Bruce Coville by Alien Visitors

Author:Alien Visitors
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-11-21T22:25:35+00:00

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Finding The Way

Sherwood Smith

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Honk! Honk!

The damage alarm was louder than the pings and klonks of the meteorite shower our scout ship had accidentally encountered on our emergence from hyperspace.

“A puncture! We’re losing energy!” Kikinee shrilled.

“Teer! Noot! Take evasive action,” the Vmmm’s voice hummed over the intercom. “I will fix the puncture.”

Teer waved at me to take piloting as she worked at her computer. I did my best to guide our scout ship around the biggest meteorites. There was no time to set up a course. I punched us back into hyperdrive, and the screens smeared as our engines took us between dimensions.

With no idea where we were going, I yelled to our navigator, “Thisko, can’t you–”

“Navigational computer is down,” Thisko said, five of his eight tentacles working away.

“At least if we drop out of hyper into a planet,” came Smelch’s mournful hoot, “we won’t have to spend five long hours in the Room for Reviewing Actions.”

Kikinee waved at a cable that had shaken loose when the first big rock hit the ship, and chirped, “Quiet, Smelch, and give me a hand with that gravity-link.”

Still muttering, Smelch shot one of its six hands across the cabin to the danging wires. The fingers quickly maneuvered the gravity-link back to where it ought to be, and we felt gravity ripple through the ship again.

Then Kikinee tossed the hand back across the cabin and, with a loud splorch!, it reattached to Smelch’s arm.

We were all strapped into our pods, so we hadn’t floated, but a couple of the things that had come loose– like part of Kikinee’s lunch– stopped floating and dropped with a thud, Hank, and a squashy noise. Kikinee and Smelch scrambled to clean up. When things were stable again, I pulled us back into the realtime dimension, hoping we would emerge in the safety of space.

We were lucky.

“We’re near a system,” Thisko said after a pause, and sent the coordinates to my screen. “Noot, get us there. The third planet shows that the atmosphere is mainly oxygen and nitrogen–”

“Is the planet on the survey list?” came the Vmmm’s voice. “Dangerous lifeform warnings?”

“Class Five listing for this system,” Teer said, checking Thisko’s data.

I was still busy piloting us toward the mysterious planet, and trying to shed the enormous velocity built up during our jump between dimensions.

“Average sun, ten planets in all… looks like one broke up…” Teer went on.

The scout ship bucked again.

“No details now,” I said. “We’re still not stable! I’m taking us to the planet with the oxygen. At least we can breathe that.”

Except for the Vmmm, of course– but the Vmmm doesn’t need to breathe. -A capsule of carbon dioxide once a lunar orbit, and the Vmmm is fine.

“Third planet in from the primary…” Teer said, scanning. “Noot! Slow us down! We’re approaching way too fast! We’ll bounce off the atmosphere and back into space!”

“I’m trying,” I yelped, braking us hard.

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