Moon Dreams

by M.A. Harris

  Part of the reason they could do the extensive testing was because they would have more time. The ‘Dream had a much improved cooling system, she still had the big ice tanks but they were under the cargo deck not on it, and were twice the size. She also used the two fixed sides of the stealth shell as large radiators instead of the wings on the Alexis, a better and safer solution. She also had extensible radiator wings as well, but smaller and simpler versions. Tonight they’d try this entire system out and they could well be hovering in the hollow for several hours instead of the forty minutes of Alexis’ first flight.

  “Disconnect the coolant line Engineer. Commencing Stack array startup now.” They went through the modified startup routine John had developed for ‘his’ ship. It was longer than Paul’s mainly because it did not depend on the engineer and copilot nearly so much. Paul had been through all this and had bitten his tongue the whole time. Raoul had watched Paul very blatantly not making comments and kept his reservations to himself.

  Raoul generally had been lying very low lately; he was under a bit of a cloud since his involvement with Patsy had become public knowledge. Most people, including Patsy’s parents, had taken it well. The young Latino was well liked and respected but some, including Cliff, had been upset about the affair. Paul thought that some of it on Cliff’s part was jealousy, possibly jealousy Cliff himself wouldn’t acknowledge.

  The Stacks came up to twenty percent power and they did all the checks then John brought the thrust up gradually. When the recorded weight on the jacks was a ton John locked the thrust and did another full check. Since the ground crew had run a similar check a few hours before Paul felt this excessive, but John was the commander.

  “I’m going to command a hundred and ten percent base load thrust until we reach sixty feet altitude then put on an all axis hold.” VanDoone’s voice was calm.

  The ‘Dream rose off the pad and slid skywards. The ship was moving upwards at ten miles an hour when they passed through sixty feet and John flipped on the hold altitude command. There was a moment of weightlessness and then a bit of a jerk as the ‘Dream’s Stacks went to zero thrust to lose upward velocity and then brought the thrust back to holding level as the ship began to fall back. Paul tensed but the systems were all operating as designed. Out of the side of his eye he saw John jerk spasmodically during the few instants of weightlessness.

  Paul gritted his teeth; John just didn’t have ‘it’ - whatever ‘it’ was as far as the Moonships were concerned. He did not have the feel for the ship’s dynamics and responses to input. Still, after that first bobble things settled down. John seemed to have it under control and Paul began to wonder if it had simply been first flight nerves. For almost an hour John maneuvered the big freighter around the Hollow. Up and down, around, jogs of acceleration, much of it was redundant in Paul’s opinion but it wasn’t his ship or his program.

  “Ready to deploy the thermal wings Engineer,” John said quietly.

  “The board is green Commander.”

  “Deploying thermal wings.” The shell sides opened and the wings unfolded.

  “Coolant flow is nominal Commander, the melt rate in the tanks is nominal.” From Raoul.

  “Good, I’m going to swing her around to see how the wings affect response.” The ship floated around and began to turn.

  “RRRRR,” The alarm enunciator was a shock and the yellow strobe on the master alarm panel made Paul’s heart leap.

  “What the hell, Engineer?” There was an edge of alarm in VanDoone’s voice. The ship continued to spin and there was a wobble as the commander twisted around to look at the engineer without letting go of the manual controllers.

  “We’ve lost coolant flow in the Stacks commander, we’re completely convective, we have not lost pumps or pressure.” Raoul’s voice was a flat crack, “We have about thirty seconds, I’m going to reverse the flow in the coolant lines, I think we must have a big airlock somewhere in the system.”

  “No, wait, what is it? We’re going down.” John sounded confused and he twisted back to look at his own console. At that second the main horn went off with a nerve twisting howl and red lights lit up. Two Stacks were in shutdown and then two more tripped off, followed by three more.

  “Shit,” VanDoone’s voice was an inarticulate yell.

  Oooof,” Paul felt himself slung against his four-point harness as the ship spun uncontrollably and began to yaw. Paul’s left hand fumbled with the center console between him and the command pilot for an instant, he found the shield, flipped it up and mashed the switch down with his thumb. The wild yawing spin vanished almost instantly

  “What...what?” There was a lost edge to John’s voice, almost like he was just waking up.

  The master alarm had gone off and the light was now flashing slowly instead of throbbing with savage intensity.

  Raoul’s voice was savage, “Well, I guess that was one way to get rid of the damned air bubble.”

  Paul finished dialing in the landing pad location, “We’re on our way down; Raoul see if you can keep the Stacks that tripped off from cycling, I want to be able to do a diagnostic on all of them.”

  “What? What are you doing Richards?” snarled VanDoone.

  “I’m landing the ship John, we need to find out what happened and to be honest I don’t trust your reactions any longer.” Paul’s voice was flat; he was already typing notes into his workstations memo pad.

  “I’m the Commander of this ship damnit!”

  “Not any more. If you remember I am still Senior Pilot for Luna Haven John, and in my opinion you are not ready to pilot one of the freighters yet.” And never would be as far as Paul could tell. The man had not only screwed up when things went bad, he’d very obviously panicked as well.

  The ex-Air Force Major stared at Paul open mouthed, unable to say anything, his face flaming red with rage.

  Raoul spoke softly, “I’ve frozen the status on the Stacks that tripped Paul, we’re lucky the rest of them didn’t trip off. They all show the flags that say they wanted to but the master override triggered before they could do it since we were under thrust in a grav field. Nice save by the way, I think we missed the north cliff face by about fifty feet.”

  -o-

  Three nights later the MoonDream’s Stacks were at fifty percent power and the landing jacks showed only a few hundred pounds of weight. They were light with four big freight containers and a few odds and ends strapped to the new moon freighters cargo deck. Paul tapped a couple of switches, “Raoul what’s your read?”

  “All green Commander.” Raoul was just as calm and competent as ever.

  Paul looked over at the copilot, Bill Suter, “How do you read things copilot?” Paul asked quietly.

  The young man nodded a little jerkily. “All green Commander, I have the lift line plotted.” Paul hoped the young man’s nerves would settle, apparently he’d been a bit unnerved by the near disaster three nights before.

  The problem in the end had turned out to be three fold and simple. The ground crew had done a redundant purge of the coolant lines at Major VanDoone’s insistence and had not gotten all the air bubbles out. The bubbles had collected into one large one that had been out of the loop until the wings were deployed when it had migrated and stopped the water flow. Raoul’s back pumping would have solved the problem, but the spin on the ship had also upset it enough to restart the flow.

  The other two problems had been in software and the result, in Paul’s opinion, of fiddling on the part of the design team. He’d, quietly, read them the riot act about it since they had in fact violated several of their own design and implementation standards to screw it up. It had been in a good cause, they’d tried to improve both the power quality and safety margins in the power converters at the same time and the simulations had looked good, as had the ground tests, but it had turned out that they had made the system much too sensitive to fluctuations in coolant temperature, and mor
e intolerant of out of range conditions. The only thing that had saved them from a messy crash and possible death had been the master override that had stopped the cascade of shutdowns, it had been designed in for just that sort of situation and it was nice to know it worked, though the need for the live test was enough to have unnerved anyone.

  “I read green as well, Hollow Base this is MoonDream we are ready to lift.” Paul could see Cliff in the window in the big display.

  “You are clear to lift MoonDream, give Patsy and her crew a wave on the way out Paul.” Cliff was a bit subdued but Paul appreciated that comment.

  “Wilco that Cliff. See you tomorrow night.” Paul rolled the thrust control up and the Stacks’ output swept smoothly up, almost imperceptibly they began to lift. Paul snapped the velocity control on and the geo centering mode, then locked onto the lift line Bill had laid in.

  Paul monitored the systems but there was little to see. His mind flitted back over the past days. Checking the MoonDream out, and a series of unpleasant meetings, had taken up the two days after the near disaster.

  The meetings with VanDoone had degenerated into one-sided shouting matches, VanDoone apparently thinking he could browbeat Paul into letting him fly again by screaming at him. The meeting with the steering committee and the selection committee and VanDoone had been as bad. Even with his previous experience the ex-Air Force officer had simply not been able to believe that everyone would listen to Paul and not to him. In the end he had stormed out of the meeting and out of the Hollow. He had a nice home on the outskirts of Primus Junction, hopefully he was there settling down. Paul hoped VanDoone would simply accept his own limitations and go back to being a good manager on the logistics side of the program, but he was very afraid that VanDoone was incapable of seeing things that way.

  One good thing had come out of all of this. It had firmed up Paul’s position as senior pilot, the steering committee had given him the title of Chief Pilot and handed him a lot of power on the operational side of the Moonship program. He had decided to exercise that power by making Patsy the Alexis’ reserve command pilot and shifting Frank Johnson to the command pilot slot on the MoonDream.

  Of course, Frank had then proceeded to catch the flu, which was why Paul was taking the MoonDream up for the first time. They couldn’t wait for Frank to get well enough to fly.

  So Patsy was on her first flight as a command pilot, with Greta Trazone as her copilot and Steve Evans as her flight engineer. In fact she was probably on the way back now. For a while they would be trading back and forth, with the MoonDream at the Hollow one day and Alexis the following day.

  When the MoonBeam came on line things were going to start getting a little chaotic. By then the heavy lift effort would almost be over and they’d be operating almost on demand though one ship would always be on the moon just in case.

  They’d had one accident so far on the moon; one of the second crew had managed to get his leg crushed out on the surface. The disaster system in the suit had saved his life and the Alexis had been there to get him home quickly enough that he wasn’t going to lose his leg. That had ironically happened the day the cell with the village infirmary had been delivered. Now there was a full time doctor at Luna Haven and one of the freight containers on the MoonDream’s deck was full of supplies for the infirmary.

  Paul had almost dug in his heels and had them load up a habitation cell but in the end he’d decided it was just as well to do a shakedown run. It was not that critical that they get another cell up since there was a considerable stockpile already. With the MoonDream on line they were going to stop doing the double cell lifts. The Alexis was already beginning to show the strain in fatiguing joints and sagging decking. It had probably been a bad idea from the first but it had moved the construction schedule up by a remarkable amount. They would have a functional community on the moon before the MoonBeam was flying.

  And that was good; one of the first residents of Luna Haven would be Cooper Paaly. The old physicist was frailer every time Paul saw him, though there was an amazing amount of energy and bounce in the old man. Paul enjoyed his all too brief visits with his irritating old friend and wished he could spend more time talking about the technology of the Paaly Effect. Some of the things Cooper had let slip indicated that he had a much better theoretical understanding of what was going on in the Stacks these days. Possibly the low gravity on the moon would give the old man’s system a chance to fight the disease that was stealing his life away little by little.