Shackleton's Folly (The Lost Wonder Book 1) (28 page)

Alec approved. “You do that, and I’ll get back up front.” Alec left Dancer and Electra alone. They could see Alec back in the pilot’s chair, adjusting their course to a new destination.

Dancer reviewed the data coming on screen. Electra rounded the table. Electra eyed Dancer intently. “You are troubled?”

Dancer stopped what he was doing and spoke directly to her. “I have never seen him like this.”

Electra made her way to the door. “I know — he is a good man.”

The flying hulk, built from scraps from a spacer’s boneyard at FTL flight speeds, managed to shift its mass enough to pass by an errant dwarf star. The sudden maneuver caused the fresh weld on the leading edge of a newly attached section of the Skiptracer’s ship first to crack and then, with a cascading failure, to lose its connection with the rest of the hull. The section floated free, reaching the edge of the warped-space field of the ship, and disappeared as it fell from FTL speeds.

Worrell and Gino ran about the bridge from one panel to another from materials cobbled together in an arrangement seemingly more artistic than functional.

Five unique alarms and a bank of 100 warning indicators blared dissonance at full volume in the dimly lit bridge. Worrell stopped at a loose panel with a yellow button the size of its hand in its center. It was stuck in the depressed position. He picked it up and tried pulling it far enough from the console to see underneath. Gino tried to look underneath to see if they could see the problem. Gino’s proximity to Worrell caused them to bump into each other. Gino jumped back and knocked a testing unit off the console onto Worrell’s foot. The lower creature yelled in pain. The other creatures jabbered together in recognition of the indignity of and sympathy for of the pain Worrell had endured.

Worrell screamed in anger, “Tell you, we did not touch the yellow alarm reset button.” The sub-creatures with the sore foot pulled out a mallet from a toolbox nearby on the floor. It hesitated for a moment and struck Gino’s foot. It passed the mallet along to those creatures above as its counterpart howled in pain. Worrell held the panel down and started to hammer the stuck button.

Worrell took a swing at Gino’s midsection with the mallet. Gino’s upper half jumped up, separating from the lower body, allowing the tool to pass, with upper and lower halves unscathed. Gino reassembled and grabbed a wrench. Gino took a downward swing, trying to crush Worrell’s skull. Worrell split in two just ahead of the wrench rocketing downward. A resonating bang punctuated the alarms as the wrench struck the floor. Worrell’s two halves moved forward and struck Gino with stooge slaps for both upper and lower creatures.

Worrell cried, “I get hold of myself.”

Worrell’s two halves reached for each other. The arms got hold of each other and in what looked like two lovers in an animated embrace; Worrell reassembled itself.

Gino yelled, “Now?”

Worrell screamed back, “Boss must report us.”

Gino punched keys on his console. Gino yelled back, “Sent report.”

“Alarms shut down us,” cried Worrell as they started to hammer on the yellow button again.

*

The Skiptracer’s ship arrived at the nebula at the point in space near where the
Quest
had dropped from FTL. Its course somewhat followed the circumnavigation of the mesa, as had the
Quest
. The markers they followed showed a spiraling course into the heart of the nebula, and they did cut the trail short to head directly to the Falls of Ur. Their ship slowed to a crawl as it reached the opening where the
Quest
had entered the nebula.

Worrell ran from one side of the bridge to the other in a low-gravity environment and bounced off equipment, as they were unable to stop their momentum. “Forget gravity units. We said not to lose them. Boss will shoot part of us. What would the rest do?”

Gino hung at various angles at a station; the gravity in this part of the bridge was nearly zero-g. Gino said excitedly, “Have found trail again.”

Worrell ran over to look at the screen Gino was viewing, losing contact with the floor with the change in gravity fields. Worrell smiled with a big toothy grin, “Good,” just before his four body sections impacted with Gino. The four creatures pushed off, went to the communications console, and keyed in a message. Worrell emitted a deep, bellowing victory sound.

Gino responded to the sound by hammering their fists against the instruments. One of the impacts must have fixed the gravity problem because they all felt the return of full gravity simultaneously and fell to the deck. They reconstituted their respective Worrell and Gino to have a victory dance, but it got out of hand. Gino screamed with excitement, “Belly flop.”

The two creatures faced off. They ran toward each other, stopped, and smacked their bellies together. The two subgroups of creatures could not take the impact, and the thugs fell backward and apart at the seams simultaneously.

The eight sub-creatures were in various states of disarray in a pile on the floor. They tried to coalesce into the thug creatures only to find they were all mixed together and not the units they were before.

Worrell Group yelled at Gino, “Knock it off. We have a bounty to collect.”

A Gino group member punched one of the Worrell group members in the face as it went over to the rest of its group to work out the logistics.

*

Worrell was at the pilot’s station. He pulled down a periscope from the ceiling. The two creatures that made up his upper body fought briefly for the privilege of being first to use it. The right side lost as the left head butted the right and got an eye up to the viewer first.

“Here went ship,” said Worrell. “Tracker left trail through here. They hide from us. Rewards great!”

“Aye, 10% of ship’s sale,” replied Gino.

“Find them first we must. Coming the new boss,” reminded Worrell.

“Forward?” asked Gino.

“Forward, yes,” commanded Worrell.

Gino pushed the lever to accelerate the ship. They looked at one another as nothing happened. Gino chirped with understanding and ran to a panel mounted on the side of the console. He stopped in front of it; the lights on it were unpowered. Gino balled up all of his fists, hit it with all of his free arms, and struck the panel at different places and times. The panel lights lit up. Gino ran back to the lever and pushed it forward again.

The Skiptracer’s ramshackle ship sputtered and coughed as it entered the light yellow dust cloud making up the mist at the bottom of the Falls of Ur. The ship slowly followed the wake of the
Quest
into the dark nebula’s interior.

The shields lit up more so than the
Quest,
with the same small material hitting them constantly. The brightness spiked quickly as the inferior equipment and fix-on-failure mentality of the crew wrought havoc on the ship.

Worrell’s upper body maintained their focus on viewing the tracker’s trail through the periscope, while his lower body flew the ship. Their bodies, not in synch as the ship lifted, rolled and tried to follow the maneuvers of the much more nimble ship they were following.

The ship wove and rolled its way deeper and deeper into the nebula. With the shields as they were, sections of the ship that were unprotected got scoured with the fine material. Their divergence from the trail went wide as they followed the
Quest
.

Worrell caught sight of more than one thing to be concerned about in the viewfinder, including shadows of things large, just out of visual range, lost in the dust.

Gino jumped to pieces. Two landed on the copilot’s station, and the rest ran to the back of the cabin as the magnetometer screeched a warning. Worrell frantically searched for the danger in the glass. An iron mountain, 3500 meters tall, came at them, business end first.

“Full aft!” he commanded.

Gino, on the console, ran to the lever and pushed it back as Worrell steered the ship full port. The ship slowed quickly and turned from the asteroid.

“Forward now!” yelled Worrell.

They jerked ahead and missed impaling themselves on the peak of the iron asteroid.

*

The Skiptracer’s ship emerged from the dust cloud into the void. It nearly collided with a chunk of floating space debris the size of the ship as it cleared the dust. It slowed to a stop, with smaller rock floating nearby. The ship turned down one wall of the void, accelerating as it scanned for its quarry.

A small planetoid swept by, in a circular orbit of the thing in the center of the void. The planetoid was powered with thrusters making course corrections. It was being used to keep the void clear of rock, using its gravitation to draw in the smaller material and to nudge larger out. A second planetoid appeared, and another one followed. Soon, the number of the sweepers grew into the hundreds, then thousands. An army of planetoids was being used to manage and clear the void debris. The Skiptracer’s ship circumnavigated the sphere and took readings, trying to deduce what it was and where the
Quest
had disappeared.

Worrell checked the periscope and turned to Gino. “Crashed they did.”

Gino shook their heads. “Went this way.” They pointed to one of the pentagons on the long-range scanners. “Signal gone. Just emission trail left. It decays quickly. Go here. Trail says so.”

Worrell stopped Gino from accelerating the ship, “Report data to Boss, first.”

Gino nodded and sent a report. “Nebula problem will be.”

Worrell shrugged his shoulders. “Go in now.”

The ship changed its course and spiraled down toward the sphere.

Gino checked the readings coming from the tracker unit and made adjustments to their trajectory. A corner of one pentagonal entry port filled the screen. “They go here.”

“Follow them,” Worrell said. He checked his console for any further readings.

The Skiptracer’s ship entered the sphere. The great rods extruded themselves from the wall as the defensive systems were not able to definitively resolve that the ship was a powered craft and turned their focused energies in the direction of the mass and fired. The beams struck home and took off an unused and sealed-off section from the top of the craft, which floated away. The remaining structure seemed to be intact and continued inbound.

The marker buoy sensors were triggered by the entry of the Skiptracer’s ship. Its cameras focused intently on the ship to record as much as it could of the imaging, weaponry, power systems — any capabilities it could draw upon in a fight. The marker buoy pointed its communication dish in the direction the
Quest
had taken when it had been left behind and sent the encrypted data in a burst transmission.

*

Dancer keyed commands into the keyboard at his console. He gave a start: “Got something interesting.” He brought up the holographic schematic with their location within the sphere. A second ship behind them was highlighted near the portal through which they had entered. Dancer then displayed the recording of the Skiptracer ship passing the marker buoy. Dancer recognized the ship. “I can’t believe they found us. Must be a tracker unit on the hull somewhere.” He looked from the monitor to Alec. “Everyone knows we hang out on Ferrar. I’ll give them that, but Blind Load and now here?” Dancer keyed in commands. “One maybe, but two? They found us — I’ll find a place to land.”

Alec watched the screens intently. Electra kept station at the engineer’s console. She observed the recent burns of the defensive systems’ surgical strikes.

“They caught a blast from the Garden’s defensive systems,” she remarked.

Alec looked at the video again. “You are right. Looks like this section here,” he said, pointing to the top. “Has the scorch marks to validate your observation.”

Their path had crossed the tops of a number of gardens before it started its downward path. The
Quest
flew low over the top of the garden and kept its altitude of 4100 kilometers, giving the top of the garden wall some clearance room. The wall’s height gave the structure the ability to contain the atmosphere of the garden within. The wall above the atmospheric line contained systems that would replenish any losses from sphere movement or changes to the atmosphere from environmental forces running out of control.

The crystal-clear jade green of the clouds below glistened in the starlight of the star above. Landscapes they passed over quickly showed no signs of civilization. But, then again, the garden’s livable land area was so large it was very possible they could fly over it many times and still miss all signs of a very viable, intelligent race.

The garden’s wall was coming at them quickly as they sped on. The
Quest
traversed the wall like a Peregrine Falcon’s hunting dive, climbed for height, and then dove steeply, an act that was ever so graceful and effortless. The garden wall passed below them, revealing the next garden as one more inviting to an oxygen-breathing species. The
Quest
reduced speed and altitude as the sparkling blue-green oceans wrapped themselves around island chains and archipelagos that stretched as far as the sensors could reach. The ocean surrounded islands and land masses. The top edge of the garden had a light force field that covered the whole garden. The
Quest
penetrated the field as it headed for the garden of endless tropical beaches of sand, surf, and tropical vegetation.

Electra checked the systems at the engineer’s station. “Why are we landing? Is there a problem?”

Alec replied, “Someone placed a tracker on the
Quest
.” Alec glanced out the port. “It might be Wolfgang Gray. He would have the other piece with him. This tracker might be a good thing. Dancer, don’t destroy it — just get it off the hull.”

The
Quest
cruised over long strips of the most gorgeous beaches. The vegetation started back of the tide marks. Grasses, flowers, palms, and other plants of what could best be described as a tropical paradise lined the shores. The ship slowed and descended onto an open field of shore grass just off the beach.