Unstable Prototypes (66 page)

Perhaps it wasn't quite built to code,
perhaps the fuel mix hadn't been quite right. Whatever the reason,
when he fell back out of FTL for his fifth missile attack, the CMEA
wasn't quite where the flight plan predicted. His speed was still
ticking down when it came streaking into site. He pulled the ship
hard and tried to cut speed even more, but it was too little too
late. With a long, grinding slide, he struck the missile. There
must have been something to that infinite mass nonsense, because
when the weapon and the ship collided, it didn't feel like the
jarring but ultimately inconsequential sort of clash you would
expect from a ship hitting something the size of the missile. The
blow rocked the SOB as though he'd slammed into a mountain.

For a few seconds, the SOB was completely out
of control, as was the missile. Fortunately, regardless of how out
of control something gets, when it is moving at such high speeds
without any real countermeasures, it inevitably ends up moving
roughly in the same direction. That's inertia for you. In this
case, the result was his ship doing an about-face and sliding along
at 0.995c backwards, which treated him to a lovely red-shifted
version of the cosmos to complement the blue-shift ahead. He
finessed the controls into facing the right way again without
flying apart in the process, and was greeted by a flurry of weapon
discharges from the hostile little rocket.

Trying to get the SOB to avoid the blasts at
this speed was like trying to get an elephant to dodge raindrops,
but he managed to keep the damage to a minimum. He glanced at the
clock again and tried to do the math to see how much time he had
remaining, but it quickly became clear that he didn't have enough
spare braincells to be doing something complicated like
subtraction, so he settled on the answer "not enough." With a
desperate heave of the coil, he managed to nail the nose of the
missile, which was impressive, because he was fairly sure it was
out of range of the tractor beam. A moment later he realized why
he'd managed to reach it, when the tractor beam emitter itself
drifted along beside him, apparently having been torn free in the
process.

He had no weapon, one missile, and
maybe
ten seconds left. It would have been nice to say he
didn't know what he was going to do, but the fact of the matter was
that he knew exactly what he was going to have to do. One last tap
of the navigation computer brought him to the final missile. It was
beginning to slow up for its swan dive into the star, but Karter's
flight plan had taken that into account. The star itself was
steadily creeping back toward its proper yellow color, and filling
far too much of his view screen with blinding light, but in the
brilliant field of light was a single black form, and Lex powered
his ship toward it. The side panels were disengaging now, drifting
alongside the weapon as it continued its path. The center split off
and spun away, but he dodged it and followed the warhead. He was
directly above it now. Once he knew he had enough of a lead, he
drove the ship downward, bashing the activating weapon with his
unshielded ship.

The collision was no less severe than the
last one had been, and the malfunctioning inertial inhibitor only
seemed to make it worse. His teeth rattled in his head, the ship
pitched and rolled, and the constant blaring warnings all suddenly
vanished into silence as the power in the cockpit dropped away. His
ship went into a roll, twisting his cockpit toward the weapon he'd
just intentionally struck. It was in pieces, shattered by the hit.
That was it. All six missiles destroyed. Now all he had was the
comparatively minor problem of being strapped in the cockpit of a
ship that had no power to its controls and was moving at nearly
light speed into a giant ball of nuclear fire.

The lights and sounds of the cockpit were
slowly reactivating in a garbled and scrambled state, but there
wasn't a flicker of life in his control harness. No amount of
fighting with the yoke would prompt even a nudge of motion from the
spiraling ship. He glanced out of the cockpit to see that the star
was... well, all there
was
to see. It was blinding, even
with the cockpit safeguards. Out of reflex, he reached up to
increase the tint, and raised his eyebrows when it actually
worked.

"Okay, fine. Good. The tint works. So it
isn't the entire control system that's down, just
these
controls," he said quickly. After a quick attempt to access the
autopilot, he amended his statement. "And the navigational
computer. So I either blew a fuse or a wire came loose. Here's
hoping its a wire, because I don't have time to replace a
fuse."

The sun had already raised the interior
temperature of the ship to broiling, and sweat was pouring down his
face as he looked madly over the various hatches and panels that
had been jarred loose by the flight. Finally he spotted a thick
bundle of wires with a snapped connector that was dangling free. He
pressed it into the matching socket and the controls came to life
again.

"Yes!" he proclaimed, putting his hands on
the yoke. The moment he did, though, the wires fell loose again.
"No!"

He reinserted the wires and attempted to
steer the ship with one hand, but it soon became clear that it
would probably take three hands to do the psychotic level of
aerospace acrobatics necessary to keep from going out in a blaze of
glory.

"Gotta find a way to keep it in! But I
don't... GUM!" he blurted as his brain rushed out a solution.

He spat the wad of gum from his mouth, shoved
the wires into the socket, and stuck the gum over the damaged clip.
They held firm as he grabbed the controls and wrestled with the
damaged ship, tweaking and nudging until he stabilized its tumbling
roll and orienting it away from the sun. With the proper heading
set, he maxed out the engine's power and gritted his teeth as he
watched his velocity tick down.

"Come on. Come
on!
" he begged the SOB
as it fought the pull of the star.

The stresses on the ship – now thanks to good
old momentum, heat, and gravity rather than some bogus relativistic
equations – rattled and popped beams and struts, and his engine was
doing the star ship equivalent of a wheezing final breath when the
balance finally tipped and he started to move away from the star. A
few seconds later his engine shutdown completely due to overheat,
but by then he had enough speed to coast away from the star, at
least for a while. For now he simply took a deep breath and tried
to get his blood pressure down below 300/250. With a crackle, his
radio clicked on.

"Lex, my boy," squawked Garotte's voice
across a radio connection that was nearly as warped and distorted
by the sun as Lex's ship. "Since the time limit has come and gone
and there are no significant fireworks, am I correct in assuming
you succeeded in damaging the missiles?"

"Yeah, just barely. And the SOB has seen
better days," he replied.

"Need a lift?"

"Yeah, but aren't you trapped in an equipment
locker?"

"That was an hour ago, my boy. The computer
managed to get us out a few minutes after you left. We got the
Declaration on its feet, then I headed out to meet you while Silo
cleared out and locked up the riffraff. We also managed to patch up
Karter, who seemed only vaguely aware that he was minutes from
bleeding to death."

"But wait, it was... Oh, right. The time
thing. Well, I'm flattered that you were confident enough in my
abilities that you would be willing to hang out this close to the
star."

"Don't be
too
flattered. I only came
down here once Ma assured me that in the event of mishap I'd be
able to outrun the ejection. Even so, waiting to see if you'd
succeeded was the longest hour of my life."

"It was the longest couple minutes of my
life, too. Literally, I guess. Well, wherever you are, come and
give me a tow. I think I've done enough flying for today."

Once Ma and the others had gotten the more
fatal damage to the space station sorted out, it had taken just
over ten days to get it back to Big Sigma. Their original intention
had been to find a way to transfer Ma out of the system and load
themselves into the SOB and the Declaration, but Karter had been
rather insistent that he be allowed to keep the station as payment
for his 'inconvenience.' A thorough search had turned up three
intact escape pods, and the surviving Neo-Luddites had been loaded
into them until they and their departed brethren could be dropped
off on a planet where the local law enforcement could find them.
They had also snagged the still drifting, and still homicidal Zerk
and deactivated it. It was wisely decided to find some way to
return Zerk to military storage as soon as possible, since all were
in agreement that something like that really ought to be kept out
of the wrong hands, and hands didn't get much more wrong than
Karter's.

When they had reached Karter's base, the EMP
devices were deactivated by the codes in the station computers and
there was a brief conversation between Ma and herself, who had
greeted each other as "Primary Instance" and "Subset 1.2"
respectively. Once the AI pulled herself together, she sent a
shuttle up through the cloud of debris and ferried them each to the
surface. In the facility, each member of the group saw to their own
pressing needs. Silo took the opportunity to use "an honest to
goodness shower for the first time in three years." Karter locked
himself in one of his workshops with a case of beer and a box of a
semi-legal snack food called Vice Stix. Garotte disappeared into
one of the computer labs, and Lex convinced Ma to autopilot the SOB
down from the orbiting space station to get some proper repairs.
Once all had seen to their various priorities, Ma summoned them to
one of the cafeterias in the facility. Lex was the first to
arrive.

"Yeah? Well that's great!" Lex said into the
slidepad held to his ear. "Have you ever done an interview that
high up the chain of command before? … I didn't think so. … Yes,
I'm fine, I told you. … Mitch, I'm sure. … No I didn't forget. I'm
going to discuss it with him again right now, but don't expect a
different answer. … And it'll be voice only, if anything, because
of the moat thing. … I told you, it's a bunch of junk in orbit.
Screws with connections, otherwise I'd be staring at your pretty
face on my slidepad right now. … Yeah. … I will. See you in four
days. … Love you too, babe. … Bye."

"How have these events affected Miss Modane's
career?" asked Ma's voice.

"Disaster, crime, intrigue, they're all good
for business when you're an investigative reporter," he said,
poking at the device. "Between the work she'd already done, the
stuff she learned from us, and the chaos we managed to cause in the
Neo-Luddite organization, she blew the lid off of them. There's
already award talk for her. She's got interviews lined up with
Admirals and Field Marshals, and the remnants of the Neo-Luddites
are scattering like roaches with the lights turned on. Evidently
Jon the intern is up for a distinguished journalism award, too,
just for holding the camera. She convinced her editor to put him on
the official payroll at a 'very competitive salary.' She wants me
to do a big followup story with her next week, and she thinks we
might be able to squeeze a press tour out of the last wavering
moments of my fifteen minutes of heroism, so we ought to be able to
hang out without someone detonating antimatter in the atmosphere.
That should be nice for a change."

"I am pleased to hear it," Ma replied.

"I've got a big pile of messages I've been
ignoring. … It looks like my courier boss has been calling every
four days to see if I'm back. Like usual. My chauffeur dispatcher
seems to have forgotten I went on sabbatical, so I've had eleven
missed pickups, nine angry messages, two notices of termination,
and then another three missed pickups. That man seriously needs an
assistant to at least remind him of who he fired and who he didn't.
I seem to have a message from Preethy Misra, the personal assistant
of my mobster landlord. I'm sure
that's
good news..."

"Your performance in the tasks of the last
few weeks suggests that there are few challenges beyond your
capability. I am confident any difficulties awaiting you will be
easily dispatched."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Ma," Lex
said.

He took a seat at one of the plain,
institutional-style tables of the cafeteria. The room would have
been familiar to anyone who had spent any time in a dorm, factory,
or other facility that required a bureaucracy to provide meals. For
the uninitiated, that meant neutral colors, cheap and sturdy
furniture, plastic serving trays and utensils, metal steam trays,
and various other examples of a bare bones, maximum efficiency
dining experience.

"I see that this place is still as sterile as
ever," Garotte proclaimed as he entered the cafeteria as well.
"Hardly much different than the prison."

"Speak for yourself, buster. Maybe this is
what that country club you call a prison was like, but this is
worlds better than what I've been dealing with for the last few
years," Silo countered, entering behind him. "Par
-tic
-ularly
those showers. I could live in there."

While Garotte was dressed in the crisp white
shirt and black pants that he evidently treated as a uniform, Silo
had taken advantage of the calmer circumstances to change into
something a bit more casual, a pair of snug jeans and a tank top.
Though it may not have been the intention of the outfit, it
certainly did an excellent job of showing off her curves.

"What have you two been up to?" Lex
asked.

"After fighting with the network connection
enough to patch into the appropriate servers, I managed to tweak
our entries in the facial recognition databases for most of the big
security repositories. Silo and I won't have to worry about getting
recognized anymore. Not digitally, anyway," Garotte explained,
taking a seat at the table.