“The probability of there being two rocky systems in a row is quite low,” Nelly put in helpfully.
“The mere fact we’re still alive means we’ve used up a whole lot of good luck, Nelly,” the captain pointed out. “We can’t expect the princess’s pot of gold to keep sprinkling us with the good stuff forever.”
“I don’t have any magic supply of luck,” Kris snapped in good humor.
“Don’t tell me that,” the captain snapped right back, though with a broad smile on his swarthy face. “Without that bucket of luck, you and Ray and Trouble would have been dead long ago.”
Kris chose to let the captain have the last word concerning her notional luck and left him staring at Nelly’s map of hopeful outcomes of the next two jumps.
Hungry, she dropped down to the wardroom to find chow was bread made before the last jump. With no weight on the ship, even the vaunted Cookie was reluctant to try his hand at baking fresh bread. The last of the deli-cut meats had been slapped on with the last of the condiments.
Kris took a turkey sandwich and found that Maggie and Vicky were there before her. Rather than avoid the grand duchess, Kris asked if the seat across from them was taken. Maggie glanced at her young friend and interpreted a minuscule blink of an eye as, “No, please sit down.”
Kris did.
She took a bite of her sandwich. The bread was not up to Cookie’s usual high standards. As she chewed, she eyed Vicky.
The not-so-grand duchess took a sip from tea that no longer steamed.
“You enjoying the hangover?” Kris asked in a voice even she knew was way too cheerful.
“What good is a doctor who can’t cure agony like this?” Vicky whispered.
“When the agony is self-inflicted,” Maggie said, “it only seems right that the path through it should be on your own. But I must point out that I did give you the best medicine available for what ails you.”
“You lie,” the Greenfeld scion mumbled.
She sipped her tea, then managed to raise her eyes to level with Kris. “I hear we’re going to be the real Flying Dutchman.”
“Not from anyone of the bridge crew. The captain strictly forbids it.”
“You have, have you?”
“Not me. Captain Drago.”
“I thought you outranked him. Something about papers and all.”
Kris quickly explained about the rearrangement of commissions on the Wasp but that she had left the experienced captain in his chair.
“You are a whole lot smarter than me,” Vicky said. “I’d have leapt at the chance to sit in the command chair.”
“And ended up like your brother,” Maggie said darkly.
“No doubt,” Vicky said, and sought solace in her tea.
“So where are we going?” Vicky asked.
Kris could almost hear the silence fall in the room. What she said next would be spread from one end of the ship to the other in five minutes. Maybe less.
“We’ve got enough speed on the boat to make a long jump, and since the next jump point is in easy reach, we’re saving our reaction mass. That will let us make two more jumps if we want to before we have to slow down and refuel. If the next system looks like a good place to gas up, we may do it there, or just keep going. I like life when it leaves me lots of choices, don’t you?”
“Speak for yourself,” Vicky grumbled. “This morning I am none too sure that life is all it’s cracked up to be.”
“What do you expect when you’re coughing up a hairball from the hair of the dog that bit you,” Maggie said.
“See the kind of concern I get when I’m on death’s door,” Vicky complained.
“You put yourself on that door, and you’ll walk yourself back from it and think twice about going there again. Right, Your Highness?” Maggie said.
“The agony and the puking was the only thing that cured me,” Kris admitted.
That and the joy of skiff racing from orbit. It was amazing what life had to offer when you weren’t looking at it from the bottom of a bottle every waking moment.
Kris left the wardroom and headed for her bunk. She hadn’t gotten there when Nelly said, “Kris, Captain Drago sends his thanks for you spreading the word that we’ve got several more jumps in this old girl.”
“He could have announced it to all hands.”
“Yes, Kris, but he suspects that its leaking out from you was a much better way to go. Overhearing it in the wardroom seems to lend more credibility to countering the Flying Dutchman myth than the captain himself saying so. I really think you humans are all crazy,” Nelly said.
“Very likely so,” Kris said, letting herself into her empty stateroom. “Nelly, I need some help from you.”
“Just ask.”
“Is it really impossible to fly three shuttles in formation with a balloot between them?”
“Kris, what with the air currents, the launches will be knocked all over the place. The chances of keeping the balloot open enough to gather anything are slim, and there’s the bouncing around. You’re bound to fly into each other, or rip something loose as you get knocked farther apart than your cable allows. Kris, it’s not a mission, it’s a quick suicide.”
“Okay, I understand. You’re right, Nelly. Now, given all that, how do we do it, because I don’t think the Wasp can hold up if it does another dance with a gas giant. Do you?”
“I think the chances of the Wasp’s surviving a refueling pass are about equal to three shuttles managing the same, Kris. Neither one works.”
“Sorry, Nelly. I will not end up dead in space this close to home. We must refuel. We will refuel. You put your kids together, get any help you need from any of the boffins left aboard, and you figure out how we do this. You’re the Great Nelly. Let’s see some of that greatness.”
Nelly called Kris a bad name, but she was very quiet as Kris strapped herself into her bunk.
52
Kris was locked in tight at her Weapons station as they went through the next jump.
And for good cause.
They landed dangerously close to Iteeche territory, and . . . maybe worse . . . the area where the Iteeche scout ships had vanished. Kris hoped that the flaming-hot datum they’d left way the other end of the galaxy would attract aliens away from this corner of space, but you could never tell who had gotten The Word, and who hadn’t.
Nelly was wrong about the odds of hitting two rocky systems. Or maybe Nelly was right and Captain Drago was also right about Kris’s having exhausted the Longknife supply of luck.
“All rocks,” Chief Beni reported. “Not even a small gas bag in sight.”
“Jump points,” the captain snapped.
“Only one other new fuzzy one,” the chief replied.
“Give Sulwan a course heading. Navigator, aim us there, and spare the reaction mass.”
Sulwan’s usual prompt response was slow in coming. She worked her board for a long time. Then muttered a few curse words and started all over again. Finally, she broke into a victorious grin and turned to face the captain. “Sir. If we use .05-gee acceleration and the proper vectors, we should make the jump in eighteen hours, Captain.”
“Do it, ma’am,” he ordered, and it was done. Then the skipper turned to Kris.
“Does that computer of yours have any kind of idea where we are?”
“Nelly?” Kris said.
“This is interesting,” the computer replied.
“What’s that mean?” Kris said, discovering that her stomach could get an even more sinking feeling than it had habitually had since that huge mother ship entered Kris’s life.