“Emergency backup power.”
“Backup power at one hundred three percent of nominal,” the board assured her. “Connection time three nanoseconds.”
“Very well. Display on, forward, wide.”
The big display board came on and showed… nothing. There was as yet nothing really to see that any of the instruments could pick up other than constantly fluctuating energy surges.
And then there was the clock. The simplest, most primitive device on the board, it was the one that interested Cross the most. It read “00:00:05:35:16,” and it was counting down.
Five and a half minutes.
She felt a curious detachment now, as if she were cut off, watching from some safe and far-off place and time Eyegor’s recording of the moment rather than experiencing it. It was often like that, when push came to shove. It also somehow caused five and a half minutes to go by in a kind of agonizing slowness that physics would never explain.
“Five minutes,” the captain’s voice said throughout the ship. “I will call each minute now until one, then count from ten seconds.”
Lucky Cross wanted a cigar, but she knew it would be some time before she could have one. She sat there now, watching the timer crawl down, and she found some personal satisfaction in the situation as tense as it was.
Big, fat, foul-mouthed, coarse lowlife Gail Cross, she thought. They’d laugh and tease me, they’d call me names and make me the butt of their jokes, and they’d go off to their fine places while I went home to a ramshackle junk house built from yesterday’s disasters. Nobody ever gave me nothin’, but I didn’t take like An Li. I learned and I earned, and look who’s sittin’ in the C&C chair now ready to set eyes on the Three Kings!
“Thirty seconds.”
C’mon, c’mon! If we’re gonna die, then let’s do it. Either that, or a share of the biggest pie in creation!
“Ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… two… one… egress!”
The board came alive with so many things it was impossible to make them all out, but that wasn’t the thing that Cross and the others thought of just then. The vibrations, the crashing sounds, the objects they’d missed shooting lethally around them as they lay strapped in, the ship’s lurching, nearly out of control movement in all directions for what seemed like several minutes, all combined to give them a carnival ride and a sea of sensations, mostly unpleasant.
The captain’s warning hadn’t been the half of it, and even the lights, the blowers, everything except the flying and clanking junk around flickered on and off and they felt themselves growing sick and disoriented.
But the captain definitely had control of all engines and energy controls and stabilizers, and although it took some time the ride eventually smoothed out and the noises, smells, and spinning sensations ceased.
Cross hit the intercom. “Everybody check in! An Li?”
“Here! I’ve got strap bruises and a small cut, otherwise okay.”
“Doc?”
“Bad bruise on my right arm above the elbow. At least I hope it’s just a bruise. Something hit it with tremendous force. Still, I’ll live.”
“Jerry?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. Something put one hell of a dent in the bulkhead here, though.”
“Sark?”
“Broke one of the straps and got tossed a little, but I’m okay. Just feel like I’ve had a few back-alley brawls with some ghosts from my growing up years.”
“Well, I seem to be no worse for wear, but I had more protection. Cap? I don’t have to fly the damned ship, do I?”
“Not yet,” the captain responded. “Damage control reports a great deal of minor damage but nothing that can not be attended to by self-maintenance systems. I believe we made it in very good shape, although it will take a little bit of skill and a lot of power to navigate in this system.”
They all immediately forgot their bruises and turned to the hologram of the primary C&C screen in front of Lucky Cross. Cross gave a low whistle.
The G-class star was slightly larger than average but not outside the range of such suns in the database of known systems; what was spectacular was the fact that there was a series of debris rings where solid planets might be expected, and, beyond, well out from its star, was a single gas giant so massive that had it ignited there would probably be nothing else around at all. At a diameter of almost three hundred thousand kilometers, it dominated everything, and it had not one spectacular ring but two, eerily paralleling one another above and below its equator. But the oddest thing about it was that, even beyond its terminator, on the half turned away from its sun, it had an eerie but bright luminescence that transferred a good deal of light and even some heat from internal forces to the moons. It was what made at least three of those moons capable of life support in spite of long periods when the moons hid from the primary source of their energy.
There were three more gas giants farther out, none nearly the size or complexity of the massive inner one, and a number of very thick asteroid belts that might well have been other planets if the gravitational forces of the monster planet and its interaction with the others had permitted them to form.
“There’s little use even looking at the other gas bags, they are too far out,” the captain noted. “And while the asteroid belts contain some of extraordinary size, I cannot at this point sense any with any sort of atmosphere that might be stable and life supporting, let alone old enough to develop anything. That leaves that inner monster. Of its many moons, two currently visible are planet sized with atmospheres, and indications are that they are within tolerances for sustaining life as we know it. A third might be on the other side at the moment.”
“So the Three Kings are moons. Curious that the monk who discovered them wouldn’t nail that down,” Nagel commented.
“Not necessarily. The survey was considerably garbled, and much of the information we did have was reconstructed and some of it interpreted,” Queson put in. “There certainly were suggestions of it in the report, but who would have thought that they would be three among many around some monster that size?”
“I’d like to know what stabilizes the temperatures on those worlds,” Nagel replied. “I mean, running the two visibles we can see, I get fairly reasonable surface and low atmospheric temps even on the night side. There’s some heat from the giant, which, like most of that type, is virtually a failed sun, but why don’t they broil when they get into real sunlight? There’s no way they can do both. It’s almost like they have thermostats.”
“Perhaps they do, in a way,” the captain said. “The combination of inert atmospheric gases might well interact with the sunlight on the other side to filter out some of the solar heat and disperse it. That is certainly true of the pretty blue and white one. I just ran a simulation, and the addition of sunlight to that mixture would almost create both a heat and light shield. You could almost think of it as a planet with a natural sunscreen. It’s still going to be very hot on the other side, but if you limited your activities to ‘night,’ when it was turned towards the planet and away from the sun, and took shelter during the day, you could live through it. It’s also got quite a lot of water, so think of it as a tropical steam bath.”
“That other one isn’t any steam bath,” Nagel pointed out.
“No, it’s mostly desert, and a cold desert at that, at least on this side of the planet, away from the sun. Still, there is considerable water, much as ice, on the surface, and a good atmospheric mix. It probably gets just cold enough to be nearly unbearable when it rounds the big one and gets hit by sunlight. I think it might well be a whole different world on the solar side. Warmer, liquid water, who knows what else? Heated up just enough to sustain it and anything on it that knows how to compensate during the cold outsystem time. Roughly thirty standard days on this side, about the same on the other. Our jungle world is faster, under fifteen days each side. Wonder what the third is like?”