A Planned Improvisation (21 page)

“They’re all up on the bridge,” one of Claner’s men told them. “Huddling for warmth.”

“On our way,” Park told him. With a few missteps, Park and Iris made their way to the ladder that led to the upper deck. The lift was in the down position with the floor above open, but while the Mers could use their gravity belts to lift them up to the upper deck, the ladder would get Park and Iris there faster.

They found Cousin had beat them there and was now trying to cuddle against the face of a human man who was just barely conscious against one of the walls. There were only a few people left on the bridge by then and when Park and Iris attempted to lift him, he protested feebly, “No, get the crew to safety first.”

“They’re on their way, Captain,” Iris told him. “Your turn now.”

Together Park and Iris lifted the captain in the failing gravity and got him to the ladder‘s opening and waited as two other rescuees were
 
carefully handed down to the people aiding them. It was a long process carrying the injured across
Starblade’s
engineering deck, but finally, after only a few wrong steps, they reached the airlock and handed the captain off to Claner and his engineers. Is that everyone?” Claner asked.

“All we could find, sir,” the same engineer who had fixed the navigation console reported.”

“All right, let’s close up,” Claner replied and started toward the
 
inner door of
 
Starblade
. Before he could reach it, however, Cousin launched herself through the door and into the darkened ship once more.

Park sighed,” and told Claner, “I’ll go get her.” He poked his head
 
back into
Starblade
and saw Cousin jumping up through the ladderway to the upper deck, so he pushed himself off and floated most of the way to the ladder before coming to rest on the deck again. He lifted himself deftly up the ladder and then nearly hit the ceiling on the upper deck.

Once he came to rest, however, Park heard Cousin whimpering piteously outside the door to the last of the small cabins on that deck. Something about the way she held herself made Park think there might be someone inside the room. All the other cabins had been empty and the doors left open, but this last door might not have been spotted in the darkness. Then Park heard the soft moaning and opened the door and flashed his light around the room.

The cabin was typical of the ships that had been built at Questo since the Humans had arrived on the scene. It was just big enough to contain a cot, a small closet and a space in which one might get dressed with a modicum of privacy. The cot, at first seemed to be piled high with blankets and then Park heard the moan once more and he realized there was someone in the bed. “Hello?” he asked and was answered only by a barely audible groan.

Cousin, meanwhile had pushed herself off from Park’s leg and was now burrowing into the bedding, crooning gently as she did. Park followed her and carefully unfolded two blankets to discover a Mer female only a few years older than Marisea curled up in a fetal position.

Park lifted her from the bed, blankets, Cousin and all and carefully made his way to the lift area. He looked down through the hole to the lower deck and stepped off into thin air. The Mer was wearing her gravity belt, which not only made her very light and easy to carry, but slowed Park’s descent to the lower deck.

When he alighted on the floor below, he bounded slowly across to the airlock where Claner’s men were waiting to help. They took the woman from his arms and pulled him back into
Independent
and normal shipboard gravity, which, while still light compared to that on Earth, was reassuringly firm to Park.

“Claner, we need to rig up a safe way to tow that ship back to Earth,” Park instructed. He looked around and saw that
 
the men and women from
Starblade
 
had been arranged on
 
the flight chairs of the engineering deck, which, in turn, had been
 
unfolded to serve as emergency cots. “Also, are we certain everyone is accounted for now?”

“I checked
Starblade’s
roster,” Iris told him. “This lady was the last of them. Let’s close those doors for now and turn up the heat. They need it more than anything else. Hypothermia is not the only problem though. They all sustained bruises went they lost power and I’m fairly sure there are broken bones and a few concussions as well.”

“They would have been thrown all over the place when the gravity cut out,” Claner agreed.

“There was artificial gravity working there just now,” Park noted as he took a careful look at the woman he had just rescued. She had started shivering, but he thought that was a good sign considering she had not had the energy to do so several minutes earlier. “Let’s get some of those self-heating blankets on these people,” he decided, but his order had been anticipated.

“Right here!” a crew woman told him. Park turned to see her passing out a stack of thin, silver sheets that were, in turn, draped over the people from
Starblade.
“There’s not much we can do about broken bones, though. Not here. We’ll have to rush back to Earth.”

“With
Starblade
in tow?” Park asked. Then he corrected himself, “No,
Phoenix Child
can tow her back to Earth.” He thumbed the intercom on. “Bridge! Plot the fastest course back to Van Winkle Base and engage when ready.”

“Aye aye, Skipper!” Tragackack’s translated voice came back.

“I’d better disengage the airlocks then,” Claner remarked dryly.

“Oh yeah,” Park agreed sheepishly. “I should have thought of that. Is
Starblade’s
inner door air-tight?”

“It ought to be,” Claner almost laughed. “Otherwise, why are we using it for an airlock? But, no, it does not appear to have been damaged, if that’s what you meant.”

“It is,” Park agreed. “Better strap all these people into their beds until we know who can move about the cabin safely and who broke their legs.” He took another look around and saw that he was only getting in others’ ways. “I’ll be up on the bridge if anyone needs me.”

“Right,” Claner nodded, “Oh, Skipper?” Park turned back to face his chief engineer. “The reason you had even light gravity over there was because the ships were docked. Our generators were trying to provide for both ships. It doesn’t work very well as you could see, but it was better than nothing.”

Two weeks later, Veronica Sheetz walked into Park’s and Iris’ home and announced, “I think I have a way to track a ship through Other Space.”

“I thought that was supposed to be impossible,” Marisea noted. “That’s what Sartena said, wasn’t it?”

“It’s what she said,” Ronnie agreed, “and it is what everyone in the Confederated Worlds believes. It’s not entirely false. I can’t look at a screen and point at a blip and say, ‘There they are,’ but entry and break out of Other Space is simultaneous in spite of how it feels subjectively and there is energy expenditure in the process. That’s why we detect radio noise when it happens, right?”

“So we’ve been told,” Park nodded.

“Well, you can calculate from the
 
intensity and amplitude of the signal, just how far away the breakout point is from the entry,” Ronnit explained. “And it works both ways. You can tell from how far away a ship came as well as how far it went after leaving your own system.”

“Why doesn’t anyone in the Alliance know that?” Iris asked.

“They do,” Ronnie replied, “or rather their scientists do, but they don’t realize it. They have the math, but don’t see the implications. They convinced themselves that you can’t track a vessel through Other Space and they are so certain of that, they do not even see this means of calculating an exit point from the signal emitted at entry or vice versa.”

“Or maybe it is not as reliable as you think,” Park pointed out.

“I’ve been testing it on incoming and outgoing ships the last two weeks,” Ronnie replied. “I requested their origins and destinations as they came and went. A few refused to answer, but all the others checked out. It’s not a simple calculation if you have to do it by hand. In fact it’s a sort of eleven-dimensional extension of calculus, but the basic formulae are in the Alliance text books, Sartena loaned me. Hah! It’s all in the Mer texts too, but for the Mer it’s always just been theoretical notions the big brains play with. I’ve been working with some of the Mer’s best mathematicians and they’re starting to switch over to applied physics. The rest of the galaxy is going to have a few surprises when a million years of theorizing gets applied to real life!”

“Okay, but Sartena told me it is possible to change the distance you travel relative to this universe after entering Other Space,” Park told her. “I can see how you might be able to
 
measure the energy used to punch into Other Space and use the waste signal to calculate the distance the ship might go, but what if they come out early or apply more power to go further?”

“See?” Ronnie laughed. “That is the same mistake the Alliance spacers are making. They forget that transit is simultaneous relative to this universe. No time has passed here no matter how long you seem to be there. Let’s see, I need an analogy. Oh yeah, think of it as a wormhole through space. It isn’t really. Wormholes are another phenomenon and so far as I know, no one can travel through one intact. But that’s another sort of simultaneous travel across stretches of space. You go in one end and out the other. If you change your mind midway it’s still happening at the same instant you entered and left Other Space. And the change in the energy and its state is measurable in frequency and amplitude.”

“It’s that easy?” Marisea asked uncertainly.

“Hardly!” Ronnie laughed. “It’s horribly complex. Eleven-dimensional calculations are mind-mangling things to work with, but the computers do it without complaining very often.”

“I’d like to see your work,” Iris decided.

Ronnie looked at her strangely and then laughed. “I keep forgetting you’re not just a superbly talented gunnery officer, dear. You were two years ahead of me at MIT, weren’t you?”

“I was,” Iris nodded, “and in the same department. I think the original plan for Project Van Winkle was for us to work together, but here in Pangaea we both went in different directions. No matter. I still remember the math.”

“But have you been keeping up with the new stuff?” Ronnie asked. “Well, I mean the stuff that’s new to us. It’s considered ancient here and now.”

Iris laughed. “At least these days when we refer to the lost sciences of the ancients, they really are sciences of the ancients. Remember how some people used to go on about how the Egyptians must have invented all sorts of advanced scientists simply because they had built the pyramids?”

“The larger pyramids were no mean feat for a culture without iron tools,” Ronnie replied.

“The bronze tools of the period were harder than plain iron anyway,” Iris shrugged, “and they had thousands of workers to shape the blocks and put them in place. It was an amazing feat, but it neither required unknown science nor alien assistance. All it took was excellent organization. Anyway, yes, I have kept up with the math and sciences of the day and age we now find ourselves a part of. I don’t just shoot the guns. I look to see how they might be improved.”

“True enough,” Ronnie admitted, “We did work together on that for a while, but you’ve been stuck in administration while I’ve been having all the real fun.”

“Administration has had its fun points too,” Iris chuckled.

“Not that I can see,” Ronnie disagreed. “But here, let’s use that computer pad you were reading just now. I’ll bring up what I have and walk you through it. It must have taken hours to grasp it all.”

Iris looked at it and an hour later admitted, “It only took you hours? It will be days at least for me.”

“Nonsense,” Ronnie told her. “You’re almost there. Stop trying to hold the whole picture in your head, that’s what held me back. There are hundreds of sub-equations to fathom here but it’s all modular and one leads to the next until they all converge at the final answer. Once I realized that, I saw you only had to follow one chain of equations to see where they all headed.”

“But then you’re throwing out a lot of other data that might vary,” Iris argued. “You can’t know until you look. There are a lot of these so-called chains of equations.”

“Nice understatement,” Ronnie chuckled, “Their number is infinite and it all happens at once, but they all come down to the same conclusion. I used the computers to confirm that with a million chains. The math as I’m sure you will see soon proves that they have to all resolve to the same answer or else travel through Other Space doesn’t work at all.”

“Okay,” Iris nodded, “that makes sense, I think. You’ve had a head start over me, though.”

“I’ve been playing with these equations for years,” Ronnie admitted. “Ever since I had
Turnabout’s
and
Fairplay’s
star drives to examine. Too bad we had to give them back, but it was enough, especially with my copies of the manuals that were on those ships to work it all out. The manuals only gave a basic and dumbed-down explanation for how it worked though. It’s why it took three years to duplicate the drive successfully.”

“So we have a way to know where someone went after they slip away into Other Space,” Park nodded. “But can a ship’s computer do the calculations?”

“It can but we need a device,” Ronnie replied, “a tracker, if you want to give it a name, to feed the equations and the variable values into it fast enough to be of any use. I have one on
Pickup
and will have one on
Independent
by this time tomorrow. I think we’ll just make it standard equipment on any starship.”

“Good idea,” Park agreed. “Wait.
Pickup
?”

“It’s what I’ve been calling the new carrier ship,” Ronnie admitted. “I suppose you’ll want to give it some other, more serious name, but I think of it as a sort of interstellar pickup truck.”

“That carries fighter ships,” Marisea added.