Back | Next
Contents

8

Three days later and the ship had settled into a routine. There wasn’t much to do, and the crew, quite frankly, was getting bored, so Clement shortened duty shifts and let everyone cross-train in any area of service they were interested in, sort of as a hobby. That worked for a short time, but then Yan suggested he try something else to “spice things up.”

“What do you mean by that?” he said, staring at his first officer from the opposite side of his office table.

“By ‘spice things up’ I mean lessening the rules against fraternization among the crew,” she said.

“By fraternization, you mean sex?”

“Sexual intimacy, yes. When people get bored they will bend the rules, just for a break in the monotony. My experience has told me that it will happen anyway on long-duration space voyages, and a month or so is plenty of time for bored souls to get into trouble.”

Clement leaned away from her. “I see. I confess to not having dealt with this problem before, so I will likely defer to your experience in the matter.”

“Well, before it wasn’t a problem because you always had Elara DeVore.”

He sat back from the table, and spoke with an edge of anger at her implication. “Not in that way, Commander, not while I was captain. And that will not be happening for me on this mission.”

She responded without any emotion or acknowledgement of his anger. “So you say, Captain. Nonetheless, you have my recommendation.”

“I do, Commander. You’re dismissed,” he said curtly. He was beginning to wonder if having Yan on this mission was going to be a blessing or a curse—but, he did have to think of the welfare of his crew.

An hour later Clement issued a memo to the crew indicating he was suspending all rules against fraternization, on the condition that any crew “interactions” lead to “no drama” regarding daily work assignments. He tried with his wording of the memo to limit the “interactions” to those of similar rank to prevent any unease among the crew.

Soon it seemed everyone was enjoying their new freedoms, and taking every opportunity to exercise themselves in the bedroom. The new policy seemed to have the desired effect on the morale of the crew, and there were more than a few smiling faces around the ship. For Clement though, he had to console himself with the occasional drink from Yan’s stash of whiskey.


The LEAP drive was humming along as usual, and Clement found himself astonished by the rhythmic ease with which the LEAP system performed, creating an antimatter singularity thousands of times per second, then annihilating it with a proton and capturing enough explosive power to bend the fabric of space. It all seemed so easy. Probably make scientists from earlier centuries roll over in their graves, he thought.

But this time his stop-in had another purpose, and he dragged Nobli into the small engineer’s office in the Propulsion Center. “I think you know what I’m here to talk about,” started Clement. “Have you come up with any ideas about converting some of the power the LEAP drive creates to a defensive weapon of some kind? Maybe a shield?”

Nobli smiled as he looked up at Clement from under his circular wire-rimmed glasses. “Oh, a bit of this and that,” he said as he fiddled with his pad display, then handed it to Clement. The display showed fully drawn schematics, installation guides, and equipment specs for what Nobli was calling the “Matter Annihilation Device,” or just MAD for short.

“What the hell,” said Clement as he swept through the drawings. “Don’t you have a hobby? Or at least a girlfriend?”

“No to both,” said Nobli. “You give me an idea, I can’t stop running with it, can’t shut my mind down. It’s one of my charms. I didn’t sleep for three days until I had this all figured out.”

“It’s impressive,” Clement conceded. “But how practical is it? Is this something we could really build?”

“Build? I’ve already prototyped it. It will work, that’s for certain. But you can’t fire it while we’re using the LEAP drive reactor for propulsion, and we’d have to have a pretty clear line of sight to any ship to be sure of hitting anything.”

“You’re joking, right?”

Nobli shook his head. “Not in the least. The biggest problem was sheathing against the energy beam to keep it from annihilating us in the process of firing. I coated the old plasma-cannon piping with the same nanotube material as the reactor core is made of. Should be more than enough.”

“But how would we aim such a weapon?” asked Clement.

“Line of sight? How did you aim the old plasma cannon?”

Clement thought for a second. “Through the helm station. There was a restrictor nozzle on the cannon port that the helmsman could use to aim. It wasn’t very effective.”

“And the nozzle will be burned off in the first microsecond if you ever light this thing up,” said Nobli.

“So . . . you’re telling me I have the most powerful weapon in the known universe but I can’t aim it at anything?”

“True, but you did say this was only for emergencies. If that’s the case, I recommend you personally take over firing control of the MAD, and you do the aiming yourself. And you’d better make sure you’re damn close to your target when you fire on it.”

Clement rubbed at his eyes. “What’s the estimated range of this thing?” he asked.

Nobli looked at him with a very serious look on his face. “Somewhere between one klick and eternity,” he said.

Clement took that as Nobli’s usual sarcasm. “What about enemy shielding? Will it penetrate gravity shields?”

Nobli leaned back, a look of astonishment at his boneheaded commander on his face. “Captain, you’re annihilating tens of thousands of micro-universes a second. I can’t think of a goddamned thing in the universe that could stop that.”

“How close?”

“What?”

Clement was frustrated. “How close is too close to fire this thing?”

“A thousand kilometers?”

“C’mon, Nobli, you said I had to get close. How close?”

Nobli looked down at the floor. “The destructive radius is probably close to one hundred klicks, maybe one hundred fifty. It’s hard to say without test-firing it. You’ll have to use your best judgment. And . . . ”

“And what?”

“And . . . there’s a chance that this weapon may not detonate in any traditional way, like ordinary or even nuclear ordnance. The beam could . . . just keep going.”

Now Clement was confused. “Going? To where?”

Nobli just shrugged. “Anywhere. That’s why I recommend you use your own best judgment before firing it.”

“And that’s what I don’t want to do,” Clement said, exasperated. “I want you to craft me a mechanism that tracks, aims, and fires. How soon until you can hook this thing up?”

Nobli scrambled around the floor of his office for a few seconds and then pulled out what looked like normal plumbing and pipes and held it out to Clement. “I told you I’d already prototyped it.”

Clement held it in his hands, it was light to the touch, almost fragile. “You’re sure this is—”

“Damn sure, Captain,” said Nobli. “That long pipe hooks right into the plasma tube in the floor. The top vents into the reactor.” Clement handed it back to his engineer. “But as I said, I suggest we don’t try and install it until we arrive in the Trinity system and we’re in normal space.”

“Understood,” said Clement. “Make it your first priority to hook this up when we shut down the reactor. And make me some kind of app control for firing it that I can use from my command console.”

Nobli sighed. “Captain, I’m not a programmer,” he protested.

“And that’s why I want you to build the firing control for me. You’ll keep it simple, and that’s what I want.”

“But, Captain—”

“Did that sound like a request, Engineer?”

Nobli sat on the edge of his swivel chair, staring at his commanding officer over the top of his wire frames. That was as close as he ever got to complaining. “Understood, sir,” he said.

“Thanks, Hassan.” With that Clement sauntered off to finish his rounds, unsure if his ship was safer or not.


With one more full day before arriving at the Trinity system, Clement and his team had one last round of entertainment planned. Middie Telco had set up a safe shooting range on the cargo deck as instructed by his captain, and there had been a shooting tournament almost every night since they’d gone under the LEAP drive. Clement had won his share, but with only one more day to go everything was on the line.

The rules were simple, fire live rounds into targets, highest score wins. So far about 42 out of 50 had been the average to take a win, but this night felt different. Everyone was pumped up to win the final round.

Many of the crew had already tried their hands at the target; the high score on the board when Clement showed up was a 39 from Telco. Not bad, but not impossible to beat either.

The command crew was the last up, plus Lieutenant Pomeroy, the medic who had been doing some final prep for landfall at Trinity. Clement watched as Captain Wilcock took his rounds, scoring 32 out of 50. Wilcock always seemed to underperform somehow, no matter what the task. Nobli was staying out of the competition so next up was Ivan Massif. The lanky navigator was a good shot, but he was streaky. He hit his first seven shots but then missed three in a row. He ended up with a 37. Mika Ori came next and despite her diminutive figure she was a great shot and hit 43. Yan gave it her best but hand weapons were not her forte and she settled for 37 out of 50. Then it was down to two, himself and Pomeroy.

She was a tough-looking tech, probably Marine-trained from what Clement could tell, brown hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and she had that look of efficiency about her. Clement was sure he wasn’t going to catch a break from her tonight. She came to him with a coin in her hand. “Flip you for it. Winner gets last shot.” There was an “Ooo” of the challenge from the crowd of ten watching the contest.

“You’re on,” said Clement.

“Call it in the air.” Pomeroy flipped the coin.

“Tails,” called Clement. She caught the coin and flipped it over on to the back of her hand, then lifted her palm.

It was heads. The last shooter almost always had an advantage, knowing what score they had to beat. Clement went to the assortment of cobra pistols and tested each one for weight and balance, then loaded a ten clip of kinetic rounds and primed the first shot. He took to the stage inside the firing range. It was all black. The holographic targets would come up at random locations; you had to fire your rounds at the target and then reload four more times and get your shots off, all within sixty seconds.

The first target lit up. Clement raised his pistol and fired with expert precision. All ten shots lit up the target. After the reload he missed one each on the second and third rounds, and two on the fourth. The last round came up and he tracked the target, fully concentrating until he emptied his clip.

46 out of 50.

Pomeroy took that all in stride. She loaded up and entered the chamber before turning back to her captain.

“What does the winner get?” she challenged. Clement thought about that for a moment.

“Loser buys the first round at the first tiki bar we find on Trinity,” he said. Everyone laughed at that, and Pomeroy smiled. “Loser buys a full round for the crew at The Battered Hull.”

“Done,” she said. As she turned back the first target lit up and she started firing. She didn’t miss any in the first two clips, one early in the third, then another in the fourth. Clement held his breath. He was nothing if not competitive, and he was, after all, the captain. A miss in the middle of the last clip gave him hope. Then the final bell sounded. Her minute was up.

47.

The crowd cheered as she came up and shook his hand. Clement couldn’t help but smile.

“Well done,” he said. “I owe you a drink.”

“Yes you do, sir, and I’m going to hold you to it!” she said. “At Trinity?”

“At Trinity,” he replied. “If we don’t find that tiki bar, we’ll build one ourselves.”


Everyone was at their stations and prepped with twenty minutes to go to shut down of the LEAP drive. The bridge was quiet and everyone was ready, if not a bit tense. Clement ran through his command displays, noting the new icon for using the LEAP reactor as a weapon that Nobli had uploaded, then decided he wanted verbal reports from his people.

“Ivan, time for shut down of the LEAP drive?” he asked.

“Eighteen minutes now, sir,” reported Massif.

“And what will happen when we exit quantum-fluid space?”

Massif turned to his captain. “The bubble will slowly dissipate. Of course, we’ll lose speed rapidly when we hit normal space again, cruise for about an hour at near-superluminal speeds. Then the inertial dampeners will slowly take away our momentum during that time until we reach a manageable cruising speed. In fact, we’ve already been slowly decelerating for the last forty-eight hours; current speed is 1.12 light.”

“And what if I want to slow us faster than that, to optimize our drift toward a planet, or maybe change direction toward an interesting object?”

Massif nodded to Mika Ori. She turned from her station then.

“We can use the thrust reversers,” she said. “Of course, that will put g-force pressure on us, but nothing we shouldn’t be able to handle. If there is an ‘interesting object’ in our path, we can use a variety of slingshot maneuvers to get where we’re going, but the charts the unmanned probes made show nothing of significant mass in the area where we’ll be dropping out of quantum space.”

“And where is that, exactly?”

“There’s nothing exact in all this, Captain, but the best guess is about 10.25 AU out from the primary star. That’s approximately where the probes have come in.”

Mika was always focused when on duty, and that’s something Clement liked about her.

“Then what’s the best guess time-wise to the first planet in the system?”

“About eight hours, sir. Our speed coming out of the fluid will be about .925 light, and it’s hard to maneuver at that speed, but depending on how good the navigator is . . . ” She trailed off, smirking at her husband.

“What will a 1.5 g break buy me?”

Ori did a quick calculation on her pad. “We can cut that to about four hours, sir, give or take a quarter hour depending on our exact position, if we properly reorient the ship toward a particular destination,” she said, directing the barb at her husband again. Ivan smiled this time but said nothing.

“And the length of the burn?”

“Twenty-two minutes by my calculations, sir,” she said, without looking back to her pad. She had already figured it out in her head.

“Thank you, Mika. Let’s plan for that.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Middie Adebayor,” he said to his systems officer, “once we drop in on the Trinity system proper I want you to start a full-scan protocol on the planets, starting with Alphus, Bellus, and Camus,” he ordered.

“Are you expecting communications, Captain?” asked Adebayor.

“No, but it is standard procedure for any ship entering a potential battlefield.”

“Are you expecting a battle, sir?” asked Adebayor, again.

Yan cut in here. “You won’t last long on this bridge if you question all of your captain’s orders, Middie. That’s my job. Yours is to do what your captain requests.”

“Yes, ma’am,” replied Adebayor. “But if I need clarification—”

“You don’t in this case, Middie,” said Yan, stepping out from behind her station. “Now I suggest you stick to your board and follow your orders.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Adebayor again, and glued her eyes to her board, appropriately chastened. Yan came and stood beside Clement, who then called down to the propulsion room.

“Nobli here,” came the reply. Clement looked up to the timer on the main screen display.

“Shut down the LEAP drive fourteen minutes from my mark, Mr. Nobli . . .” He looked down at his personal watch instead of the ship’s clock, “Mark,” Clement said.

“Aye, sir,” acknowledged Nobli.

Clement shut off the com to propulsion and switched to Middie Telco in the weapons bay. Telco acknowledged.

“Store everything for the transition, Middie. We’ll be running at 1.5 g deceleration for about four hours. After that, I want those missiles back up and ready, understood?”

“Completely sir. We’ll be fully operational well before then, sir. 1.5 g isn’t that much of a load.”

“Spoken like a young man,” replied Clement. “I’ll hold you to that. And inform Captain Wilcock that he’s to release the atomic warheads to you upon your request. I want us locked and loaded the whole way in, Middie.”

“Aye, sir.”

Clement turned to his first officer. “Commander Yan, call all hands to stations, prep for deceleration to exit LEAP space.”

“Aye, sir,” she replied, then she got on the ship-wide com and ordered everyone to take their deceleration stations.

The next few minutes rushed by as systems reports continued to come in. When the time mark finally came, Clement called down and gave Nobli the order to cut the LEAP drive at his discretion. The forward viewer showed the bending of space steadily decreasing until the flow of stars clarified and resumed a more normal appearance, or rather, as Clement thought, a much more mundane one. Nobli called up just as they all felt the tug of the g-force deceleration, in toward planet T-7, the outermost world in the Trinity system with a high-content methane-based atmosphere.

“Point nine two five light speed as predicted, sir,” said Mika. “We’re decelerating toward planet T-7, estimated time of arrival at target four hours, thirteen minutes, sir.”

“Excellent work, everyone. What’s our path inward from there?”

Ivan Massif had that calculation. “Based on our current trajectory and the alignment of the planets we can use T-7 to cut our speed through aero-breaking, then swing in toward T-5, or Camus as they call it, break again, and that should put us at the fourth planet, Bellus, in about sixteen hours’ time, sir. Our speed will be sufficiently low to be captured gravitationally by the planet, if the probe’s reports on her mass is correct.”

“Best get to reviewing all the reports from the probes and verifying the data against real measurables. I wouldn’t want to skip past one of the new worlds and end up having to claw ourselves back using thrusters,” said Clement.

“Aye, sir.”

“Plot and execute,” ordered Clement. Then he looked around his bridge, proud of his crew and excited for what the next part of the journey would entail.


Back | Next
Framed