single remaining Grav motor showed it also should work.

  Bill suited and was out on the asteroid. He had removed the cable anchors to both the ice and asteroid, and with his back against the asteroid, he used his legs and strained against the ship to get that first little push off. He came inside and we waited.

  With a few scraping noises we started to move away. A short burst of attitude jets and we were drifting free. We had to move as slowly as possible. We were all in the suits in case we had a blowout. The atmosphere inside was reduced to minimum. We had to wait to see if we could drift out of the belt before trying to move under real power.

  Steering was turned over to the comp to insure we cleared the belt without ‘bumping’ anything. Two days later we were free and the comp could see enough stars and sky to try to calculate our position. “I have located our position with a high degree of accuracy. We are 47.18 million Light Years from old Earth, and 1.3 Light Years from New Earth. We are an eighth degree below the galactic plane,” the comp said.

  “So we are only one T/S Fold jump away?” I asked.

  “Correct,” it said.

  “Okay, take us home then,” I said.

  “Cannot be done using T/S folds. The ship is not capable. The damage would give less than no chance of making a jump successfully,” it said, almost, it seemed, with glee.

  “So we’re still screwed!” Sylvia said.

  Mary looked like she wanted to cry. Bill was sullen.

  “I am sorry all, I never thought to ask it about a T/S jump. I just assumed.”

  “None of us did,” Sylvia said.

  “Comp, best time to get in range through normal space?” I asked

  “If F/F is added in for maximum utilization and with one engine, 3.4 years should put us in tight beam contact.

  “I am picking up very weak broadband transmissions in violation of that order, by the way,” it said.

  “Any way we go, we are in trouble. We cannot last that long. This pile of junk is ready to fall apart if someone farts too hard,” Sylvia said.

  Bill caught it. “Wait! Comp, you said weak broadband pickup? Where from?” he asked.

  “The star system you see from the port window, 1.7 million miles away, the second planet is emitting mixed, weak signals.”

  We had only recently imposed the no broadband, to stop the HH from finding us.

  I asked, “Any reference to that system in memory?”

  “There is one that matches the distance from old Earth,” it said.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Camelot,” was its single bombshell reply.

  Chasing a Myth

  “You mean the Myth?” Mary asked.

  “Myths don’t put a book in a trashed out ship and send it into space with a four page math problem that gave us the stars,” I told her.

  “You know they made it up at NASA for the extra funding.” That was Bill’s contribution.

  “Computer, bring up the last page of the attachment to the We Were Legends book and enhance please?” I asked.

  Up came the famous page. “Confirm the analysis done by non-NASA scientists on this document.”

  “Jake Spoonbill positively identified from NASA records. Remaining signatures unknown, but not believed mechanical. Paper composition of unknown origin and production process. It was almost duplicated later, but found to be prohibitively expensive. Ink used is 100% organic of unknown plant origin. End of report.”

  “That was an independent study, one of many. No Bill, Camelot is real, but no definitive location was ever given in the book. Just the 47.2 Mil Light years and an eighth degree off the elliptic plane which happens to be almost where we are,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t that be a kick?” Sylvia said. “A planet ran by naked Amazon women with bows and swords.”

  “Like you, Sylvia, I am a one at a time thank you guy, and you know it,” I said.

  “Does not mean you cannot look, hundreds of firm young breasts bouncing in the sun as they march. Think of it, Bill,” Mary said.

  We both failed the test, and the girls laughed.

  “Comp, can we get to Camelot in a reasonable time?” I asked.

  “If you can get the ship far enough away from all the iron to allow separating the Grav fields, and we find a descent rider, two weeks to orbit entry,” it said.

  Bill said something from some ancient space show. “Make it so, Number One.”

  “Engage!” I added. Part of too much free time in space.

  The comp did not care. Attitude jets kicked here and there and got us pointed in the right direction.

  “F/F coming on line in five minutes. Total time estimated at sixty-five minutes to reach our maximum sustainable thrust.

  The five minutes went by in a few hours. It seemed like it anyway. We felt the little shove, we were moving. We were actually under power and headed somewhere.

  We remained strapped in. The F/F was just starting; we had to get up to a decent speed as the comp fed more and more power from the F/F reaction into the converters. Slowly the external cam showed the belt moving away inch by inch, foot by foot. We felt a sense of acceleration pressure in our chairs.

  Every minute someone would ask the comp, “how much longer?” I think it actually slowed down time. After what seemed a few more hours it turned out twenty minutes had went by. We were under continued thrust and the individual asteroids were blending into a belt.

  The comp responded to Bill’s latest request, “Twenty-three minutes in. F/F is holding at 99.913%.” I remember that 100% was called a runaway or something.

  “Hull integrity change due to acceleration?” Sylvia asked.

  “Noted, 0.12% compression increase. All patches and seams holding,” it said.

  “Suggest waiting until maximum F/F power is attained before we pressurize any more,” Sylvia suggested.

  “Already planned that,” I said to the others.

  Time crawled. I think we were near the maximum power output when there was a huge thrust and we were all slammed deep in the flight chairs. The whole ship shook and I heard air hissing.

  My console showed the F/F was no longer producing power.

  “Sylvia! What happened?” I asked.

  “Give me a second damn it, I got things to look at,” she said.

  About a minute later she said, “We blew a gasket.”

  “I know, I heard the air leak,” I said.

  “No, the F/F blew a gasket. The whole back blew out and all the reaction mass went poof, pow!” She emphasized the pow with her hands.

  “The good news is we got a huge bump in the ass, speed wise,” she said. “The bad news is it is as fast as we are going to get.” She read her console. “I have both robots on the way to repair the holes and check for leaks. Give me thirty minutes until we can try to pressurize. Think about it, even NASA never dreamed these tubs would take the kind of damage this one has and still move. They would be so full of themselves!”

  “Grav motor?” I asked.

  “Look, A Fission/Fusion reactor went nova under our ass and we are still here to talk about it. Who cares about the grav motor?” Bill asked.

  “I do, we are not heading in the right direction now. No grav motor, we’ll miss the system completely.” I looked around, “Just thought I’d point that out.”

  Sylvia said, “On it. I will need to wait on one of the bots to get back that way.”

  The robots patched up the hull again and pressurization to twice standard held, so after it was back to normal we stripped the suits. On the visual the ship was actually bent now at the area in front of the engines.

&nb
sp; I saw the robot’s cam view of the back of the last motor; all but one inboard vectoring tube were blown off. Inboard and outboard were assigned from the crew hatch position looking toward the nose, as was up and down.

  The term ‘grav rider’ is a misnomer. NASA just called them Engine, 2ea, X-31. They did pick up the weakest gravity signal and if they were already spun up, could follow the grav field it rode. In a strong field they could tap it for some power. The monopole engine was also enclosed, a basic rocket motor in that any gases that burned could be used. I didn’t understand all the theories, but it did work and was strongly based on some research of monopoles found way back in the earliest years of the twenty-first century. Some German college was credited with the discovery. I only remembered it now because I missed it on an exam at the Academy.

  Given enough time, with grav fields and a small spin up, the grav motors could get you off a planet, depending on the planet’s gravity, but possible. Add any type of rocket fuel and you could zoom all over. Using the F/F on a planet’s surface to create reaction mass was still considered a deadly sin. Maybe because of what just happened I could see where their fears might be justified.

  Sylvia was running all sorts of tests. “Impellers are okay. One operational vector tube, comp says not enough vectoring for grav riding, even with attitude jets. We will skip across all the ones we need.”

  It was Mary who saved the day. “We are trying to go to Camelot, right?”

  “If that is it, yes,” Sylvia told her.

  “Remember in his book? He had one robot and no vectors and did something to steer it. I remember, but not what.”

  “Bingo!” Sylvia said. “A rudder! He used the robot as a rudder, and we got two.”

  The rest of the day was spent going through all the repair gear and getting a robot to burn off the torn-apart motor and vector casings.

  Sylvia had the robots in place at the rear; each had a large panel. Since we weren’t going into atmosphere it wasn’t necessary to weld anything in place.

  “One up top, one on the outboard side. Both clamped down tight. With 360 degrees of motion they should be able to simulate the other vector tubes enough to maybe get us on a field wave,” Sylvia said.

  “Turn it over to the comp for control and see if it can do anything with it,” I told her.

  “No, wait,” Bill said. “Get into the comp code and edit out the missing vectors first or it will try to loop the code to do something that isn’t there.”

  “True, but it learns on its own,” Mary said.

  “How many waves from here to there are usable? How many can it learn from? I say do the code to speed it up.” He was our crypto, radio and Intel guy. We all wore many hats.

  Sylvia modified the code. “Computer, train mode Charlie, Robot #1 and #2. Vector control, acknowledge,” Bill said.

  The computer confirmed it was pointing to the correct memory stacks and programming code.

  For the next three hours we felt slight changes of direction, then two in the same direction with hard attitude jet action as well.

  “Course corrections made, but we missed three waves so far. It looks good if we get a couple more.” Bill was watching readouts intently.

  Everyone perked up.

  “Time to orbit?” Bill asked the computer.

  “Sixteen to twenty days depending on the strength of waves closer in to system,” it reported.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest we go back to twelve hour shifts. Whose turn in the sack?” I asked.

  Sylvia said, “We were in last, Mary and Bill’s.”

  “Oh well, done. See you guys in twelve,” I said, and it was not long before they were gone.

  Sylvia came over and whispered, “We don’t have to wait for the sack to celebrate, you know,” and she winked.

  I whispered back, “Love to, but this pile of junk is held together with spit and used band-aids. I think we would be better served to stay on top of it.” I gave her a lovesick puppy look.

  She made a sour face, and then smiled.

  Turns out, I was right. With only the one motor when we did lock on a wave, we kept skewing sideways and the comp was using a lot of gas in attitude jetting. To stop it I would kill the remaining engine thrust and coast for long periods. At the end of our shift I told Bill and he said he’d reprogram it to coast or reduce acceleration to minimize gas losses. He finally set the robots to vector the thrust counter to the pull enough we could slowly increase thrust without using the jets. We weren’t trying to get there faster, we were turned and trying to slow down. The kick in the ass was quite substantial, speed wise.

  Sylvia and I hit the sack. She had found her old vigorous, devil be damned style. I felt sad.

  Time slipped by. Eight days later Sylvia teared up on me. I had never seen her do it before.

  “I can’t. I am sorry, I can’t!” She held me tight, like a death grip.

  “Can’t what?” I asked.

  “I can’t pretend any more. That I don’t care, feel, or want. Until all this happened, I could pretend I didn’t give a damn. I don’t know, I see life can be really short and I already missed so much. I feel I did any way.” She watched my eyes. I just leaned forward a hair and kissed her on the cheek. We were still getting in the sack.

  “Welcome to the real world, Sylvia.” I stared at her a bit. “I love you, you have known it for a long time, but you could never love back. You had a heart that was ice.”

  “I didn’t always, you know. My first love showed me off, put me on a pedestal. I would have killed for him! Instead, I became his ‘trading’ material for what he wanted. Always he promised it would all change. He was almost to the top, we would be together forever. At fifteen, I believed him. He was twenty-three and on the way up. When I was seventeen, he was at the top and gone. He told me bye, thanks for the ride.” She sobbed a little. “I never told anyone. I became like him, hard as nails, uncaring. I started college, but hadn’t met you yet. I eventually sacked with a guy that was higher up—it took a lot of work, but I got him fired, I destroyed him! He knew who did it, he knew why too. All the way to the bottom of the building he lived in. For thirty floors after he jumped he had time to regret it before, before he went splat. And I loved it!”

  I had heard her story, not of her, but other men and women, used, abused, thrown away like old clothing. It was one of the reasons our GC went to the stars, to leave behind that world. We brought parts of it to New Earth with us, like General Paddock.

  I hugged and kissed her and said, “I have no top to rise to, and I love you. I never wanted to share you with anyone, but you are your own person. We went through this when you left the last time.”

  “I know. I had to leave, don’t you see? I had started to feel again, well, as I do now. Like I love you, but I can’t. I swore I’d never be a fool again.” She sobbed some more.

  I kissed her face, her cheek, and her lips. Slow and tender. Soft jazz played in the background and finally we slept. I woke and she was just lying there and watching. She put her hand up, moved a few of my hairs out of my eyes, and smiled. Gave me a fierce hug and whispered, soft and low, “I’m a fool, I love you too.”

  We spent most of the hours talking. I was lying there and she was just staring at nothing in particular when Mary was heard to say, “Something’s different with them.”

  Bill said, “Yeah.”

  Sylvia smiled a big smile.

  Mary said, “Yes, I wish you were a little more, err, attentive sometimes.”

  We both started laughing softly.

  Bill said, “First, you say I am too horny, now you say I am inattentive? No pleasing you?”

  “Guess not. As a woman, I am allowed to change my mind,” she said.

  Sylvia mouthed, “I love you.”

  “I love you too.” It was time for shift change.

  After they left and we settled into checking the readouts, I think twenty minutes went by when I heard Mary tell Bill, “Not so rough. Like they did, slow
and easy. Enjoy it!”

  We looked at each other and burst out in a laugh and Bill hollered at me, “It is your damn fault! I was happy just being horny, and now you bring stupid love into it! Grrr.” He yelped when Mary slapped him.

  All was quiet for a long time. “Well?” Mary asked.

  “Well what?” Bill replied. ‘Slap’. “Oww. Okay, it was different. I enjoyed it, happy?”

  Mary said, “Nope, not yet I’m not. Ride cowboy, ride.”

  We really had a hard time controlling ourselves.

  At shift change it was clear neither had much sleep. Bill had his head down as he said, “It’s all your freakin’ fault, you know. I hate you!” But he wasn’t angry.

  Mary whispered to Sylvia, “If we had gravity, I’d be waddling like a duck. Most fun I have had since my wedding night with my real husband, before he died.” She winked. “I think I got him hooked, though.”

  I liked Mary, always had. She said, “You two the real item now? I sense a major change in our block of ice here,” looking at Sylvia.

  Sylvia smiled, “Yup, his hot generator melted my heart all to slush, again. Took three hookups for him to do it, but it is done. I ran the other times, and would have here, but no place to go, and I got cornered.”

  I remembered. We dated for six months in college on Earth before she blew up and left; no reason, poof, gone. Then I heard she was going to be on a GC ship so I signed up too. We hooked up again on New Earth but it only lasted three months. I finally hooked up with the captain because she was cute and had a mutual space goal. Same reason 90% of us did. Sylvia and I wound up crewing the same ship, but with different partners. Destiny changed that and here we were. Now I knew the reason, and am glad I stuck around.

  Mary said, “You’ll like it a lot better than having the rep of being more frigid than a witch’s tit.”

  Sylvia glared at me. “I wasn’t thought of that badly, was I?”

  Mary said, “Don’t know about the guys, a lot of them wanted you in bed, but the women said space was hot blooded compared to you.”

  I nodded. “True, but you are gorgeous, even as an ice cube!”