“It’s about time, Ornish. I was beginning to think you’d gone AWOL. Are you having a problem down there, or did you just plan to hang around for a while and get stoned?”
“I’ve got a problem, ma’am.” The shuttle shuddered and began to lift with agonizing slowness. “The vulking Prezzies stuffed the shuttle full of junk from the vault.”
“Artifacts!” came a chorus behind me.
“I had to hold their data at gunpoint to get them to board. Now we’re so overloaded we can barely move.”
“Sounds like you have your hands full,” she commented with a marked lack of sympathy. “I’ll stop being a distraction. See you when you get up here.” With that she broke the connection, leaving me staring at a dead screen.
“Thanks for all your help,” I growled, searching my boards for some clue as to how to get out of this predicament. Then I looked again, hoping there was something I missed. No such luck.
Less than four minutes remained until impact, we were less than a hundred meters up, and while our rate of ascent might have made an arthritic vulture carrying off a dead heifer proud, all it was giving me was a sour, sinking feeling that my next flight would be on angel’s wings.
My fingers did a fast, sweaty flamenco, asking the shuttle’s computer a dozen questions.
I started getting answers I didn’t really want to hear. The shockwaves impact was going to cause would be far nastier than the shuttle’s shields and hull could withstand. To survive them, we had to be almost halfway around the planet or pretty much clear of the atmosphere. The fastest way to clear air was to go straight up—right toward the oncoming Rocks of Doom—and our present rate of climb just wasn’t fast enough to get us to vacuum in time. I compromised, peeling us off at a slight angle so we weren’t on a head-on heading.
The only thing in our favor was that escape velocity wasn’t a problem for the shuttle since it used gravitic propulsion. You just keep negating gravity until there isn’t any more. It was getting clear of that shockwave which was our deadline. One we were going to miss by a considerable margin.
Back in the Academy simulators we called a situation like this a phillips head, so named because no matter what you did, you were completely screwed and in the crapper.
What we needed was more acceleration. The gravgrid under the shuttle was running at redline. I had the small maneuvering thrusters running at full. While making the SOBs who had gotten us into the mess get out to push might have made me feel better, that wouldn’t help either. The only propulsion system not running flat out was the other gravgrid on top of the shuttle.
Gravitic propulsion needs either a gravity field or at least a reasonable amount of mass to either react against or pull toward, the amount of lift and delta V constrained by several factors: the class and power rating of craft’s systems; the mass of the craft itself; the mass and gravitational pull of the bodies you are heading to and/or from, and the distance to those bodies. Much complex math here, but of a kind the shuttle knew how to do.
In other words, to use the topgrid I needed something above us to hook onto. So I ran some numbers.
Another dead end. K’leven’s moon was too far away to add all that much lift. The Gibbon was closer and suffci-iently massy, but the geometry sucked. Heading toward her would force me to take a longer flight path through more atmosphere, and we’d still be in air thick enough that the odds of the shockwave smutching us were seventy to thirty.
On our present course the odds were seventy-two to sixty-eight. So I loaded the course correction to veer us off toward the Gibbon and gain us that pointless increment of lift.
Just as my finger touched the surface of the pad which would initiate the change I froze. It was another case of inspiration striking, only this time it hit like a ten-ton gumball. I let out a strangled sound of dismay at the insane idea which had just stepped out onto the front of my brain, looked me in the inner eye, grinned and said, hey sailor, what do you think of ME?
“Are you all right, son?” Dr. Xan called from behind me.
I ignored him, moving my hands and preparing to run the numbers on the plan my possibly snapped mind had just given me.
A crazed chuckle rose up out of some deep and strange place inside me. “To hell with it,” I said, still cackling dementedly as I laid in the new instructions and initiated them.
The overloaded shuttle shied onto its new vector, moaning in protest. Noticeable acceleration settled over us as the topgrid sank its ethereal hooks into those oncoming rocks and began hauling us right toward them in a game of megalithic chicken.
Now I was getting a readout that was less than encouragingly labeled TIME TO IMPACT. It started at just over three minutes, and the numbers were changing faster than realtime because the closer we came to those stony spitballs, the more acceleration I could wring from them. I watched them flicker madly, sweat trickling down my sides.
When less than thirty seconds remained until we occupied the same space as those baby mountains I put my hand over the pad which would initiate our final, but hopefully not final course correction.
“Better hang on—” I called to my passengers. Ten seconds left.
“—This just might—” Five seconds. The slap of a pad unlocked the topgrid from the Stones of Death, stood the shuttle nearly on its side and latched onto the Gibbon.
“—Get a little—” A fiery chunk of K’leven’s moon, the size of Gagarin Hall back at the Academy, roared by us with less than five hundred meters to spare. The shuttle bucked as the pressure wave its passing created hit us, but that too added another bit of acceleration.
“—Rough!” One screen tracked the monster buckshot on its flaming descent. The shields were on full, and while we had reached the uppermost edges of the atmosphere, we still weren’t completely clear of it. The rocks’ kamikaze death-dive ended in a blinding blue-white light so sudden and so bright some of it made it through the shuttle’s luma-reactive ports.
The wait for the Shockwave seemed to take an eternity, one I spent pounding on the arms of my chair and going, “Come on baby, just a little faster, you can do it, just a little farther—”
When the wave front hit it was like a massive hand had come up under us and flung us like a shotput. My boards erupted with dire warnings and reports of systems failure.
The wonder of it all was that I was still alive to deal with them.
Just about an hour later I was still sitting in the shuttle’s cockpit. The boards were quiet, and there was no sense of motion. That was because it was snugged safely into its bay aboard the Gibbon.
My passengers had already debarked. They had interrupted their heated discussion as to whether the vault might have survived (it was one to one with four abstentions), and whether there might be well-hidden military emplacements the Spyter had missed worth investigating on K’leven’s moon, to each thank me for saving their artifacts and data—and by the way, their lives too. Clotilde slapped a vigorous liplock on me, then whispered that if I came by her quarters later I might just be given a proper hero’s reward.
I just sat there in the silence. My plan was to get up and leave the shuttle once I stopped shaking. I had high hopes that would happen before my thirtieth birthday, which was a mere four years away.
Captain Chandaveda materialized beside me on her bare and soundless feet. For once she didn’t startle me. My nervous system was beyond such responses.
“Shutdown checkout going a little slow, Ornish?” she asked, one eyebrow arched in inquiry.