“Are you sure you don’t want to come along?” I asked him. “We can fight this. Eventually you’ll die of natural causes, if nothing else, and then we can all three go to Alpha Centauri.”
“Hah,” he said. “And by then the damned UN will have beat us to it and stolen all our thunder. No, you’ve probably got a day, maybe two at the outside, before they impound your ship again on some other trumped-up charge and ground you for good. So get it refueled and ready to fly today. They won’t let me within a mile of the Spook, so I’ll just have to see you off here, and you’re going to have to make the trip on your own.”
I couldn’t believe that he would voluntarily stay behind, not even considering what it would cost him to go. But he sounded sincere, and I remembered his earlier reluctance to take that final, irrevocable step.
“Good luck,” he said, holding out his hand.
“Well,” I said, reaching out with my own, “what can I say? We’ll miss you.”
We shook, and his grip was strong enough to press into my hand a ways. When he withdrew, I felt something left behind inside my palm.
He winked. “See you later,” he said. He shook Tilbey’s hand, too, but if he left anything there, Tilbey didn’t let on.
Later, back on board the Spook, I fished his note out of my palm. It wasn’t much, just a line scrawled quickly on the torn-off corner of a napkin: “8:15, my place. Bring the ship.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I asked Tilbey, showing him the note. “We can’t dock the Spook with Freeport.”
He rubbed his chin in thought—an old habit from the days when he’d had a chin substantial enough to rub. “No,” he said, at last, “but we can do something almost as good.”
We had the tritium tanks topped off by 6:00, and had downloaded all the library and video information our computer could hold by 7:00. At 8:00 we warmed up the engines and slotted ourselves into our body cages. And at 8:10 the radio beeped for attention.
It was Liam. “Thought I’d call and wish you guys a good trip,” he said. “You about ready to go?”
“Pretty close,” I answered. “Are you, uh…”
“Open channel,” he reminded me. “But yeah, I’m watching from my window. I expect to see a pretty impressive flash when you light the drive.”
“Well, we’re ready any time you are,” I said.
I could hear him breathing hard. “Give me a minute.”
“Roger.”
But a moment later another voice said, “This is Freeport traffic control. You are not cleared for departure. Power down your engines immediately.
“Under what authority?” I asked.
“United Nations Security Council,” he replied.
“Roger,” I said, putting as much reluctance into my voice as I could muster. “Powering down.” And I even said, “Computer, take engines off-line.”
The command phrase wasn’t “Computer,” but only Tilbey and Liam and I knew that.
“Go,” Liam said.
“Command, execute,” I said, and the course I’d already programmed into it engaged. Fifty gs for six seconds, a hellishly fast spin-around under high-power attitude thrusters, and fifty gs for another six seconds brought us to a stop twenty feet from Freeport’s central hub—just outside Liam’s bubble-shaped condo that stuck out from its central stalk like one grape in a bunch of them.
“Good-bye, cruel world,” Liam said. He laughed maniacally, there was a loud bang over the radio, and big curved glass shards flew past the ship. He’d blown up his entire condo.
And a few seconds later a manshaped patch of fog swept past. It made a grab for the open framework of the ship, but missed.
“There he is,” I said. “Command, track and match velocity with object in screen sector—” I read the edges of the grid in the heads-up display “—beta-seven.”
The ship surged away from Freeport and caught up with the ghost, and this time he was able to grab hold and pull himself aboard. “Watch out for the coils!” I said as he positioned himself inside the third body cage, but he couldn’t hear me until he pulled on the throat collar and stuck the mastoid phone into his jaw. He’d replaced enough coils to know to stay clear, though.
He reached forward and punched the manual control that turned on his restraint field, and said aloud his first words since the explosion: “Step on it.”
“Command, full speed straight ahead,” I said, and Freeport dwindled to a speck behind us within seconds.
“Welcome aboard,” Tilbey said.
“Thanks,” said Liam. “Man, this feels strange.”
“Are you OK?” I asked, suddenly concerned that something had gone wrong with the interface.
“I’m fine,” he said. “This is the first time in thirty years that I haven’t hurt somewhere, that’s all.” Then he laughed, a long, throaty laugh that went on and on.
“What’s so funny?” Tilbey finally asked when he’d settled down a bit.
“Everything is,” Liam said. “But my nephew in particular. He inherits my condo. Every blessed shard of it. I’d love to see his face when he learns that he’s got to clean up the debris.”
Editor’s Note: This story is a sequel to “Unfinished Business” (October 1996), “The Spectral Stardrive” (November 1996), and “Holiday Spirits” (January 1997).