Total pages in book: 112
Estimated words: 105936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 105936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
“There! Let’s see the little snot beat that!” he declared.
“First we have to check your route,” I reminded him.
He looked affronted.
“You presume to check my navigation?”
“Of course I do,” I growled, nearly losing my temper. “That’s what we’re fucking here for. Agatha,” I said, raising my voice to speak to the AI that ran most of The Illyrian’s computer functions. “Use the Imperium Verifier and check the route.”
The Verifier was like the central nervous system of our home galaxy—it was good for all kinds of functions but we used it most for checking Cross Dimensional Routes.
Unfortunately, when you left the edge of the Imperium Galaxy, you lost access to the Verifier. Which was why it was so vitally important to have a navigator you could trust. Once you crossed over into extra-galactic space, you were on your own and you had to trust your navvie implicitly.
“Acknowledged, Captain,” Agatha murmured in her low, feminine voice.
I’d had her programmed as a female on purpose. Sometimes on these long, interstellar voyages a man got lonely. Of course, in almost every port you visit you can find companionship, but I tended to avoid it for the most part. There are enough horrible venereal diseases out there to fill up a whole database of medical texts—I prefer not to catch them if I can help it.
We waited another few minutes for the route to go through the Verifier and then Agatha announced,
“Verification report complete. Verdict—pass. Rating on a scale of one to five—four stars.”
“What? Only a four? That’s ridiculous!” Gurflug burbled. “What justification can you give for such a low rating for my route?”
“Agatha? Justification?” I asked, frowning.
“Stage three of the proposed route takes us very close to an asteroid field, Captain,” the AI said calmly. “There is only a fifteen percent chance that it would become a problem for us, but the chance of a collision with a stray asteroid is not non-zero.”
“Ridiculous!” Gurflug declared again, crossing his slab-like arms over his beefy chest. “I have never plotted a course that would put a ship in danger—never!”
“That’s not what the Verifier said,” the boy remarked, speaking up before I could answer. He turned to me. “Captain Turk, let me have a try. I can get you to the Triplex Cluster in five jumps with a perfect five-star rating—I promise.”
“Impossible!” Gurflug blustered. “Such a thing is simply not possible!”
“Not if you have blind spots,” the boy said, smirking a little. He turned to me. “He’s skipping possible routes because he can’t tell if there’s a problem through the distortion field or not. I can do better—let me try.”
“Go ahead.” I swept out my hand in a, “be my guest” gesture.
At first I wasn’t sure if Gurflug would relinquish the nav chair and band. But at last, grumbling about “nasty little snots who didn’t know their place,” he rose and left the nav chair. He pulled the band off his head as an afterthought and tossed it back on the console, as though it wasn’t an extremely expensive piece of equipment. (It was.) I made another mental note.
The boy sat down gingerly in the chair and started to pick up the nav band. But when he went to touch it, we all saw that it was coated in slime and grease from Gurflug’s skin and hair. He made a face and looked around, clearly searching for something to clean the equipment off.
I took pity on him and pulled out the all-clean cloth I carried with me everywhere. It was a self-cleaning and self-mending piece of fabric that looked shiny blue in some lights and dull green in others. I had gotten it in on Zerkzies Alpha from a wise woman who claimed it would clean anything at all and then clean itself up afterwards. Imagine my surprise when it actually worked. I’d had it for five cycles now and I didn’t go anywhere without it.
The boy took it from me but looked up at me uncertainly.
“Er, are you sure, Captain?” he asked, looking at the slimy, greasy nav band and then at the pristine clean-cloth. “I mean, it might get ruined.” He kept his voice low but Gurflug wasn’t paying attention to us anyway. He was staring at the viewscreen where his route was still displayed and frowning moodily.
“It will only stay dirty for about an hour,” I told him. “Once I wad it up in my pocket again, it will clean itself.”
“Oh!” The boy examined the cloth with renewed interest. “What a great invention!”
“I thought so too—that’s why I bought it,” I said dryly. “Now use it so you can prove your claim. You’ve got some big fucking words to live up to, boy.”
“All right.” He quickly cleaned the muck off the nav band and handed me back the cloth. Then he settled the band over his temples and closed his eyes—the better to concentrate.