Shipstar Read Free

would not move without great strain. She made herself get unsteadily up onto two uncertain feet. Clouds in her mind dispelled slowly—something about green wealth, forests of quiet majesty, her parents …
    She made her chin snap up, eyes fluttering, back on duty … and slowly turned to survey the area. Where’s Beth?
    Clouds still grasped at her. Breathe deeply, keep it up.
    Tananareve strode off to check around some angular buttress supports. No human about.
    The snakes had crawled into the ship, fitting somehow into open spaces. Lau Pin jogged to join them. He glanced back at her, waved a hand, turned, went away.…
    Still there were clouds. She listened intently as she tried to put one small foot in front of the other. Remarkably difficult, it was.
    Rumbling, sharp whistling, chatter. Tananareve walked a bit unsteadily back toward the ship. Her vision was blurred, sweat trickling into her eyes and stinging.
    The great curved door closed in Tananareve’s face.
    “Hey,” Tananareve said. She stopped, blinked. Clouds swept away on a sudden adrenaline shock—
    “Wait!”
    The drone slid out of line and away, slow at first, then faster and faster.
    “Dammit!” she shouted. “Damn—” She couldn’t hear herself over a whistling roar. Hot air blasted her back.
    *   *   *
    “Wait!” Beth Marble shouted. She could feel the acceleration building. The finger snakes were wrapped around support pillars, and her crew were grabbing for tie-downs. She found handholds and footholds while thrust pulled massively at her.
    She wailed, “Tananareve!”
    “She was sick,” Phoshtha said, recessed eyes glittering. “Thrust would have killed her. She would have slowed us.”
    “What? You let—” Beth stopped. It was done; handle the debriefing later, in calmer moments. The snakes were useful but strange.
    They were accelerating quickly and she found a wedge-shaped seat. Not ideal for humans, but manageable. There was little noise from the magnetics, but the entire length of the drone popped and ponged as stresses adjusted.
    Lau Pin said, “I have SunSeeker online.”
    “Send Redwing our course. Talk to him.” Beth couldn’t move; she was barely hanging on to a tie-down bar. “Use our best previous coordinates.”
    “Okay. I’m having it compute from the present force vectors.” Lau Pin turned up the volume so others could hear. “Lau Pin here.”
    “Jampudvipa here, bridge petty officer. Captain Redwing’s got some kind of cold, and Ayaan Ali is bridge pilot. What’s your situation?”
    “We’re on our way. It went pretty much as we’d planned. Hardly anything around on the way but finger snakes. We’ve got three with us. Uh … We lost Tananareve Bailey.”
    “Drown it,” the officer said. “All right. But you’re en route? Hello, I see your course … yeah. Wow. You’re right up against the back of the mirror shell.”
    “Jampudvipa, this drone is driven by magnets in the back of the Bowl. Most of their ships and trains operate that way, we think. It must save reaction fuel. We don’t have much choice.”
    Some microwave noise blurred the signal, then, “Call me Jam. And you don’t have pressure suits?”
    “No, and there’s no air lock. No way to mate the ships.”
    A pause. “Well, Ayaan says she can get SunSeeker to the rendezvous in ten hours. After that … what? Stet. Stet. Lau Pin, we can maybe fit you into the bay that held Eros before we lost it. If not … mmm.”
    Lau Pin said, “The finger snakes don’t keep time our way. I think it’s longer for us. I’ll make regular checks and send them.”
    “We’ll be there. And you all need medical assistance? Four months in low gravity, out in the field—yeah. We’ll have Captain Redwing out of the infirmary by then, but it only holds two. Pick your sickest.”
    “Would have been Tananareve.”
    *   *   *
    The drone was gone. The system’s magnetic safety grapplers released with a hiss. Tananareve stood in the