Authors: Dain White
I miss the feeling of paper, of turning the page. A well written book, familiar and well read, seems to just melt away into nothingness, the words just leap off the page and straight into my head, a visceral experience that no holovid can compare with. I can lose myself in the pages and watch the story unfold.
We had been slipping towards Danaan for about 4 days, and were coming up on our first dogleg, in about... 20 more pages, I guessed. Yak was on watch at the helm station, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, taking his post seriously, as you'd expect. That is one serious soldier when he wants to be. Good on him, too – we all could learn from his example.
Gene was probably having kittens back there, lost in data, trying to make sense of it all – but we weren't even firewalling it, we were barely poking along, only about four times as fast as we made the run to Europa. Janis assured me we'd barely started moving, compared to what we could do - but when I brought it up to Gene, he turned a lovely shade of purple and started to gasp and choke. I figured I'd let it slide. We were still making this run faster than I would have expected, thanks to Janis.
The Danaan Fields were very tricky though, and it looked like it was just about time for me to take the helm. Luckily, I am the best pilot I've ever met, and confident enough to know it.
To make this transit, I'll need every bit of skill and a keen eye on the gravimetrics – but first, since we were deep into a whirling mass of rocks, it seemed like as good of a time as any to warm up that gun and see what that red button did. Time to get to work.
“Fire control, Conn. Suppression Mission. Telemetry designation Sierra 1. Fire for effect.”
“Suppression Mission on target Sierra 1, firing for effect, aye.” Shorty was all business now, and her response time was impeccable. Inside of a second, a 6 meter rock at 2300 meters ahead and a little up to starboard started coming apart as a kinetic stream of ordinance started vaporizing against it.
“Janis, give me four targets in this sector, between 5 and 20 meters in diameter, please.” Immediately, my screen lit up with targets, vectored with movement indicators. I designated each Sierra, and numbered them two through five. “Fire Control, Bridge. Adjust fire; shift Sierra 2 and Sierra 3. Fire for effect.”
“Fire Control, adjust fire Sierra 2, Sierra 3, firing for effect, aye”. Two poor, innocent rocks started glowing and coming apart nearly simultaneously. I purposefully selected divergent targets to make the turrets work for it a bit, one of which was moving pretty fast, inside of 12km/sec, but the current fire solution was registering an acceptable 85% hit rate.
“Sir, I am registering a 15% reduction in optimal solution from turret two”, said Janis. At least I thought it was acceptable – she clearly felt otherwise.
“Can you improve on that, Janis? Do you have direct access to fire-controls?”
“Certainly Captain. I have access to everything. Corrected fire controls are on line and ready, sir”. That's what she thought. It was time to make Janis and the Archaea work for a living. I opened the target list and designated ten additional targets, wildly divergent, some at extreme range.
“Fire Control, Bridge. Adjust
fire; shift Sierra 4 through Sierra 14, fire for effect. Janis, helm control please, translate as needed to stay on target.” I could imagine Shorty right about now, keyed up and flashing targets as fast as they came on screen.
“Fire Control, adjust fire Sierra 4 through Sierra 14, firing for effect aye.” The view on my screens was amazing. Rocks in every direction from about 1000 meters to 90k meters were simultaneously hit and started coming apart. Our new fire solution was showing a 100.00% hit rate. Archaea was responding unbelievably well. Nothing I've ever seen in my time in the service even comes close to this sort of capability, not even the point defense turrets for a capital ship can track simultaneous concurrent targets with anything like a 90% hit rate, and that only at close or medium ranges.
“Bridge, Fire Control. Targets destroyed.”
“Very well, Fire Control stand down.”
Time to do some after-action review. Despite how I might think we did, I was not prepared to bet the life of my crew and ship on my hunches. At least not too much.
“Pauli, can you please go through the data for that drill with Janis, and let me know how close to her limits we were with that?”
“I sure can Captain, though I don't think we even scratched the surface of her capabilities”, he trailed off, as charts and graphs started showing up on his screens.
A flash page from Shorty appeared on my screen, requesting I visit her station. She will almost certainly want to chew on me a bit, and talk me out of my next test.
Time to go pay the piper, I guess.
*****
Since we'd transitioned from slipspace, and the turrets were (for the moment) powered down, the reac drives were my main focus.
We'd peaked out at 15% of our capacity, according to the current limits set by Janis. What this place would be like if we ever really pushed it, I was afraid to even imagine.
The tokamak is always on, of course, but when it's not glowing hot, pushing petawatts throughout ship systems, the entire atmosphere in the engineering space changes. Cooling pumps slow down, temps and pressures drop, and it's almost like I can breathe again.
I noted a slight fluctuation in the neutron pumps on the inner torus, but it appeared to be a harmonic, and Janis seemed to have quickly locked it down and corrected it. I was just wading through the voluminous report she provided me about the event, and I whistled under my breath at the speed in which she was able to respond, while monitoring fire-solutions and everything else she was doing at the time.
The Archaea responded perfectly, as best as I could tell, despite my deepest paranoid fears and perverse need to have things broken so I can fix them – I have to admit we seemed to be dangerously close to not needing me around.
Luckily for me, this isn't a push-button sort of system. There are too many hot-rod modifications and purpose-built interfaces for this to be a completely hands-free sort of engine room. I was kept pretty busy watching temperatures, pressures, reactive pumps, and sludge levels.
Finally, for the first time in my career, I had everything the way I wanted it. Every control was where I wanted it to be, every system worked the way I wanted it to work. There was no policy, regulation, ordinance, procedure or plan handed to me – there were no rules governing what I did.
The captain trusted me implicitly to make the decisions I need, to do the type of work I felt needed to be done. The Archaea was a dream come true for an old space-hand like me.
*****
“Captain, I love you!”
Shorty just about leaped into my arms the moment I poked my head into her station. She was positively glowing, radiant and happy.
I whipped out my industrial-strength concerned eyebrows, and gave her my full attention. I thought maybe she had gone stir crazy. “Shorty, are you feeling okay? I thought you'd be gnawing through a medium-rare cut of Captain's Flank steak right about now.”
“No sir! That was the most fun I've had since we mixed it up with the stationmaster and his goons. Did you see how well the Archaea responded? It was epic!”
I laughed, her enthusiasm was catching. “Well Shorty, I thought at first that 85% was a pretty good show, definitely on-par with the best I've seen in the service--”
She shrieked. I swear, she actually shrieked – like a little girl that just found a pony eating the grass of her back yard on Christmas morning.
“I know! I was amazed at our accuracy over two divergent targets – but then, when you pulled ten targets at the same time – it was like... Whoosh!”
“Janis reported a 100% accuracy on all ten targets too”, I added, fuel to her fire. Shorty's eyes opened wide, and she pushed back into her chair.
“Are you serious Captain? Is that possible? How could we simultaneously track 14 targets and hit with a 100% accuracy?”
“I don't know, but I am having Pauli go over it with Janis now, just to make sure. I also want to know how much of her ability we tapped into. Do you have any way to tell how close we were to the limits of the mechanicals on the turret armature?”
Shorty thought for a moment, and brought up some data on her holo. “That's hard to say Captain. We have some good gear on this ship, and I've worked pretty hard to make sure mechanically, it's top flight. Still, while Janis may be able to calculate azimuth and fire rate at blinding speeds, I can't see any way she could get a 100% result from the machinery. She had to have been close to the upper limit of what the armature can do, I think.” she trailed off, doing calculations on screen, in her head, and probably counting on her toes for all I could tell.
“So you think we were pretty much at the limit then?” I asked.
“Yes, I do – if you were to track more targets, I think the accuracy and fire solutions would degrade. There's a mechanical limit to how fast the turrets can translate through their axes. Actually, now that I think about it a bit more, it seems at the very limit of possibility that we'd even get 85% on two targets. Did you have telemetry on the targets before and after the fire mission?”
“I did – all targets destroyed, Shorty. It happened so fast it was like watching a fleet exercise, a coordinated attack from multiple platforms. I'll have to follow this up with Pauli, and see what happened here...” I paused for dramatic effect, and then continued, “But that's a topic for a later discussion. I wanted to talk with you about the next phase of our test.”
“Do you mean--” she trailed off, looking hopeful like a starving waif being offered a hot meal.
“Yes. It's time to see what that red button does.”
*****
If there's one thing I learned to do in the Marines, it was sit on my bunk. That's pretty much what we did, when we weren't deployed, but that didn't mean I had to like it. I can't be any use to anyone sitting on my bunk. I really wanted to help if I could, so I made my way to the bridge after the live fire drill ended.
When I arrived, Steven was deep in conversation with Janis, and had multiple streams of data flowing through his station, so I latched a grabber, and took in the view from the forward port.
An endless sea of stars spread out in front of us, a view I will never, for the rest of my life get used to, or sick of. That sense of wonder, of amazement at how utterly vast, unknowable and unending our universe is...it's just impossible to overlook.
Even from within a remnant system like Danaan
, the dust clouds enhance the deeper mystery of the depths of space, rather than hide it.
I definitely had a sense aboard of anticipation. A feeling that we may not be at war yet, but it might happen any moment.
“Captain, I want to do what I can to be of help. I am familiar with service comms, Unet, targeting...” I trailed off, not sure what else to mention. I can also kill people pretty effectively, though it didn't look like there was much need for that on the bridge.
“Winner!” The captain's eyes lit up as one of his dreaded eyebrows slowly crawled off the side of his forehead. “Yak, congratulations. You are now our official targeting and communications specialist.”
I laughed, and took a seat on the starboard station.
“Janis, can you please clone target controls to the starboard station?”
“Done, sir.”
“Thanks Janis
, can you also put comms and a Unet terminal at that station as well please?”
“That is already done sir. Is there anything else I can to be of assistance? “
“Yes dear. Could you please take care of plotting as many targets as you are able to, as far downrange as you can? Prioritize on heading, impact vector at highest priority at all times. Filter and adjust based on proximity scale, armament, and movement.”
He paused briefly,
and then added “We want as clear of a picture of the tactical situation around us as immediately as we can get it, in simplest terms.”
“I understand perfectly Captain.”
*****
At that moment, every screen on deck lit red, and the piercing alarm of material condition Zebra mixed with the sound of every hatch crashing shut.
Suddenly, I found myself in a defining moment, facing a situation that might make or break it for my crew, my ship, for our very existence. It was on my shoulders now, and it felt good. That's why I am good at what I do, I guess. I live for this.
“Gene, I need maximum power now. All hands stand by for evasive action.”
I felt like I was about to throw the switch on the end of my life. I was only able to do so because it was what Dak needed, my best friend, his supreme confidence firmly in command of everything in sight.
I definitely couldn't have made myself do that to the Archaea. I knew more than anyone what Janis had done to my original maths – she blew past them like they were in reverse. We were ramped up many orders of magnitude past what I would have ever considered possible.