Chapter Eleven

 

Lieutenant Commander Andrew Howe prepared for the most dangerous voyage of his career.  The cylinders containing the five Icarus crewmembers were secure, strapped within the pod.  Beneath the deck rested the anti-gravity booster unit, designed to drop off the makeshift vessel upon reaching escape velocity; during acceleration out of the system, the extra mass would be useless.   Howe hoped that his improvised power links held up during their journey outsystem.  He planned on being picked up in space; there was no mechanism for landing his craft. 

 

The capsule, resting on its end in the launch cradle, was already banged up from its rough arrival on Abandon.  Andrew knew that it would hold an atmosphere for a few days before the leaks got out of hand.  By then he hoped to be suspended like the surviving crew of the Icarus; by then it would no longer matter. 

 

Finding the right parts to put the capsule together had not been a problem; about fifteen hours of time had been devoted to the actual search.  An additional twenty hours went into fabrication.  But making the components talk to each other had been much harder.  Howe was not a programmer; all of his modest skill had been required to link the different machines together into a cooperative whole. The trickiest part had been putting together the locomotive source. 

 

A crudely assembled anti-grav unit, built from juiced-up and polarity-reversed gravity generators aboard the wrecked Icarus, would lift the six of them off the surface, slowly accelerating until they reached escape velocity -- assuming it didn't fail before that point.  There were not enough parts to build a backup; so if it self-destructed it would be a very long fall.  Andrew figured it was a better risk than remaining on Abandon. 

 

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His five slumbering passengers were carefully stowed in their respective pods.   Andrew gingerly strapped himself into the sixth container.  He had relocated the capsule's control center to rest beside his head as he lay within the cryogenic pod.  Howe hoped that this casket would not be his coffin.   He deliberately left the lid of his pod open as he entered the booster's start up sequence into the console; he hoped he would remain awake long enough to break orbit of Abandon.  Howe expected the upward journey to take three hours; the anti-grav units strapped beneath him were simply not powerful enough to lift the craft any faster. 

 

The green booster status light on the panel flashed as the anti-grav units kicked in.  Then all indicators shifted from green to yellow as the capsule lurched cumbersomely skyward.  Howe had hoped the liftoff would be easier on the machines; his concern grew as several of the lights shifted to red during the next twenty minutes.  The overworked units were being subjected to stresses well beyond design tolerances. 

 

But the lifeboat kept climbing upward, remorselessly kicking its way heavenward.  Howe's brow drained sweat into his eyes as one after another the warning lights began flashing at overload levels.  The last five minutes before breaking free of the shackles of Abandon's gravity shook his soul. 

 

And then they were out.  Visible through the viewscreen on the control panel, Abandon rotated slowly beneath the pod, a pea-green orb to fascinate a child. The navy darkness of space beckoned him onward, as the thumping explosion of separation kicked the anti-grav units loose.  The stars, close by in this heavily laden quadrant, gleamed brilliantly, like broken glass on a children's playground. 

 

Several of the indicators had returned to status green when the booster fell away; the remainder slipped downward to amber.  At least Howe and his passengers weren't in eminent danger of burning to charcoal and then carbon atoms in Abandon's atmosphere. 

 

Howe cut in the capsule's thrusters then, noting with some satisfaction that their status lights stayed green.  The acceleration pressed him toward the rear of the pod, making him slightly dizzy. 

 

Then he saw it. 

 

A glowing swirl of gas, surrounding... nothing. 

 

His instinct, a faculty he had learned to trust during his tenure on Abandon, told him that the whirlpool was his gate home.    Without thinking further, Andrew set the controls to fly the pod right through the vortex. 

 

Then he very deliberately set his container to sleep mode and shut the cover.   

 

The cryogenic gas flooded the cannister before Howe could complete his final thought; while far below Abandon spun on, oblivious to the six refugees fleeing her unconscious menace as the spiral of gas and dust awaited, ready to consume the helpless capsule in his enormous maw.