Chapter 11
As he climbed into the sled Mervyn punched the thrusters to life and felt the comforting presence of his biolink reactivating. He had been isolated in his own mind since Revlon, now he felt the others hovering on the fringes of his consciousness. Not the same as having access to limitless information, but these were the friends who counted.
Aurora linked herself to the sleds’ bionet too, ‘How do we do this, Mervyn?’
‘We hot launch,’ he replied. ‘Equal amounts of forward and reverse thrust. Then kill the reverse.’
Without warning, the bay doors began to open. Mervyn snapped the canopy shut and strapped himself in -- this would be a rough ride. The thrusters howled in protest as he increased power and held them in balance; the sled shook as though alive. A slash of black starscape appeared between the bay doors. Freedom? Or a false hope? Anything was possible -- you just had to grab the opportunity and tag along as it passed, wasn’t that what his dad had said.
‘We go as soon as that gap is large enough to take a sled,’ Mervyn instructed.
Aurora got away first, angling her sled to slip through the doors and escape into the darkness beyond. Mervyn was hot on her tail. The G-force squished him into the back of his seat like a rubber ball. He felt sure he could feel the muscles of his face tearing off the bones. As the sled escaped the battleship’s artificial gravity he felt the familiar lurch, like speeding over a humpbacked bridge, as he become weightless. The G-force lost its power over him and everything sprang back to its rightful place.
On the viewscreen, at frequencies beyond the visible spectrum, the seemingly featureless space came alive with vibrant colours: vast interstellar gas clouds glowed red and blue, a Brown Dwarf pulsated with a malevolent orange glow, far off to the left a nova glowed with rainbow coloured gas clouds heated by a neutron star buried somewhere at its core -- the remains of a collapsed giant star -- now long forgotten. He sped away at full throttle, recklessly gobbling fuel, to put as much distance as possible between the sled and the battleship.
‘Valna must have refuelled the sled before we left Revlon,’ Loren reported, ‘we have a full load on board.’
Thank goodness for Valna -- at least he remained loyal.
‘Ok, so I am a bad judge of character,’ Aurora said. ‘Just don’t rub it in, ok.’
‘What did I say?’
Tarun tactfully interrupted, ‘Where are we heading for then -- even with a full fuel load there isn’t enough to reach even halfway to Ethrigia’
‘Ok guys,’ Mervyn said, ‘what advantages do we have over fighters?’
‘The sleds are smaller--’ Tarun began.
‘Don’t think size, think mass,’ Loren said. ‘We may be smaller, but we have more mass.’
‘What difference does that make?’ Aurora asked.
‘Did you asleep through all your navigation lessons?’
‘No -- not all of them.’
‘Having a higher mass means we can get a faster slingshot from the gravity of that Brown Dwarf. We’ll need all the extra speed we can get.’
‘What else,’ Mervyn. asked
‘We can manoeuvrable better,’ Tarun, suggested.
‘There’s two of us in each sled,’ Aurora, suggested, ‘We can take turns to sleep on straight runs. That way we’ll be fresher when we have to decide on curse corrections. And anyway, when we are sleeping we will use less oxygen.’ Aurora was right. Although the sleds were cramped, there was a cubby hole which one person could just squeeze in to if they had a mind to sleep.
‘Is that it?’ Mervyn asked. It was. ‘Right, Loren and Tarun, you work out the best route -- maximum speed over maximum distance -- while Aurora and I head for that Brown Dwarf.’
Silence reigned as they worked. Far ahead the Brown Dwarf sparked and boiled in its vain attempt to spark into life as a star. What must it be like to spend an eternity in failure? Maybe one day it would get lucky and capture an asteroid with enough mass to tip the balance.
Loren jolted Mervyn out of his musings, ‘Got it! You’ll like this -- all we got to do is send them in the wrong direction.’
‘This sounds bad,’ Aurora said. ‘Does this plan have an ending?’
‘It’s a good plan.’
‘So that’s a no then.’
Loren ignored her and called up a star map on the viewscreens and marked a route. ‘There’s one opportunity to deceive them,’ she marked a circle on the map. ‘Here. But there’s a cost -- we’ve gotta slow down and let them catch up. The fighters need to be committed to their trajectory before we are. That shouldn’t be too difficult, they have less mass than the sleds so they’ll have to fly closer to the dwarf to get their slingshot.’
‘But that puts us within shooting range,’ Tarun said in alarm.
‘Ah, yes... it will be tight.’
‘How tight?’
‘Very tight.’
Aurora was not convinced, ‘So what if we just pile on the power and head out as far as we can?’
‘They will catch us here,’ Loren marked a cross on the map.’
‘And if we pull off this trick?’
Loren marked another cross much further away. Mervyn suspected by the tone of her voice she was hiding a surprise up her sleeve, but he decided not to spoil her fun, he would know soon enough anyway.
‘So what is the point, Loren? They are going to get us anyway,’ Aurora exclaimed.
It was the response Loren wanted, ‘Because, I have worked out a way to get us to here,’ she said smugly and marked a new cross. ‘Which, you might note, is within communications distance of this relay station,’ she drew another circle.
‘All right, genius, so tell us how we achieve this magnificent feat,’ Aurora, sneered.
Loren told her.
‘Are you mad?’ Aurora, hissed, ‘even I can’t make a sled do that.’