“I know that. How long will it take you to figure it out?” I asked.
“Pardon me, sir?”
I looked at him squarely. “You have nominated yourself to figure out this interface and fly this thing. I’ll assist you.”
“Colonel?” Gorski sputtered. “Let’s just set up a new autopilot.”
“No can do. We lost our factories. I don’t have spare brainboxes floating around.”
Gorski’s shock changed on his face to an expression of near panic. “Major Welter was a gifted pilot. I flunked my first driver’s test in high school.”
“You are also the only one who watched him do it. And you understand machines.”
“But sir-”
“I bet you were a gamer back in college, before all this shit started, weren’t you?”
“Uh, yes sir, but-”
“You’ve played flight sims. You’ve figured out a hundred interfaces. This isn’t much worse than flying a helicopter, Gorski. We are in space, man! There’s nothing out here to hit, really. Besides, I’ll be helping you.”
Gorski nodded slowly. He looked terrified. I clapped him on the back and forced him to smile weakly. “Great sir,” he said.
“Good,” I said, “and thanks for volunteering. What do we tap first to get it to stop and turn around?”
Gorski and I worked on the screen for the next ten minutes. I decided at last we just had to go for it. We pressed a half-dozen surfaces at once. I had to wonder how Welter had managed to get anywhere alone. The man must have had his knees up to touch this screen. Gorski explained he had seen him working on multi-contact programs built into the interface.
“You mean it has configurable hot-keys?” I asked. “Can we set up our own?”
“It’s not that simple,” Gorski said. “We don’t even know the sequences. We have to get them down first before we can encode them.”
“Right,” I said. “Let’s do this.”
“I really am not sure this is the correct sequence.”
“I’m not going to sue you if you frig this up,” I assured him. “The firing squad is more my style.”
“Thanks a lot, sir.”
“Now, go!” I said. We reached out with both hands each and put them on the board. The ship lurched sickeningly under my feet.
“I think we are accelerating,” Gorski said. “The red disk sir-”
“I’m pressing the red disk!”
“No, press the bottom portion, along the rim.”
I moved my hand, and stumbled forward, almost putting my face into the control board. A hand snapped out and grabbed each of us from behind. I glanced back. It was Sandra. I would have stared in disbelief if I had had the time, but I didn’t. I thought to myself that if I ever got her back into the sack it was going to be-daunting.
The ship was braking now. A low, whirring sound came from the engines, which were thrumming with power. This ship seemed in better shape than the last one. I recalled we’d done some damage to the power systems in the last ship and had never gotten her up to full speed-which was one of the reasons the enemy cruisers had caught up with us.
“Should we try a turn?” I asked.
Gorski shook his head. His eyes were wide, and he strained with effort to keep his fingers pressing the big board in exactly the right configuration. “You can’t really turn in space, you can just curve. Let’s get her stopped, do a slow one-eighty and fly back. We might be able to hit the ring that way without having to replot our course. I don’t understand the course-setting controls yet. I only know how to aim the ship and apply thrust.”
I grunted unhappily at this news. I decided braking was taking too long. We stopped applying the forward brake-jets and instead managed to turn the ship around. This was a harsh moment, as it took us two full revolutions before we had ourselves aiming back the way we had come. I was heeling over, struggling to keep on my feet as we spun. I recalled doing things like this back in high school parking lots as a kid.
Finally, we got the ship’s main engines headed in the direction we wanted. We were able to apply maximum thrust and use the primary engines for braking. Every hour that passed, more of my marines were running out of air and heat back in the Helios system. I wanted to save every last man I could.
After braking for more than an hour, we began slowly heading the other way.
“How long do we have before we reach the ring?” I asked.
“At this acceleration rate,” said a female voice behind me, “I’d estimate we have just over ninety minutes to go, Colonel.”
I chanced a glance over my shoulder in surprise. There was Major Sarin. I recognized her voice, but hadn’t believed it for a moment. I saw she was glaring at me. Sandra was still there-she was glaring too.
“The magic of nanites!” I said, with a slightly nervous laugh. “Good to see you back on duty, Major.” I turned my back upon these two women only because I had to. I returned my attention to the impossible Macro control systems. I felt like I was playing twister while pissed off people stood behind me and contemplated kicking me in the rear.
“Good to be here,” Sarin said in a sour voice.
“Let’s lock this thing and take a break from the controls, Gorski,” I said.
He gave me a dirty grin. “Got somewhere else to be, Colonel?” he asked.
I knew right then that everyone on the ship knew the whole story. How could they not? They knew about the kiss-and the thumping Sandra had given Jasmine after the kiss-the whole thing. I felt a hot, embarrassed flush coming up my neck. Soon, my cheeks were burning. I’d never been in the middle of a scandal before. I didn’t like the sensation.
39
After we had the controls locked and had verified we were on course for the ring back to Helios, I had a quick strategy session with Gorski. The two women watched us closely. They both had their arms crossed and refused to look at each other. I didn’t know much about women, but I knew this was a bad sign. Instead of eyeing one another they were both eyeing me with venom. I found myself desperately wishing we hadn’t wiped out the last of our booze supplies long ago.
“We can’t just blast our way through the ring again,” Gorski was saying. “We have to assume there are explosives there, waiting for us.”
It took me a second to tear my eyes away from the two tail-lashing women and turn my attention back to Gorski. “Yeah,” I said. “There may be more mines.”
“There almost have to be more,” he said. “It wouldn’t make sense otherwise. We ran through a ten-mile wide ring, and hit two or three of them. There must be a large number of mines in a field there, waiting for anything that comes through like a net.”
We’d determined by this time that the ship had indeed run into mines. I’d wondered if the Macros had done it themselves in an attempt to blow us off the hull, but that simply didn’t make sense. They hadn’t needed to blast the nose off their own ship to attack us.
“Okay, so we are flying into a minefield, most likely one put up by the Worms,” I said. “Can’t we just fly through the same exact spot?”
“We can’t be sure exactly where that point was, we weren’t in control of the ship’s navigation at that point. Also, the mines may have shifted. Even more importantly, we aren’t in precise control of this vessel yet.”
I nodded. I had to agree with him there. Every time we touched the controls, everyone onboard got sick. “We have no choice then,” I said. “We’ll slow down as we approach the field. We’ll nose our way through, blowing the mines out of the way with our rifles if we have to. I’ll see if I can rig up a few auto laser turrets with some marine rifles and spare brainboxes. If we come into the field slowly enough, we can shoot the mines down.”
“Sir, there’s a few more considerations,” Major Sarin said.
I looked at her. Her expression had softened somewhat, as she became concerned for the lives of the crew, rather than just being angry. I welcomed the change. I needed my staff functioning again. I knew I’d brought this all on myself. My first mistake had been bringing Sandra onto the bridge staff-no, it went further back than that. I shouldn’t have brought her on the mission at all. It was madness to do so. Unprofessional. But my outfit was anything but pro. We were gifted amateurs at best.