Read Online Guardsmen of Tomorrow by Martin H. & Segriff Greenberg, Larry Segriff - Free Book Online Page A

nodded. “You’re seeing through its eyes, Mister Dawes, not your own. Those are still quite useless.”
    “I had this flown in for you,” Straf said. “There are only a couple in the entire Sol system. I need you, Chil. Not only for my parents’ sakes. We can’t let five thousand people just be slaughtered in their sleep. Even at translight, our nearest ships can’t reach the Via Dolorosa before she enters Burnham space. Only the Sabre can.”
    “Why Chilson, Colonel?” Donovan demanded. “You’ve had nearly two years to locate and divert this ice-this cryo-ship.”
    Straf frowned and seated himself on the edge of his desk. His voice turned harsh.
    “Frankly, we screwed up. Because the Via Dolorosa launched so long ago and is moving so slowly, the bureaucrats in Tracking Control forgot about her. On top of that, the Guard’s been distracted with a lot of pirate activity lately.” He paused and rubbed his chin. When he spoke again, the harshness was gone from his voice, replaced with an obvious fatigue. “Last week would have been my parents’ wedding anniversary. I’m older now than they were when they launched with the other con-gregationalists. I’d just entered the Guard back then. Maybe I’m getting sentimental, Chil, because on a whim, I pulled out an old star chart my father left me outlining their course. I hadn’t looked at it since I was a punk. When I saw the danger, I started pulling strings and bending a lot of rules to arm the Sabre , then trace you down, to…”
    Dawes’ mind raced as he considered all the angles. An excitement he hadn’t known in three years filled him. “What do you call this thing?” he interrupted, continuing to stroke the creature. It had a strangely soothing effect.
    “We call it a Mintakan mind-worm,” Straf answered.
    Dawes scoffed. “You would. God, that’s unimaginative.” He thought for a moment, then addressed the caterpillar. “Okay, little fella, from now on, your name’s
    ‘Hookah.’” The woman in her lab coat still filled his vision; he wondered what his chances would be of getting a date with her, and muttered, “Because if this whole thing isn’t right through the looking glass, nothing is.” He wiped the last traces of tears from his cheeks and turned his shoulder so that Straf’s face came into view.
    “And you’re tossing in one hell of a fat cash bonus.”
    Even at translight, our nearest ships can’t reach the Via Dolorosa before she enters Burnham space. Only the Sabre can .
    God, how it must have killed Straf to make that admission. From the beginning he’d been skeptical of Dawes’ project. Once a translight pilot himself, the colonel had done his best to delay funding and make himself an obstacle around which Dawes and his research team had had to dance-because, if successful, Project Sabre meant a total retooling, perhaps even a dismantling, of the Stellar Guard as it existed.
    Project Sabre represented that kind of a revolution.
    Translight vessels were the fastest ships ever developed by mankind. They had given humans the stars, allowed them to explore, to settle new colony worlds, given man frontiers undreamed. Yet, even translight vessels, traversing hyper-space, required time to journey from one point to another. Sometimes that time factor was a matter of weeks, sometimes a matter of months. Sooner or later, as mankind kept pushing out, it would be years, until even translight travel would become insufficient.
    Project Sabre was the answer to that-the next step. With massive engines built into the body of a Foss Starfish, the largest ship in the Guard fleet, the Sabre not only folded space, it creased it. This fold-space drive system, Dawes’ brainchild, made translight travel slow by comparison, obsolete. Practically instantaneous, in Dawes’
    opinion it was as close as man was likely to come to teleportation.
    There were only two drawbacks. The field generated by the fold-space drive was, as Dawes liked to