“Eight hours, Captain,” Jeri said.
“Thank you, Mister Bose,” he said, otherwise barely acknowledging her. “Eight hours. At this time the Comet will be secured for emergency action.”
He folded his hands across his vast stomach and gazed back at me querulously. “Any further questions, Mister Furland?”
Further questions?
My mouth hung agape for a few moments. I was unable to speak, unable to protest, unable to do anything except wonder at the unmitigated gall of this mutant amalgamation of human and frog genes.
“Just one,” I finally managed to say. “How do you expect me to make my rendezvous with the Jove Commerce if we detour to…”
“2046-Barr,” Jeri said softly.
McKinnon didn’t so much as blink. “We won’t,” he said. “In fact, I’ve already sent a message to Ceres Station, stating that the Comet will be delayed and that our new ETA is indefinite. With any luck, we’ll reach Ceres in about forty-eight hours. You should be able to…”
“No, I won’t.” I grasped the armrest of his chair with both hands and leaned forward until my face was only a few inches from his. “The Jove is due to leave Ceres in forty-two hours… and that’s at the latest, if it’s going to meet its launch window for Callisto. They’ll go, with or without me, and if they go without me, I’m stuck on Ceres.”
No. That wasn’t entirely true. Ceres Station wasn’t like the Moon; it was too small an outpost to allow a shipwrecked spacer to simply hang around until the next outer-system vessel passed through. The TBSA rep on Ceres would demand that I find a new gig, even if it entailed signing aboard a prospector as grunt labor. This was little better than indentured servitude, since my union card didn’t mean shit out here in terms of room, board, and guaranteed oxygen supplies; my paychecks would be swallowed up by all the above. Even then, there was no guarantee that I’d swing another job aboard the next Jupiter or Saturn tanker; I was lucky enough to get the Jove Commerce job.
That, or I could tuck tail and go back the way I came—and that meant remaining aboard the Comet for its return flight to the Moon.
In the latter case, I’d sooner try to walk home.
Try to understand. For the past three weeks, beginning with the moment I had crawled out of the zombie tank, I had been forced to endure almost every indignity possible while serving under Bo McKinnon. His first order, in fact, had been in the hibernation deck, when he had told me to take the catheter off his prick and hold a bag for him to pee in.
That had been only the beginning. Standing double-watches on the bridge because he was too lazy to get out of bed. Repairing decrepit equipment that should have been replaced years ago, only to have it break down again within a few more days after he had abused it past its tolerance levels. Being issued spurious orders on a whim, only to have those same orders countermanded before the task was half-complete because McKinnon had more scut-work he wanted me to do—then being berated because the first assignment had been left unfinished. Meals skipped because the captain decided that now was the time for me to go EVA and inspect the davits in the payload bay. Rest periods interrupted because he wanted a snack fetched from the galley and was too “busy” to get it himself….
But most of all, the sibilant, high-pitched whine of his voice, like that of a spoiled brat who had been given too many toys by an overindulgent parent. Which was, indeed, exactly what he was.
Bo McKinnon hadn’t earned his TBSA commission. It had been purchased for him by his stepfather, a wealthy lunar businessman who was one of the Association’s principal stockholders. The Comet had been an obsolete ore freighter on the verge of being condemned and scuttled when the old man had bought it for the kid as a means of getting his unwanted stepson out of his hair. Before that, McKinnon had been a customs inspector at Descartes, a minor bureaucrat with delusions of grandeur fostered by the cheap space operas in his collection of moldering twentieth century magazines, for which he apparently spent every spare credit he had in the bank. No doubt his stepfather had been as sick of McKinnon as I was. At least this way the pompous geek spent most of his time out in the belt, hauling rock and bellowing orders at whoever was unlucky enough to have been talked into signing aboard the Comet.
This much I had learned after I had been aboard for three weeks. By the time I had sent a message to Schumacher, demanding to know what else he hadn’t told me about Bo McKinnon, I was almost ready to steal the Comet’s skiff and attempt flying it to Mars. When Schumacher sent me his reply, he gave a lame apology for not telling me everything about McKinnon’s background; after all, it was his job to muster crewmembers for deep-space craft, and he couldn’t play favorites, so sorry, et cetera….
By then I had figured out the rest. Bo McKinnon was a rich kid playing at being a spacecraft commander. He wanted the role, but he didn’t want to pay the dues, the hard-won experience that any true commander has to accomplish. Instead, he managed to shanghai washed-up cases like me to do his dirty work for him. No telling what arrangement he had worked out with Jeri; for my part, I was the latest in a long line of flunkies.
I didn’t hijack the skiff, if only because doing so would have ruined my career and Mars colonists are notoriously unkind to uninvited guests. Besides, I figured that this was a temporary thing: three weeks of Captain Future, and I’d have a story to tell my shipmates aboard the Jove Commerce as we sipped whisky around the wardroom table. You think this captain’s a hardass? Hey, let me tell you about my last one….
Now, as much as I still wanted to get the hell off the Comet, I did not wish to be marooned on Ceres, where I would be at the tender mercies of the station chief.
Time to try a different tack with Captain Future.
I released the armrests and backed off, taking a deep breath as I forced myself to calm down. “Look, Captain,” I said, “what’s so important about this asteroid? I mean, if you’ve located a possible lode, you can always stake a claim with the Association and come back for it later. What’s the rush?”
McKinnon raised an imperious eyebrow. “Mr. Furland, I am not a prospector,” he huffed. “If I were, I wouldn’t be commanding the Comet, would I?”
No, I silently responded, you wouldn’t. No self-respecting rock-hounds would have you aboard their ship. “Then what’s so important?”
Without a word, McKinnon unbuckled his seat harness and pushed out his chair. Microgravity is the great equalizer for overweight men; he floated across the narrow compartment with the grace of a lunar trapeze artist, somersaulting in mid-air and catching a ceiling rung above the navigation table, where he swung upside-down and typed a command into the keyboard.
The holo expanded until 2046-Barr filled the tank. Now I could see that it was a potato-shaped rock, about three klicks in length and seven hundred meters in diameter. An octopus-like machine clung to one end of the asteroid, with a narrow, elongated pistol thrust out into space.
I recognized it immediately. A General Astronautics Class-B Mass Driver, the type used by the Association to push large carbonaceous-chrondite asteroids into the inner belt. In effect, a mobile mining rig. Long bores sunk into the asteroid extracted raw material from its core, which in turn were fed into the machine’s barrel-shaped refinery, where heavy metals and volatiles were separated from the ancient stone. The remaining till was then shot through an electromagnetic railgun as reaction mass that propelled both asteroid and mass driver in whatever direction was desired.