Free Endgame by Dafydd Ab Hugh Page A

eyes and solved the mystery: “Learned it from the Freds, of course.” It probably wasn’t Klavish, actually, just some common language the two sides, the Hyperrealists and the Deconstructionists, used for interparty negotiation.
    Sears and Roebuck turned back to the local navigational system. Evidently, in the absence of conflicting orders from any other section of the ship, any one station was sufficient to pilot the entire vessel. “Voyage taking us another eight of weeks, it will,” announced the pair of Klave. “External times in the hundred and twenty of years.”
    Eight more long weeks . . . God, just what I wanted. I took a deep breath. “Push the button, Max,” I said. Arlene gave me a swift kick in the ankle.
    The lift sequence was bizarre. It took a full day, much of which was a carefully calculated refueling that the ship carried out automatically after Sears and Roebuck programmed the course. Arlene interrogated the Klave extensively on just how the launch itself worked, then briefed me, like a good junior NCO.
    On their homeworld, the Freds used something Arlene called a “pinwheel launcher,” which she described as a huge asterisk in orbit around the planet. Each limb of the asterisk was a boom with a hook attached; the diameter of the asterisk, counting the booms, was something on the order of seven thousand kilometers!
    The whole pinwheel affair rotated directly opposite the day-night rotation of the planet. The spokes of the pinwheel descended from the sky and just kissed the ground; at that precise point, ground and boom were moving exactly the same speed and direction . . . so from the viewpoint of a ship on the runway—our ship—the boom appeared to hesitate motionless for a moment.
    That was the moment that our ship attached itself to the boom; in that fraction of a second, the Fred ship transformed itself from being a member of the Fredworld system to a member of the pinwheel system. Then, as the pinwheel continued to rotate, it pulled our ship up with it . . . gently at first; it felt like zero-g for a few minutes. Then we felt the centrifugaltug as we were yanked in a different direction than the planetary rotation.
    The g force increased rapidly, then just as suddenly, it decreased as the inertial dampers kicked online. Still, my stomach flew south while the rest of me went north, and I longed for the comfortable, familiar disorientation of mere zero-g! That was a first, I was absolutely convinced—Fly Taggart longing for free-fall!
    The pinwheel carried us up and around, then at perigee, the highest point of our little mini-orbit around the center of mass of the rotating asterisk, the ship decoupled, launching us into space. We were once again at freefall, and I regretted my earlier wish for it. But the ship immediately started spinning up, eventually hitting 0.8 g again. Meanwhile, the engines began to whine and moan and loudly groan, and we felt the hard backward push that indicated we had started our long acceleration, prior to the seven-week drift, culminating with the hard deceleration at the other end, dropping us into . . . into what?
    It was a frightening thought. And we would have fifty-eight creeping days to think about it.
    We fell into a standardized shipboard routine: training, mess, watchstanding, strategic mental improvement (we played chess and Go), and endless worrying, discussing, theorizing, emotional reminiscence of all that was best on Earth before this whole, horrible nightmare started. Once again, I took to walking the long, wet, slimy, hot corridors . . . but this time with Arlene at my side.
    Everything we saw reminded us of the monsters the Freds created for us; they drew heavily from their own world. They loved dark alcoves, doors that opened suddenly with only a hiss for a warning; I couldn’t count how many times I whirled around, drawing down on a frigging