He Who Dares: Book Three Read Online Free Page A

life pod!” The old man snorted.
    “Didn’t mean it like that, Gramps.” He said in his defense.
    “I know you didn’t, son, and I didn’t miss the situation that prompted it either.”
    Mike kept his silence after that. He hadn’t meant Gramps to overhear what he’d muttered, but even in the engine-room environment Gramps still had good hearing with his headset on. They trailed after the others, still hearing the distress call on the high-band receiver. By this time, everyone in-system had heard it; those in the know, shivering in horror. One of those impossible strings of misfortunes had overtaken the luxury liner Queen Ann on her inbound course. Unlike many regular passenger liners, she had the clearance to go just about anywhere she wanted on the whim of the captain or one of his very rich passengers. They’d even received permission to pass through the Rift and visit Christchurch. In this case all their misfortunes met at the same juncture. The captain thought it would a good idea to let his human, and non-human, passengers see the spectacular Christchurch system, especially the Jovian gas giant, up close. At the same time many of the previously mentioned passengers wanted a close look, a very close look. It could be said in the captain of the Queen Ann’s defense, that he let the pride in his vessel, and the prompting of his rich clientele to override his natural caution. This led him to descend further into the Jovian atmosphere than he would have otherwise. Multiple storm eyes dotted the surface, and it was toward one of the smaller ones that the Queen Ann was headed when her main electrical buss blew.
    That caused a cascading power failure throughout the ship and the fusion reactor to SCRAM. That in turn brought down her main drive. When the electrical buss blew, it killed a number of her main engineering crew, and with the AG generator off-line, even for a short while before the emergency generator kicked in, the 530,000-ton luxury liner sank deeper into the gas giant’s embrace. By the time they restored partial power to the bridge, the captain realized to his horror that they were below the maximum safe limit he could launch the life pods. These were designed to safely put the pods out into space and down on the surface of an M Class planet not pull the life pod out of the gravity well of even a one G planet, let alone that of a 2.5 G gas giant.
    Two hours ago, his first “Mayday” lit up the screen of Orbital Approach and was immediately passed to Orbital Center, but there was little they could do. A quick check verified there were no vessels within immediate range to aid the stricken liner. The call went out to all deep space tugs as the authorities tried to mount some kind of rescue mission. Many suspected it was already too late, but they had to try. The captain and crew of the Queen Ann worked desperately to get the main engines back on line, but other than stabilizing their sink rate by diverting power to the Ag system, nothing worked.
    For ten long hours, Mike flew the Prometheus outward, using two of them for breaking. It was a rough twelve hours, even with the compensators working at max against the fifty G inertia. Even so, their rate of approach was still high for a zero/zero intercept with the gas giant.
    “You tuned into the commercial frequency, Mike?”
    “Sure am.”
    “Anything?”
    “Oh yes, the Titan and Samson are sitting back while the Lady Penelope haggles with the shipping agent.”
    “Trying to get round the standard Lloyds’ salvage contract, I bet.”
    “Right, but the agent is sticking to her guns. Standard, or nothing.”
    “Sheesh! You’d think that something else besides money would come into play at a time like this, like rescuing the bloody passengers!” Gramps was definitely irritated. “You have the Queen Ann on screen?”
    “Just about. It’s a little murky down there, but I’ve got an active ping back from her.”
    “Good. So what’s your plan? We