Zombie Road , Simpson, A. [best authors to read TXT] 📗

in, made the final checks, flipped the antigravity switch and eased the ship off the ground. Maddy released the air pressure from the bay and activated the door. It groaned open and she calculated the battery drain it used. They wouldn’t be coming back, there wasn’t enough juice left in them to power the life support systems back up. In a little over a month, they’d burned through all the energy it had taken thousands of years to collect.

Jessie gripped the oversized controls tightly and steadied the ship. It had been pretty sleek until he started modifying it. The aerodynamics were mostly for aesthetics, there wasn’t any air, and any drag, in space. The humans from this galaxy were similar to the humans of earth in many respects. They liked nice things and they liked glamorous trappings. The captain’s ceremonial ship and had been designed to impress and entertain officials. The locals on backwater planets would marvel at the shiny craft with a long fuselage, swept back wings and richly appointed amenities.

They had ruined its impressive silhouette with the addition of extra thrusters in the rear. They had broken up its clean design with the gun turrets stripped off the escort ship. They hadn’t bothered to repaint anything and the scorch marks from the welders and cutters were left alone. Space ships were pretty basic once he understood the systems. They had advanced technology but it was contained in various modules. If one broke, you replaced it. The ion thrusters, the plasma cannon loads, the shield power and most other things swapped in and out as easy as changing a fuse. A giant fuse to be sure but as long as the craft itself was airtight, everything else went together like Legos.

“Can these be run in a series?” he asked her when adding the ion generator modules from the transport ship. “Will it make us go faster?”

“It is ill advised.” She said. “The ships are designed to maintain the same speed as all others. If they moved at different speeds in the shipping lanes, there could be collisions.”

It was an argument they had that ran for weeks even as Jessie was gutting the luxuriously decorated sleeping quarters and the living and entertaining areas befitting a warship captain. He stripped anything he considered superfluous and replaced it with hardware, spare modules and supply containers.

“I don’t need a virtual reality entertainment room or whatever that thing is.” He’d argued. “I don’t know what’s out there, I need guns and ammo. I need food and water. I need to be fast in an atmosphere and I need to be fast out in space. What if we run into a bunch of those dinosaur looking guys and they’re hungry? I want laser cannons to aim at them, not offer them a relaxing massage bath.”

She knew how he was thinking, he had survived on his planet because of his machine. His Mercury. It kept him alive and kept him safe. He wanted the same thing again. She helped him because in the end it was her job to protect him, not keep him comfortable.

The ship used an anti-gravity projector to maneuver when they were planet side and thruster bursts when they were near spaceports. To travel from one planet to the next inside a solar system they had a hyper drive system with ion propulsion. It could move them along at close to a hundred and fifty thousand miles an hour so moving between planets inside a system could usually be done in a week or so. To get between systems they had to use wormhole jump gates, every system had a few scattered around left over from the Great War.

Once he was miles away from the bay doors, clear of any floating debris, Jessie turned the transporter and took in the majesty of the giant, wrecked ship. It was still slowly spinning, still tumbling from the devastating blasts that hit it thousands of years ago.

“It will keep going forever.” Maddy said. “Like a bullet shot from one of your earth guns, it will never stop. If scrappers don’t find it, it will continue until a million years from now gravity from a planet or star will suck it down to its surface.”

Jessie shook his head. “I still can’t believe you pulled me in like you did. What are the odds? Gotta be a million to one.”

“They are incalculable,” she said. “I can’t count that high.”

Jessie looked at her. “Did you just make a joke?”

She looked puzzled for a moment then smiled. “Yes, I did. It must be a joke because it is untrue. I can count forever.”

The Madroleeka had been drifting for millennia, slowly spinning away from the jump gate where she had been attacked and into open space where no one traveled. Her tumbling had slowed but like anything in the vacuum of space, once she had been set in motion she had kept going. They were a billion miles from any systems when Jessie turned his ship away from the spinning hulk, locked the coordinates onto the nearest spaceport and engaged the hyper drive. It would take them months to arrive and it was impossible to tell if they were moving by looking at the outside screens. They were in the vast blackness of nothing. A minuscule pinprick, a single grain of sand in an ocean. The ship accelerated smoothly, reached the maximum speed within minutes and the only way they knew they were moving was by watching the display tick off numbers.

“We will arrive in two hundred seventy-one days.” She said.

“Not if these work the way I think they will.” Jessie said and flipped the switch to turn on one of the extra hyper drive thrusters. They watched as the speed climbed and the ETA fell. The ship still felt smooth, no crazy vibrations or funny noises.

“There appears to be no change in hull integrity.” Maddy said as she scanned through screens and readouts “but I would advise against