Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  “Wow,” she said simply, mostly to herself, forgetting that her microphone was picking up her every word.

  “State of the art,” agreed Pasqua, “and then some.”

  “Are these the only two outlets for the system?” asked Hana, who sounded equally chagrined at how easily and completely she’d been entranced.

  “On this scale, I’m afraid so. There are smaller imaging chambers scattered about the ship, but they can’t match this for sheer impressiveness. The other drawback is that imaging—especially these LiveTime displays—eats a tremendous volume of computing power. That’s why the system has its own dedicated sensor and cybernetics array.”

  Nicole restored the scene to its default perspective. A second window had opened on her HUD, listing the navigational waypoints of their outbound course. In the air above her, following the computer’s dictates now, the display compressed as an arrow of light speared up and away from the Constitution and the Solar System, indicating their initial departure vector. When the ship was actually ready to go, the scene would back away to reveal the course in its entirety—too large a scale at that point to show the Sun as more than one dot of stellar light among many and the Earth not at all.

  “Departure checklist, please,” Nicole requested from the computer and was immediately obliged, via a subordinate window in her HUD.

  She began with Master Systems Review, which presented the starship’s operating status in broad brushstrokes: Engineering, Life Support, Personnel, Structural Integrity. For the better part of the last day, the SysTechs seated at the lowest ring of consoles (the Fourth Tier) had been checking off each of the individual component elements and subroutines, performing a manual backup check of the computer’s own examination. Now, Nicole was using a different element of the system to overview the entire procedure, one computer watchdogging the others. If she wanted specifics, she could isolate them on a display menu or request it verbally.

  She saw the status with a glance, but made herself take the time to be sure, remembering a time sailing aboard Sundowner, not that long after Alex Cobri’s death and before she’d properly gotten to know the boat. She’d thought she knew what she was doing—arrogantly assuming her own skill plus the adaptations Alex had made to the gear would allow her to handle this cruising yacht designed ideally for a crew of six. She was a half-dozen klicks off Hanecgar, on a glorious reach with both wind and speed in double digits; she was stretched full length in the cockpit, luxuriating in the warmth of the afternoon sun, a disk of rich autumnal gold against the sky its radiance had bleached to a pale cream. The sea was dark, sunlight scattering the surface and spray with flashes of golden fire, so brilliant it hurt the eyes. It was a rare moment and it made her careless. She wasn’t paying attention to sea or sky and was caught totally off-balance when the wind shifted. In barely a heartbeat, the boat’s deck had tipped near vertical, pitching her sprawling across the cockpit, dunking head and shoulders underwater as a wave broke over the rail.

  She lost hold of the tiller and the boat swung clumsily out of control, righting itself; she flopped backward this time, coughing and sputtering from the salt water she’d swallowed, cracking her head painfully hard on the opposite coaming. There was no time to worry about how badly she’d been hurt, however; the mast had been set to the wrong tension and the violent torquing motion collapsed a set of spreaders two thirds of the way up. She cursed, grabbed for the tiller, but the blow to the head had scrambled her perceptions and she missed. Sundowner wallowed in the swell—all the elements that made the day’s sail such a treat now conspiring to make a bad situation significantly worse—and Nicole had to duck to avoid being clobbered by the boom as it clattered past to the limit of its traveler with what sounded like a tremendous crash.

  She manhandled the tiller around, bracing it with one foot and herself with the other while she hauled desperately on the sheets. Unless she could bring Sundowner into the wind, and take the strain off the gear, she would very likely lose the mast as well.

  It was a very hairy few minutes—in no small measure because a Bermuda Forty was way too much boat for a single sailor—and she had the goose egg just behind her right ear and the cuts and bruises to show for it. Fortunately, that proved to be the extent of the damage, to herself and to her boat. She was luckier than she deserved. After that, for the better part of the year, she never left the harbor without a crew, until she’d come to know the boat as intimately as she did her Beechcraft Baron or, later still, the Swiftstar.

  Everything had its learning curve, the trick was coming through intact.

  She blinked, frowned, reran the memory in her mind’s eye, trying unsuccessfully to find the aspects of it that bothered her. She shook her head finally and forced her attention back to business.

  “PriCom,” she called, “SecCom.”

  “Bridge, aye,” replied Commander Rossmore.

  “Stage One MSR complete. I have a clean screen at this station.”

  “Affirmative. Proceed to Stage Two.”

  Now they’d assured themselves the ship was all right, it was time to see about getting her safely under way. This involved accessing a vast sensor web encompassing the entire surface of the hull, whose function was not only to tell them where they were in the celestial firmament, but how best to move through it. Baumier maneuvering wasn’t like standard spaceflight. Nicole’s Wanderer, for example—or the Swiftstar—propelled themselves in the classically old-fashioned manner: thrusters, either chemical or nuclear, fired in one direction, thereby provoking an equal and opposite reaction in the other. Essentially, sublight In-System spacecraft were giant, inexhaustible firecrackers, no different in their basics from the finger-sized—and altogether illegal—bottle rockets Nicole used to celebrate the Fourth of July. The Baumier Drive by contrast manipulated gravimetric fields, sliding through the fabric of the Universe like a bar of wet soap.

  One by one, the consoles on the Third Tier completed their responsibilities towards the checklist and posted the data to Nicole’s HUD. While they worked, she opened yet another window to monitor the progress of the Second Tier, the starship’s combat systems.

  A tiny flash caught her eye and she froze her screen, scrolling carefully back through the entries until she found one tagged with scarlet. Obligingly, the name and face of the relevant SysTech appeared beside the list.

  “Talk to me, Chief,” she said, after paging him.

  “Nothing much to say, I’m afraid, Major,” was his reply. “I have no clear explanation for the glitch. Matter of fact, it only appeared on your display because the system hasn’t updated itself yet. Diagnostics routine is giving me a green light, has been from the start. In my opinion, sir, what we got here is a hiccough in the network. I read no fault on any of my telemetry.”

  “Terrific,” Nicole muttered, biting ever so lightly on the inside of her lower lip as she stared at the HUD, and the data that confirmed what the SysTech had just told her. “But something had to trip an alarm.”

  “I can’t see too clearly from this angle, Ace,” Hana said, leaning forward to place her head by Nicole’s, “what section are we talking about?”

  “Communications, the tertiary C3 nexus.”

  “Not a frightfully essential system, then?”

  “Only if the primaries and secondaries crash.”

  “Which, as we all know, is supposed to be impossible.”

  Nicole bent the microphone arm away from her mouth and covered it with her hand.

  “Damn it, Hana, don’t act coy, and don’t play dumb. I’ve got the whole countdown on Hold for this. I don’t flash the Bridge in fairly short order, they’re going to be wondering what the Hell’s the problem.”

  “Communications is where we got zinged aboard Swiftstar.”

  “You think this could be a replay?”

  “A variation, perhaps? Want to lay odds Little Miss Wonderful has already tapped into the system?”

  “Give it a rest, willya?”

  “You sayi
ng you haven’t considered the possibility?”

  “SecCom, Bridge, acknowledge please.”

  Nicole shot Hana a glare. “I have a fault indication, Commander,” she told Rossmore.

  “We don’t see it here, Major.”

  Nicole shook her head in frustrated agreement. “Nor here either, sir, since the Chief recycled his board.”

  A new voice came on-line, Hobby himself. “Could be a short in the monitor system. Had a problem like it in a car once, turn signals and hazard flashers kept quitting on me for no apparent reason. Then, a while later, they’d kick back in, fine as can be.”

  “The Chief labeled it a ‘hiccough.’ ”

  “Same difference.”

  “Captain,” Hana interjected, “this is Dr. Murai, suppose it’s in the software? You have an unimaginable number of data algorithms running around in there... ”

  “You suspect you have something, Doctor, all the evidence to the contrary?”

  “With respect, sir,” Nicole said, “this system is ‘Command, Control, and Communications.’ Even though it’s the backup to a backup, it still interfaces with the primary operating networks; a bug here could well spread throughout the entire C3 infrastructure.”

  “You have a recommendation, Major?”

  “Unplug it, then run a full-range diagnostic on the hard- and software.”

  “And hope we won’t need it in the meanwhile?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t think such action is called for in this situation, Bill,” Rossmore protested, deliberately into his open mike.

  “So noted. You’ve got yourself a job, Ms. Shea. Pull the tertiary nexus, but leave it in stand-by for the departure phase, just in case. Once we’re under way, and you and your people are comfortably settled, you can begin your inspection. I want it thorough and I want it fast, understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’re in vacuum, Major, instead of on the sea but we’re still sailors at heart; we prefer the term ‘aye-aye.’ ”

  Nicole shook her head ever so slightly, her reaction belied by an equally small, equally instinctive smile. “Aye-aye, sir,” she said, and released the Hold, allowing the countdown to continue.

  A moment later her screen confirmed the Chief’s report that the tertiary C3 nexus had been removed from the active network and isolated.

  “Billions and billions of bits,” Hana muttered, “won’t that be fun. How d’you want to work it?”

  “Software actually should be the easy part. Pull the program from the Master Archives and run a spectrum comparison, see if the raw numbers match. Your portable have enough capacity to handle the load?”

  “Should do. Why?”

  “I’d like to have at least one computer available I’m absolutely sure of.”

  On her HUD, the remaining elements of the checklist fell neatly and speedily into place. Her voice lost none of its calm, professional intonation—indeed, the casual observer might well assume Nicole had done this scores of times before—but there was a brightness to her eyes, a sharpness to her manner that spoke all too eloquently of the growing excitement of the moment. Hana was much the same; only as a pure observer, she had the luxury of being able to show it.

  “Ever wonder what it must have been like in the old days,” she mused aloud, Nicole paying only marginal attention as she acknowledged one item on the checklist after another, “sitting on top of a million kilos of thrust, waiting for someone to light the candle and send you on your way. Knowing that once you fire a solid fuel booster, you can’t shut it down. It’s a little like that here, I’m thinking... ”

  “Thinking too much, sounds like to me,” Nicole said.

  “Probably so. But even if we abort the instant we leave the Runway, it’ll still be the better part of a light-year before we fully reintegrate with Normal Space.”

  “True fact. Baumiers are great for zipping around the galaxy, miserable for local flying. Just like a hypersonic transport, just like a Ferrari or a Jag. But what a helluva way to fly.”

  Nicole reached the end of the list, and split her HUD into five windows, one for each of the Second Tier Manager consoles. She called them in turn.

  “Power, final status for launch.”

  “Engines on-line, performance telemetry nominal across my screens. Primed for warp insertion.”

  “Life?” The one oversaw all aspects of the ship’s power plant, the other its life-support systems.

  “Atmosphere, nominal. Gravity, nominal. Environment, nominal. Biologicals, nominal.” This last related primarily to the crew and basically meant that everyone aboard was healthy. It also applied to the stores—food and water—necessary to sustain the crew.

  “C3.”

  “Runway’s clear, scanners register open space to the hundred and a half mark.” A hundred fifty million kilometers, a shade under one astronomical unit, the distance from Earth to the Sun, that would be disrupted by their passage, in much the same way the movement of a vessel through water creates a wake, only these swells were made of energy. That’s why all approach and departure vectors were perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, moving at ninety degrees difference from the orbital track of the planets. On one hand, that minimized the danger of running into anything along the way, but it also reduced any interaction between the Baumier wakes and the planets themselves, not to mention the Sun. Theoretically, the backwash of even the largest starship shouldn’t have even the slightest deleterious effect, but aviation and space history was replete with disasters—the DeHavilland Comet for one, the Challenger STS shuttle for another—that came about when the outside of the operational envelope was pushed wide open and “theory” slammed up hard against reality. No one wanted to make a similar mistake here.

  “Final data and communications updates from DaVinci Flight Control logged and loaded,” the Manager, a Lieutenant, Senior Grade, reported.

  “Nav?”

  “Waypoints tagged and entered, outbound course locked in. Helm free to navigate.”

  “Combat?”

  “Local space clear to ten kay,” ten thousand kilometers. Normally, Constitution’s “local space” was a globe around the ship a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter, but this close to the Earth-Moon system that wasn’t practicable, there was simply too much traffic. “Runway clear to the Outer Marker. Weaponry systems, enabled. Targeting systems in active acquisition, no contacts at this time. Vessel is at Condition Two readiness.”

  Nicole swung her chair towards Pasqua: “Tom?”

  “Got no comments, no complaints, Nicole. Make the call.”

  She did, and told Rossmore the consensus at her end was “go.”

  Pasqua tapped her shoulder and pointed. Her eyes followed his arm, and she swung her chair to follow her gaze. From opposite sides of the great curved imaging shell, a pair of brilliantly colored bands of light stretched off into the distance, reminding Nicole of nothing so much as the marker beacons of an actual runway. Her HUD elongated into a skinny rectangle before her, to show the starship’s Runway in its entirety.

  She felt a small tug at her midsection, a grab at the back of her chair from Hana, who’d felt it, too, and immediately an overlay window appeared to tell them what they’d already guessed, that the Constitution was under way. It was a steady one-G acceleration, ten meters per second per second; every second the ship went ten meters per second faster—by the one-minute mark their velocity was six hundred meters per second, better than thirteen thousand miles per hour. The stars ahead changed color ever so slightly, taking on a marginal bluish tint as the spacecraft’s perception shifted the value of their light higher up the visible spectrum.

  The dominant window of Nicole’s HUD was a projection of their course schematic, while the others informed her of velocity, vector, ship’s internal-and external status, and the condition of the Baumier Drive as it projected its field around and ahead of the ship—focusing on the still-distant Outer Marker—acting on the physical fabric of sp
ace itself and creating the functional equivalent of a black hole.

  The overhead display showed no true sense of what was happening other than that they were moving fast enough to actually notice. With good reason, if the HUD visuals were any indication. It was as though space had become the velvet curtain imagined by ancient philosophers and someone had twisted it violently to form a crude spout. The Constitution was racing along the curve of that spout in a nauseating motion that tested even Nicole’s storm-weathered stomach.

  The Outer Marker, when it finally came, was disconcertingly anticlimactic. In the back of her mind, although intellectually she knew it wasn’t so, Nicole had always imagined, hoped, the Transition to warp space would be the way it was portrayed in the movies she’d devoured as a girl. Lots of sound and fury and brilliantly spectacular special effects.

  “Drat,” she groused, before she could stop herself, as her HUD quietly announced the Transition, and the blip that represented the Constitution left the Runway far and fast behind. The only real difference, so far as she could tell, was a quantum increase in velocity, from miles per second to parsecs per day.

  “Not what you expected?” She was startled to hear Pasqua’s voice for real, instead of in her earphone. He’d removed his helmet and was rubbing his scalp in a gesture Nicole found painfully familiar.

  “To be honest, no. Anyone ever taken a look outside while a ship’s in Transit?”

  “Not me. Not anyone I know. Not sure, as a matter of fact, it’s ever been tried.”

  “Come on,” Hana scoffed as Nicole released herself from her harness and stretched to her feet, giving small voice to her aches as her body vehemently protested its confinement, “somebody must have. What about back in the beginning, the initial test flights, before we had these wonderful toys?”

  Pasqua shrugged. “What do you want from me, Doctor? If anyone has, it’s a secret. But I’ve got to say, if it’s anything like what the Universe looks like when we’re on the Runway, then I got no complaints about missing the view.”