No. That wasn’t quite all there was to it.
When one got past the fact that she was a scarecrow with feet that functioned as a second pair of hands and eyes the size of fuel valves, she was sensual as hell. She was a pretty woman, and I had become infatuated with her. Schumacher would have twitched at the thought of sleeping with a google, but in three weeks since The Brain had revived us from the zombie tanks, there had been more than a few times when my desire to see the rest of her body exceeded simple curiosity about her tattoos.
Yet I knew very little about her. As much as I loved looking at her, that was surpassed by my admiration for her innate talent as a spacer. In terms of professional skill, Jeri Lee-Bose was one of the best First Officers I had ever met. Any Royal Navy, TBSA, or free-trader captain would have killed to sign her aboard.
So what the hell was she doing aboard a scow like the Comet, serving under a bozo like Bo McKinnon?
I tucked in my knees and did a half-gainer that landed the soles of my stikshoes against the carpet. Feet now firmly planted on the floor, I walked across the circular compartment to the nav table, sucking on the squeezebulb in my left hand. “Where’s the captain?” I asked.
“Topside, taking a sextant reading.” She nodded toward the observation blister above us. “He’ll be down in a minute.”
Typical. Part of the reason why Superiors have enhanced eyes is for optical work like sextant sightings. This should be Jeri’s job, but McKinnon seemed to regard the blister as his personal throne. I sighed as I settled down in my chair and buckled in. “Should have known,” I muttered. “Wakes you up in the middle of the goddamn night, then disappears when you want a straight answer.”
Her mouth pursed into sympathetic frown. “Bo will tell you more when he comes down,” she said, then she swiveled around in her chair as she returned her attention to her board.
Jeri was the only person aboard who was permitted to call Captain Future by his real name. I didn’t have that privilege, and The Brain hadn’t been programmed to do otherwise. The fondness I had developed for Jeri over the last three weeks was tempered by the fact that, in almost any disagreement, she usually sided with the captain.
Obviously, there was something else she knew but wasn’t telling me, preferring to defer the issue to McKinnon. I had become used to such behavior over the last few months, but it was still irritating. Most first officers act as intermediaries between captain and crew, and in that sense Jeri performed well, yet at times like this I felt as if I had more in common with The Brain than with her.
So be it. I swiveled my chair to face the nav table. “Hey, Brain,” I called out. “Gimme a holo of our current position and trajectory, please.”
The space within the holo tank coruscated briefly, then an arch-shaped slice of the main belt appeared above the table. Tiny spots of orange light depicting major asteroids slowly moved along blue sidereal tracks, each designated by their catalog numbers. The Comet was pinpointed by a small silver replica of the vessel, leading the end of a broken red line which bisected the asteroid orbits.
The Comet was near the edge of the third Kirkwood gap, one of the “empty spaces” in the belt where Martian and Jovian gravitational forces caused the number of identified asteroids to diminish per fraction of an astronomical unit. We were now in the 1⁄3 gap, about two and a half A.U.’s from the Sun. In another couple of days we would enter the main belt and be closing in on Ceres. Once we arrived, the Comet would unload the cargo it had carried from the Moon and, in return, take on the raw ore TBSA prospectors had mined from the belt and shipped to Ceres Station. It was also there that I was scheduled to depart the Comet and await the arrival of the Jove Commerce.
At least, that was the itinerary. Now, as I studied the holo, I noticed a not-so-subtle change. The red line depicting the freighter’s trajectory had been altered since the end of my last watch about four hours earlier.
It no longer intercepted Ceres. In fact, it didn’t even come close to the asteroid’s orbit.
The Comet had changed course while I slept.
Without saying anything to Jeri, I unbuckled my harness and pushed over to the table, where I silently stared at the holo for a couple of minutes, using the keypad to manually focus and enlarge the image. Our new bearing took us almost a quarter of a million kilometers from Ceres, on just the other side of the 1⁄3 Kirkwood gap.
“Brain,” I said, “what’s our destination?”
“The asteroid 2046-Barr,” it replied. It displayed a new orange spot in the tank, directly in front of the Comet’s red line.
The last of my drowsiness dissipated into a pulse of white-hot rage. I could feel Jeri’s eyes on my back.
“Rohr…” she began.
I didn’t care. I stabbed the intercom button on the table. “McKinnon!” I bellowed. “Get down here!”
Long silence. I knew he could hear me.
“Goddammit, get down here! Now!”
Motors whined in the ceiling above me, then the hatch below the observation blister irised open and a wingback chair began to descend into the bridge, carrying the commanding officer of the TBSA Comet. It wasn’t until the chair reached the deck that the figure seated in it spoke.
“You can call me… Captain Future.”
In the ancient pulp magazines he so adored, Captain Future was six-and-a-half feet in height, ruggedly handsome, bronze-skinned and red-haired. None of this applied to Bo McKinnon. Squat and obese, he filled the chair like a half-ton of lard. Black curly hair, turning gray at the temples and filthy with dandruff, receded from his forehead and fell around his shoulders, while an oily, unkempt beard dripped down the sides of his fat cheeks, themselves the color of mildewed wax. There were old food stains on the front of his worn-out sweatshirt and dark marks in the crotch of his trousers where he had failed to properly shake himself after the last time he had visited the head. And he smelled like a fart.
If my description seems uncharitable, let there be no mistake: Bo McKinnon was a butt-ugly, foul-looking son of a whore, and I have met plenty of slobs like him to judge by comparison. He had little respect for personal hygiene and fewer social graces, he had no business being anyone’s role model, and I was in no mood for his melodramatic bullshit just now.
“You changed course.” I pointed at the holo tank behind me, my voice quavering in anger. “We’re supposed to come out of the Kirkwood in another few hours, and while I was asleep you changed course.”
McKinnon calmly stared back at me. “Yes, Mister Furland, that I did. I changed the Comet’s trajectory while you were in your quarters.”
“We’re no longer heading for Ceres… Christ, we’re going to come nowhere near Ceres!”
He made no move to rise from his throne. “That’s correct,” he said, slowly nodding his head. “I ordered The Brain to alter our course so that we’d intercept 2046-Barr. We fired maneuvering thrusters at 0130 shiptime, and in two hours we’ll execute another course correction. That should put us within range of the asteroid in about…”