John Maddox Roberts - Space Angel Read Online Free PDF

Once, during the War, I was serving as navigator on a cargo transport supporting the Li I'o invasion. On the night before H-Hour, I was reclining in just such a bubble as this one. On a Navy ship, it's just about the only place a man can find some privacy and be safe from his superiors, since most of them don't even know the bubble exists. Suddenly, before my eyes, the specter of a ship appeared: one of those knobby, old-fashioned affairs, all tubes and spheres. Great rents marred her sides, and you could see the bones of the dead inside. Her bridge was lit by a red light, such as they used on the old ships, and enclosed in glassite. Across her nose I could just read the name Nevsky. I later learned the Nevsky disappeared during a routine run to Titan in 2022, with some of Earth's greatest scientists aboard. The next day—well, everybody knows what happened at Li Po."
    Unable to control himself, Bert exclaimeed, "Finn, were I not an old spacer, well versed in the strangeness of the spaces between the stars, I would call you a most thoroughgoing Irish liar. As it is, I shall merely reserve my judgment."
    "You don't need to believe Finn or Ham, Kelly," Torwald said, "but before you've been out too long, you'll have seen some strange things." The others nodded their heads in agreement. "The first thing you need to cultivate is a mind open to any possibility, because anything is possible out here. You abandoned the word impossible back a{ the pad when we left."
    None disputed this great truth.
    Nancy, tuned to her satisfaction at last, broke into a rhapsody by Kallio, the only major composer ever to be a spacer. She followed up the Kallio piece with others by Debussy, Ravel, Respighi, and Hoist. Of Earth's composers, these were the spacers' favorites;
    their impressionistic melodies evoked the flavor of life between the stars better than any others, even though the composers had lived out their lives bound to Earth.
    One by one the crew began to retire to their cabins. The violin was put away, the empty bottles picked up, the aroma of cigar smoke faded as the smoke trailed down the ladder to the Navigation compartment. Fi-ally, no one was left in the bubble except Kelly, looking at the stars.
    Two
    Kelly passed through the hatch marked engine room . Faded letters below said unauthorized personnel keep out . Kelly wondered if the restriction applied to him, decided it didn't, and entered.
    The room was brightly illuminated, and its bulkheads were painted stark white, in contrast to the rest of the ship, which had been painted in various colors and patterns according to the whims of former skippers. Toward the rear, two pits contained the lower halves of the main thrusters. Between them was slung the tapering cone of the Whoopee Drive. Achmed and Lafayette had stripped the cowling from the off-duty thruster and were scrubbing it down with a variety of implements.
    "Hop in and get to work!" Achmed shouted. "Take Lafayette's side." Kelly dropped into the well next to the red-headed boy and reached toward a sonic disruptor of the kind he had seen used on Earth to clean buildings. Lafayette slapped his hand away before he could touch the instrument.
    "Naughty, naughty. Kiddies don't play with power tools in the engine room. Here, take some of this and start scrubbing." He thrust a wad of steel wool into Kelly's hand. "That's more your speed. Now, get to work."
    Kelly scrubbed at the piled-up engine gunge, fuming silently. It was like that all morning. The older boy kept finding fault with Kelly's work and passing Kelly the dirtiest jobs. Kelly refused to let the hectoring destroy the enjoyment of his first real spacer's work. He had performed harder, dirtier labor before, so the necessarily grimy work of engine maintenance didn't bother him. Eventually Achmed called Lafayette over to his side of the thruster and Kelly heard a brief, muffled exchange before Lafayette returned. For the rest of the job, Lafayette dropped the bullying, but