He could envision the ground crew driving up the lift and shortly the V-102 was being hoisted up onto it. He could feel the slow-moving vehicle trudging him over to the shuttlecraft and then the V-102 being lifted up into the cradle.
He switched on his communication screen. Lieutenant Risseeuw was piloting the shuttle. “Cheers, Jan,” Don said, “what spins?”
Jan Risseeuw said, “Hi, Don. Heard you’ve had trouble the last few patrols.”
“Yeah,” Don said, keeping his voice glum. “A regular jinx. If I don’t snap out of this, they’ll fire me and I’ll have to take a job being a Tri-Di star, or something.”
“Ha,” die other said. “All set down there?”
“Take her away,” Don said.
He knew damn good and well that Jan, as much so as his sergeant mechanic, knew as did every pilot on the base that Don Mathers was running scared, aborting patrol after patrol. And nobody could possibly like it. Fellow pilots tried to take care of their own, but the Space Service just wasn’t large enough to run sufficient patrols. More spacecraft were being poured into the skies, but there still weren’t enough. When Don Mathers was taking his three weeks leave of absence, after each patrol, his sector was empty. Command tried to cover by having his adjoining sectors manned during that period, in the same way as when he was on patrol while the adjoining pilots were on leave; but it still left a hole. And particularly did it leave a hole when a One Man Scout returned from a supposed three week patrol in just several days.
But that wasn’t his worry now.
Jan lifted and Don Mathers sunk back into his acceleration chair. This was the part he, and every other pilot, particularly hated, the initial lift into space. Among other things, this was where most of the danger was. If you were going to blow, four times out of five it was when you were lifting off, getting into initial orbit.
As always, they went up fast, out into the zone where it was safe for him to activate his nuclear engines. Out where Earth was no longer in danger, even if he blew.
Don said into the screen, “How’s Greta?”
“She’s all right,” Jan told him. “Going to drop her kid in about two weeks.”
“How many does that make?”
“Four.”
“Fifty years ago they could have jailed you.”
“That was before the Kradens. Now we need every human being we can get. When this planetary engineering really gets under way, we can populate Luna, Mars, and the Jupiter satellites, maybe even some of the others.”
“That’s the dream,” Don said. “Read the other day that they’ve located several asteroids that are solid ice. What they want to do is chivy them over and drop them onto Mars to melt”
“Sounds pretty far out. I’d hate to be under it when one of them dropped. But if they could swing it, it’d be something. I suppose you’d have as much water as a good-sized lake.”
Don said, “I was pretty well holed up this last three weeks. Anything new happened during that tune?”
“Not much. Marty Cantone reported he saw a Kraden over in his sector. Just a quick spotting and then it was gone.”
“Did he?”
Don could hear the other’s yawn. “Naw. When he got in, he was shaking with cafard. That boy ought to take the psych treatment.”
Don said carefully, “I ran into a guy the other day, a technician on the Luna radio telescopes, who claims there aren’t any Kradens. His theory is that they came that one time, half a century ago, found we were hostile, and took off and haven’t returned.”
Jan grunted. “He might be right. I’ve never spotted one of the bastards.”
“How could you, in a shuttle?”
Jan said, “I was in the Two Man Scouts for a couple of years. They pulled me out. Too susceptible to space cafard. They decided that not even a psych job would help for any length of time. Well, here we are, Don. Ready for the drop?”
“All set. See you, Jan. Give my regards to Greta.”
“Luck,” the shuttle pilot said.
Don could feel his craft falling away. For the moment, he was in free fall. His practiced hands darted about the cockpit, firing up his nuclear engines.
Under way, he turned to his navigation, flicking this, touching that, checking dials and gauges, getting the coordinates of his sector A22-K223 into the computer. He flicked his acceleration over to 2 Gs and felt himself pressed back into the acceleration chair.
Don Mathers was an old hand. He reached into his kit and brought forth a vacuum bottle. It supposedly contained fruit juice, and didn’t. He took a deep swig from it and then turned to his mini-tapes and selected one, a revival of an old-old two dimensional movie, Gone With the Wind and relaxed. He enjoyed the old films, totally unbelievable though they were.
It was a far cry from the early days of the space age when with rocket engines you lifted off from Earth and headed for, say, Luna. You reached your escape velocity and from then on, until it was time to start braking, you coasted. No more, with the coming of nuclear powered engines. Now you could continue to accelerate until you reached almost to your destination. Aside from the speed, you also avoided the misery of free fall. Once arrived in his sector, he’d drop it down to one G. It was a bit on the complicated side, but the double domes had worked it out over the years.
Maximilian Rostoff had evidently been a space pilot in his youth. When he and Demming had spotted the drifting Kraden derelict he had not only gotten a fix on it but had determined its course and speed and now Don had little difficulty in locating the Miro Class cruiser.
And there it was all right, drifting comparatively slowly, inertia maintaining the speed that it must have been under when it was hit and the crew killed.
He had never seen a Kraden spaceship before, though, like every other cadet, when he was at the Space Academy he had pored over the photographs and video-tapes taken during the initial battle between the Kradens and Earthmen. There could be no doubt of its extraterrestrial origin. Earth spaceships, even the Monitors which were assembled in space, were still built, for unknown reasons so far as he was concerned, to resemble overgrown torpedoes. The Kradens were built every which way and sometimes basically resembled a box.
The Miro Class cruisers looked more or less like a rectangular box. The only manner in which you could tell if they were coming or going was that there was a control area in the prow, a blister. Or, at least, that’s what the Earthling technicians had decided it was, and were probably wrong, Don thought.
He braked to the speed of the other ship and then used his directional jets to circle it. It was even larger than an Earth Monitor and must have been one hell of a fighting machine in its day. If it had been a warcraft. According to Thor Bjornsen, it might have been a colonizing ship, or a merchantman.
Had he done a more thorough job of his patrol, the last time—hell, for the last half dozen times—he should have stumbled upon it himself. In actuality, largely he had kept himself doped up on soma during those few days he had remained in space, keeping himself only alert enough to be able to make his routine reports. Anything to fight off the space cafard.
He circled it again. If he had spotted it on his last patrol there was no doubt that he would have at first reported it as an active enemy cruiser. Demming and Rostoff had been right. The Kraden ship looked untouched by battle.
That is, if you approached it from starboard and slightly abaft the beam. From that angle, in particular, it looked untouched.
Demming and Rostoff had mentioned going inside and finding repulsive looking alien corpses. On the face of it, it had probably been Rostoff alone who made the spacewalk between the automated space yacht they were in and the extraterrestrial ship. Demming couldn’t have gotten into a spacesuit, even had he wanted to. And even though he’d had constructed a special one to fit his bulk, Don doubted that the fat slob would have exerted himself to that point—no matter what the potential profitable possibilities.