Free Lone Star Renegades by Mark Wayne McGinnis Page A

hadn’t he been leading ever since they’d been abducted? Wasn’t he already taking charge? His mind went to Darren, who was comfortable in that position … in fact he strived to always be in command. But the thought of handing the reins over to him, let Darren even try to get them out of this predicament, was ludicrous.
    Collin nodded. “Let’s work together … but we’ll need to work fast.”
     

Chapter 12
     
     
    Cine opened the hatch, startling DiMaggio and Bubba. Both looked up in surprise. Collin, seated at a bridge console with Orman, broke off their conversation to signal them to come in.
    “Frost! You all right?” Bubba asked, looking ready to kill someone. The cat-like man looked at him warily and then at Collin.
    “It’s okay. We’re going to work together. Truth is … our chances of survival depend on us being able to work together.”
    Bubba and DiMaggio looked skeptical. “Why do we need them? How do we know they won’t try to F- with us later?” DiMaggio asked, his eyes never leaving Cine.
    “We’re going to have to trust them … just as they’re doing with us right now.”
    Collin changed the subject. “Bubba, I was wondering if you could help us figure a way to get this ship operational. You know, since your father owns an interstellar spacecraft repair depot.”
    Bubba smiled at that and was about to say something when, seeing Collin’s serious expression, he caught himself. “Um … I guess I could try. I am … better with the more mechanical aspects.”
    “That’s fine. It’ll be a learning experience for all of us. Orman, here, is conveying his fairly good knowledge of this spaceship. We’re starting with bridge operations. Next, we’ll move on to Engineering … it’s there he believes there’s a problem.”
    Bubba took a seat next to Collin.
    “And what do you want me to do, Collin?” DiMaggio asked.
    “I want you to take Cine with you and bring everyone back here. We need to get everyone on board as quickly as possible.”
    “You serious? Darren’s not going to—”
    Collin cut him off, holding up a hand. “Do whatever you have to do to get him and everyone else back here within the next hour or two. Do whatever you have to … use your imagination. Hell, lie to him if you have to,” Collin said with a crooked smile.
     
    * * *
     
    Over the next two hours Collin learned as much about the spacecraft as possible. There were times, Collin guessed, when Orman was becoming suspicious of his lack of knowledge concerning even the basics associated with space travel. It was only Collin’s rudimentary understanding of physics, and what he’d learned reading Discovery magazine and watching Nova, that he was able to maintain any semblance of believability. What kept getting in the way for him was the simple fact that, at current levels of human understanding, space travel between interstellar bodies wasn’t even remotely possible. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, objects will always gain mass as they accelerate to greater and greater speeds. To get an object, like a spaceship, to move faster, you’d need to give the vessel some sort of monumental push. A spacecraft with more mass would need an even bigger push … say, than a smaller ship with less mass. In any event, if an object did reach the speed of light, it would have an infinite amount of mass and would need an infinite amount of push, or acceleration, to keep it trucking along. There was no amount of thrust—no rocket engine, no matter how powerful—that could accomplish this feat. In fact, as far as modern Earth science was concerned, nothing could exceed the speed of light.
    What Collin was inadvertently discovering was that space travel was made possible not so much by bending the rules of physics, but by compartmentalizing those rules. When Einstein was working out the fundamentals of his principles behind the relativity of time, he wasn’t keyed into other, perhaps even more