He Who Dares: Book Two (The Gray Chronicals 2) (27 page)

“By the way, it was your report that prompted those sealed orders, Michael.”

“Really?”  That surprised him.

“Carry on, Mike, and God’s speed and good hunting.”  The Admiral held his hand out.  It was a traditional dismiss, and Mike stood, shook, replacing his cap and return the Admiral’s salute.

“Take care, Mike.”  Mike departed the package heavy in his hand, wondering if there was a letter from the ‘Lady Ann’.  He hoped so.  There was, but he didn’t get a chance to read it until much later.  First, he returned to his ship and got her underway towards Solar North, still banging his head on the overhead pipes and ductwork.

*  *  *  *  *  *

“Nav, have you worked out the course for our first jump?” He asked a day later as he settled into his seat.

“Finishing up now, sir.”  A few moments later the message light on his side consult flashed and he opened the message.  Pete Standish did the same, and they both read the results.  It took a few moments for Pete to run the calculations, pursing his lips and nodding.

“Looks good to me, Skipper.”  He said, looking around.

“Humm…”  Mike intoned.  “Cutting it a little close there Nav.”

“Close, sir?”

“Yes.  It appears to me that you will bring us out a little too close to the target star for safety.”  Pete raised an eyebrow and turn back to his screen without saying anything.  He ran the calculation twice, rubbing his chin and wondered what he’d missed.  Then he saw it and mentally kicked himself.

The Skipper was right, the course/time duration would bring them out a little close to the target star.  It took navigation a little longer, but in the end he found the error and sent the new results back to the OX and the Captain.  Pete happened to look over at Janice, seeing a slight smile on her face.  She knew something, but it wasn’t until later that he got the chance to ask her about it.

“Much better.  Lock these into the nav computer.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”  During a break, Pete strolled down to the Wardroom to get a cup of coffee, and by luck ran into Janice as she was about to leave.

“The Skipper’s pretty sharp when it comes to running the calculation for a warp jump.”  He looked at Janice, seeing her use that same smile again.  “Come on, what’s the joke?”  He asked.

“No joke, OX.”  She laughed.  “The Skipper didn’t run the numbers.”

“What do you mean, of course he did.  He must have run them the moment he opened his orders.”  Janice shook her head and Pete’s face pulled into a frown.  “You mean he already had them?”

“No, he did them in his head.”  She hid a laugh behind her hand.

“Don’t be absurd.  You can’t run
nth space calculations
in your head!  Damn it, it takes a bloody super computer to do that.”

“Not Mike… I mean the Skipper.  I watched him do it at the Academy lots of times.  It is used to drive the instructor nuts.”  Pete looked stunned.

“How on Earth do you run
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th
space calculation in your head?”

“That, you will have to ask the Skipper.  He never would tell me how he did it.”  She gave him another secretive smile and headed back to the Bridge.

Pete got himself a cup of coffee and sat there thinking about what Janice had said.  To him it didn’t make sense.  How could a human, any human run
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th
space calculation in their head.  It almost sounded like a contradiction in terms.  There were way too many variables for someone to take them all into account.  You not only had to know the orbit of the target star around the galactic center in its X, Y and Z-axis but that of the star you departed from.  You then had to know the speed and position of both star systems in relation to the galaxy in three dimensions, as well as orbital variations.  It didn’t stop there, as there was the gravitational variable to take into account.  True, most of them known and represented by a string of numbers two feet long locked away inside the navigation super computer.  What was even more astonishing was that his Captain had spotted the discrepancy in the navigator’s calculation with one look.  Mike Gray might look like a young man, barely into his twenties, but Pete suspected he was a lot older, and probably wiser than he was.

In the end, he shook his head and headed back up to the Bridge, immediately checking the Nav screen for their position.  Their course spiraled them up out of the gravity well of Earth’s system above the plane of eclipse towards a position one AU out at Solar North.  As they were actively ‘pinging’ with their tachyon sensors, the six massive OWP clearly showed up as bright dots on the screen, each marked with its designator.  As the hours passed and they drew closer, the true size of the orbiting weapons platforms became apparent.  Up close they looked like small moons rather than man-made objects, and between all six they could put out an overwhelming amount of firepower.  This was critical during the first few minutes of an enemy fleet transfer into the system where they were most vulnerable before their sensors, shields, and weapons came back on line.  Drawing closer, traffic control answered their hail.

“Traffic control has given us an insertion slot twenty-six minutes from now, sir.”  Janice reported crisply.

“Traffic’s a little light today, thank goodness.”  Pete observed.

“Thank God for small mercies.  We can leap across light years in a single bound, yet can get stuck in traffic for three hours just to do it.  It’s worse than being stuck on the M1 Motorway at rush hours.”  Janice grouched.  

The Bridge crew laughed, knowing how right he was.  The banter went on as other added their favorite, and not so favorite moments getting stuck in traffic as something to do while they waited. Another Captain might have put their time to checking, or rechecking instrument, or running diagnostic on this or that bit of equipment.  Mike did neither, partly because he was new to Command, but partly because he knew his people had already done all of the things multiple times.  If something were out of whack, he’d have been notified long before this.

“Moving inside the warp point event horizon, Skipper.”  Janice Fletcher announced at last, moments after receiving their clearance from traffic control.

“Thank you, Ops - sound wrap transfer warning Number One.”

“Aye-aye, sir, sounding warp warning transfer.”  Pete touched his keyboard and a stridence horn sounded throughout the ship.  Immediately everyone stopped and went to their duty station and strapped in.

“Slow ahead, helm.”

“Aye-aye, sir.  Slow ahead, it is.”

“Ops - lower shields and set our inertial dampeners to 25%

“Aye, sir.  Lowering shield and setting inertia dampeners to 25%.”

“Janice - rise ‘sail’.”

“Aye-aye, sir.  Raising
the nth space sail
.”  She answered, and everyone on the Bridge who could, took a moment to watch as the armored ports in the hull opened and the
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sail antenna telescoped out of the hull for the first time.  The antenna was six foot across at its base, stepping down as each ten-foot segment extended out to ninety feet.  At the tip, the last ten toot section measured only one inch across.   Mike waited patiently until the antenna locked into place, watching Janice out the corner of his eye as she worked her control board.

“XO,  I have the Argos beacon.”  She announced at last.

“Helm.  Do you have the heading?”  Pate Standish asked.

“Aye, sir.  Course locked in for the Argos binary system.”

“Helm - all ahead slow.  Steady as she goes.”

“Aye-aye, sir.  All ahead slow and steady as she goes.”  Going in at slow ahead had the advantage of giving them a little leeway on the other side, just in case the current ‘Notice to Starships’ was a little off.

It was all a question of when it was last undated from the information received from a returning starship Captain.  During the initial insertion, sitting or lying down was mandatory due to the disorienting effects of transfer.  Mike ordered all none essential equipment shut down and all bulkhead hatches closed and locked.  If this were a combat situation, the crew would be in armor and at battle station, instead they simply donned breathing gear as the ship automatically sealed each compartment.  Failure to do so had killed a lot of crewman over the years, just like the Captain William Enright crew on his first transfer.  Many things could go wrong, the least of which was ending up in a minefield, or an asteroid belt, or possibly too close to a star.  The warp transfer wasn’t exact, and an orderly group of ship entering the event horizon together would find themselves scatter over half a sector of space when they came out the other side.  Mostly, fleets entered in line astern to avoid disastrous interspace collisions, but it did leave all ships vulnerable for the first few minutes.  Many times, it was a race to see who could get back in formation and fire off the first shot.  In the main view screen, they watched as the Kashiwa radiation began to dance between the antennas, slowly building until it became a solid blue/white ‘sail’ between each of the pylons.  The boundary layer radiation gradually enveloped the ship from end to end, and like breaking the outer membrane of a giant cell, they could now enter.

“Slow ahead, and initiate warp transfer, helm to standby.”

“Aye-aye, sir - initiating warp transfer.”  The alarm sounded a final warning, and a few seconds later the universe turned itself inside out, or seemed to.  For the crew it was as if time itself stopped, and they hung for an eternity over the dark bottomless pit of forever. 

Then it was over, the ship’s clock showing no passage of time at all.  No one could really explain clearly what happen in a warp transfer other than to say that it connected two points in space.  One in this three dimensional universe, to another in
n
th
space.  It did permit them to neatly sidestep old Einstein’s universal speed limit and travel thousands of light years with no appreciable time dilation.  ‘Where’ they were was a matter for philosophers to ponder, as most mathematics had given up trying to figure it out.  The first part of getting into
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th
space had something to do with the sun, but again, no one could really explain it in plain English, and even mathematicians had difficulty understanding the quantum physics involved. Suffice to say, most stars had two warp points, depending on their angle off true north, one at Solar North and South, except super massive stars, and those could have up to six.  Some stars with a massive angular wobble could also have up to six.  This was all wrapped up in the spin of the star and what it did to the gravitational forces around it.  In some ways, the analogy of a whirlpool wasn’t far off.  As seen in a black hole to a greater extent, matter, energy, and even gravity tends to get pulled into a circulating mass around the star.  At the center is a plume of concentrated gravitational flux, and the gateway to
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space.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Harmony

Occasionally a star such as a brown dwarf might only have one, whereas in a binary Star System each star had two each.  In most cases, they were located outside the main gravity well of the star system, yet some were found inside, similar to the one Captain Enright found himself dumped out in.  No warships Captain wanted to get caught in a system with only one warp point, especially if the enemy was on the other side of the one he’d just exited.  He had nowhere to go, and no escape except to run across the immense distance to the next star system.  By taking the WP at Solar North, Mike knew they’d pass into the Argos binary star system, friendly and firmly under Royal Naval control.  Here he had a choice of five other warp points, all located in positions he could get to in a reasonable time.  Two at Solar North and three at Solar South.  From there, he could jump out to just about anywhere he wanted, but first they had to undergo the disorienting effects of multiphase transition.  It was one of the main reasons most people, if they could, preferred lying down, or asleep if possible.  Both going in and coming out felt as if you were standing in a ghostly room of mirrors, seeing reflections of yourself vanishing into infinity.  No matter in which direction you looked, you saw another version of yourself, some looking back at you, other looking elsewhere.  It was as if every possibility in your life, every branching decision you ever made came together at that moment.  No one had ever been able to explain it, and more than one person had thought of the possibility of walking over and changing places with that other self.