The Blue Marble Gambit (9 page)

CHAPTER
6. BAKEDBEAN

There
was a very simple reason that a being of Ned's enormous intellect hadn't
suggested the lifeboat: he was too smart for such a hopeless ploy. If the
Blue Bean
itself couldn't evade the Etzans, then the lifeboat
couldn't hope to. Luckily I wasn't
as smart as Ned. I was willing to
take an impossible chance.

"At
least," I joked as I elbowed Trina while grabbing for the controls and
slamming the hatch shut, "we won't lose track of each other in here,
eh?" While a space yacht, even a nice one like the
Blue Bean
, is by most measures a small place, it is a palace
compared to a lifeboat.

"Right,"
Trina agreed. “None of that awkward
privacy."

"It's
really not so bad," I said lightly, as I brought the pitifully few systems
on line.

"Especially
since we'll only be here a few minutes before we're reduced to our component
atoms."

I
flipped a row of switches. “Fixated
on the black cloud at the center of the silver lining, are we?" I was
distracted, for I was scheming with both the tiny lifeboat computer and the
Blue Bean's
jittery brain. Picking a moment. A still morose Ned finally joined in.

"It'll
never work," he mourned.

"Shut
up."

The
trick was to launch the lifeboat late enough that the Etzans wouldn't spot it,
but early enough that it wouldn't be blasted into smithereens. Assuming that the blaster bolts impacted
a favorable spot and didn't atomize us instantly, the computer consensus was
that the launch window was precisely 0.27 seconds long. Any earlier, and we were toast. Any later, and we were toast.

I
assigned the launch to the lifeboat's computer.

It
refused.

I
tried again.

It
refused again.

"Curses!"
I shrieked, unable to think of any in particular and so settling for a generic.

"I
think I understand the problem," Ned said.

"Tell
me, o sage with no body."

"The
computer doesn't want to be responsible for our, er, demise. Rather, it can't. Its programming won't let it. It seems it doesn't think much of our
chances."

"Arg!
Then I'll do it! Manually!"

I
gripped the launch handle, a long lever striped with bright red and yellow.

"Easy
enough," I lied for Trina's benefit. She glared at me and turned away, her skin flushing crimson, half her head
wearing long blonde hair, the other half a bobbing Afro.

I
glued my eyes to the readouts. The
Etzan was powering up its main batteries; the tips began to glow purple. The first blow would be massive - though
our little ship was a mere soap bubble to the heavy blasters, the Etzans
believed in overkill, and then a bit more for good measure. I gripped the launch handle, feeling its
smooth metallic warmth.

"Not
yet," Ned said from somewhere.

The
purple glow deepened. A
computer-run projection of time to optimal launch jolted and jumped. Tennish seconds.
Then, in a moment,
six.
Then
sevenish.
The Etzans were
not only thorough,
but
thoroughly unpredictable.

Two. I gripped harder.

Four.

"Saturn's
ringed ass!" I groaned, and relaxed.

One.

Launch,
screamed the screen.

"Launch,"
screamed Ned.

I
was already yanking the handle. The
twenty-two G jolt was enough to black both - or maybe even all three - of us
out. But even through that
blackness I saw the brilliant flare of the Blue Bean's destruction. Brighter than a solar flare, brighter
than a supernova.

Then
we were away and in a tumble, gyrating around all three axes. The blood fought its way back into my
head and rebooted my brain. My
vision returned, which told me several things. First, it meant I still had eyes, and a
brain, and they were connected to each other. That meant we'd survived, this far, at
least. I took a closer look around
the pod, now that I had time. A
small plaque announced that the Blutonians had manufactured it in Orbital
Lifepod Factory #329. In case I
cared to make any complaints, it also informed me that it had been inspected by
# 7,149,008(b).

I
reached over to check Trina. She
was groggy but recovering, and sat up after a few gentle slaps.

"Pluto's
teeth," she yelled. “We're out
of control!" Stars were whipping and streaming past the tiny
viewports. We were faster than a
top, twirling like a one-winged bird in a power dive.

"Straighten
us out!" she shouted next.

But
I couldn't. Or rather,
wouldn't. For although we had the
necessary attitude thrusters, it was vital that we impersonate a piece of
lifeless rubble blasted to kingdom come. Otherwise, we would shortly be exactly that. There was no telling how long it would
take the Etzans to lose interest in scanning the rubble. But given that they were both thorough
and thoroughly unpredictable, it would be at least several hours before we were
safe.

"Reminds
me," I said, "of a gravity storm."

She
thought for a moment, smiled, and wafted towards me.

The
funny thing about lifeboats is that they're actually miniature starships. Far more than mere bubbles of air, they
have drives, air cyclers, and food and water supplies.
Everything to keep one
alive to enjoy the misery of close confinement.

Of
course there's good reason for this. Once lifeboats were unpowered baubles, mere reservoirs of air and maybe
a sip of water. It was quickly
established that all they were good for was exchanging a quick fiery death -
usually from a cascading drive malfunction - for a painfully lingering
expiration. This was because once
you were in such a
lifeboat,
you were utterly and
completely stranded. Helpless. After a week or so - if you lasted that
long - you just opened the airlock and got it over with.

But
none of that was a problem for us. We had primitive but serviceable nav computers and drive elements. And since we were carrying the
Blue Bean's
inertia, we were still on
course for the Boff homeworld.
Although, with the lifeboat's lesser thrust, we would arrive a bit
late.
But
not bad at all, compared to being dead.

"I
don't get it," Trina said, pulling away. “Why did they follow us? Why monkey
around with that mine? Why not just vaporize us to start with?"

"That
would offend their sense of order," I
explained,
as I shifted our tandem orbit ninety degrees.

"That's
crazy."

"That's
the kind of place the galaxy is." I spun her, slowly.

"I
just hope this isn't an omen."

I
shrugged. “Well, it probably
is."

Trina
glanced around the tiny lifeboat. It held only us, and two tiny parcels I'd grabbed as we fled the Blue
Bean. “Diz! We're ruined! Our mission! Humanity is doomed! All of our supplies were on the
ship!"

Almost
all, I agreed. We had only the
tiniest scraps from our mountain of equipment. We'd be hitting Boff almost naked, which
was happily ironic, since at the moment we were both entirely naked.

"What
are we going to do!
"

"When?"
I was pondering several interesting options for the next minutes. At least two were completely impossible
but worthy of speculation anyway.

"When
we get to the planet, you idiot.
If we get to the planet.
What did you think I meant?"

I
shrugged. Now, I had thought she
meant, but I didn't say so. I said,
"Improvise," and did. Trina stopped asking questions.

We
entered the Boff system, and the old balky computer managed to point us in the
correct direction and light off the engine, which slowed us. We dropped below TL - far
more stealthy
that way, with no photic bow wave - and
cruised onward. Trina began demonstrating
several fascinating aspects of zero-g hyper-yoga.

We
could have happily copulated the parsecs away except for an odd bit of trivia:
thirty five
years before, on an obscure Horsehead nebula
planet called Grooge, it rained.

The
planet Grooge has long been inhabited by a race of sponge-like caterpillars,
each of which is possessed of five fuzzy wisps of nearly prehensile
antennae. Grooges are singularly
uninterested in the universe around them, with the sole exception of the mining
and polishing of the silicon
orbs which
grow from the
unique Groogian silicate trees.

Coincidentally,
these same silicon orbs are essential conductors in modern trans drives, and
the best orbs, of the most exquisitely perfect cut and alignment, come from
Grooge. Happily for the Groogians,
they now enjoy a profitable trade, sending their orbs to all six corners of the
galaxy. Early negotiators were
stymied, though, because it was very difficult to find anything at all that the
Grooge liked more than their orbs. Thus, for many years, they were completely and utterly uninterested in
selling them. Then one day a junior
negotiator named Clemence McGillicuddy, in a fit of exasperation, said
sarcastically, "How about robot harvesters? If we trade you those, you can
harvest even more orbs."

The
Grooge spokesman, who was slowly and methodically plucking orbs from a
shrub-like silicate tree, made an unusual, an unprecedented, even, gesture with
its usually limp and uninterested communication antenna.

The
negotiation team scrambled through their dictionaries to find the meaning of
the strange wavering motion.

At
last Clem found it. It translated
as: "Well, alright. If you
insist."

And
so began a new era of safe and efficient space travel, made possible by the
uniquely pure and perfect silicon orbs of Grooge.

The
only problems arose when, every few decades, a rainstorm hit Grooge. Then, the spongy Groogians would soak up
water, swelling to three times their normal size. In a drunken frenzy of short-circuited
silicon-based biochemistry, the bloated Groogians would no longer seek out only
perfect orbs. Instead, their sense
of aesthetic fulfillment, which normally could be satisfied only by crystalline
perfection, was replaced an equally high regard for mischievousness. They would, with their habitual care,
select only those
crystals which
appeared to be
perfect but in fact contained tiny flaws.

Tiny fatal flaws.

Such
a crystal followed the usual route. It was mined, no doubt to the rustling corduroy sound of damp Grooge
antennae shivering with drunken amusement, and then sent to Groogopolis, where
it perhaps sat in a warehouse for years. It might then have been traded to the Grapoids, those notoriously
unscrupulous middlemen, or perhaps to the nomadic Huffers. Most certainly, though, it found its way
to the Blutonians, more specifically to Orbital Lifepod Factory #329, perhaps
at a cut-rate price, but perhaps not. From there it made the short journey to the lifepod slated for the
Blue Bean
.

Where,
just as Trina and I were attempting a blindfolded no-hands matching of
trajectories, the worthless little unit turned an eighty
million
credit
lifepod into a weightless paperweight, with two critical
differences:

1. There was no paper below us.

2. Few, if any, paperweights are on
collision courses with planets.

As
soon as the orb shattered and stilled the ship's heart I knew what had
happened. To a pilot, the hum and
thrust of a ship's systems are as familiar as one's own heartbeat; such things
become remarkable only when they cease. The odds of a failure were like those for lightning - tiny but
real.
But now?
On this mission?
Cruel, but for me typical, luck.
I whipped off my blindfold and darted
straight to the pilot's couch. Trina orbited overhead like a highly erotic moon.

"Come
back here, Apollo," she called seductively. “Soyuz calling. Mission
incomplete.” We were reenacting the
historic docking of the 1970s. “

Engrossed
in the displays, hoping my gut was wrong, I didn't reply. Finally she removed her own
blindfold. The pod's power and
system monitors were flat-lined. Dead.

"Why
is it so quiet?" she asked. “And why do have that funny look on your face?"

I
fondled a few controls; there wasn't much to try, though enough to confirm what
I already knew. So I told Trina the
story of Grooge and our drive orb. When I finished, she didn't look especially concerned. Instead, impossibly, she just shrugged
and pointed at a certain part of me. “We still have some unfinished business."

I
wasn't in the mood, and said so.

She
pursed those fine full lips into a pout. “So what do we do?"

I
reached out and ran one finger down the cold clearsteel porthole. The thin wafer was all that lay between
us and death
by vacuum. “It's very simple, Trina. We
can't maneuver. And we can't
stop. So in ten hours, we make a
very appreciable size hole right in the middle - and maybe even right through -
the planet of Boff."