Wreckers: A Denver Boyd Novel by George Ellis (ebook reader ink .TXT) 📕

series, and I thought they blew it,” Edgar said. “But now I don’t think so. I mean, if they blow the failsafe, we’re not going to know it. Our brains won’t have time to process it. We’ll just cut to black. Like if we got whacked. Like Tony.”

“Spoiler alert!” Gary cried. “I haven’t committed that one to my memory yet! But now there’s no point.”

I was thinking about the metaphysical implications of “cutting to black” when the Burnett hailed us. I answered and Slay’s face filled the screen. “You rang?”

“I just called to pass along a final message from Largent,” she said.

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“He wanted you to know it was him. He said you’d know what I was talking about. Enjoy your last few seconds of existence.”

And with that, she cut the beam.

Next thing I knew, I felt like I was split in half. And each half of me was being slammed to my chair with such force I didn’t even feel pain. My body just tremored and seemed to flatten a few inches.

Through the glass, I could see the blackness of space somehow expand around the Stang. Lights flew by the ship. Or vice versa. I was too disoriented to understand the difference. The moment seemed to stretch on for minutes.

Then the pressure lessened.

My body could move again. I could breathe. According to the instruments, we were still traveling about 1/6th the speed of light. The Burnett and the Golden Bear were a distant memory. I checked the failsafe on the floor. It was still there. I was still there. We weren’t exploded. The plan worked; we had used the warp drive to outrun the transmission radius of the bomb. Slay couldn’t detonate the failsafe while we were traveling 30,000 miles per second in the opposite direction.

I looked at Edgar. It was odd that he was the person I was sharing this life-altering moment with. He grasped the gravity of the moment, however, and simply shook his head in disbelief.

I unstrapped from my chair and stood up, uncertain at first. A few steps later, it was clear that warp speed didn’t work the same way as mechanical speed. Apparently, it wasn’t a matter of g-force. It was all about displacement. I’d read that somewhere anyway. It was just a theory at the time, of course, but now I was experiencing it.

“I’ll take this over the credits any day of the week,” Edgar finally said.

I was about to exit the cabin when he asked if I knew where we were going. I honestly had no idea.

* * *

The drive had always been our way out. It was just so damn obvious, none of us even considered it until Avery pointed out that we had two of the people who built it and two of the best mechanics in the verse on board.

As I walked to the engine room, it dawned on me that every step I took marked another 30,000 miles we’d traveled. The simple act of stopping to think about it for a few seconds gave the warp drive enough time to transport us farther than we’d ever been from the known verse. It was mind boggling.

It was also scary. If the drive broke down, we were marooned in deep space with no supplies. I pushed that thought from my mind and decided to revel in the moment. We were the new explorers, as unlikely a group as you’d ever see.

Pirate sauntered into the corridor and brushed against my leg. He was feeling spry too, apparently. I knelt down to pick him up and he willingly obliged, a rarity since our crew of two had expanded to six.

“You realize you’re the first cat to venture this far into the black,” I told him. He proceeded to knead my chest in victory.

“I know I don’t have a body, but I feel weird,” Gary said. “We’re traveling almost as fast as the circuits in my head.”

“I know the feeling,” I replied.

When Pirate and I got to the engine room, Marcum was dancing. Batista, Romy and Avery were all just watching him, bemused. I walked to where my brother was laying on the gurney and held out my hand.

He shook it with all the strength he could muster.

“This the famous Pirate?” he asked, reaching to pet him.

I placed the purring cat onto Avery’s gurney and he nestled next to him. I looked at my brother’s legs with concern.

“They’ll come around eventually,” he said, wistfully. I nodded, also not wanting to discuss it.

My eyes scanned the warp drive, which had been hastily (but apparently, properly) installed by connecting it to the main engine core. I was still amazed by its compact size, but I had a new respect for the device, even though I had no concept of how it worked. I didn’t bother to ask Marcum or Romy. That was a question for another time.

“We should probably stop soon,” Romy said, doing some calculations in her head. “We’re getting pretty far off the map, so to speak.”

“Is the stopping process the same as the speeding up process?” I asked, referring to the few seconds of body-splitting weirdness I experienced the moment we launched to warp velocity.

“No, that was just because we went from zero to warp,” she explained. “The drive can grad it up or down.”

“Meaning we can slow down slowly?”

“Yep.”

“Okay Gary, let’s try that,” I said. “You know how it works?”

“Pffft,” he said. “I’ve known how it worked for a good two minutes now.”

I felt a slight reduction in speed, but other than that, the transition was fairly smooth.

“It’ll take about a minute to get back down to average Stang velocity,” Gary said.

“Pull up a map. let’s see where we are,” I said.

Gary projected the solar system until the screen in the room. We were a blinking dot just past Mars, between the Red Planet and Jupiter.

“Huh, not too far,” I said.

Marcum stopped dancing and took exception. “Not too far? We just traveled 20 million miles in a matter of minutes!”

“I