“Beggin’ the commander’s pardon, the Margaite’s no heap,” the chief piloting it snapped.
“Fair enough. This is no time to argue aesthetics.”
“Comin’ up on the hull, sir,” the chief reported. “Hold on, we’re about to mate with the high energy power intake.” There was a shudder, and the old chief nodded. “Now comin’ up on the ship. You got ten minutes, sonny. Get in the damned suit now. Ten minutes from now I got to disengage or they’ll know we’re up to somethin’.”
“They already know we’re up to something,” Harker noted. “They’d have to be nuts not to. I just hope they don’t think about this.”
He shook hands with the two superior officers and even the chief, and went back and turned his back on his suit. The suit walked slightly forward and enveloped him, and he felt himself drifting into the center. All of the life support plug-ins, instrumentation, direct links to the cortex were established, and he began to see better than ever, hear better than ever, and feel a little like superman.
“God be with you, Mister Harker,” the chief said simply but seriously.
He stepped back into the hatch and it closed. It drained of air in a matter of thirty seconds, then the outer door slid open and he gave a slight kick and sailed out and almost immediately on to the hull of the Odysseus’s main cabin.
At this moment, the tiny receptors in his head were directly connected to and communicating at the speed of thought with the suit. He could, essentially, fly in space using tiny nozzles, by just thinking about it, and he floated away from the tender and just half a meter above the smooth, dull hull of the bigger ship.
There was no safe place to do this, but the design of the bigger ship put a series of large spokes emanating equally from around the midsection of the cabin. These were used for precise genhole injection, and where they were joined to the ship, there was quite a large indentation at the base of each. He picked the nearest one and settled down into it. Once there, the suit secreted one of the most powerful bonding substances known that could later be dissolved. In fact, ships were often repaired with it. It wasn’t intended to take the place of true molding on a permanent basis, but many a warship had lasted many days in running pursuits and fights and it had held until they made it to dry-dock. It would cement him to the hull of the Odysseus so thoroughly that he would effectively become part of it.
So far the drill was going according to form. Now, and for many weeks if need be, the suit would generate or convert all that he required. He would not eat, or drink, or directly breathe, but those elements would be supplied or created as the monitors of every single square millimeter of his body told the suit he required. He would be, in effect, a disembodied spirit, and, before injection, even that spirit would be placed into a tranquilized sleep, not to awaken until there was a reason for it to do so.
If this group was going out to meet the real Dutchman, then he was ready to board and, if necessary, do battle and set tracking devices. If somewhere else, well, he hoped that this group believed that an extra experienced hand was more convenient than killing off a nosy hitchhiker.
He wished he could plug into that gathering once they’d injected, but to do that he’d have to be inside. He could communicate with them in real space, but inside a wormhole, whether natural or created, you were strictly incommunicado.
Commander Park elected not to hold them up anymore. In the little time he could finagle, there didn’t seem to be anything more he could do that he hadn’t already done anyway. At twenty hundred hours, the Odysseus gave a shudder and came to life like some great prehistoric star beast suddenly waking up and needing to prowl. Automated pilot programs handled all the undocking and everything up to and including injection. The ship’s on-board computers and even her live captain were basically redundancies, just as Eugene Harker, in his much smaller environment, was.
The great ship quickly picked up speed. First the space dock and then the entire planet began to rapidly recede with little or no sensation inside or out. Harker was still conscious and still thinking about whether or not he was committing the stupidest act of suicide in recent memory. It took the form of a dialogue, only he was the only one speaking…
Okay, so why wasn’t this a job for a good bioengineered robot? he asked, trying to convince himself that he was in fact useful.
Because, if there are Titans involved, not even the old lady’s lower parts would work, let alone any form of robot, no matter how much of it was quasi-organic. If it was a machine, they’d eat it.
So what are you right now but a lump of biological material lying inside a big machine? Some help you’ll be if the Titans show up!
Maybe. Just maybe. We’ll see…
The ship continued to accelerate and steered itself for a large structure floating in space, one of three in the area. These looked like giant squares, kilometers high and wide but only a hundred meters thick, and within them was a void that could not be described. Even a vacuum was something. How does one describe nothing? Many had tried, none had succeeded, but even those who saw it regularly tended to feel as if there was a total wrongness there, that even “empty” had to have some meaning.
The genhole was connected, through a kind of warp in space, a folding of space-time, with another at a predetermined point. You couldn’t just go faster than light in a practical sense—even if you weren’t quite doing it in a literal sense—and come out where you pleased. Each “hole” was still a sort of tube that needed another end. That was how Harker and Park and the rest knew where the ship was going, at least initially. They had to file plans so that ships were not crashing as they emerged from one or another, and, of course, it was a good way for the Navy to know just where everybody was heading. Of course, that assumed that all of them were charted, that all of them were legal, and that those which had been in areas no longer on the service lanes had been deactivated. In no case were these assumptions valid, of course, particularly not in this day and age.
The spokes along each segment of the Odysseus now hummed to life, and blanketed the entire outer hull with an energy shield. Fortunately, as it was supposed to, that energy shield considered Gene Harker a part of the hull and blanketed him as well.
The tip of the forward spokes now activated, throwing energy beams that struck the surface of the genhole. At this point the ship pitched slowly, until the twelve radiated lines on the ends of the spokes hit the precise spots of a similar grid just inside the genhole itself. At that point, ship and hole were locked on. There was a sudden heavy burst of power and the ship aimed right for the nothing in the middle. Perfectly aligned and oriented, it struck the outer surface.
Watching this from a side angle was something technicians always loved, no matter how many times they’d seen it. A huge, elongated modular ship crashed headlong into a block only a hundred meters thick and kept going until it was apparently consumed: it was always an awesome sight.
Just before injection, Gene Harker’s suit decided it was time to put him to sleep.
Even so, he was awake and aware when injection actually arrived, and he felt it: a weird, bizarre feeling that combined a crackling heat and the deepest cold all at once, and sent a roar with the sound of a cyclone’s winds through his unhearing ears. It was probably the drug and the fears and imagination of his mind, but he could never be sure.