Free Trespassers: a science-fiction novel by Todd Wynn, Tim Wynn

weren ’ t there any passengers? ” he pondered aloud.
    Web lifted his eyes from his menu. “ Ships don ’ t always have passengers. ” He shrugged.
    “ They don ’ t? ”
    Web shrugged again. “ Maybe he was picking somebody up. ”
    “ So, you ’ re saying he was abducting someone and making a vaccine so that he could transport a visitor off the planet? ” Stewart countered.
    Damn, Stewart was making sense . Web shrugged anyway. “ Let ’ s just eat first, before we start with the questions, ” Web was more interested in lunch at this point than talking Stewart down from another mysterious mission. Web didn ’ t mind indulging Stewart ’ s hunches, but he did mind when those hunches threatened to cut his lunch short. He had spent far too many days balancing food on his lap, bouncing down the road, chasing one of Stewart ’ s hunches.
    “ What if someone was on the ship? ” Stewart asked.
    “ You checked the ship. ”
    “ I could have missed someone, ” Stewart said. “ I was in a hurry. . . . Do you think those energy pulses could have been other passengers, bailing out? ”
    “ Bailing from a moving ship? ” Web scoffed. “ No way. ”
    This piqued Mindy ’ s curiosity. “ How exactly does one . . . bail out of a moving ship? Or any ship for that matter. ”
    Web perked up. He loved teaching and never missed an opportunity.
    “ Ships like that one — transporter ships — have deceleration slopes, which allow cargo to be dropped to the ground at ten percent g, ” Web explained, as if giving a miniature seminar. “ That means that if you drop something from ten feet, it would be like dropping it from one foot. And if you dropped it from one hundred feet, it would be like dropping it from ten feet. It all works off an invisible pulse that dampens the gravitational pull on the selected object, but that object is still uncontrollably falling, just not as fast . . . just like when we dropped —” He swiveled his thumb around like a weather vane to point at the vehicle in the parking lot. Mindy nodded, and suddenly what she had seen was making more sense.
    “ But when an object is dropped from a ship that is moving, only the drop is slowed, ” Web continued, “ there ’ s nothing to dampen the forward momentum. So, if the ship ’ s going twenty miles an hour when you leave, you ’ re going twenty when you land. And if you leave at a hundred miles an hour, ” he smiled, “ you ’ re going to be smeared across something. ”
    Mindy nodded, feeling a little more up to speed.
    “ What if they're not just vacationers, ” Stewart pondered aloud. An ominous silence fell over the table.
    In that silence, Mindy noticed something. She noticed . . . Stewart . He seemed powerful and confident in a way she hadn ’ t realized before. She looked a little closer and saw that it was something more than confidence. There was something spectacular about him. It was . . . oh, no . . . it was attraction. She had developed a crush on him. Somewhere in the excitement it had happened. It happened before she could even detect it . . . somewhere in the midst of lying on that red-and-white blanket and watching him confiscate a spacecraft.
    Mindy noticed Stewart looking back at her. Had she been staring? Had she given herself away? She hoped not. She tried to act nonchalant. She would have to rein it in.
    Stewart had noticed. His favorite type of person was a person who was impressed with him. And his favorite type of girl was a girl who was crushing on him. He sensed Mindy was shaping up into that type of girl. He just needed to make sure she didn't take it too far. That could be bad for business. Mindy found it hard to hide in the silence, so she broke it.
    “ If they ’ re not vacationers, ” she asked, “ what would they be? ”
    Her plan worked. Stewart ’ s thoughts returned to the trespass.
    “ I ’ m not sure, ” he responded, as he swirled his tea a few more times. “ Order me the chicken