Stephanie heard a loud mechanical screeching sound followed by a raucous siren blast. She grinned around at the children sitting at the kitchen table. “Looks like your uncle Moyo has found us some transport.”
Her humour faded when she reached the bungalow’s front porch. The bus which was parked on the road outside was spitting light in every spectrum; its bodywork a tight-packed mass of cartoon flowers growing out of paisley fields. LOVE, PEACE, and KARMA flashed in nightclub neon on the sides. The darkest areas were its gleaming chrome hubcaps.
Moyo climbed down out of the cab, busily radiating embarrassment. The doors at the back of the bus hissed open, and another man climbed down. She’d never seen anyone with so much hair before.
The children were crowding around her, gazing out eagerly at the radiant carnival apparition.
“Is that really going to take us to the border?”
“How do you make it light up?”
“Please, Stephanie, can I get inside?”
Stephanie couldn’t say no to them, so she waved them on with a casual gesture. They swarmed over the small front lawn to examine the wonderment.
“I can see how this should help us avoid any undue attention,” she said to Moyo. “Have you lost your mind?”
A guilty finger indicated his new companion. “This is Cochrane, he helped me with the bus.”
“So it was your idea?”
“Surely was.” Cochrane bowed low. “Man, I always wanted a set of wheels like this.”
“Good. Well now you’ve had it, you can say goodbye. I have to take these children out of here, and they’re not going in that thing. We’ll change it into something more suitable.”
“Won’t do you no good.”
“Oh?”
“He’s right,” Moyo said. “We can’t sneak about, not here. You know that. Everybody can sense everything in Mortonridge now.”
“That’s still no reason to use this . . . this—” She thrust an exasperated arm out towards the bus.
“It’s like gonna be a mobile Zen moment for those with unpure thoughts,” Cochrane said.
“Oh, spare me!”
“No really. Any cat catches sight of that bus and they’re gonna have to confront like their inner being, you know. It’s totally neat, a soul looking into its own soul. With this, you’re broadcasting goodness at them on Radio Godhead twenty-four hours a day; it’s a mercy mission that makes mothers weep for their lost children. My Karmic Crusader bus is going to shame them into letting you through. But like if you hit on people with a whole heavy military scene, like some kind of covert behind-the-lines hostility raid, you’ll waste all those good vibes your karma has built up. It’ll make it easy for all the cosmically uncool redneck dudes running loose out there to make it hard for us.”
“Humm.” He did make an odd kind of sense, she admitted grudgingly. Moyo gave her a hopeful shrug, a loyalty which lent her a cosy feeling. “Well, we could try it for a few miles I suppose.” Then she gave Cochrane a suspicious look. “What do you mean, us?”
He smiled and held his arms out wide. A miniature rainbow sprang up out of his palms, arching over his head. The children laughed and clapped.
“Hey, I was at Woodstock, you know. I helped rule the world for three days. You need the kind of peaceful influence I exert over the land. I’m a friend to all living things, the unliving, too, now.”
“Oh, hell.”
Erick still hadn’t activated the life-support capsule’s internal environmental systems. He was too worried what the power drain would do to the starship’s one remaining functional fusion generator. There certainly wasn’t enough energy stored in the reserve electron matrix cells to power up the jump nodes.
Ngeuni’s star was a severe blue-white point a quarter of a light-year away. Not quite bright enough to cast a shadow on the hull, but well above first magnitude, dominating the starfield. His sensor image was overlaid with navigation graphics, a tunnel of orange circles which seemed to be guiding the Tigara several degrees south of the star. After five jumps he was still matching delta-v.
Thankfully, the clipper’s fusion drive was capable of a seven-gee acceleration, and they weren’t carrying any cargo. It meant he had enough fuel to align the ship properly. Getting back to Golomo was going to be a problem, though.
The flight computer warned him that the alignment manoeuvre was almost complete. Tigara was flashing towards the jump coordinate at nineteen kilometres per second. He started to reduce thrust and ordered the fusion generator to power up the nodes. As soon as the plasma flow increased he started receiving datavised caution warnings. The confinement field which held the ten-million-degree stream of ions away from the casing was fluctuating alarmingly.
Erick quickly loaded an emergency dump order into the flight computer, linking it to a monitor. If the confinement field fell below five per cent the generator would shut down and vent.
For some reason he was devoid of all tension. Then he realized his medical program was flashing for attention. When he accessed it, he saw the packages were filtering out a deluge of toxins and neurochemicals from his bloodstream at the same time as they were issuing chemical suppressors.
He grinned savagely around the SII suit’s oxygen tube. Neutering his own reflexes at precisely the time he needed them the most. Too many factors were building up against him. And still it didn’t really bother him, not snug in the heart of his semi-narcotic hibernation.
The flight computer signalled that the jump coordinate was approaching. Sensors and heat dump panels began to sink down into their recesses. The main drive reduced thrust to zero. Erick fired the ion thrusters, keeping the Tigara on track.
Then the energy patterning nodes were fully charged. Finally he felt a distant sense of relief, and reduced the fusion generator output. The straining confinement field surged as the plasma stream shrank by ninety per cent inside half a second. Decaying failsoft components didn’t respond in time. An oscillation rippled along the tokamak chamber, tearing the plasma stream apart.
The Tigara jumped.
It emerged deep inside the Ngeuni system; at that instant a perfect inert sphere. The poise was shattered within an instant as the raging plasma tore through the tokamak’s casing and ripped out through the hull, loosing incandescent swords of ions in all directions. A chain reaction of secondary explosions began as cryogenic tanks and electron matrices detonated.
The ship disintegrated amid a blaze of radioactive gases and ragged molten debris. Its life-support capsule came spinning out of the core of the explosion; a silvered sphere whose surface was gashed by veins of black carbon where energy bursts and tiny fragments had peppered the polished nultherm foam.
As soon as it was clear of the boiling gases, emergency rockets fired to halt the capsule’s wild tumbling motion, a solid kick into stability. The beacon began to broadcast its shrill distress call.