Brake

by Poul Anderson

"The Thunderbolt" is a space freighter, built as a steelloy spheroid, 300 meters in diameter. She is a fast ship, not restricted to Hohmann Orbits and capable of reaching the Jovian moons in less than a month. The flip side is that - since her speed is greater than the Solar Escape Velocity - should anything prevent "The Thunderbolt" from decelerating, she would go on forever into interstellar space, and all on board would die when supplies run out. For that reason, she carries no lifeboats - jumping into a lifeboat which cannot decelerate either would save nobody. Also, for most of her voyage, she is out of radio range and cannot call for help; her crew must deal by themselves with any emergency - natural, mechanical or (as in this story) man-made.

Captain Peter Banning is a veteran, highly capable spaceman, with a lot of experience also in hand-to-hand fighting (especially in zero gravity conditions). He has considerable intellectual curiosity and knowledge of such abstruse ancient history subjects as Weimar Germany and the struggle between Nazis and Communists - names which mean nothing to most 23rd Century people. Having observed the fast deteriorating situation on Earth, he tries to avoid being there and has bought a ranch on Venus to serve as his refuge; however, Earth's crisis would soon reach into his own ship.

On what seems a routine voyage, "The Thunderbolt" sets out with a cargo of terraforming equipment for Europa. Banning strikes up a friendship with Planetary Engineer Luke Devon, with whom he shares an enthusiasm for Shakespeare. Nothing much happens on board, except for a budding love relationship between Devon and Cleonie Rogers - one of the few people in this period with the money and leisure to engage in space tourism, and one of the few women to keep up an alluring female appearance at a time when the typical Western woman is a "crop-headed, tight-lipped, sad-clad creature". Banning has some vague suspicion about the ship's four other passengers, but nothing concrete - and they all have plausible reasons for traveling to Ganymede.

In fact, the four are members of the fanatic "Western Reformers" and plan to take over the ship. This is part of a much wider plot: the "Reformers" have started a secret asteroid base, which they plan to expand and use to build a fleet of nuclear-armed ships. Ultimately, they intend to launch a surprise attack on Earth, destroying India and other centers of the Kali cult, killing hundreds of millions, and take over power on the rest of the planet. To build up the base, they need a big, fast space freighter - and the Thunderbolt's cargo of terraforming equipment will also be useful to them.

Devon - a late clone of the Rostomily Brotherhood, whose struggle to help unite the Earth two centuries earlier was described in "Un-Man" - recognizes Serge Andreyev, one of these four passengers, as a former Engineer who had been expelled from the Order "for good reasons," and confronts him - whereupon Andreyev pulls a gun. Captain Banning comes upon the tableau and manages to get Devon free. This precipitates the conspirators into acting quicker than they planned, taking over strategic positions in the ship, killing two crew members out of hand, and imprisoning several others. However, Captain Banning remains at large and manages to free and rally his crew. They are hampered by the "Reformers" having all the firearms - since none are normally carried aboard space freighters. This, however, is compensated for by turning off the ship's artificial gravity - free fall giving the spacemen a considerable advantage over "landlubbers" - and by the Captain's considerable skill with throwing knives. Captain and crew, together with Luke and Cleonie, engage in a series of grim battles and manage to kill three of the four would-be hijackers, though Luke is severely wounded.

However, Professor Gomez - leader of the Reformers' group - holes up in the ship's engine room, where it would take the Captain and his crew hours to cut through the thick metal partitions. He demands that everyone surrender to him and take the ship to the conspirators' asteroid. Otherwise, he will flush the ship's reaction mass into space, dooming everybody to die in interstellar space; with "a face of embodied Purpose, known through millennial of slaughterhouse history" he declares his determination to die, too, if they reject his terms.

From the revived Devon's knowledge of the "Reformers", the Captain concludes that he and his crew would be killed out of hand at the conspirators' asteroid, and that therefore they have nothing to lose. They cut through the partitions, get into the engine room and kill Gomez - who has already flushed a large part of the reaction mass into space.

Having done what they could to avert Earth's doom, Captain Banning and his people must find a way to save themselves. The remaining reaction mass is too little to stop the ship from leaving the Solar System. It is, however, enough to send it on a course through the atmosphere of giant Jupiter, where friction will slow them down - a risky maneuver never tried before. They lighten the ship by cutting up all internal partitions and throwing them out of the cargo hold; as well as all but the most essential gear. After the last of the reaction mass is used, the ship's engine is also cut off and jettisoned. The resulting course takes the ship into the Jovian atmosphere, where friction reduces its speed considerably. It emerges into space and than again plunges into the atmosphere, and so slows again and again.

On one brief re-emergence into space, the obsolete ships of the Jovian Republic make a valiant effort to intercept and take them off - but in vain. Finally, "The Thunderbolt" comes to rest in the upper Jovian atmosphere - "a hollow steelloy shell, three hundred odd meters in diameter, could carry more than a hundred thousand tons besides its own mass, and still have a net specific gravity of less than 0.03". So the ship floats in the Jovian atmosphere "like a free balloon over Eighteenth Century France". The people in her have enough supplies and stored energy to last them until rescued by a big ship; one capable of entering the Jovian atmosphere and taking them away from Jupiter. The group is hopeful that their rescuers will arrive from Earth.