Tramp

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I could feel the off-balance tremor of the displacers through the soles of my feet as I worked my way down the cabin-way on the Orion’s starboard side. Every thirty-three feet I had to duck my head to clear the blow-out hatches Captain O’Bannion had been forced to install on Carlon’s World before the underwriters would let us break orbit. The welder’s beads where the modules were jammed against the deck plates still glinted a clean blue-black, as yet free of the verdigris that tattooed the rest of the ship.

The Orion was typical of the freighters plying the ports of the Middle and Outer Rings. She sported twin Murray Hi-Twist Injectors to warp the ship into Non-E where six GMF 4100 displacers maneuvered her at a cruising Equivalent Velocity of about one light-year per standard day, more or less. In the Orion’s case it was usually less as the synchronization of displacers two and five had degraded to 3 percent below book specs before Calipha’s incantations had finally seemed to take hold.

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