Lando liked exercise, the real kind, which involves some sort of accomplishment. If there was anything more boring than walking on a treadmill he couldn't think of what it was. Walking was boring, the gray little compartment was boring, and his thoughts were boring.
On the other hand, not being in shape was even worse, so he did it anyway. Melissa was a welcome interruption.
She entered the gym like a cyclone, jumped onto the treadmill, and walked backward. She wore a big grin. "I know something you don't."
Lando used a towel to wipe the sweat off his forehead. "Good. I hope it's some math."
Melissa produced an exaggerated pout. "That's not fair! I'm doing very well. You said so yourself!"
Lando snapped the towel in her direction and she jumped off the treadmill. "Sure, but 'very well' and 'outstanding' are two different things."
Melissa made a face and stuck out her tongue. "For the next few days I'll be too busy to study math."
"Why's that?"
"'Cause we've got a tow that's why. A big one."
A timer went off. Lando stepped off the treadmill. Sensing his absence the machine turned itself off. "A tow, huh? How do you know?"
Melissa jumped up, grabbed the chinning bar, and swung back and forth. "I know because I was on the bridge when the call came in." She dropped to the padded deck with a small thump.
"In fact . . . Daddy should call right about now."
So saying Melissa assumed a dramatic pose and pointed toward the intercom. It bonged right on cue. She smiled triumphantly as Lando shook his head in pretended amazement.
"Lando here."
Cap sounded tense. "We've got a tow, Lando . . . a big one. I need you on the bridge."
"Coming," Lando answered, and chased Melissa down the corridor toward the lift tubes. She won as always.
They arrived on the bridge to find everyone else already there. Cap was seated in front of the NAVCOMP typing away, Dee was slouched behind the weapons control module, and Cy hovered in midair.
"What's up?"
Lando dropped into the seat next to Dee. She wore a tight ship-suit and he liked the view. Dee knew it and smiled.
Cap answered without turning around. "We received a distress call from an Empire liner called the Princess Claudia."
Lando gave a low whistle. "The Princess Claudia. The biggest and the best. What's the problem?"
"A meteor strike," Cap answered. "It punched a hole through her hull and disabled both drives."
"What about her force field?" Cy asked. "I thought the big liners ran 'em full-time."
"Normally they do," Cap answered, "unfortunately theirs was down for repairs. A meteor happened along, and whamo."
Dee shook her head sympathetically. "Rotten luck."
"Yeah," Cap agreed distractedly. "But that's not the worst of it. They were pretty close in when the accident happened. Bit by bit they're falling into the sun."
Lando was on his feet. "Into Durna? How long do we have?"
Cap pushed a button that shunted the NAVCOMP's output over to the main screen. Lando saw the system, a projected course that would carry them dangerously close to the sun, and a digital readout. It read forty-one hours, sixteen minutes, and thirty-two seconds. As he watched the two changed to a one.
Cap turned around. His voice was grim. "During the next thirty minutes Junk will accelerate to maximum speed. Even so it will take eighteen hours to get there, and by the time we put some tractor beams on her, the Claudia may have fallen too far for us to tow her alone. Even the most optimistic computer projections say we'll be lucky to hold the ship where she is. In fact, given her mass and Durna's gravity, she could pull us down with her."
"How 'bout other tugs?" Cy inquired. "This is a rich tow. In fact, since she has no power of her own, we can claim salvage. Surely they want a piece of the action?"
Cap nodded soberly. "You bet they do . . . but we're closest . . . and they won't arrive until the critical moment has passed."
Lando returned his attention to the main screen. Cap was right. They were the only ones who could help. With some money in the bank, and the crew paid up, Sorenson had resumed his search for the Star of Empire. He'd paid good money for those coordinates and planned to use 'em.
As a result Junk was halfway to the asteroid belt when the distress call came in, a location that put her closer to the sun than the other tugs happened to be, and best positioned for a rescue. A rescue that could turn into a suicide mission if they weren't careful.
Cy broke the silence. "Have we got a com link with the Claudia?"
Cap nodded.
"Good," Cy said as he squirted himself toward the comset. "I want a look at their damage reports."
"Captain?" The voice belonged to Rubashkin.
Neubeck felt her head come up, suddenly aware that she'd fallen asleep. A quick glance at the ship's clock confirmed that five minutes had disappeared. Eight hours had passed since the meteor strike and she was very tired.
"Yes?"
"The captain of the Junk wants to speak with you."
Neubeck rubbed her eyes. She still couldn't believe it. A tug named Junk. She sincerely hoped the name reflected the owner's sense of humor . . . not her actual condition. Well, something was better than nothing, and the other tugs were a long ways off.
Neubeck wanted to know who she was dealing with. "A man or a woman?"
"A man."
"Do we have anything on him?"
Rubashkin had anticipated the captain's question and pushed a button. There were various advantages to working for the Empire Line, and one was a computer loaded with trivial but sometimes useful information. Included were files on all registered ships, their owners, and senior officers.
Words appeared on the com screen and Rubashkin waited for her reaction.
Name: Sorenson, Theodore A.
Born: 1-30-3006 Terra
Education: Graduated New Point Prep School 6-17-3023
Graduated Imperial Maritime Academy 6-24-3028
A surprisingly short list of ships and ranks followed. Neubeck skimmed through them to the final entry:
Assumed command liner Star of Empire 3-2-3047
Star of Empire wrecked 11-12-3049
Subject found unfit for duty and relieved of command 8-4-3050.
Presently owner/operator tug Junk.
Rubashkin smiled as her eyebrows shot up. "That's right, Captain, he has more than a passing acquaintance with liners in trouble."
Neubeck started to say something but held her tongue instead. Assuming the ship survived she'd face a court of inquiry as well. How would she fare? She could almost hear the prosecutor as he or she said, "So, Captain Neubeck, you were asleep when the meteor hit, what happened then?" She pushed the thought aside.
"Put Captain Sorenson on."
The face that appeared on the com screen was long and thin as if suffering from a protracted disease. He had bushy eyebrows, intelligent blue eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth. Neubeck summoned a professional smile.
"Greetings, Captain Sorenson. I look forward to meeting you in person . . . and the sooner the better!"
Cap laughed politely. "I understand. Believe me, the feeling's mutual. And that's why I'm calling. We've got some work to do."
Neubeck sat up a little straighter. Work to do? Great Sol, her people had been working around the clock! She felt defensive and did her best to hide it. "Okay, Captain, what have you got in mind?"
"Not me." Cap answered, "my chief engineer. I'll put him on."
Sorenson disappeared and was replaced by a shot of a floating globe. It extruded a vid pickup and aimed it in her direction. Neubeck glanced at Rubashkin. He smiled and gave a shrug. She managed a straight face.
"Hello, I'm Captain Neubeck."
The globe bobbed up and down. "Glad to meet you, Captain. My name is Cy Borg."
"I'm pleased to meet you," Neubeck replied. "I wish our chief could join in this conversation, but he was killed in the meteor strike."
Cy sank slightly. "Yes, I'm sorry."
Neubeck cleared her throat. "So, what can we do to help?"
Cy was silent for a moment as if gathering his thoughts. "Given your present rate of descent, we'll be lucky to hold you where you are, much less pull you out."
"So?" Neubeck hoped this was going somewhere. She was well acquainted with her ship's situation.
"So," Cy replied, "we'll try to repair drive number two. Number one is a dockyard job, but according to your damage reports, number two remains a possibility. With some power from it, plus what Junk can provide, we'll pull you out."
Neubeck shook her head. The cyborg was wasting her time. "Sorry. It's like I said. The chief and all of his officers are dead. Some techs survived but they don't have the knowledge. We even checked the passengers. No luck."
"You don't understand," Cy replied patiently. "I have the knowledge, and I'll tell your techs what to do."
Neubeck perked up slightly. "You could do that? Direct them from there?"
"Yes, I believe I can," Cy said evenly. "Now here's what I need . . ."
Durna was a fiery ball that filled most of the main view screen and backlit the liner. Looking at it Lando could almost feel the sun trying to pull him down.
From a distance the Princess Claudia looked fine. In fact better than "fine." She looked beautiful. In spite of the fact that she would never pass through a planet's atmosphere, her designers had taken care to smooth her skin and make her look like what she was. One of the finest ships ever built.
But under high mag Lando could see the point where the meteor had plunged through the liner's outer hull. A rough-and-ready patch had been installed allowing Neubeck to repressurize the drive rooms.
By using jury-rigged vid cams to see what was going on, and by driving the ship's remaining engineering staff to the edge of exhaustion, Cy had accomplished a great deal during Junk's long approach.
But there was still work left to do, dangerous work down inside drive two's reaction chamber, work that they hoped to avoid. There was a chance, a slim one to be sure but a chance, that Junk could tow the liner unassisted. Everyone had agreed to give it a try.
Lando used delicate bursts of power to move Junk even closer. "You ready, Cap?"
"Ready," Sorenson answered tersely. "Here goes."
There were beads of sweat on Cap's forehead as he reached out with two tractor beams and locked them onto Claudia's hull. "I have lock-on . . . pass the word."
Lando touched a button and Neubeck came on-line. "Captain, we have two-beam lock-on. Applying power now."
Neubeck nodded. "Thank you, Pilot . . . here's hoping it's enough."
Careful to apply the power smoothly Lando brought both of Junk's drives up to max and a little beyond. Twin warning lights and a buzzer came on. He checked the NAVCOMP for a change in position. A yard, a mile, anything. Damn! They were losing ground.
Cy's voice came from Junk's drive room. He'd been monitoring their progress or lack of it.
"It's just as we feared, Pik, she's still falling toward the sun, slower now but falling all the same. Back off the power a bit. Save it for later.
"I'll transfer to the liner in the meantime. Things will go more quickly if I'm there in person, or in housing, as the case may be."
Lando chuckled. "That's a roger. Reducing power now." The buzzer went suddenly silent and the warning lights vanished. He turned toward the com screen.
"Sorry, Captain, it looks like we're going to need drive two."
Neubeck was disappointed but determined to hide it. She forced a smile. "Well, thanks to the hard work by your chief engineer we still have a chance. I'll send my gig."
An indicator light went from green to red. Lando smiled. "Thanks, but that won't be necessary. Engineer Borg is on his way. You might station someone at your main passenger lock though. Cy's in a hurry."
Neubeck frowned, then smiled her understanding. "Of course! The chief has built-in transportation. How convenient."
"It has its moments," Lando agreed. "We'll continue to slow your descent. Let us know when it's time to leave."
Though separated from space by a metal housing Cy came closer than most to direct contact. Because his alloy casing was the same one he lived in all the time there was no sense of putting something between him and the void. He had total freedom to move in any direction that he pleased. It was wonderful, exhilarating, and terrible all at the same time.
The trip from Junk to the Claudia was one of the loneliest moments of his entire life. There was nothing to be but himself. He felt separate, different, and terribly alone. Suddenly he wanted a body, any body, even one riddled with disease.
He remembered what it was like to be a man. To run, jump, and make love to a woman. He remembered what it was like to make things with his hands. To push, pull, and twist parts together. He remembered what it was like to put everything on one throw of the dice. To lose, cry, and be taken apart.
Where were his arms? His lungs? His heart?
Reaching out to hold someone else's wife? Breathing life into someone else's dreams? Pumping blood to someone else's brain?
Oh, God! It would be so easy to stop, so easy to turn off the air that pushed him through space, so easy to settle into Durna's warm embrace.
"Cy?" The sound of Melissa's voice jerked him back. There was a multifreq comset built into his electronics. He saw Claudia's lock just ahead.
"Yes?"
"Would they have any ice cream? We're all out."
Cy smiled deep within himself. "Come to think of it, I'll bet they do."
"Could you bring me some?"
The lock opened and Cy squirted himself inside. "Work comes first, but if everything goes well, I'll see what I can do."
"Thanks, Cy! I love you!" and Melissa was gone.
Neubeck sipped her latest cup of black coffee and grimaced at the bitter taste. She was determined to stay on her diet. At least that was something she could control.
Neubeck had just completed a tour of the ship and found morale was slipping. The costume ball had been a great success, but there was no hiding the desperate situation, and voices were getting shrill. Rubashkin had been waiting for her return.
"All right, Andre, give me the bad news."
Rubashkin was tired and looked it. His voice sounded slightly hoarse. "We have one, maybe two hours. After that things get ugly. If we wait too long the lifeboats won't have enough power to blast clear. Those little in-system drives weren't designed for this sort of thing."
"We can put some of our passengers aboard the tug."
Rubashkin nodded. "True, but not enough."
"What's the latest on drive two?"
Rubashkin gave a characteristic shrug. "It's down to the wire. Someone's got to enter the reaction chamber and hand align the flux rods. Whoever goes stands a good chance of radiation poisoning."
Neubeck winced. Flux rod alignment was normally carried out by robots. The kind you can find in any good-sized yard but not aboard ship. "Any volunteers?"
"Yeah, the borg's going in."
"The tug's chief engineer?"
"That's right."
"Damn."
"Yeah, damn is right, he's one helluva man."
Neubeck gave it some thought and decided Rubashkin was right. Cy Borg was one helluva man. She sipped cold coffee.
"I guess we'd better get everyone onto the boat deck. Load but don't launch."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And, Andre . . ."
"Yes, Captain?"
"If you know any good prayers, say 'em now."
"What's happening now?" Dee was standing behind Lando and looking over his right shoulder while Melissa peeked over his left. The picture quality was extremely poor, and not knowing much about ships, Dee had a hard time understanding what Cy was up to.
"Cy's going in. You see that weird-looking thing they draped over him? Well, that's some makeshift radiation armor. It might protect his brain."
"Might?"
"No one knows. We hope so."
"It will," Melissa said fiercely. "Cy knows what he's doing".
Dee put a hand on Melissa's shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze. "What's the long skinny thing?"
"A flux rod from drive one. One of the rods in drive two is badly bent and Cy's got to replace it. Once that's accomplished he'll make sure the rest of the rods are in alignment, seal the reaction chamber, and restart the drive."
"Yeah," Melissa agreed, "then we have ice cream."
The minutes seemed to crawl by with agonizing slowness as Cy carefully removed the bent flux rod, installed the new one, and began to align the rest. It was a painstaking process full of starts and stops. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the task was over.
They saw a fuzzy image of Cy leaving the reactor, of it being resealed, of technicians clearing away tools and parts.
Cy disappeared, then reappeared via cleaner video. The awkward shielding was gone, and except for the cable connecting him to a DC power outlet, Cy looked his normal self. He aimed a vid pickup toward the com screen. There was something formal about the way he said it.
"Captain Neubeck, Captain Sorenson, it's now or never."
Neubeck clapped her hands. "Excellent work, Chief! You're incredible!"
Lando looked around. Cap was nowhere in sight. He turned back to the com screen.
"We read you, Cy . . . we're standing by."
It took a good fifteen minutes to bring drive two from zero to fifty percent power. With both ships slipping toward the sun time was of the essence, but so was safety, and the last thing Cy wanted was an accident. If a flux rod was misaligned and they applied power too quickly, the drive could blow up.
But it didn't. Bit by bit the power came up until Neubeck was grinning from ear to ear and Lando was itching to try it.
"Okay," Cy said carefully, "let's give it a whirl. Captain Neubeck . . . ask your pilot to apply power. Gently now . . . let's minimize the stress as much as we can.
"Pik, just keep it steady, and watch those tractor beams. This would be a bad time to lose them."
Pik looked around. Cap was still missing. He had a sudden premonition and punched up the intercom in Cap's cabin. The vid pickup was positioned to cover the desk but he could see the foot of the other man's bunk in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. There was no mistaking Cap's boots.
Damn! Sometime during the last hour or so the worthless bastard had consumed enough booze to pass out. Now he was gone. Out from under the pressure, the tension, and the possibility of failure.
Della and Melissa had taken Cap's place. Melissa knew, Lando could tell from the tight expression on her face, and he felt sorry for her.
As if reading his thoughts Della looked up and smiled. "Don't worry, Pik, we've got it covered, don't we, honey?"
Melissa nodded, and even though she didn't say anything, Lando thought he saw the trace of a smile. Maybe she'd accept Della after all.
And then, slowly but surely, both ships began to move. Even though they weren't getting more than half power from drive two, it was enough to make the critical difference, and everyone heaved a sigh of relief.
About an hour later they were out of Durna's gravity well and headed for the Imperial navy yard on a planetoid designated as IW-72.
By now the passengers had been sent back to their staterooms to dress for dinner, the other tugs had been sent back home, and Cy had returned to Junk.
Neubeck had insisted on sending Cy home in her gig. Lando had to stay on the bridge, but Melissa and Dee were in the tug's launching bay when the hatch opened and Cy floated out.
It was only after the cyborg had received a shower of congratulations and hugs that Melissa noticed the man and woman. They wore identical uniforms and carried a large metal canister between them. The woman smiled. "Don't tell me, let me guess, this is for you."
Melissa's eyes got big. "For me? What is it?"
Cy bobbed up and down. "What do you mean 'what is it?' It's your ice cream."
Melissa grabbed Cy's casing and gave him a big hug. "Thank you, Cy! But it's so big!"
Cy chuckled. "Captain Neubeck does things in a big way. Speaking of which I'll bet she'd like her crew back. Now, if you and Della will take the ice cream, these two can return."
Taking the ice cream between them, they thanked the man and woman, and stepped into the lock. As the hatch sealed behind them a sad expression came onto Melissa's face.
Cy saw it and said, "That's a sad expression. What's the matter, hon?"
"I just realized how selfish I am. You're the one who fixed everything and I got the reward."
Cy wished he could pick her up and hold her but settled for touching her shoulder with a mechanical pincer. "That's not true, Melissa. The truth is that you fixed me so I could fix them."
Melissa smiled in an automatic sort of way, not understanding, but content to let it go.
But Della looked Cy right in the vid pickup, and although she didn't know exactly what had happened, the softness in her eyes said she cared. Cy felt warm inside. It was something nobody could take away.