The good old stuff, p.61
The Good Old Stuff, page 61
“But—”
“Coronis out.”
Gollem grimaced, trying to picture Quine going outstation.
He went back to pounding on his brain. The Themis woman went on calling. “We are in an impact path, we need power to move. If anyone can help us please come in. Medbase Themis—” He cut her off. One Ragnarok was enough and his was just ahead now. There was a faint chance they weren’t expecting him so soon. He powered down and drifted. As his screens cleared he saw a light move in the bubbles behind the freightdock.
His one possible break, if they hadn’t yet moved that phage inboard.
He grabbed the wrecking laser controls and kicked the patrolboat straight at Ragnarok’s main lock. The laser beam fanned over the bubbles, two good slices before he had to brake. The crash sent him into his boards.
The docking probes meshed and he sprang headfirst into Ragnarok’s lock.
As it started to cycle he burned the override, setting off alarms all over the ship. Then he was through and caroming up the shaft. Among the hoots he could hear more clanging. Phagers were piling out through the freightlock to save their bubbles. If he could get to the bridge first he could lock them out.
He twisted, kicked piping and shot into the bridge, his arm aimed at the emergency hatch-lock lever. It hadn’t been used for decades—he nearly broke his wrist, yanking the lever against his own inertia and was rewarded by the sweet grind of lock toggles far below.
Then he turned to the command couch where Topanga should be and saw he was too late.
She was there all right, both hands to her neck and her eyes rolling.
Behind her a lank hairless figure was holding a relaxed pose, in his fist a wirenoose leading around Topanga’s throat.
“Truly fine, ‘Spector.” The phager grinned.
For a second Gollem wondered if Leo hadn’t noticed the hand-laser Gollem pointed. Then he saw that the phagehead was holding a welder against Topanga’s side. Its safety sleeve was off.
“Deal, Gollyboy. Deal the fire down.”
No way. After a minute Gollem sent his weapon drifting by Leo’s arm.
Leo didn’t take the bait.
“Open up.” The phager jerked his chin at the hatch lever and Topanga gave a bubbling whine.
When Gollem opened the hatch the game would be over all the way. He hung frozen, his coiled body sensing for solidity behind him, measuring the spring.
The phager jerked the wire. Topanga’s arms flailed. One horrible eye rolled at Gollem. A spark in there, trying to say no.
“You’re killing her. Then I tear your head off and throw you out the waster.”
The phager giggled. “Why you flash on killin’?” Suddenly he twisted Topanga upside down, feet trailing out toward Gollem. She kicked feebly.
Weird, her bare feet were like a girl’s.
“Open up.”
When Gollem didn’t move the phager’s arm came out in a graceful swing, his fingers flaring. The welding arc sliced, retraced, sliced again as Topanga convulsed. One girlish foot floated free, trailing droplets.
Gollem saw a white stick pointing at him out of the blackened stump.
Topanga was quiet now.
“Way to go.” The phager grinned. “Truly tough old bird. Open up.”
“Turn her loose. Turn her loose. I’ll open.”
“Open now.” The welder moved again.
Suddenly Topanga made a weak twist, scrabbling at Leo’s groin. The phager’s head dipped.
Gollem drove inside his arm, twisted it against momentum. The welder rocketed out around the cabin while he and the phager thrashed around each other, blinded by Topanga’s robe. The phager had a knife now but he couldn’t get braced. Gollem felt legs lock his waist and took advantage of it to push Topanga away. When the scene cleared he clamped the phager to him and began savagely to collect on his investment in muscle-building.
Just as he was groping for the wire to tie up the body something walloped him back of the ear and the lights went out.
He came to with Topanga yelling, “Val, Val! I’ve got em!”
She was hanging on the console in her hair using both hands to point an ancient Thunderbolt straight at him. The muzzle yawned smoke a foot from his beard.
“Topanga, it’s me—Golly. Wake up, spacer, let me tie him up.”
“Val?” A girl laughing, screaming. “I’m going to finish the murdering mothers, Val!”
Valentine Orlov, her husband, had been in the snows of Ganymede for thirty years.
“Val is busy, Topanga,” Gollem said gently. He was hearing hull noises he didn’t like. “Val sent me to help you. Put the jolter down spacegirl. Help me tie up this creep. They’re trying to steal my boat.”
He hadn’t had time to lock it, he remembered now.
Topanga stared at him.
“And why do I often meet your visage here?” she croaked. “Your eyes like unwashed platters—” Then she fainted and he flung himself downshaft to the lock.
His patrolboat was swinging away. Tethered to it was the phage-runners’ pod.
He was stranded on Ragnarok.
Rage exploded him back to the bridge consoles. He managed to send one weak spit from Ragnaroklasers after them as they picked up gees.
Futile. Then he pulled the phager’s head over his knee and clouted it and turned to setting up Topanga with an i.v. in her old cobweb veins.
How in hell had those claws held a jolter? He wrapped a gel sheath over her burns, grinding his jaw to still the uproar in his stomach.
He completed his cleaning by towing the phager and the foot to the waste lock.
With one hand on the cycle button he checked frowning. He could use some information from Leo—what were they into in his patrol sector?
Then his head came together and his fist crunched the eject. His patrol sector?
If the Companies ever got their hands on him he’d spend the rest of his life with his brains wired up, paying for that patrolboat. If he were lucky. No way, no where to go. The Companies owned space. Truly he was two thousand light-years from home now—on a dead driveship.
Dead?
Gollem threw back his lank hair and grinned. Ragnarok had a rich ecosystem, he’d seen to that. Nobody but the phagers knew she was here and he could hold them out for a while. Long enough, maybe, to see if he could coax some power out of that monster-house without waking up the sector. Suddenly he laughed out loud. Rusty shutter sliding in his mind, letting in glory.
“Man, man!” he muttered and stuck his head into the regeneration chamber to check the long trays of culture stretching away under the lights. It took him a minute to understand what was wrong.
No wonder the phagers came back so fast, no wonder he was laughing like a dummy. They’d seeded the whole works with phage culture. A factory.
The first trays were near sporing, the air was ropy. He hauled them out, inhaled a clean lungful and jettisoned the ripe trays.
Then he crawled back in to search. On every staging the photosynthetic algae were starting to clump, coagulating to the lichen-like symbiote that was phage. Not one clean tray.
In hours Ragnarok would have no more air.
But he and Topanga wouldn’t care. They’d be through the walls in phagefreak long before.
He was well and truly shafted now.
He flushed some oxy into the ventilators and kicked back to the bridge.
Get some clean metabolite or die.
Who would give him air? Even if he could move Ragnarok, the company depots and franchises would be alerted. He might just as well signal Coronis and give himself up. Maybe Quine wouldn’t bother to reach him and Topanga in time. Maybe better so. Wards. Wires.
Topanga groaned. Gollem felt her temples. Hot as plasma, old ladies with a leg shortened shouldn’t play war. He rummaged out biogens, marveling at the vials, ampoules, tabs, hyposprays. Popping who knew what to keep alive. Contraband she and Val had picked up in the old free days, her hoard would stock a ... Wait a minute. Medbase Themis.
He tuned up Ragnarok board. The Themis woman was still calling, low and hoarse. He cranked the antennae for the narrowest beam he could get.
“Medbase Themis, do you read?”
“Who are you? Who’s there?” She was startled out of her code book.
“This is a spacesweep mission. I have a casualty.”
“Where—” The male voice took over.
“This is Chief Medic Kranz, spacer. You can bring in your casualty but we have a rogue headed through our space with a gravel cloud. If we can’t get power to move the station in about thirty hours we’ll be holed out. Can you help us?”
“You can have what I’ve got. Check coordinates.”
The woman choked up on the decimals. No use telling them he couldn’t do them any good. The gee-sum unit he had in Ragnarok wouldn’t nudge that base in time for Halley’s comet. And Ragnarok drive—if it worked it would be like trying to wipe your eye with a blowtorch.
But their air could help him.
The drive. He bounced down the engineway, knowing the spring in his muscles was partly phage. Only partly. A thousand times he had come this way, a thousand times torn himself away from temptation.
Gleefully now he began to check out the circuits he had traced, restored the long-pulled fuses. There was a sealed hypergolic reserve for ignition. A stupefying conversion process, a plumber’s nightmare of heat-exchangers and back-cycling.
Crazy, wasteful, dangerous. Enough circuitry to wire the Belt.
Unbelievable it had carried man to Saturn, more unbelievable it would work today.
He clanked the rod controls. No telling what had crystallized. The converter fuel chutes jarred out thirty years’ accumulated dust. The ignition reserve was probably only designed for one emergency firing.
Would he be able to ignite again to brake? Learn as you go. One thing sure, when that venerable metal volcano burst to life every board from here to Coronis would be lit.
When he got back to the bridge Topanga was whispering.
“Id,3 left the haven hanging in the night—0 thou steel cognizance whose leap commits—”
“Pray it leaps,” he told her and began setting course, double-checking everything because of the phagemice running in the shadows. He wrapped Topanga’s webs.
He started the ignition train.
The subsonic rumble that grew through Ragnarok filled him with terror and delight. He threw himself into the webs, wishing he had said something, counted down maybe. Blastoff. Go. The rumble bloomed into an oremill roar. Gees smashed down on him. Everything in the cabin started raining on the deck. The web gave sideways and the roar wound up in a scream that parted his brain and then dwindled into silence.
When he struggled back to the board he found the burn had cut right.
Ragnarok was barreling toward Themis. He saw Topanga’s eyes open.
“Where are we headed?” She sounded sane as soap.
“I’m taking you over to the next sector, Themis. We need metabolite, oxygen. The phagers ruined your regenerators.”
“Themis?”
“There’s a medbase there. They’ll give us some.”
Mistake.
“Oh, no—no!” She struggled up. “No, Golly! I won’t go to a hospital—don’t let them take me!”
“You’re not going to a hospital, Topanga. You’re going to stay right here in the ship while I go in for the cores. They’ll never know about you. We’ll be out of there in minutes.”
No use.
“God hate you, Gollem.” She made an effort to spit. “You’re trying to trap me. I know you! Never let me free. You won’t bury me here, Gollem.
Rot in Moondome with your ugly cub—I’m going to Val!”
“Cool, spacer, you’re yawning.” He got some tranks into her finally and went back to learning Ragmarok. The phage was getting strong now.
When he looked up the holographs were watching him drive their ship.
The old star heroes. Val Orlov, Fitz, Hannes, Mura, all the great ones. Sometimes only a grin behind a gold-washed headplate, a name on a suit beside some mad hunk of machine. Behind them, spacelost wildernesses lit by unknown moons. All alive, all so young. There was Topanga with her arm around that other spacegirl, the dark Russian one who was still orbiting Io. They grinned past him, bright and living.
When they start talking, we’ve had it ....
He set the gyros to crank Ragnarok into what he hoped was attitude for the retro burn. If he could trust the dials, there was enough ignition for braking and for one last burn to get out of there. But where would he go from Medbase? Into the sky with diamonds ...
He heard himself humming and decided to lock the whole thing into autopilot.
No matter what shape that computer was in it would be saner than he was.
Have you seen your mother, baby, standing in the shadows? ...
When he began hearing the Stones he went down and threw out half the trays. The three remaining oxy tanks struck him as hilarious. He cracked one.
The oxy sobered him enough to check the weather signal. The Medbase woman was still trying to raise Themis Main. He resisted the impulse to enlighten her about the Companies and concentrated on the updated orbits of the Trojan rogues. He saw now what had Medbase sweating.
The lead rogue would miss them by megamiles but it was massive enough to have stirred up a lot of gravel. The small rogue behind was sweeping up a tail. The rock itself would go by far off—but that gravel cloud would rip their bubbles to shreds.
He had to get in there and out again fast.
He sniffed some more oxy and computed the rogue orbits on a worst-contingency basis. It looked O.K.—for him. His stomach flinched; even under phage it had an idea what it was going to be like when those medics found out they were wasted.
He saw Topanga grinning. The phage was doing her more good than the tranks.
“Not to worry, star girl. Golly won’t let ’em get you.”
“Air.” She was trying to point to life-support, which had long since gone red.
“I know, spacer. We’re getting air at Medbase.”
She gave him a strange un-Topanga smile. “Whatever you say, little Golly.” Whispering hoarsely, “I know—you’ve been beautiful—” Her hand reached, burning. This he positively could not take. Too bad his music was gone.
“Give us verses as we go, star girl.”
But she was too weak.
“Read me—” Her scanner was full of it.
“In oil-rinsed circles of blind ecstasy.” Hard to dig, until the strobing letters suddenly turned to music in his throat. “Man hears himself an engine in a cloud!” he chanted, convoyed by ghosts.
“—What marathons new-set among the stars!... The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches, already knows the closer clasp of Mars—” ·..
It was indeed fortunate, he discovered, that he had set the autopilot and stayed suited up.
His first clear impression of Medbase was a chimpanzee’s big brown eyes staring into his under a flashprobe. He jerked away, found himself peeled and tied on a table. The funny feeling was the luxury of simulated gravity.
The chimpanzee turned out to be a squat little type in med-whites, who presently freed him.
“I told you he wasn’t a phager.” It was the woman’s voice.
Craning, Gollem saw she was no girl-girl and had a remarkable absence of chin. The chimpanzee eventually introduced himself as Chief Medic Kranz.
“what kind of ship is that?” the woman asked as he struggled into his suit.
A derelict,” he told them. “Phagerunners were using it. My teammate’s stoned. All he needs is air.”
“The power units,” said Kranz. “I’ll help you bring them over.”
“No need for you to go in—I’ve got them ready to go. Just give me a couple of metabolite cores to take back to start the air cleaning.”
Unsuspicious, Kranz motioned the woman to show the way to their stores.
Gollem saw that their base was one big cheap bubble behind a hard-walled control module. The molly hadn’t even seamed together under the film; a couple of pebbles would finish them. The ward had twenty-odd burn cases in cocoons. Themis didn’t bother much with burns.
An old spacerat minus a lot of his original equipment came wambling over to open up. Gollem loaded as much metabolite as he could carry and headed for the lock. At the port the woman grabbed his arm.
“You will help us?” Her eyes were deep green. Gollem concentrated on her chin.
“Be right back.” He cycled out.
Ragnarok was on a tether he didn’t recall securing. He scrambled over, found the end fouled in the lock toggles. If there had been tumble—bye-bye.
When he got inside he heard Topanga’s voice. He hustled up the shaft.
Once again he was too late.
While he’d been in the stores unsuspicious Chief Medic Kranz had suited up and beat him into Ragnarok.
“This is a very sick woman, spacer,” he informed Gollem.
“The legal owner of this derelict, doctor. I’m taking her to Coronis Base.”
“I’m taking her into my ward right now. We have the facilities. Get those power units.”
He could see Topanga’s eyes close.
“She doesn’t wish to be hospitalized.”
“She’s in no condition to decide that,” Kranz snapped.
The metabolite was on board. Doctor Chimpanzee Kranz appeared to have elected himself a driveship ride to nowhere. Gollem began drifting toward the ignition panel, beside Topanga’s web.
“I guess you’re right, sir. I’ll help you prepare her and we’ll take her in.”
But Kranz’s little hand had a little something in it.
“The power units, spacer.” He waved Gollem toward the shaft.
There weren’t any power units.
Gollem backed into the metabolite, watching for the stunner to waver.
It didn’t. There was only one chance left, if you could call it a chance.
“Topanga, this good doctor is going to take you into his hospital,” he said loudly. “He wants you where he can take good care of you.”
One of Topanga’s eyelids wrinkled, sagged down again. An old, battered woman. No chance.
