A Planned Improvisation (7 page)

“I see we only have Marisea at Communications this morning,” Dannet observed and he sat down beside her although it was clear he was observing the working of the ship as the one-time captain of an Alliance vessel.

The large craft rolled to the foot of the base’s oldest runway and on receiving final clearance, left Van Winkle Base and set a course for the outer system. They rose up through the sky smoothly to an altitude of forty thousand feet on their jet engines and then Park gave the command to ignite the rocket.

Once again, they felt the familiar pressure of enhanced acceleration pushing them firmly into their chairs as the sky turned from indigo to black. Then came what felt like the longest wait of all to Park as they spent several hours in Earth orbit running down the final deep-space check list. So many times in the past they had been lifting under emergency conditions and this final check had been omitted, but there was nothing of an emergency nature on this trip and so Park forced himself to sit back and out wait the long checklist procedure.

It was not that Park had nothing to do, but as captain his immediate job was to accept the reports as they came in and he knew from experience that they would all come in at once. In the meantime, he called up the latest edition of the Ghelati Daily Report, a Mer version of an electronic newspaper and caught up on what had been going on around the world while he, Iris, Marisea and Dannet had been on vacation.

It turned out it have been an uneventful period. Several Galactic ships – the Mer continued to refer to the peoples of the Alliance of Confederated Planets as “Galactics” – had come and gone from Collins Base on Luna. They seem to have all been traders doing business with Alliance concerns that had established branches on the Moon during the long period that the Alliance claimed ownership of the natural satellite and who had chosen to stay after said ownership had been returned to the Earth.

Elsewhere in the world, the news was satisfyingly boring. Park actually preferred it that way. All had been quiet during the last three years giving them time to rebuild from the Alliance attacks that had preceded Earth’s acceptance by the majority of the Diet, the Alliance’s central government. There had been a local election in Bacaw during which most of the incumbents had been re-elected and ground had been broken for a new building, based on Human records of skyscrapers in Senchi along a river that emptied into the northeastern part of the Bay of Coolinda.

Park was skeptical as to whether the Mer needed such a tall building in any of their cities. Mer construction tended to expand horizontally rather than vertically, almost never growing beyond four or five stories. But the Mer seemed fascinated by the Human methods of doing things. Larie Hawshu was constantly looking at samples of human concrete even though it was apparent that the Mer material was superior in nearly every aspect.

Finally, the reports started coming in and once he was assured that all was ready for deep space, Park gave the order and
Phoenix Child
began the mission in earnest. A trip to Saturn would have taken months for a manned vessel in the Twenty-first Century. An unmanned craft would have conserved fuel and taken years to make the trip, looping around the system and past Earth two or three times in order to build up the velocity necessary to reach Saturnian orbit.

The Mer interplanetary drives, however, could accelerate all the way out and back and therefore make the outbound trip in under a week. If they had needed to get there sooner, Park could have ordered high acceleration and arrived in half the time, but there was no need to hurry and the week slipped by rapidly enough. Park took the opportunity to sit down with Iris and Ronnie and discuss Ronnie’s other recent improvements to the ship and her armaments.

“I have managed to tweak the engine efficiency another two percent,” Ronnie reported. “Well, actually I just followed Vel’s computer models. The improvements were her ideas.” Velvet Blair had been a computer techie back in the Twenty-first century, but had been working closely with Ronnie at the shipyard in Questo on ship and weapons designs. Park suspected the two women were a couple, but they had never openly displayed such a relationship and he had been too polite to ask. “She also gets the credit for our new targeting computers. I think you’re going to like this. I still haven’t managed to crack the problem of our stasis shielding putting the whole ship into stasis, not just the outer skin, but now that won’t be as much of a liability.

“The new computers are programed to calculate our ship trajectory under stasis, including all the rolling and pitching we go through as we are shoved across the sky,” Ronnie announced, “and can also track whatever they were targeting at the moment stasis began during those microsecond pauses in stasis. So now all we have to do is choose our targets before the stasis plating activates and the computers will keep shooting when they have a chance even if we don’t have the time to react ourselves. We believe it will work much better with missiles rather than beam weapons, since the beams will be chopped up into very short bursts, but the real test will be in battle conditions.”

“No matter what,” Park replied, “it will be better than not shooting at all. We do have safeguards against shooting allies, don’t we?”

“That’s a little iffy,” Ronnie admitted. “The missiles will go where we shoot them as always, the beams might splash allied ships as the computer resynchs with the target. We thought of placing transponders on all Earthly ships, but we decided it would be too easy for an enemy to fake the signal and if we encrypted, it would take longer to analyze the signal than the computer has while out of stasis. However, while untested, I’m fairly sure we will cause more damage to an opponent than to an ally.”

“What special training will I and my gunners need for this new system?” Iris asked. “Had I known, I would have had a full crew of gunners this trip for the practice.”

“No special training will be necessary,” Ronnie assured her. “You’re already using the computer for assigning targets to your gunners and for aiming. The machine will continue to aim at your intended targets until they are destroyed or you counter the instructions.”

“I can’t do that while we’re in stasis,” Iris pointed out.

“If we’re in stasis we are still under attack,” Ronnie told her. “Also if the programmed target is destroyed, the computer will pick any other hostile ship firing at us.”

“It sounds good,” Iris admitted. “We’ll have to see how well it works in practice.”

Vel and I have another surprise for you,” Ronnie went on. “We’ve creased the range of our induced stasis effect from ten feet to over one mile. That’s still fairly close in space terms but a vast improvement. A stasis missile will be able to go to work well before impact. Also I’ve built some misslies with engines that can be throttled back and even coast a while. The result is the flight will be slower, but can be fired off from longer rang, giving us the first shot if we get into a battle like three years ago. The guidance systems on all missiles had been improved for greater accuracy as well.”

“I haven’t had many accuracy problems,” Iris pointed out, “but that’s good to know. Anything else?”

“What do you want?” Ronnie laughed. “Miracles?”

“We can always use a miracle or two,” Park smiled, “but I’ll settle for a working star drive.”

Saturn was on the other side of the Sun, so there was nothing of interest in the screens by the time they reached Saturnian orbit. “Just the way I like it,” Ronnie told them, sitting at a special console on the bridge. She had just finished the EVA during which she and two helpers had manually removed the probe from the cargo bay. It was
 
now floating outside
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waiting for the launch command. “Less radio noise to possibly obscure the break-out signal. If only Uranus were on the other side of the sky as well, but it can’t be helped and it’s not like we’re aiming at the planet. All systems are on line, trajectory is set and all I need is clearance to launch, Skipper.”

“Fire at will,” Park replied.

“Launch in ten seconds,” Ronnie reported and paused, “Five, four, three, two, one, launch.” There was no special excitement in her voice that time. They had all been through this before. She brought her finger down on the button that would send the final activation signal and the probe would either do the rest or not.

They all watched as the probe streaked away from the ship and then, with a dim flash of light, disappeared from this universe. If the probe worked, it would reappear almost instantaneously one astronomical unit, the distance from the Sun to Earth, beyond Uranus’ orbit. The radio signal that accompanied that emergence was known as the “breakout noise.” It would take almost an hour and a half for that noise to reach them.

The wait seemed interminable, but when Park suggested they all break for lunch, no one was willing to leave their station and the vigil continued. Finally, they heard it; a sudden burst of static precisely when it should have arrived. A great cheer went up as everyone on board rushed to congratulate Ronnie.

“Don’t break out the champagne yet, kids,” she told them once she was allowed to get a word in. “I need to see what condition that probe is in.”

“Tina,” Park told his pilot, “Take us out at the highest acceleration we can achieve without overcoming the artificial gravity.”

“Aye aye, sir” Tina responded. “Three gees it is.”

“Estimated time of arrival?” Park asked.

“ETA in twenty-three hours and seventeen minutes, sir,” Tina replied.

“One day then,” Park nodded. “Let’s go back to standard shifts then. See you all in a few hours.”

Of the entire crew only Park got a full night’s worth of sleep while chasing down the probe. Excitement was too high and most stayed up on the Engineering deck, chatting about the breakthrough and what it all meant for them and Earth. In spite of Ronnie’s protests, someone did break out a bottle of sparkling wine that had come from the Twenty-first Century in stasis with the rest of Project Van Winkle which was a novelty to Marisea and the other Mer crew people. The Mer did make wine, but none of their wines had bubbles. The Atackack could not tolerate the alcohol, but they had a celebratory drink of nectar they had brought from their tribal lands.

By the time
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rendezvoused with the star drive probe, half the crew was sleep deprived but all were at their stations when Ronnie and her engineers brought it
 
back into the cargo hold and then, finally onto the Engineering deck in order to begin their careful examination. They had just barely gotten the device strapped down securely when Marisea reported, “I’m picking up a distress beacon, skipper.”

“Can you give Tina a heading?” Park asked.

“Feeding it to the Pilot’s station now, Park,” Marisea replied.

“It’s coming from Neptune,” Tina noted, “well, more likely one of Neptune’s moons, of course. Setting a course, skipper. Should I lock it in?”

“Lock and load, Tina,” Park replied. “Now what’s our ETA?”

“Roughly a week,” Tina replied. “Neptune is about as far from us as we are from Earth. We can make it in three days, but it won’t be a comfortable ride with an hour of high acceleration every third hour.”

“This just became a mission of mercy,” Park replied. “All hands, we will be under full acceleration as soon as all departments signal their readiness. Get into your acceleration chairs immediately. High acceleration will last one hour and be followed by two hours of normal conditions and then we start all over again. This schedule will continue for three days until we reach Neptune.”

“Park!” Ronnie protested. “How the heck do you expect me to examine the probe under those conditions?”

“Sorry for the bumpy ride, Ronnie,” Park apologized, “but the distress signal comes first. If you can’t check out the probe during the two hours of normal ship-board gravity, let it sit until after we get to Neptune. It’ll still be there, I imagine.”

“Yes, sir,” Ronnie replied grumpily and turned to her people. “You heard the man. Let’s doubly secure the probe just in case we get our usual heroes’ welcome.”

No one thrives on several days of high acceleration travel and sleeping under those conditions never refreshes, but Park’s crew rapidly adapted to the schedule, grabbing cat naps where they could and
 
even learning to nod off when strapped into their chairs so at any given moment only those on duty on the bridge were fully away until they were eight hours out and decelerating toward Proteus, Neptune’s second largest moon.

“We can suspend the incidences of high gees for the rest of the approach,” Tina told Park. They wouldn’t get us there sooner in any case now.”

“Good!” Park decided. “We’re all looking bleary-eyed. I’d prefer not having to issue pep-pills. Marisea, any response to our hails?”

“No, Park,” Marisea responded. “All I hear is the distress beacon. We’re too far out to see where it’s coming from. Maybe a ship crashed on Proteus?”

“Maybe,” Park replied. “If no one survived, it might explain why they aren’t talking to us.”

Several hours later they were in orbit around Proteus. “Neptune is tremendous from here, isn’t it?” Marisea remarked.

“Compared to Earth,” Iris replied, “it is tremendous from anywhere, but Proteus is so close to the planet it cannot been seen through Earth-bound telescopes and I see a small base down there, a mining colony maybe?”

“If so, it isn’t registered with us,” Park told her. “Take us down, please, Tina. I’ll lead a party to investigate.”

“Park, is that wise?” Iris asked seriously.

“Probably not,” Park chuckled, “but someone has to do it and if this is a trap, I wouldn’t be any safer on the ship.”

It was another hour before Park could lead a party into the small building that sat on the surface of Proteus. “No air in here,” Ronnie noted, checking her suit’s readings, “and it looks like whoever was here scrambled to get away as fast as possible.”

There was furniture inside the building, but chairs had been toppled and there were dishes with vacuum-desiccated food still sitting on the table. There was a file cabinet, but someone had fired a laser or some other weapon into the contents and all that remained now were ashes.