Protector

“What’s happening?”

“The drive’s functioning perfectly. We’re doing one gee exactly, still lined up for Persephone.”

“Okay.” He relaxed. He moved toward the other chair, stumbling slightly.

She looked around. “Don’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“Maybe it’s me. I feel… light.”

Now he felt it too. “But we’re registering one gee.”

“Yah.”

He made an intuitive leap. “Check our course.”

She threw him an odd look, then nodded and went to work.

He couldn’t help. He had spent part of the first day and all of the next using learning tapes; he now had a good classroom education in how to fly, maintain, and repair a Belt cargo spacecraft. But Alice knew the instruments. He left her to it.

He felt it when the change came — a little more weight settling on his shoulders, a faint creaking in the fabric of the ship. He saw the fear in her eyes, and be said nothing.

Some time later she said, “We are no longer moving toward Persephone.”

“Ah.” He felt cold fear within him.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“I guessed. But it makes sense. Bre

“Oh. Well, that’s what’s happened. It didn’t register on the autopilot, of course. Which means I’ll have to get our new course by triangulation. It’s for sure we’re going wide of Persephone.”

“What can we do about it?”

“Nothing.”

He didn’t believe her. They’d pla

She turned around in her seat. “You may remember that we were going to blast up to a peak velocity of fifty-six hundred miles per second, then coast. We’ve got enough fuel to do that twice, once going, once coming.”

“Sure.” Two hundred and fifty-six hours accelerating, the same decelerating, about a hundred hours coasting. And if they had to use some fuel exploring, they’d come back at lower peak velocity. He ought to remember. They’d worked out dozens of possibilities. They’d taken a cargo ship to carry the extra fuel, lasers to cut away the empty cargo hold if things really went wrong and they had to save the weight. And the lasers would double as weapons.

All the pla

“We’re moving at about twenty-two thousand miles per second now. I haven’t got it exactly — that’ll take hours — but as it stands we’ve got almost enough fuel to bring us to a complete stop.”

“Out in the cometary belt?”

“Out in the ass end of nowhere, right.”

— that there was something dreadfully wrong in making plans against Bre

His mind pla

“We might have enough fuel for that. I’ll do a course analysis. Meanwhile—” She played with the controls.

The feel of gravity slowly died away.

The vibration of the drive was gone. It left a silence in his head.

Elroy Truesdale is less predictable than Bre

It’s like that with Truesdale’s weaponry. Lasers, of course. Lasers are too useful as an all-purpose tool to leave behind. He’d pick lasers, and one other weapon. Grenades, bullets, sonic stu

So he flipped a coin twice before takeoff. Which way did it fall, Bre

And what will he do now? Bre

“If we didn’t have to worry about Bre

They were in Roy’s hammock, loosely moored against free fall. They had spent more and more time in the hammocks these last few days. They slept more. They had sex more often, for love or for reassurance or to end the occasional snappish quarrels, or because there was nothing constructive to be done.

“Why should anyone come for us?” Roy asked. “If we were damn fools enough to come—”

“Money. Rescue fees. It would cost us everything we own, of course.”

“Oh.”

“Including the ship. Which would you rather be, Roy? Broke or dead?”

“Broke,” he said immediately. “But I’d rather not have the choice. And I don’t. You’re the Captain, as per agreement. What are we going to do, Captain?”

Alice shifted against him, and reached around him to tickle the small of his back with her fingernails. “I don’t know. What do you want to do, my loyal crew?”

“Count on Bre

“Do you think he’ll put you back twice?”

“Bre

“I don’t see the co

“You wouldn’t. Belter. On Earth there was this thing going with organ banks. Everyone wanted to live forever, I guess, and the easiest way to get enough transplants for all the sick people was to use condemned criminals. They were imposing the death penalty for anything and everything, including too many traffic violations. That was when Bre

“We never had that problem,” Alice said with dignity, “because we decided not to. We never turned our criminals into donors.”

“Granted. You got through that period on pure moral fiber.”

“I’m serious.”

“We got through it because medical research found better ways of doing things. Bre

“And Bre

“You asked my opinion, my Captain. You have no reason to treat my answer as mutiny.”

“At ease, my loyal crew. I just—” Her hand clenched into a fist. He felt it against his back. ” — don’t mucking like to depend on someone—”

“Neither do I.”

“—someone with as much arrogance as the Bre

“Maybe.”

“I still haven’t seen anything ahead of us.”

“Well, wherever we’re going, we’re going a hell of a lot faster than we pla

She laughed. Her fingernails drew circles on the small of his back.

There was something ahead of them. It was invisible to telescope and radar, but it registered, barely, on the mass detector. It might have been a stray comet, or a flaw in the mass detector, or — something else.