by S. Walker
Jamet felt like she'd pass out. "I- see." Abruptly she was on her feet without any memory of standing up. "I think... I'd like to get ready. By your leave, sir."
"Of course." He pointed at her glass, abandoned on the table. "Would you like to take that with you?"
She glanced down. Thought carefully for all of a second about regulations, reports and commendations. Then grabbed the glass and took the entire contents in one long, burning swallow. Fuck it.
Wheezing and coughing, she headed for the hatch, her room and (hopefully) an entire sleep cycles' worth of frantic refresher courses.
Captain Siers watched her stagger out, smiling faintly.
Chapter 6
Three Course Reals
Lieutenant Reals spent the next five hours on the bridge killing everyone in horrible ways.
It turns out the Kipper did indeed have simulation programs for manual navigation. They were quite recently loaded, in fact; something she was deeply suspicious about considering the extensive modifications the ship was operating with. Standard cruisers came with a bevy of instructional programs on every system from the recyclers on up to Weapons systems, but that was standard cruisers. Even then manual control of singularities didn't rate highly enough to be casually available from the digital library. That was a specialty.
But for the Kipper, with no less than three separate singularities? Not to mention wildly non-standard reactor reconfigurations and sensor upgrades? Not likely. Someone custom made these simulators.
Which was good.
But that also raised the specter of someone outside the current crew both knowing enough about the ship to create simulators while simultaneously never breathing a word of its existence. That implied a conspiracy of some sort, one with incredible funding but perfect secrecy at the same time.
Which was alarming.
Unfortunately while Jamet had the ability to fully simulate controlling ship movements what she didn't have was a setup to replicate doing so. For that it was either use the actual Bridge or do nothing at all. Which meant storming the Bridge directly after her meeting with Captain Siers, sinuses still on fire with whisky and a frantic resolve in her heart.
For as wildly customized as the CES Kipper was the control center ended up being, thankfully, mostly unmodified. A reinforced hatch dumped her directly into a half-moon command deck with individual workstations spread at regular intervals like spokes of a wheel. From left to right each ship system had individual seating, with custom local gravity and secondary harness supports to keep technicians in place. The controls themselves were console-style at waist level, but wrapped around with large, easily-punched indicators for maximum panic use. The captain's area sat slightly elevated, overseeing each section with a clear line of sight to their consoles.
Every bulkhead doubled as a work surface for the station in front of it, exterior views and overlays merging into a panoramic, two-hundred-seventy degree sweep of visible space. Which wasn't much to look at for the moment: All three singularities were currently directly in front of the bow, yanking the Kipper through space at speeds only possible by riding an event horizon. Any sensor pointed that way just stared straight into an abyss-- nothing came through. Likewise looking sideways or down showed nothing but bizarre light smears as the ship either outraced light from nearby stars or bent it into pretzels coming around the black holes' event horizons.
Jamet looked for the co-CEO workstation and found it, diagonally offset from the captain's and slightly below. Although she would have known it immediately even without looking-- someone had helpfully taken the time to program each console with a giant banner that said "IMPOSSIBLE". Someone else, and she didn't have to think hard about who, had lined through the original banner and printed "PRINCESS" beneath.
"Of all the irreverent, stupid, fiscally blind, insubordinate..." Jamet stomped to the workstation, unlocking and registering her ID while wiping the display at the same time. A minute later the manual navigation simulator was loaded and she got to work dredging up decade-old memories from the Academy. Jamet thought she remembered most of what was involved, honestly. Aside from the first month or so every single exam had come back with exemplary score. Even her instructors universally praised her near-intuitive grasp of the dynamic forces involved. "Shouldn't be hard, just brush up a little. Oil some rusty skills. Easy."
Her first dozen manual navigations ripped the ship apart in unique, bizarrely different ways. Kipper solemnly recommended against trying maneuvers without a certified expert present.
Which was when Jamet started to suspect two separate, but important truths. The first was that her instructors may not have been nearly as proficient as they let on. After all no one practiced manual navigation any more. The second truth was something she already knew, but hadn't seriously considered:
Manual Navigation classes were graded on a curve.
Jamet watched yet again as the simulated Kipper catastrophically lost most of its stern as she spun two singularities at once, tidal forces suddenly working at ninety degree angles to snap the hull like a twig. Abstract crew members and cargo spun wildly into the void, screaming death or vomiting bright gold coins (Corporate wasn't shy about letting you know how much money mistakes cost). "This," she flopped back into the work station's shock padding. "Is going to be awful."
She turned out to be something of a prophet.
Over the next two hours Jamet rediscovered the basics from the Academy introduction courses. There were really only two facets that governed controlling ship direction with artificial singularities, although both of them had disastrously bad consequences when misapplied.
The first was angle-- wherever she put the black hole was the direction it pulled the Kipper. With multiple singularities she could either group them together (to increase speed in one direction) or separate them slightly to pull the ship into a turn that exactly equaled the average distance between gravitonic forces. That was where warships shined: A hauler had only one singularity to work with, ponderously aiming itself in long, slow accelerations or gradual turns and stops. Kipper had three black holes, fully independent-- she could accelerate using only one or two while using the extras to pull through hard turns. Or, as it turned out, pull most of the ship through a turn, leaving a third behind.
More simulated coins blasted through space at a high percentage of lightspeed.
The other facet was distance. Kipper's monstrous Krepsfield Engine could project all three singularities at huge distances reaching up to a thousand miles from the ship itself. Or she could adjust them closer, although safety systems wouldn't let her put the singularities close enough to touch the hull directly to an event horizon itself-- a good thing, considering how often she cracked the ship in half. Distance made a huge difference in multiple ways, although primarily it was about how hard and fast the singularities would alter Kipper's course: At maximum distance the effect was significantly weaker, gradually applying change over time. Putting all three right at minimum safe distance made the ship skitter like mercury on a cold deck, jittering impossibly fast until the hull came apart.
Faceless, screaming crew flew across simulated space in flailing death throes.
Jamet facepalmed, groaning horribly. "I can't do this." Then, less than five seconds later: "I have to do this. Goddammit." There was nothing else: If this was the skillset that brought her aboard then this was what she'd master. The alternative was a lifetime of indebted worker status and she'd rather embrace vacuum.
She got back to murdering everyone aboard.
It took hours, but the motions and habits eventually came back. She rediscovered using her hands to control the singularities, palms hovering over an outline of the ship and fingers slide-tapping the black holes into position. Left hand for pitch, up and down. Right hand for yaw going left to right. Roll was a combination of both, spinning singularities around the ship to pull it in spirals around a midpoint. Adjusting distances magnified effects.
After thirty minutes o
f steering the ship through empty simulated space without annihilating the Kipper Jamet started to feel more confident. "Alright, I've got this. I can do it." The program was even giving her complimentary scores and an eighty percent chance at living through most maneuvers. The simulation began helpfully recommending beginner courses in hard-body navigation, moving the ship around stationary objects. Jamet jumped into the offerings, confidence high and enthusiastic.
The Kipper ran into and exploded a mock orbital launch station.
The system helpfully added a hundred billion credit's worth of damage to her already impressively negative score. Jamet pounded both hands on the console, raging. "Fuck me, you lousy, stupid, ancient piece of superstitious navigational bullshit!" She got up, angrily paced a circle around the bridge and sat back down. "Fine. Fine. Let's do that again."
Teeth gritted, she plowed through stationary object simulations. Literally. She lost forty or fifty pixelated Kipper substitutes along the way to an endlessly creative series of explosions and soundless fragmentation. After the first few dozen she stopped counting; after the first hundred Jamet searched for and angrily disabled the running monetary total. "Thanks, no thanks. That isn't helping."
Three hours and two caf breaks later-- which involved hurriedly running back and forth to the dirty break room while praying not to encounter anyone-- Jamet thought she had it under control. Ship movement, stationary navigation, even a little relative maneuvering where both the Kipper and her target were independently navigating. She hadn't killed everyone in at least thirty minutes; the last two crashes hadn't even been a complete loss.
There was still the advanced course on navigating around multiple moving bodies at once but she was running on empty at this point and skipped it. Both eyes were sandbags of grit and she'd reached the point of tiredness where exposed skin was starting to tingle. It could wait: That wasn't likely to ever come up.
Closing her console, Jamet was very careful not to leave anything on screen to do with her all-night practice before leaning against the wall and stumbling to her quarters. There was barely enough time for a uniform change and shower before she had to be right back on the Bridge again. Grabbing the last of her clean uniforms she hauled it down to the refresher, dumping the despair- and rage-scented clothes in the recycler as she went.
A cold shower, some soap and vicious amounts of angry scrubbing banished the tingle out of her skin and brought her marginally back to life. Two mugs of caf, as strong as the machine could make it, brought her barely into the land of the living. Everything else would have to wait, although Jamet made it a point to clip her awards in place and pull her hair back into a severe bun. She couldn't do anything about bloodshot eyes, but hopefully enough confidence would cover over the cracks in her professionalism.
Which lasted all of five seconds after walking back into the Bridge.
Emilia Rounds took one look at her from the Communications workstation and burst into high pitched laughter. "You look more battered than fifty-year-old cargo decks! Rough night, Princess?"
Paul glanced over one thin shoulder (he was her height, even seated), eyed the dark sandbags weighing down Jamet's face and snorted. "Do you need a stimulant to get through transition, lieutenant? I can prescribe several." His console was already open and set up, Medical and Environmental subsystems arranged neatly.
Janson just waved from Engineering, beard molded around an easygoing grin. Two thick fingers gave her the barest salute. "Morning, ma'am."
Lieutenant Jamet addressed Janson first, chin lofted to haughty degrees. "Engineer. Good morning, always a pleasure." She transferred a low-wattage death glare towards Communications and Medical. "Technician. Doctor. I wish I could say the same for you."
Emilia opened her mouth, visor flashing and eyebrows slanted. Fortunately before she could say whatever was on her mind the hatch opened, admitting Captain Siers. He took one look at his first lieutenant squared off with an irate Comm technician and waved them both down. "Professionals, at ease."
It wasn't until he said it that Jamet realized she'd instinctively come to attention. Which was infuriating because absolutely no one else even acknowledged the captain taking the Bridge. At all. She took her seat at the same time he did, angrily bringing the console back to life and throwing status icons across her workspace. A moment later she was buckled in with redundant restraints and bringing up Corporate-standard procedures for transiting into inhabited systems.
Jamet was halfway through the fifty item checklist, passing concurrency checks to the other crew systems for validation when her tired brain registered the silence on the Bridge. She looked up.
Everyone was staring back at her with varying degrees of amusement (Janson, Siers) to outright hostility (Emilia and Paul). "What?"
"You can skip the checklist, lieutenant." Siers gave her a knowing smile. "Old habits, I'm guessing?"
"It's regulations, capt-" she growled, then took a deep breath and tried to ignore Emilia's snicker. "I would prefer following the checklist if it's all the same to you, sir."
Paul took a turn. "The checklist systems are automated, lieutenant. They are made for a crew that does not exist, and most of the list we can do through chip-linked systems."
"Eh, leave the LT alone. No 'arm in it, after all." Janson made for a good peacekeeper-- no one had the heart to attack him directly. "Anyways, dun we have somethin' else to do about now? Cap'n, we're 'bout five minutes out."
Siers nodded once, eyeing Jamet as she returned to the checklist, fingers tapping and ears burning. "We do. Alright crew, everyone's had the entire transit to take a look at our next stop. Who's going to share an interesting fact about Pilster-3?" He pointed at Janson. "Engineers first, go ahead."
"It's a double asteroid belt, got two of 'em in system. Small one 'bout four astronomical units from the primary, another one at seven AU out." He demonstrated using both big hands. "Only two planets, though, both gas giants playing hopscotch 'tween the rocky bands at two, five and eight AU out. No moons. Survey team thinks everything got crushed a coupla billion solar units back and the rubble made belts." He finished with a pleased sound and a couple taps on his workspace.
"Boo, too easy!" Emilia threw something-- literally threw an unsecured object on the bridge, Jamet had to resist an urge to order her to quarters immediately. "I got a better one: Pilster is named after a mistress. Big time Upper Management type trying to suck up to a Board member, came way out here on the edge of Corporate space. Sunk enough startup capital into the system to make it the Next Big Thing, named it after his sweetheart and then lost his shirt when interests went a different direction. Sucker."
Captain Siers laughed. "Did you make that up?"
"Would I ever do that?" She grinned. Lieutenant Jamet deliberately did not glare, keeping her attention on going down checklist items. It didn't matter that most of them were things like 'announce arrival to all crew members'; it was procedure that mattered, damn it.
"You absolutely would," Siers confirmed. "Especially if it made an Exec look bad." He waved towards the Medical station. "Paul, what do you have? Best fact gets extra allowance during layover."
"Hey, no fair! I would have tried harder if you told us that!"
"Hush, Emilia. Paul?"
The lanky Doctor rested an elbow comfortably on his console. "Pilster-3 is a rare earth mining system. Two habitation rings over gas giants with Corporate gravity siphons in the middle. Purpose-made singularity engines pull liquid gas out of the atmosphere, run it through processing and extract the expensive bits." He punched a button, throwing a schematic on-screen to demonstrate. It looked exactly like a metal donut built around a boxy processing facility, thick strands of colored atmo streaming through the middle. Paul aimed a triumphant look at Communications. "Beat that."
Captain Siers laughed. "Looks like you've got it, Paul. Remind me when we transit in to get you a line of cred-"
"Pilster-3 was founded seventy six years ago by Farrier Davis Mockler, for his the
n-fiancée Sarah Pilster, who he married two years later." Jamet realized how bitter she sounded about that; it was a bit of information that hit sour notes for her personally. "He's an Exec in Upper now. Star is main sequence, billions of years left on it. Population is around eight million, split between both facilities, mostly indentured or indebted contract labor. Proles." She ignored Emilia's hot glare. "Major exports are exotic compounds and some metallic extraction from asteroid mining, although most of that is repurposed for infrastructure in-system. Imports are heavy on foodstuffs and replacement workers."