Chapter 10: Journeying

Skryben winced. Rand knew the cause; momentary twinges of intense pain throughout her body as she jumped.

"Jump completed." Tasca's voice was calm. So short a jump; she hadn't even felt any shock from it. Their third so far under command of Captain Jeryth, with thousands more to go before they reached their goal.

"Jump completed," he gave his report. He hadn't felt the jump, either. What was wrong with Skryben? "Coordinates logged into data banks."

"Excellent." Captain Jeryth's voice held a cutting edge. "Now, if our gallant Third Officer can direct his attention away from Skryben's imaginary aches and pains, he might compute our relative velocity to our target cluster, and consider what should be done to neutralize it."

"Yes, sir." Rand bent over his console, his cheeks burning. Damn it! Skryben was hurting. Why couldn't Captain Jeryth feel it? She shouldn't be hurting, not from the almost negligible shock of three light day micro jumps, at nearly forty minute intervals.

'... calendar?... '

'... year one, day six, hour nine, minute twelve, second fifteen... Mark!... '

'... Skryben, scan for Doppler shift on three axis alignments. Compute velocities relative to target cluster... '

The answers should have appeared immediately. Instead, there was a pause before the information flowed sluggishly to his console.

'... velocity along X axis: 0.079 light speed... Along Y axis: 0.127 light speed... Along Z axis: 0.195 light speed... Resultant velocity, 0.246 light speed, at 60^o angle to present course. Velocity of target cluster: 0.003 light speed, at 79^o angle to ship velocity... '

'... least stressful means of neutralizing velocity?... '

'... during time between jumps, maintain acceleration of 1.200 standard gravities, directly opposed to target cluster's relative velocity vector. Resultant velocity relative to target cluster will be less than 0.001 light velocity, at end of seventy one days... '

"Captain?" Rand reported the results of Skryben's calculations. "But, sir?"

"What is it, Third Officer Korsun?"

"Skryben can't maintain that acceleration. Not yet, anyway. She has stress fractures, and she's hurting. I would suggest..."

"Nonsense! I have perceived no flaws that would preclude using even full acceleration, for a short period of time. Repairs are proceeding on schedule. By the time that Skryben is in danger, her strength will have been restored."

"But, sir. Medic Morss has recommended..."

"I have her recommendation. She is overly cautious. She even had the audacity to suggest examining me to determine my fitness to resume command. That will be all, Officer Korsun. Pilot Tasca! Align Skryben in opposition to our present velocity vector, and raise her acceleration to 1.200 standard gravities. I said, that will be all, Officer Korsun! If your so tender conscience allows you to do so, you may leave your post. I suggest strongly that you rest until you are once again needed on the bridge."

Scowling, Rand got up from his console and left. Should he go to his own quarters? No, what he really needed was a good, hot meal. Maybe he would find someone in the mess hall to talk to, someone who would make sense, for a change.

Regular meals aboard Skryben were a thing of the past. Maybe, when all the repairs had been made that her crew could handle without docking, they could go back on some kind of a normal schedule. Until then, all that the short handed mess attendants could do was to have a supply of hot and cold snacks available for anyone who could spare the time to eat.

Rand walked down a flight of stairs, careful in the heavy gravity, then paused, waiting for a work gang to straggle past him. A couple of them nodded to him, and one or two saluted half heartedly. The rest either ignored him, pretending that he didn't exist, or glowered in his direction.

"Lousy cyborg!" He was sure that he heard one of them mutter the words. He ignored the insult; even if the words had been spoken aloud, there was no use making an issue of it. Nothing that he could say or do would change their minds. Even the most fanatical of the Ursudines weren't against the use of machines; that would have been completely irrational. They all used computers, and most of them even had nothing against the use of industrial and household metallo organic devices. They only believed that there was, and should continue to be, a vast gulf between living sentient and nonliving machine. Anything that tended to bridge that gap, whether the use of mechanical implants into an organic body, or the building of truly sentient machines, was anathema to them.

The Ursudine Creed was a good one. Rim Hells! Rand believed in its basic precepts, just as strongly as anyone! All sentients were brothers. Of course, they were. He'd been raised in that belief. He'd also worked and lived around too many members of diverse races to believe anything else. But, brothers could, and did, fight among themselves, and not all sentients thought alike. His Academy training had taught him that much. It would be a dull universe if everyone's thought patterns were the same.

And Skryben was sentient! She was a person, just as much so as any of her crew. So, she'd been born in an orbiting shipyard. So what? She had grown up, learned, gone to school, just as he had. What if her body was made up of metallo organic tissues, secreting a framework of boron fiber stress members to form her skeleton? Just because her growth had been guided by technicians, her genetic structure planned for her, did that make her any less a person? Of course not! No more than his own metallo organic heart and lung made him any less the Rand Korsun who had first boarded Skryben!

He was still Rand Korsun. Wasn't he? He put down the thought, sternly. The replacement parts were only temporary. He would have them replaced with cloned organs as soon as Skryben got them back home. Until then, he would make use of them, not that he had any choice. He'd use them like he would use a pair of crutches, as a temporary support for a system that had been damaged... Had been injured! He wasn't a machine. He wouldn't think of himself as a machine! He was Rand. Rand Korsun. Human!

At the back of his mind, he suppressed an image of a damaged repair module, limping along with an extensor in a fabric sling.

Skryben's dining area wasn't large. It didn't have to be, with her crew evenly divided into three shifts. Even so, when her crew was at its normal peacetime maximum, not everyone could sit down to eat at once. Now, with her sparse crew pared down even further by casualties, the room could have held all of them at once without crowding.

Rand crossed over to where platters of food were set out, and chose a light, but nourishing lunch. He lingered over his choice of an entree, then decided that he might as well enjoy his favorites while they lasted. Long before this trip was over, they'd all be limited to tasteless emergency concentrates. He slid the frosty platter into a microwave oven for a few seconds, then carried his meal back to a small table near one wall. The soup was delicious, the steak tender and rare. He ate hungrily, more or less ignoring his surroundings.

"Mind if I join you?"

"Huh?" Rand looked up to see Pilot An Inpi looking at him with an inquiring smile on his freckled face. "Yeah, please do. Sit down, Homr. I've been wanting someone to talk to."

"That bad? We're making good enough time, aren't we?" Homr spread his lunch out on the table across from Rand.

"We are, sure. That isn't the trouble. Something's wrong with Skryben."

"Whuffo..." Homr swallowed a mouthful of sandwich, almost choking, and tried again. "What do you mean, wrong? All of her drives are working again, aren't they? I sure feel heavy enough, and she's jumping all right."

"Oh, the drives are working just fine. That's not the trouble. She's hurting, every time she jumps, and Captain Jeryth doesn't feel it. He won't believe that anything's wrong. Also, there are stress cracks all through her skeleton. We shouldn't be using anywhere near this much power to the drive until we've checked her out a lot more thoroughly."

"Keep your voice down, dammit," Homr cautioned. "If there is anything wrong, you don't want the crew to start worrying. There's enough rumors going through the ship, as is. Have you talked to Medic Morss?"

"Not yet. I thought that I might head down that way after I'd had a bite to eat."

"Yeah, I thought that you were looking a little pale. You haven't been up and around very long, you know." He chewed his food slowly, thinking. "I'll caution Tasca to take it easy with the drives. Tell her not to change the power levels too abruptly. Let me know what you find out from Medic Morss."

Berniss was just about to leave her office cubicle, but turned back when she saw him approach. She seemed glad to see him, he thought. Or was that just wishful thinking?

"It's all right. I was just going to check on one of the repair crews. Come on in, and we'll look you over." She smiled at him. Maybe she was just glad to have something to distract her momentarily from her other duties. Maybe... "Take off your uniform, and we'll give you a complete scan. I want to see how your new spare parts are holding up."

Once again, he stood in the diagnostic booth, feeling Skryben's energies along his nerves. All of her outside sensors were active, bringing in a complete spherical image. There was nothing new. It would be a long time before the star fields changed to a noticeable degree. The universe around her was serenely calm, as though nothing that happened over a span of less than a thousand years could have any importance.