To Crush the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

closed his hatch then, stoked his reactor, fired up his sensors and hypercomputers. Engaged his gravitic grapples, yes, latching them on to the crescent moon and yanking himself right off the Earth.
    And in a rare moment of perspicacity, as the stars came alive around him and he wheeled the ship for a new, more distant grapple target, he had muttered under his breath, “Oh, yes, my friends, this vagabond heart lives on, smothered in census figures. None among you can refuse me now! Surprised though I am to say this, sometimes it's good to be the king.”

chapter two
    in which a revolution is halted
    There are moments for musing. Not moments of truth, but moments
before
the moment of truth, when the mind squirts sideways, time stretches, thoughts race. Insights leap across the gray matter like fleeing deer. For Bruno it went thusly:
    Given the Nescog, that glittering network of black-hole matter which linked every part of the Queendom to every other, he could step through the print plate of the fax machine behind him and, in a few hours' transit time which he himself would not perceive, step out through an equivalent plate in the palace foyer back on Tongatapu. Or anywhere else! The bulk of this journey would happen, alas, at Einstein's lightspeed, although ring collapsiter segments—long, thin tubes of collapsium with high-speed supervacuum inside—would shave a few minutes off it here and there.
    Ah, but with wormholes in place of collapsiters, the journey could be instantaneous! Not just to Earth, or to any other corner of the Queendom, but to the stars themselves. To the failed and failing colonies scattered among the nearby stars and dwarfs. Bruno and Tamra had sent too many young men and women out there to their deaths. Their
deaths
! But it was an error on which they could still, in some small measure, make good. If Bruno could just build a damned wormhole.
    The whirling fan of
Newhope
expanded in his view, and expanded some more. Belatedly, Bruno pulled up a schematic of the ship from
Boat Gods
' library, and then sketched an outline of the entry and exit wounds upon its hull. Presumably, the projectile had been stationary, at least in comparison to the starship's own large velocity. And that meant
Newhope
had not been facing forward or backward at the time, as she should have been for safety's sake, but rather broadside to the dust and debris of interstellar space. Oops.
    So what had happened? From
Boat Gods
' myriad sensors, a story began to emerge. The accident had occurred hundreds of years ago, the ship taking first a freak hit to its forward ertial shield, slightly off-center. The shield was hard to damage, and would have absorbed almost all of the kinetic energy, releasing it over several minutes as a blue-green flare of Cerenkov photons. A survivable event, yes. But compressive interactions had probably sent shockwaves and electrical surges all up and down the hull and superstructure, stunning the wellstone and preventing the navigation safety lasers from receiving power.
    This much at least, the starship was designed to handle. But it had gotten unluckier; the collision tipped it slightly, and before the nav systems could recover or the lasers could vaporize it, a second particle—probably larger—had struck, and the resulting plasma had flashed straight through the hull at near-relativistic speed, sending her into a wild, chaotic tumble while her fuel supply squirted away into vacuum. And without its deutrelium the ship's reactor had run down, and the ship itself had gone to sleep, perchance to wake at some future date.
    Well, with any luck, that day was now at hand.
    Bruno adjusted his grapples and set about the task of attaching himself to the center of the tumbling ship. The rest should be easy enough;
Boat Gods
was outfitted with a universal airlock and augmented with the Royal Overrides which guaranteed Bruno access to, and control over, any enlivened device designed or constructed in the Queendom