Agent of the Terran Empire by Poul Anderson

Author:Poul Anderson [Anderson, Poul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781596872073
Publisher: ibooks
Published: 1964-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

V

Flandry awoke. He spent centuries wishing he hadn't. A blurred green shape said: "Your aneurine, sir."

"Go 'way," mumbled Flandry. "What was I drinking?"

"Pardon my taking the liberty, sir," said Chives. He pinned the man's wrists down with his tail, held Flandry's nose with one hand and poured the drug down his mouth with the other. "There, now, we are feeling much better, aren't we?"

"Remind me to shoot you, slowly." Flandry gagged for a while. The medicine took hold and he sat up. His brain cleared and he looked at the screen bank.

Only one of the viewers still functioned. It showed thick, drifting redness, shot through with blues and blacks. A steady rough growling, like the breakup of a polar ice pack, blasted its way through the ultimate rigidity of the force bubble—God, what must the noise be like outside? The cabin was tilted. Slumped in its lower corner, Flandry began to glide across the floor again; the ship was still being rolled about. The internal gravity field had saved their lives by cushioning the worst shock, but then it had gone dead. He felt the natural pull of Jupiter upon him, and every cell was weary from its own weight.

He focused on a twisted bunkframe. "Did I do that with my own little head?"

"We struck with great force, sir," Chives told him. "I permitted myself to bandage your scalp. However, a shot of growth hormone will heal the cuts in a few hours, sir, if we escape the present dilemma."

Flandry lurched to his feet. His bones seemed to be dragging him back downward. He felt the cabin walls tremble and heard them groan. The force bubble had held, which meant that its generator and the main power plant had survived the crash. Not unexpectedly; a ship like this was built on the "fail safe" principle. But there was no access whatsoever from this cabin to the pilot room—unless you were an Ymirite. It made no difference whether the ship was still flyable or not. Human and Shalmuan were stuck here till they starved. Or, more likely, till the atomic-power plant quit working, under some or other of the buffets this ship was receiving.

Well, when the force-field collapsed and Jovian air pressure flattened the cabin, it would be a merciful death.

"The hell with that noise," said Flandry. "I don't want to die so fast I can't feel it. I want to see death coming, and make the stupid thing fight for every centimeter of me."

Chives gazed into the sinister crimson which filled the last electronic window. His slight frame stooped, shaking in the knees; he was even less adapted to Jovian weight than Flandry. "Where are we, sir?" he husked. "I was thinking primarily about what to make for lunch, just before the collision, and—"

"The Red Spot area," said Flandry. "Or, rather, the fringe of it. We must be on an outlying berg, or whatever the deuce they're called."

"Our guide appears to have abandoned us, sir."

"Hell, he got us into this mess.

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