The Pirates of Sufiro (Book 1) (Old Star New Earth) (4 page)

"Sounds perfect," said Suki.
Roberts shook his head. "Let's not be hasty. If we went there, there's no guarantee we'll find anything edible. The Rd'dyggians called this world habitable. That only means we can breathe there. It doesn't mean we can live there."
Firebrandt's shoulders dropped. "The only other choice is to make our way to an inhabited world."
Suki led Firebrandt aside and grabbed his shoulders, looking into his eyes. "What does going to an inhabited world mean for you?" she asked sternly.
"It means loss of everything. I'd have to sell the ship, such as it is, to get money for us to survive," he said.
"For you, that's death." Her fingers dug deeply into his shoulders.
"But you and Roberts..." he protested quietly.
"Would die as surely," she said. "We chose this kind of life as much as you did. If I am to die, let me die with dignity." Suki's brown eyes started to glaze over. "The frontier world may be death, but at least it's an attempt at life. An inhabited world is just suicide."
The captain moved to the front of the battle deck, gazing at the blank wall in the bow. He sat down at the gunner's rig and ran his finger through the dried fire-fighting foam and carbon scoring. He remembered the battles he had fought and savored the victories he had known. Roberts and Suki stepped up to him. Firebrandt looked up at his old friend. "I know what Suki wants," he said, quietly.
"We've known glory, old friend." Roberts' eyes had a faraway look. "We've known victory. We would have known neither if we played it safe."
The captain nodded. "Does the navigation computer work well enough to make a course for a jump point?"
Roberts nodded enthusiastically. "I think so, sir."
"Then get us underway," said Firebrandt.
"Course sir?" asked Roberts.
"We're heading for the frontier, Mr. Roberts," barked the captain. His face broke into a broad smile. The prospect of a new type of freedom started becoming clear to Firebrandt. His thoughts darkened as he wondered whether or not his mother had planned there to be exactly one uninhabited planet within reach. He shook his head, doubting it. The EQ drive put enough of the galaxy within reach that the odds of finding at least one unoccupied planet were pretty good. The deck plates rumbled quietly as Roberts activated the thrusters. The ship didn't feel quite right. The captain reasoned that was because there was only one thruster left. Suki stepped forward to the pilot's wheel. Roberts showed her what needed monitoring and how to keep the ship on the programmed course. She piloted the ship to its new destiny.
The ship continued on for another two hours sailing nearly as rapidly as light-speed. A green light started flashing. Suki mentioned it to Roberts who took control and continued until the light changed to yellow. He reversed thrusters. "Full stop," reported Roberts. "We're at the jump point for our frontier world."
Firebrandt, Roberts and Suki each looked at one another. Firebrandt nodded solemnly. "Let's do it," he said at last.
"Strap in," said Roberts. He sounded the jump warning.
The captain grinned. No one else was aboard to hear the alert. Still, the captain felt a wave of nostalgia. Firebrandt and Suki strapped themselves into the port and starboard gunner's rigs. Roberts strapped himself next to the computer terminal. Roberts typed in the sequence for the jump. The network controlled all shipboard functions during and immediately after the jump. If all went well, the rocket would fire after the jump and they would regain alertness to discover themselves en route to the planet. Roberts checked and double-checked the sequence. Computer would have done it in a single thought. Roberts had been trained as backup, but he didn't have the experience. If he made a mistake typing a critical part of the jump sequence, the ship would never reappear within three-dimensional reality. It would continue riding a wave moving perpendicular to all three spatial directions until the wave damped out somewhere between galaxies. Their atoms would break up and be scattered into oblivion. Roberts typed "go" on his keyboard. He closed his eyes and hit the return key.
The
Legacy
sidestepped into the fourth dimension, moving faster than light from one node of a great wave group to another. Reality ceased for the people aboard ship. Senses continued but time was no longer a referent. The colors of the rainbow could be felt slamming into their bodies. Sound was too bright. The ship grew and shrank, burst apart and reassembled. Reality resumed.
Roberts passed out. The stresses of the jump and pain of the joint where his hand had been amputated were too much for him. Suki sat motionless, her eyes glazed and her mouth open. She stared into the dead holographic wall at the front of the bridge. Only a bare, gray wall stared back. Her brain was having trouble orienting on the colors she still saw playing through it. Firebrandt's head was between his legs. He fought both fainting and nausea. He felt the slight nudge of acceleration as the ship's thrusters kicked in.
Firebrandt forced himself to stand. He balanced himself against a chair. While there were few limitations to interstellar travel with the EQ jump, they had just made a long bound to the far side of the galaxy and the effects were taking a while to wear off. He stumbled around to Suki and shook her a bit. She screamed, then she realized who he was. When reality came slamming into her, she ran back to the head. Firebrandt could hear the horrible retching sounds of breakfast coming back up. The sounds made him vaguely ill himself. He took several deep breaths and walked toward Roberts.
Firebrandt tapped Roberts on the shoulder. Roberts stirred, then jumped, blinking a few times. "How are you doing?"
Roberts looked around, dazed and listening. "Better than Suki, I think." He looked at the holographic viewer his eyes narrowing. "It's dead. I thought I programmed it to come on as we came out of jump."
The captain looked at the monitor in front of Roberts. He pointed to a line of code. "You did." He walked over to a panel on the wall next to the holo viewer and opened it. "They took the network interface." He walked back to the pilot's console and tapped the manual override button. The front wall came to life.
They were approaching a yellow star. Firebrandt located the planet on tracking sensors. He set the ship's course for it.
"Point of no return," said Roberts, checking the status of the Quinnium reserves on his console. "Good-bye civilization."
Suki returned to the battle deck. She had cleaned up, but still looked worn and tired. Stepping up to Firebrandt, she put her arms around him and together, they watched the screen. Roberts went back to the mess and retrieved some water. He came back and passed it around. They all drank greedily, not realizing how badly they had been dehydrated.
After an hour, the planet started to become visible. As they came near, Roberts read statistics from the computer screen. "Diameter, 655 million centimeters. Surface gravity is 1.05 times Earth normal. Intensity of light from the star on the surface is so close to Earth's it hardly matters. Rotational period is 25.89 hours. Revolutionary period is 414 local rotations."
The surface of the planet showed mostly a bluish green ocean and broken white clouds. Underneath, dark landmasses could be made out. A single oblong moon orbited. It looked as though it were a captured asteroid. As they approached, they saw two polar continents.
Firebrandt maneuvered the ship carefully into orbit. As they gracefully swung around the planet, two large continents could be seen, one in each hemisphere. There appeared to be four smaller continents, about the size of Australia.
"It's beautiful," said Suki, dreamily. She still clung to Firebrandt. "What will we call it?"
"Officially, the planet's name is G.S.C. 47689329 III," said Roberts.
"That's no name for a planet," complained Suki. She twirled the end of her hair, lazily. "It's got to have a real name."
"Why don't we name it after the three of us," suggested Firebrandt with a lopsided grin.
"You mean Suki-Firebrandt-Roberts?" Suki shook her head, perplexed.
"Awkward." The captain's brow knitted. "How 'bout we shorten it to Su-Fi-Ro?"
Roberts shook his head. "I hate to intrude on your romantic thoughts, but we are low on fuel for the thrusters. We won't be able to maintain orbit for much more than another hour or two."
Firebrandt turned sharply. "That's not enough time. The Admiral only left us one launch. We don't have room nor time to load it with the supplies we need."
Roberts nodded gravely. "There are two alternatives. If we begin immediately, we can perform a controlled atmospheric entry with the ship. We'll need shields to full. The computers can control most of the piloting until we are near the ground."
Firebrandt shook his head. "If we take the ship down, it'll never lift off again."
"With no Quinnium, where are we going?" asked Suki.
"What's our second option?" asked the captain.
"We do have enough fuel to put us into a stable orbit." Roberts shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Whatever we do, we need to decide now."
"I haven't even had time to check if there is fuel for the launch's reactor. If we stay in orbit, we may die here." The captain exhaled slowly. "Make your calculations and bring us in. Where will you land us?"
"I'm aiming for the first large continent we saw. I've been checking the Rd'dyggian survey reports. Records show there is a large north-south river running through it, slightly east of the continental center. If nothing else, the water should keep us alive for a while." Roberts had started typing before he finished talking.
The captain and Suki returned to their seats at the gunner's rig. The ship's electromagnetic shields popped on. The long black ship spiraled in toward the planet. As it slid into the diffuse upper atmosphere, the outer skin began to heat. The Erdonium hull designed for super light travel would absorb much of the heat. The internal graviton field compensated for the worst of the bumpy ride to the surface.
As they approached the surface, there were several power failures on the ship. The lights flickered and went out. The graviton generator died. Suddenly, the hapless crew was jostled about, their restraints digging deeply into their skin. The ship's hull could withstand the motion and the heat, but many of the internal systems were not designed to take long periods of violent, tumultuous motion. The holographic wall went dead again. They were blind as the ship moved up and down spastically, jolted by air turbulence. There was a resounding crash followed by a loud screech. The crew flew forward into the restraints, then were slammed back into the seats. The ship had hit the ground and slid. The thrusters continued to burn. Roberts struggled out of his seat and fell more than walked to the wheel. The console vibrated madly. It was difficult to focus on it. He hit it where he thought the thruster control should be. Fortunately, the thrusters stopped. Forward momentum carried the ship some distance. Finally, it slowed and stopped. Roberts slumped to the floor panting, holding the pillar for support. He felt like he was falling and attributed it to the rough ride.
Firebrandt's ears rang. He heard his heart beat inside his head. He released the seat restraint and struggled to his feet. As he stood, he slipped down the deck grating. He scrambled to regain control of his own feet as he discovered the floor was tilted nearly forty-five degrees with respect to the planet's surface. The captain caught Suki's seat as he slid by. He helped her undo her restraint and controlled her slide to the juncture of wall and floor. "I feel fat," she said numbly, balanced on the corner.
Roberts let go of the center column and slid to the junction. The captain helped him to his feet. "It's the higher gravity," Firebrandt explained. "Not enough different to harm us, but enough to feel."
They walked down through the ship. It had been hulled amidships due to the sliding. They stepped through the hull onto a grassy meadow. In front of them was a river, wider than the Mississippi of Earth. The sun was high in a slightly greenish sky. Some animal chirped.
Suki wrinkled her nose. "It doesn't smell right," she said.
"Different organics than we're used to." Roberts sniffed the air. "Alien pollens and a slightly different atmospheric content from Earth." He nodded satisfactorily. "But it doesn't smell bad. Some of this stuff may be edible after all. It's certainly not like the stench we smelled after stepping into the heavy air of the Rd'dyggian dome on Titan, eh?"
Firebrandt nodded. "Thick wet air that's about twenty degrees colder than pleasant." The captain stretched in the sunlight. "This is delightful. No wonder the Rd'dyggians turned this over to general colonization."
Roberts looked back at the gaping hole in the ship. He saw that the empty launch bay was ripped open. He looked beyond the ship. Wreckage was scattered as far as the eye could see. "General colonization or no, we're shipwrecked. Marooned until we die or someone rescues us."
Suki and Firebrandt sat down on the grass and looked at the river. They didn't even think about being marooned. They were happy to be alive, ready to face the future together. HOMESTEAD
Firebrandt, Roberts and Suki scoured the ship for supplies they would need. Firebrandt removed the emergency cooking gear from the mess. Roberts checked the kitchen and found that most of the provisions had, in fact, survived. Suki went to the hold. Many things had been damaged in the descent. After rummaging around, she found the poison detection kit along with an item she never thought they would need. Firebrandt had raided a science vessel almost a year before. Among the items he appropriated was a geologist's field tester/computer.
The captain carefully lowered himself into the unopened launch bay. The sleek, red launch vessel had broken free of its magnetic grips and rested against the bay doors, dented and scratched. He opened the craft's door manually and stepped gingerly inside. He was delighted, if astonished, when he hit the power switch and the control panel came to life. At least the batteries were intact. Unfortunately, as he feared, there was no fuel for the reactor. The captain powered down the launch and stepped out.
Firebrandt removed
Legacy's
graviton generator, a few of the deck amplifiers and tools. Roberts built a makeshift shelter out of old gray canvas and metal piping. They set up their bedrolls. Using the emergency cooking gear, they made a dinner of ship's provisions. After dinner, Firebrandt and Roberts walked across the grassy meadow and down the embankment to the river. Using the poison detection kit, they tested the water. The water proved to be safe. The captain reached down, took a handful of water and drank it. Roberts lunged at him to stop him, but was too late. "You don't know whether or not there are any microbes in that water that could kill you," he said. His thin black eyebrows closed together, worried.