by Diane Carey
The intercom buzzed and drew them both downdeck again, April shaking hands all over again as he went. “Yes, April here—”
“August! Cut that out!”
April covered a snicker in a glance at George, because even over Brownell’s snort of disgust they could hear the cheers of the engineers down below. “Just a few tests, doctor.”
“Are you nuts? If I lose my stomach, you can come down here and clean it up!”
“Yes, doctor.”
“I’m an old man!”
April leaned to George and mumbled, “He’s been an old man for forty years.”
“I don’t suppose you remembered to test the outer guard system while you were on that ferris wheel. You didn’t, did you?”
George furrowed his brow. “The what?”
“Shields, pepperhead!”
“We should do that, shouldn’t we?” April agreed, rubbing his chin.
“It’d be nice.”
“Very well. Do you want us to test the warp engines before we get any farther?”
“Nuff testing,” Brownell said, and his snarl slipped into the past. “We’ve got kids out there. They want to come home. Let’s go get ’em.”
“I agree wholeheartedly. We’ll be under way shortly. April out.”
“Why, that fraud,” George commented. “He cares as much about those people as we do.”
[103] “Of course he does,” was April’s gentle answer. “You know, Starfleet didn’t want to send him on this mission. He’s even more valuable than the ship itself. But he used his influence to come with us, and of course he got his way. Virtually everyone at Starfleet Command has been his student, and they’re all still afraid of him.”
“I don’t blame them. He’s got the disposition of a hornet with hemorrhoids.”
George hadn’t meant for everyone to hear his opinion, but his reward was a chuckle of agreement from around the bridge.
April’s shoulders wobbled with amusement, then he composed himself and said, “Shields, George.”
George turned without a pause and ordered, “Mr. Sanawey, raise deflector shields.”
“Shields read up, sir.”
There was another pause, not quite so dramatic but twice as embarrassing as George realized he didn’t have the slightest idea how to go about testing a ship’s shielding. He leaned to the captain. “How?”
April leaned inward also and muttered, “Sun. Energy tolerance.”
“Oh ... okay. Mr. Florida, come about. Approach the sun at a heading of eight-point-nine-eight.”
“George, that’s awfully tight,” April warned.
Their eyes met. George said, “You want to mollycoddle her or shake her down?”
April leaned back in his chair.
George turned toward the bow again, looking at the whirling planetary rings and the blazing little yellow-pink sun beyond them. “Mr. Sanawey, monitor the energy resistance of the forward shields as we approach and the aft shields as we pull away. Mrs. Hart, make sure the engines stay with us.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Mr. Florida, ahead three-quarters sublight.”
“Point-seven-five light, aye.”
The starship beveled space again, sweeping in a great arc that soon straightened into a path toward the sun. And suddenly the little sun didn’t look quite so little.
The ship began to hum again as she gained velocity. The sun’s gravitational pull became a heavy ballast, but the starship’s automatic systems, tied in to her complex new computer, did their jobs as the human bugs on the bridge hung on and hoped for the best. The ship’s [104] automatic intensity adjustment couldn’t compensate quickly enough for a whole sun’s worth of light, and soon the brightness caused them all to shield their eyes from the main viewer.
George felt the navigation controls take over on the heading they’d been told to execute. It felt hotter on the bridge—and even though the scorching was in his mind, he empathized with the outer shields, and knew he was just a few feet from being seared to cinders, were it not for the technology that made the starship possible.
The brightness fell away to the shimmer of space.
April spoke first, over the ship’s hum of strain as the sun continued to tug at it. “Claw? How are your readings?”
“Shields are stable, sir.” The big man raised his head from the readout screen. “Like a wall of diamonds.”
George had no idea what that meant, but evidently the engineers did. The bridge broke out into a collective smile.
“Outer shell radiation level reads normal, Captain,” Hart said from her post on the port side. “All systems on line.”
“Seems to be okay,” George murmured.
April took a deep breath. “Well, there’s one more thing we have to do about it. Carlos—”
Florida looked around at the captain, and an unspoken understanding moved between them.
April said, “Pick us out a nice one.”
George looked from one man to the other, but there was no interpreting their strange communication about the ship and its capabilities, and suddenly he was afraid to ask.
The tension returned, but this time it was definitely laced with confidence. This time, George was the nervous one. He watched the viewscreen.
They were still at seventy-five percent light speed—not exactly poking along.
At first, he thought they were moving out of the solar system. Then, quite abruptly, Florida leaned into his controls and the ship vectored back along a rollercoaster course into the asteroid belt. The rocks came up alarmingly fast, flashing past them like heavy rain. Closer and closer to each passing rock the ship inclined, until one medium-sized boulder loomed up and this didn’t tilt out of the way.
Instinctively, George cringed.
“Robert!”
“Hold course,” April said, just loud enough to be heard.
[105] George gripped the command chair and braced his feet. The asteroid filled the screen. A brown darkness.
Impact sounded hollow—like an explosion inside a cave. The ship lurched. Everyone was pitched forward, then released with a wrenching jar as the brown mush on the screen broke up in a rubbly spiral and fell away.
The ship shuddered once—or did it?—and fell gracefully out of the asteroid belt.
“Reduce speed,” April said, rather somberly.
Hart bent over her panel. “Captain, we read a nominal reduction of power to forward shield two, but otherwise the impact resistance ratio is exceptional. I’d rate it well above normal safety ratios.” She straightened and her round face grew rounder. “I guess it really is a starship.” And a tear broke from her eye.
April settled back in his chair and sighed. “Yes,” he murmured, “it really is.” He glanced around his little realm, supremely satisfied. “I’d say she tests out splendidly.” After a long breath, he faced George’s astonished glare. “How else could we know?”
A good point. A rotten fact, but a good point.
George had no answer for it. But he did have a question.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” George stepped closer.
“Forgetting? No, I don’t think so. I’d test auxiliary control if we had any yet, but we don’t, so we can’t, so I won’t ...”
“Weapons, Captain.”
April’s smile dissolved. “We won’t be using them on this mission, George.”
Feeling the eyes of everyone around him, George fixed his gaze on April and lowered his voice, “How can you know that? Test the weapons, Robert.”
George could sense April’s intense disappointment in him. He saw it, felt it, but he stood his ground. The captain had thrust this job upon him, and he would see that it got done—the whole job. If friendship was the sacrifice, if April was disappointed in him forever onward, so be it. He’d done things halfway for most of his life. Half a husband, half a father, half an officer—this time he would be the whole of what he had to be.
April�
�s jaw stiffened, his eyes grew heavy with disenchantment. He sighed, and there was almost a pain in it, almost a resentful, buried anger.
[106] With a reluctance so deep it made him shudder, he said, “All right. You do it.”
George turned away from him as quickly as possible without making the escape too obvious. He didn’t want to belabor the point—that evil men had been around as long as mankind had been, and that kindness was easily devastated by those who chose to be unkind. April would be the first of those to die for peace in an unpeaceful galaxy, and his quest would simply die with him, long before it had the chance to do any good. George moved to Florida’s side quickly, knowing April probably misinterpreted his move as an eager one. To Florida he said, “Target practice on the move. Target an asteroid about the size of the ship, at the edge of laser range. We’ll test single-stream sequence first. Rapid-fire, full intensity.”
“Aye, sir. Targeted,” Florida acknowledged.
“Increase speed to point-six.”
“Point-six, aye.”
The starship took a dip past a large asteroid and headed along the edge of the belt, swung outward, then turned on the edge of her primary hull disk and canted back toward the asteroids.
“Fire,” George ordered.
Bolts of energy killed the echo. Several energy streamers, bright orange, one after the other in rapid-fire sequence, lanced outward toward the asteroid. Bits of rock flayed off into space. An instant later, the boulder split cleanly down the middle and fell apart at its weakest point. The ship brushed between the pieces at the last moment.
“Aft particle cannons, multiple strike! Fire!”
Florida scrambled to answer the order as the viewscreen scrambled to switch to aft visual. Three separate particle bolts shot out from the hull and went after the biggest pieces of the split boulder. Two struck squarely, blasting big pieces into little niblets, and one hit a glancing blow that made its target spin out of view.
“Reduce speed,” George said, straightening up. He hadn’t realized he’d been hunching over the command console. “Could’ve been better,” he said. The bridge crew was self-consciously quiet. Then George smiled. “But not much.”
Florida offered his hand. Hart was giving them both the thumbs-up, and Sanawey and the two engineers joined in with a little round of applause.
Camaraderie tingled through George for the first time since he’d come on board, a sense of synthesis that told him he had a place here, [107] and that they accepted him as competent to his post. As first officer he would have to be giving orders. At least now he felt his participation had some authority behind it. Then he turned, and saw April’s face.
Drake hunted through the vast ship until he finally found the right place. In the bowels of the primary hull, it was the hub of power for sublight travel, as the door panel proudly professed in clean, newly painted bright red letters:
I. M. PULSE DRIVE ENGINEERING
ENTRY AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED
Entry authorization or not, the door slipped cooperatively open for him, and he strolled in, sporting his most innocuous expression. The first two people he saw were actually one and a half people; one of them was visible only from the waist down, swallowed partway by an open hatch in the underside of a piece of machinery that went from here to the ceiling. The other man was handing him equipment as he needed it.
“Hi,” the whole man greeted. He was a little older than Captain April and twice as heavy, topped with whitening hair, and had two ruddy spots at the tops of his pale cheeks that made him look like Santa Claus without a beard.
“Hello,” Drake chirped, daring to gaze up that hole at a mindboggle of exposed circuits. He pulled out the list of names he’d been systematically checking off and scanned it. “Drake Reed here. You would be Misters Graff,” he said, nodding up the hole, “and Saffire. Yes?”
“Nope,” the chubby one said. “I would be Graff, and that would be Saffire.”
From up the hole, a hand appeared and waved itself. “Hiya.”
“Hello there,” Drake called. “So sorry to see you’re being eaten alive. I trust you’ve gone numb by now.”
“Yeah, not too painful anymore—whoa, heads up!” His hips squirmed, and Graff shoved Drake back in time to keep either of them from being smacked by a falling piece of machinery. It clattered to the deck and fell into at least three pieces. “Sorry,” Saffire said.
“There goes a day’s work,” Graff complained.
“Have faith,” Saffire droned back.
[108] Graff pressed his lips together and looked mournfully at the broken pieces, then toed them aside and turned back to Drake. “You authorized to be here? There are a lot of open lines in here that could hurt you. Don’t touch anything.”
“I’m here from sickbay. Checking for contamination exposure.”
“Contamination?” Saffire’s head appeared from the hole. It was not a bad-looking head at all, only about thirty-five years old, though slightly balding and with a crooked nose. “What contamination?”
“Oh, you know, the usual contamination. What does the I. M. stand for, eh?” Cloaking his movement in the question, Drake pulled out the mediscanner and casually adjusted it for Graff’s estimated age and weight, then started scanning for metabolic inconsistencies.
“The what?” Graff asked.
Drake pointed over his shoulder at the door. “I. M.”
“Oh, ‘impulse,’ you mean? Don’t you know?”
“We cannot all be so blessed, sad though it is.”
“It stands for ‘internally metered pulse drive.’ We just say ‘impulse’ for short.”
“So wise of you.”
“Impulse drive’s been around for a long time. How come you don’t know what it means?”
Drake shrugged, watching the mediscanner. “Frightening, aren’t I?”
Graff pointed at the scanner and said, “You, uh, trying to get readings on me?”
“You’ll never feel a thing.”
Graff rubbed his nose and said, “Then maybe you better turn it over. You’re reading yourself.”
“Crickets!” Drake blinked and slapped his forehead. “I’m not a well man at all!”
He was about to milk his feigned ignorance to its fullest when the door panel slid open and the kid from warp engineering came in, pushing a rolling cart with food on it. Oak or Tree or Wood or something—yes, Wood. That was his name. A very blond fellow whose uniform still hadn’t been grown into. Smart whelp, if Drake recalled from his visit belowdecks.
“Okay, you impulsives,” Wood called. “Lunch.”
“Good thing,” Saffire said as he climbed down from the hole. “I was about to start chewing fibercoil.”
Drake followed as the engineers gathered around a makeshift picnic [109] right in the middle of the deck, and Wood started dealing out plastic plates and pre-wrapped clumps of edibles.
“I hear the pulse drive testing went great,” Wood commented as he handed a canon of orange juice to Graff.
“Lucky for us,” Graff said, and passed the carton to Drake.
“Now you guys in warp get to be on the hot seat,” Saffire warned. “Got your seals all sealed?”
Wood grinned. “Yes, the seals are sealed.” He gathered his own lunch and sat down cross-legged beside Drake. “Hi, again.”
“Hello to you,” Drake acknowledged.
“Still checking heartbeats?”
“When I recall how to work this bumblebee, yes,” Drake said, holding up the mediscanner.
Graff chuckled. “And we were about to explain impulse drive to him.”
“Two parts magic, three parts luck,” Saffire said.
“We’re good at magic where I come from,” Drake replied. “Speaking of where we come from, what is it you’re doing with your food, man?”
Saffire paused in his exercise, which consisted of carefully placing each element of his meal a specific distance from each other element—potatoes over here, ham over here, peas over there—a
nd making sure none of them touched the others. Then he had begun eating only the peas, and not in a leisurely manner either. When they were done, he started on the potatoes and was going about eating only the potatoes.
“Is this a religious habit?” Drake asked.
Saffire shrugged. “I guess so. It’s just the way we do it on my home colony. Tell you the truth, I forget why. There used to be a health rule about it, so I guess it had its start in some problem of contamination when the planet was settled.”
Graff said, “Kinda like being kosher.”
“Now it’s just polite.”
“Good gravy,” Drake said. “The way we eat on Earth must be barbaric to you, inhaling our food in such disorder, eh?”
“I just ignore it.”
“You don’t know what you’ve missed,” Wood said, “until you’ve stuffed in a nice mixed mouthful of meat and potatoes. I vote you’re just strange, Saffire.”
“Watch it!” Saffire said, flagging his fork at them. “I’m right in the [110] middle of a lesson here. Don’t interrupt. Now, you,” he said, pointing at Drake, “pay attention.”
“I am a giant ear,” Drake promised.
“Okay. Impulse engines are powered by high-energy fusion, got it? The fusion is created by a pulsed laser array, mounted all around a fuel tablet. The first pulse causes a fusion reaction which ignites the tablet, which results in a heavier element.”
“A heavier series of elements, really,” Wood interrupted.
“Which we then hit with another high-energy laser pulse, and we get the second-stage fusion reaction. That releases a hundred twenty percent more energy than the first reaction. Then the pulse hits again, and again—”
“All within a microsecond,” Graff contributed, ignoring Drake’s expression of abject terror.
“That’s where the term ‘impulse’ comes from,” Saffire went on. “Internally metered pulse drive.”
“So simple,” Drake murmured. “I should’ve been an engineer.”
The three indulged in a laugh.
Wood nodded ruefully and said, “Well, if it was really that simple, the ship would blow itself to bits in a fusion explosion.”
