He reached for the control of the good main hyperjet. Then, as his face contorted with near agony, he punched down on it.
The pain left swiftly. The ship rattled and clanked and ground hatefully, its new cacophony of protest drowning out the old clank-sss, boom and throom-throom. The small blurs in the sky elongated—five degrees, ten, twelve, twenty, twenty-five, forty.... The Cluster Queen's outline on the scope became sharp and then faded into fuzziness once more as the Fleury passed it hyperspatially along the ascending node of the arc.
He pressed the normal drive jet lever and it spluttered weakly, creating not even enough discordant sounds in the wracked ship to drown out the boom, throom, clank-sss symphony. The dot on the scope representing the Queen faded into insignificance. With a sweep of his hand, he killed power in the automatic distress transmitter.
Now it would take the Queen a little while to get a bearing on him along four co-ordinates. It would be a reprieve of several' hours—even the Fleet ships couldn't do it in less time than that without a signal to home in on.
He had no idea what the skipper of the Queen would do next. But at the moment he wasn't interested. The sharp pains were gone. But they had been replaced by an uncontrollable, reactive nausea. He unclamped his safety harness and stumbled to the jettison bin, holding a hand over his mouth. He made it just in time.
Then he dropped onto the bunk, exhausted.
The reprieve gained by his elusive tactics must have been a long one. When Brad awoke he felt fresher than he had at any time since the engine compartment eruption. He had no way of knowing how long he had slept; the secondary bus bar off which the ship's clocks operated had gone up in the initial blast when a section of the plate from the ruptured tube jacket had smashed through the junction box.
Evenly spaced swooshing sounds were emitting from the speaker. That, he realized, was what had awakened him. Someone was blowing into a mike to see if it was alive.
"SS Fleury, SS Fleury, SS Fleury," the sounds were suddenly exchanged for words—Altman's.