Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens Book 4: Alliance by Jerry Oltion

Author:Jerry Oltion [Oltion, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 0441731309
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1990-05-01T05:00:00+00:00

It was a quiet day on board the Wild Goose Chase. The ship had made its first jump on schedule in the night, and was now coasting at high speed through the waypoint star system toward the next jump point, which it would reach early the next morning. There was little to do in the meantime save look out at the stars, read, or play games. The robots were making themselves scarce, save for Lucius, who followed Avery like a shadow wherever he went. Even Mandelbrot was more taciturn than usual, no doubt trying to decide for himself where he fit into the general scheme of things as they now stood.

Derec decided to show Wolruf how to play chess, but gave it up when the alien insisted that the pieces should move in packs. He spent the rest of the day with a book, and went to bed early. Wolruf also went to bed, expressing her faith in the automatic controls to make the jump on schedule without her.

Derec surprised himself by actually being able to sleep with no one at the helm. Evidently boredom was a stronger force than worry. He managed to escape both in dreams, but his dreams ended suddenly in the middle of the night when he awoke with a start to the shrill howl of an alarm. He sat up and called on the light, trying to shake the sleep from his head enough to decide what to do next.

“What’s the matter?” Ariel asked sleepily. She sat up beside him, gathering the sheet around her as if for protection.

“I don’t know. I’ll go see.” Derec made to get out of bed.

“Why don’t you just ask?” Ariel was always quicker to wake up than he was.

“Oh. Yeah.” What’s going on? he sent out over the comlink.

General alert, a featureless voice replied. The autopilot, no doubt. Life support system failure.

Life support! Derec suddenly felt his breath catch. What happened to it?

The oxygen regeneration system has failed.

He let his breath out again in a sigh of relief. Oxygen regeneration was serious, but not as serious as, say, a breach in the hull. They weren’t actually losing air, at least.

“There’s a problem with the oxygen regenerator,” he said to Ariel. “Come on, let’s see how bad it is.”

As they pulled on their robes and stepped out into the hallway, Derec realized that the best thing to do in a case like this was to go back to sleep and reduce their oxygen consumption while the robots fixed the problem, but the time to think of that would have been before the alarm woke everyone up, not after. He couldn’t have slept now unless he were drugged, and he had no intention of drugging himself in the middle of an emergency.

Shut off the alarm, he sent, and relative quiet descended upon the ship. There was still the clatter of feet and voices coming from the other bedrooms. Derec heard Avery demanding loudly that Lucius find his pants, and across the hall Wolruf howled something in her own tongue.

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