The ship’s nose tilted up, and the main thrusters engaged with a roar I could feel in my bones.
I looked back at the landing field, rapidly shrinking into the distance below. Above us was a solid wall of white, a cloud bank that we were fast approaching.
Four gravities, my motion sense told me. No, wait, Naoko was throttling up now that we were clear of the port. Eight gravities. Twelve. Sixteen. How fast was this ship?
We went supersonic just as we entered the cloud deck. The Speedy Exit barely vibrated, but the shock wave blew a hole in the clouds behind us. Thirty gravities, now. The world around us was a cocoon of ghostly white, overlaid here and there with markers for things the ship’s sensors picked up. Other ships, a few aircraft, and the stations in orbit high overhead.
But not as high as before. We broke out of the clouds into a clear blue sky, and I couldn’t hold back anymore.
“Whoo hoo! Goodbye, Felicity. Goodbye, stupid matrons. Hello, space.”
Goodbye, Dika. Take care of yourself. Someday, somehow, I’ll come back for you.
Chapter 4
The Square Deal was a funny looking ship. Not that I was an expert on spaceships, but I’ve watched plenty of vidshows. I know cargo ships are usually fat, boxy things with a big fusion torch at one end and an armored collision shield at the other. Passenger liners are pretty, like giant abstract sculptures, with lots of big windows. Warships tend to look like armored freighters, with all that cargo space packed full of drones and missiles, or else they’re longer and have rows of gun turrets along the dorsal and ventral surfaces.
The ship in the viewscreen was sort of a flattened oval shape, and I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Naoko had the main viewscreen set to show a close-up image of each ship the Speedy Exit’s sensors were tracking, so I had a lot of other examples for comparison. There were half a dozen cargo ships that looked about like I expected, including a big one that must have been six kilometers long. But there were also a lot of smaller ships I couldn’t identify, and some of them looked pretty odd. One had wings, like some kind of giant shuttle. Another was just an open framework of beams with equipment pods here and there. A couple of smaller ships were kind of egg-shaped. Okay, so there was a lot the vidshows didn’t teach me. But still.
“Why does it look so weird?” I asked.
Naoko glanced up from the controls to smile at me. “The Square Deal was originally built as an assault transport, Alice. She’s designed to land a brigade of marines on a planetary surface, and act as a base of operations during raids or pacification actions. After the Mormon Bastions crushed the Third Clone Jihad she was put up for auction as military surplus, and my captain thought that her capabilities would be well suited to his business.”
“So she’s a warship? Sweet!”
I turned to study the ship again. It was already maneuvering to break orbit, and the giant streamer of flame made it obvious where the main drive was. It looked like the Square Deal was about seven hundred meters long, maybe five hundred meters wide, and only a hundred meters thick. The big fusion torch drive was mounted parallel to the ship’s long axis, which made sense. A ship’s bow has to be heavily armored to protect against collisions with space debris, so you don’t want it to be any bigger than it has to be.
Alright, so the drive was at the stern and the opposite end was the bow. The side we’d originally approached from must have been the bottom of the ship, because it had a lot of big flat areas that looked like cargo hatches and retracted landing gear. There were also some mass driver turrets, which my database was telling me were mainly meant for shooting at things on the ground.
As we swung around the ship the other side of the hull came into view, and it had a completely different equipment layout. Those little turrets were point defense lasers, and there were also missile launchers and a lot of big deflector shield emitters. Oh, and there was an open hatch to starboard that must be the hanger we were headed towards. There was another hatch just like it on the port side, so two hangers?
Something in the back of my head was calculating. The ship totaled twenty-eight million cubic meters of volume, and it massed about seventeen million tons right now. That was bigger than I would have expected for a tramp freighter, so I guess they must be doing pretty well for themselves.
How did I know what the ship’s mass was?
I turned my focus inward for a second, looking for the source of that knowledge. Okay, there was another calculator hooked into my visual processing, just like the dozens I’d already noticed. Eyeball the ship’s acceleration and the size of the drive flame, and then there were simple formulas to get the ship’s thrust and mass. That was useful.
I watched eagerly while Naoko brought us in, matching velocity with a pretty little maneuver that left us perfectly positioned over the shuttle bay. She cut our drive, and a tractor field grabbed us and pulled us in. For a few seconds there were so many overlapping manipulator fields on us that it made me a little dizzy trying to keep track of them all. The Speedy Exit floated across the hanger under their combined influence, and set down next to a cargo shuttle.
There was a series of heavy thunks from below us.
“What was that?”
“Mechanical couplings,” Naoko explained. “To hold the shuttle in place, if there’s a sudden bump that the inertial dampeners don’t smooth out for some reason. Ah, there’s the airlock connection. Since you don’t have a spacesuit we’ll give it a moment to warm up, and do an extra round of safety checks. We normally leave the hanger in vacuum, you see.”
“I get it. Can I get up, now?”
“Certainly.”
I popped the safety harness on my seat, and bounced over to the viewscreen to peer around at the hanger. There was so much to see! A long row of shiny new shuttles filled most of the bay, and down at the end were what looked like a couple of asteroid mining drones. Not to mention the bay itself. The hatch rumbled closed while I watched, and there were a bunch of bots scurrying around doing things.
“Alice? If you can tear yourself away from the view, my captain wishes to see us in his office.”
“Oh! Right, okay, of course. Wait, you said ‘he’. There are boys on this ship? I’ve never met a boy before. This is so exciting!”
She smiled tolerantly. “Most of the ship’s crew are men, Alice. Do try not to stare.”
“Right.”
She led me back to the airlock, where we dropped through a short boarding tube and into the ship.
Some of the areas she led me through were like the inside of the Speedy Exit, if a little roomier. But once we got deeper into the ship the bare walls and armored bulkheads gave way to soft carpets and wall panels in pleasant earth tones. There were pictures on the walls here and there, landscapes from all kinds of planets. We passed through a lounge area with a big waterfall garden thing that I really wanted to stop and admire.