Fleet of the Damned by Chris Bunch; Allan Cole Read Free Book Online Page B

for that. In that ductway should have been superheated steam. But this was a dummy, so all the candidate got was a mild blast of hot water—enough for first-degree burns—and then the ductway opened and dumped him out on the other side of the set, where Ferrari told him he was dead and disqualified from the test.
    After the "death" of the candidate, the team redoubled efforts to lever the second beam free.
    Sten did his basic physics, said "no way," and looked for another solution. He went through the ship and then outside, looking for anything that could become a tool.
    He found it.
    By the time he'd dragged the forty meters of control cable that must have exploded from the ship's skin into the jungle back into the corridor, the others were panting in defeat.
    There was seven minutes remaining.
    Sten did not bother explaining. He ran the 2-cm cable down to the beam, looped it, and wrapped a series of half hitches around it. Then he dragged the cable back up to a solid port frame that had pulled away from the ship's walls, and back toward the beam.
    Bishop stopped him. "What the clot are you doing?"
    "I'm sending kisses to the clotting Emperor," Sten grunted. "Gimme a hand."
    "Come on, Sten! You're wasting time."
    "One time. Listen up, Grunt. We're gonna block and tackle this cable and yank that beam out."
    "Sten, I'm not sure that is going to work. Why don't we talk about it?"
    "Because we got five minutes."
    "Right! We don't want to do anything wrong, do we?"
    And Sten got it.
    "Nope."
    His hand knifed out, palm up. Sten's hands could kill, maim, or coldcock any being known to the Imperial martial arts.
    The knife hand sliced against Bishop's neck, just below his ear. Bishop dropped like a sack of sand.
    "Shaddup," Sten commanded against the shout of surprise. "Get this clottin' cable back around and then we have to pull like hell. Bishop was a sabotage factor. I saw Mason give him orders. Come on, people. We got to get out of this place!"
    The block-and-tackled pulley yanked the beam free, and the team had its supplies out of the storage room and were clear of the "ship" a good minute before time ran out.
    Bishop, after recovering consciousness, told Sten he was right—Mason had told him to be a saboteur.
    Ferrari grudged that they were one of the few teams to successfully complete the test in five years.
    GRADE: OUTSTANDING.

    CHAPTER NINE
    S TEN WAS HAVING PROBLEMS.
    It wasn't that he was quite a mathematical idiot—no one in the Imperial Forces above spear-carrier second class was—but he did not have the instinctive understanding of numbers that he did, for example, of objects. Nor could he, in the navigational basic courses Phase One shoved at them, translate numbers into the reality of ships or planets.
    And so he got coaching.
    From Victoria, there was no problem, since everyone knew that she was the only guaranteed graduate. But Bishop?
    Math geniuses are supposed to be short and skinny, talk in high voices, and have surgically corrected optics.
    So much for stereotypes, Sten thought glumly as Bishop's thick fingers tabbed at computer keys, touched numbers on the screen, and, with the precision and patience of a pedant, tried to help Sten realize that pure numbers more exactly described a universe than even a picture or words, no matter how poetically or OEDly chosen.
    Sten looked at the screen again and found no translation.
    "Clottin' hell," Bishop grunted to Victoria. "Get the fire ax. Something's got to get through to him."
    Victoria found the solution.
    It took less than one evening to crosspatch Sten's mini-holoprocessor into the computer. When he input numbers, the holoprocessor produced a tiny three-dimensional star-map.
    Eventually, after many many problems, Sten glimmered toward an understanding.
    His grade:
    MATHEMATICAL PERCEPTIONS: NEED IMPROVEMENT.
    For some unknown reason, almost every school Sten had been punted into tested for gravitation sensitivity.
    Sten could understand why it would be