Read The Voyage of the Star Wolf for Free Online

our own hyperstate kernel. If they brush us they’ll disintegrate with us. Not even a Morthan would consider that an honorable death.”
    There was silence from the other end of the line.
    â€œChief?”
    The Engineer’s voice had a sour tone. “Can’t say I like it. And it’s going to be hell to burn it off at the other end. We’ll have to spend as much time decelerating as we do accelerating. And we’ll have to do it before we can inject into hyperstate for the way home.”
    â€œWell, let’s think about that . . .” suggested Korie.
    â€œUh-uh,” said Leen with finality. “I can’t compensate for that high a velocity inside the envelope. We’ll be too unstable to hold a modulation.”
    â€œAll right,” said Korie. “You win. We’ll do it your way.”
    â€œYou listen to me. I’ll bring you home. Leen out.”
    Korie allowed himself a smile. Three weeks of steady subluminal acceleration, plus another three of deceleration, would also give them enough time to effect major repairs. If they could do it at one gee, it would put them twenty-five light hours away before they had to inject into hyperstate. Not a great head start, but workable.
    Korie remembered the problem from Officers Candidate School; he hadn’t ever expected to apply it in a real situation. If it worked here though, they would earn themselves a place in future texts. But it would be difficult. Unless they could find a way to disassemble and rotate the main mass-drivers, it would be like standing the ship on its tail . . .
    No. They didn’t have the time. They’d have to jury-rig ladders. They didn’t dare risk powering up the gravitors. That would be almost as visible to a tracker as the pinpoint black hole in the engine room.
    Korie hadn’t let himself ask the hard question yet. How much of a crew did he have left? That would be the worst—not having enough skillage to pilot the ship home. What was the minimum practical number?
    Hodel returned then, pulling himself into the Bridge with a practiced motion.
    Korie looked at him questioningly, as if to ask how bad ?
    Hodel shrugged. Who knows ?
    â€œYou have the conn,” Korie said. He pulled himself down toward the floor, and out through the Operations bay, the tiny cubbyhole beneath the high platform of the Bridge. There was one man on duty in the operations bay. He looked pale and shaken, but he had the power panel of his work station open and he was testing fuel cells. Korie patted him on the shoulder and pulled himself past, down into the keel.
    The lights here were dimmer, making all the cables, conduits, and pipes into oppressive shapes in the gloom. Slowly, Korie made his way toward the A.I. bay and pulled himself up into it. HARLIE was totally dark.
    â€œShit.” Korie popped open a compartment and pulled out the red-backed manual. “First. Make sure the power is on,” he said to himself.
    He stuck the manual to the top of the console and pulled open the emergency panels. He had the nightmarish sensation that he was going to spend the next three weeks doing nothing but powering up fuel cells by hand. There had to be an easier way to do this; but nobody ever expected a ship to have to start from zero.
    The fuel cells kicked in immediately, which was a pleasant surprise. The bad news was that the automatic restart process would take several hours. Each of HARLIE’s various sentience modules had to be individually powered up and tested, and not until system confidence was acceptable could they be reassembled into a functioning personality.
    The alternative—to reawaken HARLIE without the complex system analysis—was to run the risk of post-shock trauma, disassociation, confusion, increased statistical unreliability, and possible long-term psychosis.
    On the other hand, they couldn’t get home without him. They couldn’t even run the ship.
    Theoretically,