But under six gravities, and completely immersed in a medium much denser than water, a speed of seventy kilometers an hour is more than acceptable.
Since I wasn’t foresighted enough to stow a bubble generator on board Beagle for dealing with laminar-turbulent-flow interface problems, this is the fastest I can go in this cytoplasm without running into cavitation trouble…
Roughly seventy kilometers an hour, but from that I have to subtract the thirty kilometers an hour that the gel current’s moving. Curiously, the gel continues to flow at a steady rate even as I steer into narrower and narrower branches. What would Bernoulli say? Forty kilometers an hour, net, and I still don’t know where I’m going.
But I’m an optimist. I unequivocally expect to arrive somewhere or other before this bug’s powerful enzymes digest the Juhungan bioship with my two former employees inside it.
Or at least before the eighth intelligent race with the technological capability for faster-than-light travel appears in the galaxy…
And just when I’m giving in to these melancholic reflections, the magnetometer alarm rings.
I’d love to shout, “Eureka!” But I control myself, because I’m no Archimedes.
Who said it was impossible? I’ve found the needle in the haystack.
Or at least I have a rough idea of where in the haystack it is.
Because localizing a few dozen kilos of metal, which is to say, all the magnetic material contained in the Juhungan bioship where Enti Kmusa and An-Mhaly are trapped, is still very different from being able to get there.
According to this ultrasensitive instrument, the girls and their ship are barely three hundred meters from here—but they might as well be in another galaxy. Between me and them lies nothing but sol-phase cytoplasm. And I’ve already learned how hard it is to force my way through that living flan.
For a second, despair overcomes me; I’m still drawing closer, and less than half a minute from now I’ll be as close as I can get to where they are, after which I’ll start moving away…
With them so close, could I really resign myself to not being able to…?
No way.
I’m not moving from this spot, to start with.
I deploy an anchor, a sort of metal claw on one end of a cable, which shoots out and sinks deep into the sol. It’ll stop me from moving till I can figure out how to get to Enti and An, who are now barely a hundred fifty meters from me…
Till I think of something…
It’s unfair. Have I swum so far just to drown here by the shore? Why won’t some brilliant idea pop into my head right now? Why can’t I be a holoseries hero, like the ones that always killed me even though they were so much smaller and weaker than me when I played giants on Anima Mundi? One of those characters who grow when the going gets tough?
I can’t crash into the sol protoplasm barrier using Beagle as a battering ram. I’d hardly get anywhere, and the crash alone could break my neck. If it isn’t broken already, I mean.
And I don’t have enough salt left to liquefy this much sol-phase cytoplasm by osmosis. There’s hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of the stuff.
I look desperately at the distance gauge; it’s showing 156 meters now… and growing.
Shit. I’m fuming. It’s enough to make you pull out a pistol and shoot yourself.
If I only had one…
Wait a sec!
That’s it!
A pistol.
I do have a pistol, and it’s a HUGE one.
Of course I didn’t bring any personal weapons aboard, whether sonic, projectile, or laser. What could I have done with one? Shoot Cosita? Blow out my brains before I died of asphyxiation or hunger if I got trapped in its cytoplasm?
We veterinarian biologists rarely fire anything but anesthetizing dart guns. Though, given my specialty, I’ve sometimes been tempted to use anesthetizing cannons.
But as it happens, Beagle is all one enormous gun—and I suspect it’s well loaded.
Who knows, but I won’t end up thanking that stuck-up Kurchatov for his intransigent militarism. And I’ll owe him one, precisely for not allowing me to remove the missiles from the magazines.
I just hope I’m able to fire them.
Let’s see…
On-board computer, what munitions am I carrying?
DATA UNAVAILABLE. TO UNLOCK OPERATIVE CAPABILITIES OF ON-BOARD WEAPON SYSTEMS, PLEASE INPUT PERSONAL PASSWORD OF GENERAL JUNICHIRO KURCHATOV. AWAITING INPUT.
Shit and triple shit. I’m sitting inside a gun loaded with God knows what, I don’t know where the safety is… and the computer has automatically defaulted to “don’t touch me unless you’re an officer” mode, blocking me from pulling the trigger.
Twelve characters? It could be anything… But I have to try. Try thinking like them. Kurchatov. Military. He once told me that Igor Kurchatov was the father of the Russian atomic bomb. Fix it up a little, and maybe…
Atomicbomber.
PASSWORD NOT RECOGNIZED.
No, it’s not going to be easy, like in a holoseries. But, twelve characters?
What if I misjudged him? What if all the disdain I thought he was showing for me was just envy and nostalgia for the good old times we had as students partying at Anima Mundi?
Let’s see, I’ll try it. If it’s a reference to veterinarian biology, what password would my old party buddy Juni Tacho pick? Ecology? Evolution? Seven and nine letters, too short. Cellularbiology? Fifteen, too long. What about my name? How ironic would that be… JanAmosSangan… No, could have worked, but it’s thirteen characters. Some professor, maybe—Argol Swendal? With no space it’s twelve letters. But forget it, Kurchatov hated symbolic logic, had a tutor assigned to help him both semesters. Raul Pineda? No, we only had classes with him in the fifth year, so Tacho never met him, and his name only has eleven characters even with the space. Besides, Juni Tacho didn’t bother going to classes very often; he was too busy hanging out in bars, cantinas, and other dives…
Heh.
Bars, cantinas, and dives. Could be. And it has exactly twelve letters.
But it’s so unserious. Well, it’s not like we were all that serious at Anima Mundi.
Besides, I imagine I’ll get three chances to guess the password.
I’m sure this can’t be right, either. In the holoseries, the hero always guesses it on the final attempt.
But before I get to my third try, I have to do my second.
Oceanography.
PASSWORD ACCEPTED. WELCOME ABOARD, GENERAL KURCHATOV. ITEMIZING MUNITIONS CAPABILITIES: 46 MISSILES. 8 THERMONUCLEAR WARHEADS (20 KILOTONS EACH). 16 THERMOBARIC WARHEADS. 22 DIRECTIONAL HIGH-IMPACT BUNKER BUSTERS. ALL READY FOR USE. DO YOU WISH TO LOAD ANY?
A gun? Nope: Beagle is a fucking arsenal. I can’t believe it. Eight thermonuclear warheads? 160 kilotons? They weren’t just planning to get rid of me and Enti and An if things went downhill… I doubt even Cosita would survive an explosion of that magnitude going off inside its guts. They could have blown a hole in the planet Brobdingnag itself. How ridiculous.
Military brass. Always ready to blow everything up, obsessed with the power of destruction. It must have driven them crazy to find creatures like laketons in the galaxy that would just laugh at all their weaponry!
Naturally, sooner or later they’d want to prove who’s who.
But now it’s me with my finger on the trigger. Twenty-two “directional high-impact bunker busters”? Let’s see if they can open a path for me through… exactly 159 meters of sol-phase cytoplasm.
Shamelessly impersonating Kurchatov, I set the target coordinates, order the missile launch, and there goes the first one… And I’m still acting as thoughtlessly as before. Will the missile even work in liquid?