15 Stories (Jerry eBooks) by Steven Gould

Author:Steven Gould [Gould, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2015-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

Beep, beep, beep.

I was dry-mouthed and groggy. The alarm was going off. I told it to shut up and tried to roll over on my stomach.

Beep, beep, beep.

The alarm didn’t shut off, and rolling over supposes that one direction is down. I came to complete wakefulness and checked the time. I’d been asleep for one hour and fifteen minutes. I shut off the alarm and took a swig of water from the nipple to get rid of the cotton mouth.

Per calculations, Rowan/Oakley should be fifty-seven kilometers ahead of me. Belt City was a bright speck three hundred and fifteen kilometers behind. I did a transponder check to see if Black Orchid was still in the right direction. She wasn’t. I started checking in a circle around her estimated position and got her transponder fifteen degrees off. I started scanning visually and spent five minutes trying to decide which of the three stars ahead of me were her.

She was the one on the right.

I started deceleration thirty minutes later, grabbing the handle of the hydrogen peroxide tank and lining it up with Belt City, plus a fifteen-degree offset to pull me back to Black Orchid’s course. Steam, turning almost immediately to ice crystals, blasted out of the two nozzles by the grip at a forty-five degree angle to my suddenly strained arm. I kept this up for twelve seconds before I released the trigger.

When I turned around again, I decided she was within range of my suit’s laser ranging system. Black Orchid was now three thousand and twenty-two meters in front of me with a relative velocity of -0.32 meters per sec. Her main viewport was still pointed away from me, but Rowan/Oakley could have a check port or a camera pointed my way.

I wasn’t worried. At three kilometers I was just another black piece of space.

We passed within five kilometers of several 500- to 1,000-meter-diameter rocks. Ordinary asteroids probably, since they were this close to Belt City and unprocessed. I was getting hungry—I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, seven hours earlier.

She turned the ship three incredibly long hours later. Belt City was almost a thousand kilometers behind us. A few minutes later, she began decelerating.

Things got tricky for a while. She was slowing over a prolonged period of time. If I just sat there, I would soon zip past or run into her. I wanted to keep the comfortable gap I had, but my motor didn’t push me at fourteen micro-gees—it was more like two hundred and fifty micro-gees. So, I would give a one-second burst every time our relative velocity exceeded two and a half meters per second, correcting lateral errors as best I could. Graphed, my path would be a wavy line wandering over the straight line of her course.

We seemed to be matching velocities with an installation of some kind. When Black Orchid began decelerating, I’d noticed a large kilometer plus diameter asteroid almost dead ahead. It was equipped with a transponder broadcasting the registration code “SS453.” With that “SS,” I didn’t need a Registry to tell me it was a scientific station.

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