"Nearest port is Cottman Four. It's almost exactly thirty hours away."
"I don't like to run it that close." Vorongil's face was bitten deep
with lines. He turned to Ramillis, head of Maintenance. "Do we need
spare parts? Or just general repairs?"
"Just repairs, sir. We have plenty of shielding metal. It's a long job
to get through the hulls, but there's nothing we can't fix."
Vorongil flexed his clawed hands nervously, stretching and retracting
them. "Ringg, you're the fatigue expert. I'll take your word for it. Can
we make thirty hours?"
Ringg looked pale and there was none of his usual boyish nonsense when
he said, "Captain, I swear I wouldn't risk Cottman. You know what
crystallization's like, sir. We can't get through that hull lining to
repair it in space, if it does go before we land. We wouldn't have the
chance of a hydrogen atom in a tank of halogens."
Vorongil's slanted eyebrows made a single unbroken line. "That's the
word then. Bartol, find us the closest star with a planet--spaceport or
not."
Bart's hands were shaking with sudden fear. He checked each digit of
their present position, fed it into the computer, waited, finally wet
his lips and plunged, taking the strip from a computer.
"This small star, called Meristem. It's a--" he bit his lip, hard; he
had almost said green--"type Q, two planets with atmosphere within
tolerable limits, not classified as inhabited."
"Who owns it?"
"I don't have that information on the banks, sir."
Vorongil beckoned the Mentorian assistant. So apart were Lhari and
Mentorian on these ships that Bart did not even know his name. He said,
"Look up a star called Meristem for us." The Mentorian hurried away,
came back after a moment with the information that it belonged to the
Second Galaxy Federation, but was listed as unexplored.
Vorongil scowled. "Well, we can claim necessity," he said. "It's only
eight hours away, and Cottman's thirty. Bartol, plot us a warp-drive
shift that will land us in that system, and on the inner of the two
planets, within nine hours. If it's a type Q star, that means dim
illumination, and no spaceport mercury-vapor installations. We'll need
as much sunlight as we can get."
It was the first time that Bart, unaided, had had the responsibility of
plotting a warp-drive shift. He checked the coordinates of the small
green star three times before passing them along to Vorongil. Even so,
when they went into Acceleration Two, he felt stinging fear. If I
plotted wrong, we could shift into that crazy space and come out
billions of miles away....