acceleration. At this rate we could have shut off our gravity generator and gotten on fine.
“We’re up to a million,” I called. I felt elated. My time stuck in the transport with Ray had just been cut from twenty thousand hours to four thousand. We’d still starve to death at this speed, but we’d die closer to the broadcast station.
“We’re up to two million.” A minute later I reported three million miles per hour. Unfortunately the speed topped out at four million miles per hour. That meant one thousand hours, a six-week trip with four weeks’ worth of food.
Once he got the transport flying at a couple million miles per hour, Freeman spent most of his time toying with the electrical system and trying to figure out how he could splice parts from a broadcast station into the systems on the transport. We seldom spoke to each other. To keep from losing my mind, I started reading the Bible that the Neo-Baptists had given me. I originally decided that I would not read the book. I got desperate and read it several times. The Baptists would have been proud.
I did not like the New Testament. It made no sense. The idea that an all-powerful being sent his son to die for people who did not listen to him had no logic to it.
The Old Testament resonated better. I read it four times and had a religious awakening after a fashion. As long as I accepted God as a metaphor for government, the Old Testament of the Bible made perfect sense. God took a small nation and made it a big nation by saving citizens who followed his laws. Some of the kosher laws struck me as extreme, but every government has its peculiarities.
When Freeman worked in the cargo bay, I took that Bible up to the cockpit and read. When Freeman lingered in the cockpit, I read in the gloom of the kettle. I kept out of his way unless he called me.
If you ever wondered what it would feel like to be sealed in a can, try traveling in the kettle of a military transport. Except for the netting in the cargo area and the wooden bench around the walls, everything in a kettle is bare metal. No windows. No padded seats. No carpeting. The walls are metal, as are the floor and ceiling. Even the toilet is made of metal.
Before starting my fifth trip through the Old Testament, I called up to the cockpit and asked Freeman how much farther to the broadcast station.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
There was no use pushing him, so I opened to Genesis.
And the hours rolled on.
We had plenty of air thanks to the transport’s industrial-sized oxygen rebreather. That same unit combined enough Hs and Os to provide water for two platoons. Our food supply, on the other hand, had thinned to just about nothing.
I really did not care about survival. After months of hearing people “praise the Lord” and plow the corn, I’d decided that I would rather die in space than live on Little Man. I did, however, want to reach my own personal promised land. Even if I did not get to return to Earth, I wanted to see that broadcast station.
Amazingly, I got my wish.
The broadcast station was the last vestige of a recently defunct transportation system that once served as a superhighway across the Milky Way. Even flying at the speed of light, and no Unified Authority ships could attain that speed, it would take you one hundred thousand years to cross the Milky Way. Most of the 180 planets populated by humans were five hundred to one thousand light-years apart.
The key to getting from one planet to another was broadcasting, a technology that translated spaceships and communications into data that could be transferred instantaneously from one location to another. Some ships, mostly scientific vessels, had onboard broadcast engines that enabled their pilots to plug coordinates into a computer and “broadcast” to any location. The vast majority of space travel, however, was routed through the Broadcast Network, a system of satellites called “broadcast stations.” Broadcast stations had separate discs for sending and receiving ships.
Freeman proposed a plan to try and convert a standard short-range military transport into a self-broadcaster by installing a broadcast engine. He wanted to commandeer the broadcast engine from the sending disc of the nearest broadcast satellite and attach it to the electrical system in our transport. It was a crazy idea, kind of like tying a rocket engine to an atmosphere-bound jet and flying it into space.
Assuming we could adapt the industrial-sized broadcast engine from the station to work on our ship, we could send ourselves to Earth or Mars or some other place in the heart of the Republic. Now that we had coaxed our transport two hundred thousand times farther than it was designed to fly, all we had left to do was to pull a serviceable broadcast engine out of that station, adapt it to fit on our ship, and splice it into our electrical supply.
The Broadcast Network was set up in a linear fashion. Each sending disc only sent ships to the next broadcast station down the line. The various stations did not need or have computers because their sending discs formed a dedicated conduit sending ships to a few select locations. No computers were necessary; all of the calculations were premade.
That did not bode well for Freeman and me, as it meant we would have no way of aiming ourselves once we got the broadcast engine up and working, if we got the engine up and working. We might simply send ourselves into oblivion and never materialize again.
Dropping our speed to a mere crawl, Freeman approached the broadcast station. From the front or the back, the satellite looked immense. Both the sending disc and the receiving disc were a full mile in diameter. They were made of mirrored glass. When active, broadcast discs emitted streams of hyper-accelerated electrons that shone so brightly that a quick glimpse at them would leave you blind. The power was off now. This was the first time I had ever actually seen the front of a broadcast disc up close.
“Damn, Freeman, you actually got us here,” I said.
Ray did not respond.
We went to go change into our space gear so that we could begin removing the engine from the station, and ran into a problem. Ray, the one of us with the mechanical expertise, did not fit in the atmospheric suits that came with the transport. The suits were made for general-issue military clones, men who stood just under six feet tall. Ray stood over seven feet tall and weighed approximately three hundred and fifty pounds. His torso was the basic shape and size of a wheelbarrow tipped on its nose. With his huge biceps and forearms, Freeman could not fit his arms in the sleeves. Even if he could have, his arms must have been ten inches too long to fit. His tree-trunk legs and great wide ass did not fit in the pants.
The suit did not fit me so well, either, but I managed. I stood six-foot-three, about four inches too tall. I forced my long arms into the sleeves and scrunched my back, then fastened the helmet over my head. Once I was dressed, Ray returned to the cockpit and vented the oxygen out of the kettle. With the air gone and the gravity off, he opened the six-inch-thick metal doors at the rear of the kettle. As the doors parted, an endless ocean of lights and blackness stared back at me.
Throughout my walk to the broadcast station, Freeman and I would have uninterrupted communications through the interLink—a proprietary small-area communications system developed for military use. I had a video recorder built into the visor of my helmet. From the atmosphere-enclosed comfort of the cockpit, Freeman could monitor the images captured by that recorder and guide my every move.
I hooked my tether line to a socket near the rear door of the transport and kicked off into space. Ahead of me, the dormant sending disc had the slight concave curvature of a dinner plate. If it were a dinner plate, I was smaller than the smallest fly. Its reflective glass surface seemed to stretch on forever. I drifted toward it until I was close enough to tap my finger against its surface.
My atmospheric suit was white, with lights placed on the shoulders, helmet, torso, and legs for visibility. I saw my reflection in the mirrored glass of the disc with the fabric of space as my backdrop. I reached out and touched my reflection, then used the jetpack on my suit to propel myself along its face. When I reached the top, I looked back down to where I had come from. The disc was three inches thick and a full mile in diameter. From a distance it would look sharper than a razor blade.
Ships did not actually enter sending discs. When they approached, the sending disc coated them with accelerated electrons and broadcasted them instantaneously to the next station in the Network. That was how man
