Metal Boxes (23 page)

“You do have a crush on that
marine, don’t you?” Wright laughed.

Stone grinned. “Can you blame me? I mean, she is smart, witty,
has a great sense of humor and so self assured she is scarily confident.”

“Not to mention that she is very pretty with a great pa
ir of hooters.”

“Yeah, well, that too
,” Stone blushed.

Wright looked thoughtful. “I agree. Allie
’s World it is. Any future residents will change the name to Nimrodville or something equally stupid. I would probably have named it Goatburg. Allie’s World is a good name to start. So, are we good to go?”

Stone reached up to the console and shut off the engine.
“All except getting home to register the discovery.” The drascos wonked plaintively as the CO
2
flow slowed to a stop. “We have reached the null point.”

He looked up at the fuel level
gauges in the tanks. “We didn’t use enough of this enriched fuel to be more than a small blip on the consumption gauge. That is good. It means we still have a full tank for our first attempted hyperjump.”

He got out of his chair and climbed over Jay to reach the
open hatch to the engine room. He tried to push Peebee out of the way, but she would not budge.

“Come on you two. I’ve got to get down there and reset the engine to try a jump into gray. You girls don’t need that much CO
2
anyway, you’re just being gluttons.”

Both drascos
started wonking repeatedly at him.

Wright shouted over the noise.
“See. I told you, you were spoiling them.”

Stone covered his ears and shouted. “Enough you two. Let me fix the engine then we can do lunch.”

The wonking continued.

Stone shouted. “Okay, okay. If you behave yourselves you can
each have one piece of the golden ooze for desert.”

The sudden silence was almost palpable. The drascos moved away from the hatch opening.

The humans looked at each other.

Stone said, “Huh, I wonder exactly how much they understand
of what we say.”

“Unless my scans are wrong they don’t really understand more than a few words at this point. Ooze must be one of those words.”

“Well, this engine conversion shouldn’t take long; an hour or so. Will you be alright up here with Jay and Peebee?”

“I
’ll be fine. They seem to ignore me most of the time. I don’t really think they are planning on eating me. I am going to sit quietly in this chair and think about how I am going to spend all of my new found riches.”

Stone hesitated
in the hatchway with only his head showing. “Sorry Partner, but you can’t.”

“I can’t spend my share of the money?”
Wright looked startled.

He laughed causing the drascos to wonk along with him. “That is not what I meant. You said you want to think about how to spend all of your money. You can’t spend it all. Oh, don’t get me wrong, you can try. I expect you to try real hard, but it is a whole planet. Once we get things up and running you will have
more money coming in faster than you can spend it; much, much more.”

“Faster than I can…no…I…I…” Wright’s voice faded.

Stone waved as he disappeared below. His voice sounded hollow as he shouted back up to her. “Partner, you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch. We might not be allowed to claim the planet. Grandpa’s lawyers will fight like crazy if it becomes a legal battle. But, if you do want to count your chickens, then I think you will find-crap!”

“What? Is there a problem? Do you need help?”
Wright asked.

Stone shouted back. “No. No. No. I just banged my head. What I was saying is if you are thinking of
money; try not to think about buying things, but how you can help other people with your money. Things like helping people start their own businesses, loaning a stake to immigrants moving to Allie’s World, you know: farmers, ranchers, and goat herders. And think about what you can do for your favorite charities.”

Wright moved over to the hatch opening and looked down. “I can spend some money on me and my family, right?” She
asked as she sat on the deck.

Jay stretched her
two-foot neck around and dropped her head in Wright’s lap.

Stone answered, “Oh, yeah. Spend away. Give us a year or two to get things moving
and you can just go crazy. Believe me, that gets old after awhile. Grandma always says, and it is true, if you help others with your money then you will increase your money to the point you have more than you had to start with. Crap!”

“Bang your head again?”

“Nope. Skinned my knuckles. Now the palms of my hands are torn up by thorns and the backs of my hands are chewed up working on this engine. I am never going to be a hand model ever again.”

“So, how does that work?
” Wright asked. “I can see how loaning money and helping a business get started could generate additional income. But, you said just helping others will bring me increase.”

Stone’s
muffled voice floated back up to her. “You give money away to good causes and more money flows back your way. I don’t know how it works. But it does. Just like I don’t understand how this engine conversion from sub-light to hyper jump capable works, I just know that it does. Or at least with this engine it did the first time. Crap! Banged my head again.”

Stone melted some metal ingots into cone shapes
and used another ingot to pound the cones into the ends of the exhaust pipes. He left one tight, but still loose enough that it could blow free. The others he pounded so tight they would not come out unless the engine exploded. He crawled around the engine, changing settings, crossing wiring and pushing levers until he was satisfied the engine was configured the way it had been the first time.

He double checked the configuration by comparing his work to the diagrams he had etched onto the engine room bulkheads. He reworked his first trial by comparing his memory with Wright’s
p.a. and the pod computers until he was satisfied it was a match.

He continued to check and recheck until he realized he was
just stalling. He patted the top of the fuel tank. It was meant to be a comforting gesture, but it only brought pain from his wounded hands.

He climbed the ladder back up to the bridge
, pausing on the way up to breathe into the mouths of each of his drascos. They wonked happily. Peebee rolled onto her back presenting a round little belly for rubbing.

Wright was standing by the oven. “Spoiled ‘em like last month
’s cottage cheese.”

“I didn’t spoil them. That is how you have to treat them or they will eat you.”

Wright replied with a sarcastic “Ha!”

“Hey! Who is the expert here on raising drascos?
I have two. How many are you raising?”

“Just because I can’t swim doesn’t mean I don’t know water is wet
,” Wright said. “Change of subject: I fixed lunch for us, so we can eat while you feed your girls. It is not much, I just boiled up some tubers, berries and bits of jerky in one of the bamboo buckets.”

“Sounds appetizing. Let me feed Jay and Peebee first, then we can sit and eat before we jump into gray.”
He slammed the engine room hatch closed and dogged the recessed locks. He was sure a closed hatch would not help if the engine exploded, but he did it anyway.

Stone quiet
ly piled up two equal size bundles of red leaves in the main cabin and sliced off two chunks of solidified ooze with his survival knife. He did not speak as he ate. Wright was quiet too. He wondered whether Wright was thinking about spending money or if she was as worried as he was about trying another hyperspace jump in a ship not designed to do just that.

The drascos were their noisy selves, gulping down their leaves and slurping at their golden ooze. They rolled, jumped and crashed into each other with wild abandon. Stone picked
up a discarded branch and tossed it across the cabin. The drascos fetched it back to him. He tossed it again and they fetched it again. The drascos raced each other to see who could get the stick first and return it. Jay quickly learned to either catch the stick as it bounced off the back bulkhead or to outrace the stick and use the back bulkhead as a springboard to leap into the air and catch the stick before it dropped to the deck where Peebee could scoop it up.

Stone slowly chewed his lunch, not tasting the tasteless meal. He tossed the stick without thinking. He worked and reworked the engine reconfiguration in his head. He could
not find any steps he had done the first time and missed this time.

Finally, he tossed down the small bamboo utensils and the bamboo bowl
, jumped to his feet and rushed onto the bridge. Without any hesitation, he pushed the engine thrust to the max and closed his eyes willing the little pod to make the hyper jump, not wanting to watch the bridge controls.

“Took command there
, didn’t you, Mister Stone?” Wright’s voice made him jump.

Stone answered without opening his eyes.
“Well, Commander Wright, if we are dead then we aren’t in the navy, right? And since we are partners in a commercial venture and I am the majority partner, then I am in command.”

He felt he
r arms wrap around him from behind in a warm hug.

“It’s okay, Stone
,” she said. “I wasn’t sure I could have given you the order to turn the engine on.”

“I am sorry, Commander. I couldn’t wait anymore.”

“Well, if we are about to blow up and die again maybe you should call me Dani instead of Commander,” Wright said.

Stone leaned back into her embrace
, still keeping his eyes closed. “Why? You earned the title, even if you leave the navy, it is still yours. Mom often calls Dad ‘Sergeant’, especially when they are kidding around, just before they go off alone and…well…do you know what.”

Wright chuckled. “I heard rumors about ‘you know what.’ So, was your Dad a
marine?”

“Army
,” Stone shook his head. “He and Mom were both in the army. She was a lieutenant and Dad was a sergeant. Dad was younger and Mom outranked him, but it didn’t matter to them. Do you think it will matter between Allie and me?”

“Not if I know Allie
,” Wright sighed. “I think that your coming from a rich family bothered her more than anything else. Besides partner, we should take first things first. We have one jump down and one more to go.”

Stones eyes shot open
. He saw an expanse of gray nothing on the view screen.

Wright gave his shoulders a little shake. “You’re not whooping with delight?”

“No. I think I am in shock. It shouldn’t have worked. It should have blown up and we should be dead.”

Wright turned away
. She grabbed the stick lying at their feet, and tossed it back through the cabin hatch toward the back bulkhead. “Well, Mister Stone, we are already dead, remember? You can’t kill the dead.”

“I guess that makes us
zombies.” He rolled his eyes back in his head and staggered around the bridge on stiff legs. He stopped and looked at Wright. “Nope, I still feel alive. But I never considered how zombies feel.” He picked up the stick Peebee dropped at his feet and tossed it back through the main cabin hatch.

“
So Senior Partner Stone, what is next? How long to we spend stuck in this nothing?”

Stone shrugged. “Well, we have been here and seen this, so I say we don’t spend any
more time than we have to. I won’t have to reconfigure the engine again, but I do have to check the seals and the fuel tanks.” He leaned over the bridge console. “The engine is off. It did an auto shutdown. I need to check the fuel levels, but it looks like we only used about a quarter of the fuel tank. So we shouldn’t have to slurry any more metal enriched fuel into the tank.”

He picked up the stick Jay
dropped at his feet and tossed it back through the open hatch. Both drascos bounded after the stick.

“We will need to melt down some of the girl
’s golden ooze bars if last time was any indication,” Stone said. “I will need to reseal the whole engine, spread the goop on any loose connections and let it dry. Then we can try our jump out of hyperspace and hopefully we will come out somewhere near human space.”

He picked up the stick Peebee
dropped at his feet. It was slimy with drasco spit. “Enough now, give us a break, girls.”

Jay wonked plaintively.

“Okay. One more time, but this is the last time. We can throw the stick later. I have work to do.” He waved the stick in the air. “This is for all of the marbles. Winner takes all. Got it? Whoever gets the stick this time gets to keep it until the next time we play.”

The drascos tensed into crouches ready to spring into action. Both of them stared intensely at the stick, quivering with excitement and anticipation. Although the
ir bodies were facing the main cabin, their heads were twisted around so their eyes never left the stick. When Stone finally released the stick it spun through the open hatch.