Alien Sea

John Rackham - Alien Sea

Publisher: Dobson Books Ltd | File type: PDF | 154 pages | 5.46 mb

Helpless, crippled and alone, the ship cartwheeled through space. Its rate of tumble was ponderously slow, but its forward speed was as great as anything it had ever achieved under its own power. The gravity-sink of the incandescent star-mass dragged at it with mighty hunger, but its path was such that it was passing, it was in a cometary orbit; any time now it was due to swoop out of its loop and gradually begin to fall away again
from that searing nuclear reaction.
At any rate, the hundred people carried within it hoped so. They lay still, sweating and aching, sipping at overheated air with tortured lungs, blinking agonized eyes, and hoped that the murderous temperatures would start falling soon. It had to be soon, or never. Frantic calculations had been made on a computer only partly functioning, the rest of it
obliterated by the fragmentation-bombs that had blasted the rest of the hull like a collander. On the shaky basis of those figures the stuttering, protesting, half-maimed main-drive had been fired.