The Fortress in Orion by Mike Resnick Read Free Book Online

we’re done here, I’ll have our initial itinerary—the trip through No Man’s Land—available to each of you. If you have any contacts among the inhabited or colonized worlds there, I’d like to know about it. If any true telepaths have joined the Coalition, we definitely need to know about that. I’ve checked you all out pretty thoroughly, but if any of you have any restrictions—gravity, abnormal oxygen content, endurance, anything that I might not be aware of, this is the time to tell me so we can make adjustments in our plans or eliminate you from the team.” He turned to Djibmet. “I know the Kabori are oxygen-breathers, but if you’ll have any difficulty with our oxygen-nitrogen ratio, let me know.”
    â€œWe’re fine,” responded Djibmet. “But your gravity is about ten percent lighter than that of Rigel XV or Petrus IV, so—”
    â€œIt is?” interrupted Pretorius.
    â€œYes,” answered Djibmet. “So we’ll have no difficulty at all on the ship.”
    Pretorius shook his head. “You’re not trying to fool anyone on the ship. I want our Michkag to take strength exercises twice a day, for an hour each time. We can’t have him staggering from the gravity on Petrus after all of his subordinates have seen him walking and reacting comfortably.”
    â€œYes, sir,” said Djibmet.
    â€œAll right,” said Pretorius. “This meeting is over. You can go to your quarters. Make sure you study the itinerary, and at dinner tonight we’ll discuss any further suggestions or observations. But as I said at the outset, I expect this to require more improvisation than planning.”
    â€œI don’t think of myself as an improviser,” remarked Ortega.
    â€œHaven’t you figured it out yet?” asked Circe with an amused smile.
    â€œFigured what out? asked Ortega.
    â€œ He’s the improviser,” she replied. “ We’re the tools.”

5
    They took off the next evening and left the Democracy two days later. As much time as he’d spent in space, Pretorius never ceased to be awed by its vastness. Once Man had thought that finding ways around Einstein’s equations and reaching, then exceeding, light speeds would turn the rest of the galaxy into his backyard. But a galaxy that was one hundred thousand light-years across still took one hundred millennia to cross, even at light speeds. Wormholes, which seemed to exist outside of normal space, certainly helped, allowing ships to travel parsecs in mere minutes, but one took one’s wormholes where one found them, and no one entered one until it had been charted, because it was just as likely to dump you halfway across the galaxy as in that system six light-years away.
    Literally thousands of technicians had been charting wormholes for centuries, but the job was nowhere near completion. For one thing, about a quarter of the technicians—Pretorius preferred to think of them as galactic explorers—never came back, and it was impossible to know the reason. Did they emerge in hostile territory? Were some wormholes only one-way? Did some damage or destroy ships? Until a second, or a third, or a tenth exploration of the wormhole produced tangible results, commercial and even military traffic avoided it.
    The ship emerged from the Boise wormhole, so-named for the birthplace of its explorer’s great-great-great grandmother), and since Bortai III, the first planet on its itinerary, was only one day away through normal space, Pretorius didn’t even have the ship’s navigational computer search for wormholes.
    The crew kept busy, each in their own way. The most obvious was Snake, who underwent a rigorous exercise regime every few hours, twisting and contouring her body in ways that no human body had never been designed for.
    Ortega sat and watched her. Finally she turned to him and said, “Are you just gonna sit there all day?