Free THE ALL-PRO by Scott Sigler

looked like a big, spherical rock. Maybe he’d learn how it worked someday. Kimberlin had said the principles involved required physics knowledge far above even his.
    Punch drives weren’t the only thing used to move the ship. Captain Cheevers showed Quentin banks of impulse engines located in the aft section. Each engine was an antimatter reactor, fifty feet long and twenty feet wide. A row of seven engines lined the top of the ship. Fourteen stories below them, another row of seven lined the bottom.
    “So,” Kate said, “that’s the tour.”
    “That’s everything?”
    She nodded. “Except for the Ki livestock pens. You want to see those?”
    Quentin thought back to last season’s meal with the offensive linemen, to the deer/spider creature that still haunted his nightmares. “No. No, I don’t want to see that. Not one bit.”
    He ran his hand along one of the reactors. This was the heart of the Touchback , the engines that carried them anywhere punch drives did not.
    “How fast can we go?”
    “Why, do you like to go fast?”
    Wink-twitch.
    “Uh ...” This woman made him very uncomfortable. “No, I just ... you know, if we get into trouble.”
    “We can haul ass,” Captain Cheevers said. “This used to be a military vessel. When the need arises we can move quick. But there’s a lot of mass in the Touchback , so it takes us some time to hit our maximum velocity.”
    “Can we outrun pirates?” Quentin knew the Ki Fangs franchise had been wiped out by an explosion in 2667. Many speculated that was an accident, but plenty of people thought it was pirates. The New Rodina Astronauts had also suffered a disaster when the Purist Nation — Quentin’s own people — had caught the Astros team bus and executed all non-Human players.
    “If we hit V max , we can outrun just about anything,” Cheevers said. “But until we hit that speed, we’re vulnerable to smaller ships that can close in on us.”
    “Like fighters?”
    She paused, thinking, then nodded. “Those can be a big problem if they catch you close enough to a planet, but they need a bigger ship to support them. The real pirate problem comes from ships about a quarter the size of the Touchback . They have a low enough mass that they can accelerate fast and make a run, try to knock out the engines of a larger ship before the larger ship can accelerate away.”
    Quentin thought back to his physics lessons with Kimberlin. Pirates weren’t that much of a threat these days, but not much of a threat was a far cry from no threat at all . He needed to learn all he could about this. As Michael said, it never hurt to have too much knowledge.
    “How big is the Touchback , anyway?”
    “He’s two hundred meters long and twenty-eight meters wide.”
    “Meters? What’s that in feet?”
    Captain Kate laughed and shook her head. “You never learned metric?”
    Quentin shrugged. “I sort of know it. I just think of things in football terms, mostly. Yards and feet and inches.”
    “A football field is one hundred yards, right?”
    “One-twenty,” Quentin said. “Two ten-yard end zones, so one-twenty total.”
    “Then think of the Touchback as two football fields, end-to-end. Got it?”
    Quentin nodded.
    “Eighteen decks,” she said. “Fourteen Semini-class P-22 impulse engines. He’s big, forty-two thousand GRTs.”
    “What’s a GRT?”
    “Gross register tons.”
    “What’s a gross register ton?”
    “If you can’t do meters , how about we skip the GRT explanation, okay?”
    Her condescending tone annoyed him, but he nodded anyway. No, not condescending , more like ... patronizing . She didn’t think he was smart enough to handle all of this, but she also didn’t seem to think that was necessarily a bad thing.
    “He’s also got nine quad guns,” she said. “Three of them are broken, but he’s still got enough to fend off most pirates.”
    “Why do you keep calling the Touchback a he ? I thought ships were thought of as girls.