Blitsharts was trying to regain control, but if so, he was failing. Any input from the thrusters just seemed to add to the chaos.
And all this, Martinez reminded himself, had happened over twenty-four minutes ago, with the time-lag increasing asMidnight Runner raced toward galactic south.
Martinez asked the computer to calculate how many gees the acceleration had inflicted on Blitsharts’s body. A maximum of 7.4, he found, deeply uncomfortable but survivable, especially for a yacht racer in peak condition. Blitsharts might still be alive.
A communicator buzzed on Abacha’s console. He stepped toward it and linked it to the display on his uniform sleeve. “Operations. Lieutenant Abacha.”
The voice came out of Abacha’s sleeve. “My lord, this is Panjit Sesse of Zanshaa All-Sports Networks. Are you aware that Captain Blitsharts’s yachtMidnight Runner is tumbling out of control?”
“We’re working on that, yes.”
Martinez was only vaguely aware of this dialogue. He told the computers to guess whereMidnight Runner would be in half an hour or so and to paint the area with low-energy ranging lasers aimed from the ring. That might make it easier for rescuers to track the boat.
The reporter’s voice went on. “Whois working on it, my lord?”
Abacha looked over Martinez’s shoulder at the displays again. “Right now we’ve got Lieutenant Martinez.”
“Only a lieutenant, lord?”
“He’s aide to Senior Fleet Commander Enderby.” Abacha’s tone showed impatience. A pair of Peers were dealing with the situation. That should be enough for anybody.
Martinez called up a list of every ship within three light-hours of Vandrith. The closest to Blitsharts were the yacht racers, but they were still engaged in their race, and none of them were suitable as a rescue vehicle. While they’d almost certainly noted Blitsharts’s exit, they probably were too busy to analyze the meaning of his trajectory, beyond being pleased to have one less competitor. The large tender that had brought the yachts to Vandrith would need to recover the other yachts before it did anything, and it was built more for comfort than for maneuver and heavy accelerations. And it would take twenty-four minutes for Martinez’s request to reach them, during which time Blitsharts would continue south.
Martinez scanned the display and found what he was looking for: Senior Captain Kandinski in theBombardment of Los Angeles, one of the big bombardment-class heavy cruisers. It had just finished a refit on the ring dockyards and was now accelerating at a steady 1.3 gravities toward the Zanshaa 5 wormhole gate, heading for the Third Fleet base at Felarus. For the next 4.2 standard hours a rescue boat launched from theLos Angeles could take advantage of at least some of the cruiser’s speed in its acceleration towardMidnight Runner. Not an ideal position for a rescue launch, but it would have to do.
Kandinski was something of a yachtsman himself—Los Angeleswas a well-polished ship, shiny inside and out, with a white and powder blue paint job Kandinski had paid for out of his own deep pockets. Even the cruiser’s pinnaces and missiles had the same glossy light blue finish. Maybe he would feel an affinity for Blitsharts and his shiny yacht.
Martinez reached for the communications console, linked it to his sleeve display. “Transmission toLos Angeles, ” he instructed. “Code status: clear. Priority: extremely urgent, personal to the captain.”
“Identify?” the automated comm system wanted to know.
“Gareth Martinez, lieutenant, aide to Lord Commander Enderby.”
A brief moment’s pause, then, “Approved.”
“Can you tell me what steps are being taken?” Sesse’s voice nattered in Martinez’s ear from Abacha’s sleeve display. Martinez ignored it.
Another chime from the communicator; someone else needing to talk. “We’re very busy right now,” Abacha said. “Good-bye.”
“Can you just let uslisten? ” Sesse said frantically.
Martinez took a moment to run fingers through his dark hair, then twitched his collar to make certain it was in place. “Transmit, video and audio,” he said.
He waited for the flashing orange cue in his sleeve display to let him know that transmission had started, then looked at the sleeve button camera and spoke.
“Captain Kandinski, this is Lieutenant Gareth Martinez on Lord Commander Enderby’s staff. The yachtMidnight Runner with its captain, Ehrler Blitsharts, is tumbling out of control, heading southward from Vandrith. There is no telemetry, and there has been no communication from Captain Blitsharts since before the situation started. He may still be alive but unable to recover command of his boat. If your situation permits, I should like to request that you launch one or more pinnaces on a rescue mission. I will send you the latest course data. Please advise Command your course of action as soon as possible. Data follows.”
The message, Martinez knew, was already being pulsed towardLos Angeles by powerful military communications lasers, but it would still be over twenty-four minutes before the red-shifted signal reached the cruiser, and at least that much time again before he would know Kandinski’s decision.
Martinez added Blitsharts’s real and projected course to the end of the message and closed the transmission. He tried to lean back, then swayed as he almost toppled from the Laiown chair. Abacha was talking to yet another questioner whom he cut off in mid-sentence. “Receive military communications only,” Abacha told his console. “Log others for reply later.”
Abacha turned to Martinez. “What now?”
Martinez rose from the chair and kicked it away. “We wait an hour or more for a reply, while you field calls from every Blitsharts fan on the planet.” Then a thought struck him. “Oh,” Martinez added. “I suppose we should inform Lord Commander Enderby.”
Martinez was busy trying to analyze the way Blitsharts’s boat was tumbling so that any rescue mission might better know how to dock with it when Enderby arrived at Command. The ring’s optical trackers caught only reflections of Zanshaa’s sun flashing on the glossy black surface of the yacht, hardly ideal data for an analysis. Even the 3D displays at Operations would be too small for the kind of detail he needed of a small vessel that far away, so Martinez got a headset out of storage and projected a virtual environment onto the visual centers of his brain. His mind flooded with an infinite, empty darkness that seemed to extend light-years beyond the limits of his skull, and he built a simulation with a picture and specifications of the craft he’d snagged, using Enderby’s priority code, from the files of Vehicle Registration. Once he had the model ofMidnight Runner, he created a virtual sun at the appropriate angle and of the appropriate intensity, then sent the model tumbling over and over again in a lengthy series of simulations until it began to resemble the flashing visual he was getting from the ring’s optical detectors. It could be refined later, after he began getting reflections back from the ranging lasers he’d pulsed out along Blitsharts’s presumed track.
Under normal circumstances, a Fleet pinnace should be able to rendezvous with a yacht likeMidnight Runner with little trouble. The boats were approximately the same size, and were built for nearly the same purpose: carrying a single passenger very fast, through abrupt accelerations and decelerations and changes of course. In Blitsharts’s case, this was to enable his boat to make the changes in vector necessary to win a yacht race; in the case of the Fleet boat, it was to avoid destruction long enough to accomplish its mission.
It occurred to Martinez that no one had ever performed a rendezvous like this. The yacht’s rolling was wildly complex, as if designed on purpose to baffle anyone attempting to dock with it, and he couldn’t imagine that Blitsharts could remain in that tumbling craft for long and remain conscious. There was only one hatch onMidnight Runner, and it was rolling over and over in a chaotic series of gyrations. It was forward of the center of gravity about which the yacht was tumbling, and there was no way a rescue craft could dock to it. It would be like docking with the end of a stick being waved in the air by an erratic child.
Martinez worried at the problem, his mind spinning as frantically as the tumbling yacht. He built a model of a standard Fleet pinnace and tried to maneuver it near the yacht, only to see it batted away again and again, one potentially crippling collision after another.
It seemed that if he worked really hard, he could help killtwo pilots, Blitsharts and his rescuer both.
It was the scent of a bruised apple that brought him out of the depths of his study—Abacha’s apple, or perhaps just the peel, lying somewhere nearby and reminding him that he hadn’t eaten since his noon meal, over
