“Science what?”
“Science fiction. What they used to call fantasy back… well, never mind.” She pulled her leg back and folded it beneath her bottom as she gazed again out the window. “Look, I know Bo can be weird most of the time, but you have to realize that he’s a romantic stuck in an age where most people don’t even know what the word means anymore. He wants derring-do, swashbuckling, great adventure… he wants to be a hero.”
“Uh-huh. Bo McKinnon, space hero.” I tried to transpose him on the magazine covers he had framed in the galley: wielding a ray gun in each hand, defending Jeri from ravaging monsters. It didn’t work, except to make me stifle a chuckle.
“That isn’t too much to ask for, is it?” There was sadness in her eyes when she glanced my way. Before I could get the grin off my face, she returned her gaze to the windows. “Perhaps so. This isn’t an age of heroes. We move rock back and forth across the system, put money in the bank, and congratulate ourselves for our ingenuity. A hundred years ago, what we’re doing now was the stuff of dreams, and the people who did it were larger than life. That’s what he finds so attractive in those stories. But now…”
She let out her breath. “Who can blame Bo for wanting something he can’t have? He’s stuck on a second-hand freighter with an ex-whore for a first officer and a second officer who openly despises him, and he’s the butt of every joke from Earth to Iapetus. No wonder he drops everything to answer a Mayday. This may be the only chance he gets.”
I was about to retort that my only chance to get a job on a decent ship was slipping through my fingers when her console double-beeped. A moment later, The Brain’s voice came through the ceiling speaker.
“Pardon me, but we’re scheduled for course correction maneuvers. Do you wish for me to execute?”
Jeri swiveled her chair around. “That’s okay, Brain. We’ll handle it by manual control. Give me the coordinates.”
The AI responded by displaying a three-dimensional grid on her flatscreens. “Want me to do anything?” I asked, although it was obvious that she had matters well in hand.
“I’ve got everything covered,” she said, her long fingers typing in the coordinates. “Get some sleep, if you want.” She cast a quick grin over her shoulder. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell Bo you dozed off in his chair.”
End of conversation. Besides, she had a good idea. I cranked back the chair, buckled the seat belt and tucked my hands in my pockets so they wouldn’t drift around in freefall. It might be a while before I got another chance; once we reached 2046-Barr, Captain Future would be back on deck, bellowing orders and otherwise making my life painful.
She had told me a lot about Bo McKinnon, but nothing I had heard gave me much affection for the man. So far as I was concerned, he was still the biggest dork I had ever met… and if there was anyone aboard the TBSA Comet who deserved my sympathy, it was Jeri Lee-Bose, who was meant for better things than this.
As I shut my eyes, it occurred to me that the captain’s chair fitted me a lot better than it did McKinnon. One day, perhaps I’d have enough money in the bank to buy him out. It would be interesting to see if he took orders as well as he gave them.
It was a warm and comforting thought, and I snuggled against it like a pillow as I fell asleep.
“Look, Arraj—it is a meteor!” cried the younger Martian excitedly. “And there’s a ship guiding it!”
The two stared for a moment at the incredible spectacle. The expanding black spot was clearly a giant meteor, rushing now at tremendous speed toward Mars. And close beside the booming meteor rushed a dark spaceship, playing rays upon the great mass. The ship was propelling the meteor toward Mars.
Several hours later, the Comet rendezvoused with 2046-Barr.
The asteroid looked much the same as the holo tank had depicted it—an enormous rock the color of charcoal—but the Fool’s Gold itself was the largest spacecraft I had ever seen short of a Lagrange colony. It dwarfed the Comet like a yacht parked alongside an ocean liner, a humongous machine attached to one end of the asteroid’s mass.
A humongous machine, and apparently lifeless. We approached the mass-driver with great caution, being careful to avoid its stern lest we get nailed by the stream of debris being constantly ejected by its railgun. That was the only apparent sign of activity; although light gleamed from the portals of the rotating command sphere, we could detect no motion within the windows, and the radio remained as silent as it had been for the last eighteen hours.
“Look yonder.” I pointed through the window at the hangar bay, a wide berth within the barrel-shaped main hull just forward of the railgun. Its doors were open, and as the Comet slowly cruised past we could see the gig and service pods parked in their cradles. “Everything’s there. Even the lifeboats are still in place.”
Jeri angled the camera on the outrigger telemetry boom until it peered into the bay. Her wide eyes narrowed as she studied a close-up view on a flatscreen. “That’s weird,” she murmured. “Why would they depressurize the bay and open the doors if they didn’t…?”
“Knock it off, you two!”
McKinnon was strapped in his chair, on the other side of Jeri Lee’s duty station from mine. “It doesn’t matter why they did it. Just keep your eyes peeled for pirates… they could be lurking somewhere nearby.”
I chose to remain silent as I piloted the Comet past the mass-driver’s massive anchor-arms and over the top of the asteroid. Ever since McKinnon had returned to the bridge an hour ago—following the shower and leisurely breakfast I myself had been denied—he had been riding his favorite hobby horse: asteroid pirates had seized control of the Fool’s Gold and taken its crew hostage.
This despite the fact that we had not spotted any other spacecraft during our long journey and that none could now be seen in the vicinity of the asteroid. It could also be logically argued that the four-person crew of a prospector ship would have a hard time overcoming the twelve-person crew of a mass-driver, but logic meant little to Captain Future. His left hand rested on the console near the EMP controls, itching to launch a nuke at the pirate ship he was certain to find lurking in the asteroid’s shadow.
Yet, when we completed a fly-by of 2046-Barr, none were to be found. In fact, nothing moved at all, save for the asteroid itself….
A thought occurred to me. “Hey, Brain,” I said aloud, “have you got a fix on the mass-driver’s position and bearing?”
“Affirmative, Mr. Furland. It is X-ray one-seven-six, Yankee two…”
“Mr. Furland!” McKinnon snapped. “I didn’t give orders for you to…”
I ignored him. “Skip the numbers, Brain. Just tell me if it’s still on course for cislunar rendezvous.”
A momentary pause, then: “Negative, Mr. Furland. The Fool’s Gold has altered its trajectory. According to my calculations, there is a seventy-two-point-one probability that it is now on collision course with the planet Mars.”
Jeri went pale as she sucked in her breath, and even McKinnon managed to shut up. “Show it to me on the tank,” I said as I turned my chair around to face the nav table.
The tank lit, displaying a holographic diagram of the Fool’s Gold’s present position in relationship with the Martian sidereal-hour. Mars still lay half an A.U. away, but as The Brain traced a shallow-curving orange line through the belt, we saw that it neatly intercepted the red planet as it advanced on its orbit around the Sun.