by David Smith
“NO YOU WON’T!!” yelled the Commodore “Those ……. those ……. savages ruined my beautiful station!! They’ll all be doing time in MY Brig!!”
“Absolutely, Commodore, but as Tiger has proving tests to complete, could I request that we delay judicial proceedings until completion of the tests?” asked Dave hopefully.
There was a distinct smirk on the Commodore’s face: “I don’t think so. They’re in the Brig and they’re staying there until I can personally find time to try each one of them.”
“But Commodore, that’s forty-three of my crew. We’re already short-handed, I can’t undertake the tests with a twenty percent crew-shortage.”
The smirk widened into a beaming smile “Well you should have thought of that before sending your crew on a demolition mission to MY space-station, shouldn’t you?”
“Commodore, I know we got off on the wrong foot, but there’s a lot at stake here……”
“I couldn’t agree more, which I why I’m making it a personal crusade of mine to make sure that your ship ends up in a breakers yard and your rabble are scattered far and wide so they can’t wreak this sort of havoc anywhere ever again! Good day, Commander, and good luck. You’re going to need it!” the Commodore chuckled.
Dave slunked out if the office to find Commander Chamberlain waiting for him outside. “Walk with me”, she said with the slightest of smiles.
They headed out into a corridor and turned back towards the Transporter Room. The Adjutant said “He’s completely within his rights to insist on holding your crew here and disciplining them himself.”
“I know, but he doesn’t have to. He’s doing it because he’s taken a dislike to us”, complained Dave.
“That’s as maybe, but there’s nothing you can do about it, he’s got you fair and square. I can temper his mission profiles, but I can tell you now, he’s really gunning for you. I’ve never known him set such extreme requirements. You’ve really rattled his cage” she said, shaking her head.
“Can you help us? Give us a few pointers?” he asked hopefully.
“Sorry Commander, I would if I could, but I can’t push it that far. Suffice to say, I’ll be doing what I can in the background.”
“He’s going to screw us over, isn’t he?” said Dave dejectedly.
“Hollins, the Commodore may not have read your mission reports but I have, and I know you won’t give up. If it means anything to you, your crew are already famous among the fleet. Everybody seems to know somebody who’s on the Tiger, and they’re all behind you. I’m sure you’ll find a way; from what I’ve seen so far, finding a way is what you do best.”
Chapter 7
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the range briefing for your first mission. I’m Commander Devon Chamberlain and I’ll be in the Mission Control Center over-seeing the exercise. The object of this briefing is to outline the nature of the test, define the success criteria and state any restrictions in place during the course of the mission.”
She paused and pressed a button on her pad. “These are the full mission details you can peruse at your leisure, but for the moment I’ll give you a brief run-through, and then try to answer any questions you have.”
“Today’s first mission is primary ship handling at sub-light velocities.” She pulled up an image on a large 3D holographic display in the centre of the briefing table. The display rotated slowly so everyone around the table could see the flight profile the ship would have to perform.
There were murmurs from many of the staff as they saw the flight path loop around one of the inner planets and then pass back through one of the asteroid belts that were such a feature of the star system.
Dave interjected "Commander Chamberlain, this can't be right! Tiger’s a heavy cruiser; surely you can't expect us to navigate a dense asteroid belt? That would be dangerous enough in a fighter or a scout. But a heavy cruiser?!?"
She shook her head. "You haven't heard the worst of it yet. There are three particular conditions for successfully completing this mission. One, you must complete the flight path without damaging the ship's hull. Two, you're not to use the ship’s navigational deflector to move asteroids out of the way. Three, and this is the really tricky one, you have to complete the mission in six hours or less."
The room erupted as everyone realised that this was right on the border of the ship’s capabilities. Tiger was a massive vessel and accelerating her and decelerating her took time. Precision manoeuvres through an asteroid belt would be impossible at the velocities the ship would need to reach to complete the trip in six hours. There would be absolutely no margin for error, and travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light in normal space, any collision would have dire consequences for the ship.
Catching Dave's eye amongst the cacophony, Chamberlain smiled "Don't look so worried. It's tough, but I hear your Helmsman is something special. You'll do just fine!"
When Chamberlain left, Dave continued the briefing with his team.
"Ok team, we've been given a tough task. What are our options?"
Crash and O'Mara looked at each other and Crash said "We've got an idea sir....."
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Commander Chamberlain accepted the call from Tiger and saw Dave's face appear on the small screen at her desk. "Good afternoon Commander Hollins, how may I help you?"
"Good afternoon Commander Chamberlain. I believe from our interpretation of Range regulations that in instances where the ship is at risk of physical damage, the ship's Senior Officers may request twenty-four hours extension to allow more detailed mission planning?"
Chamberlain sat back, instantly recognising that she was being hustled. "Well that is technically correct, yes."
“And that in cases of crew incapacity, a Captain may also request a further extension to enable re-allocation of man-power resources?”
“Commander, you’re crew aren’t incapacitated, they’re in the Brig. That’s not the same.”
“Actually, Commander Chamberlain, if you check the Station’s records, you’ll find that four of my crew are in the Station’s Sick-bay.”
“Yes Commander Hollins, being treated for injuries sustained in a brawl. As soon as they’re fit, they’ll be transferred to the Brig.”
“But they are, nonetheless, medically incapacitated …..”
“Ok Hollins. You got me. Now cut the crap and tell me what you’re angling for”, said Chamberlain, trying to hide a smile.
“I want to start the first test forty-two hours and twenty-six minutes later than scheduled.”
“Ok, Hollins, I’m going to say yes, but that’s purely to satisfy my own morbid curiosity. I don’t know what you’re playing at, but it had better be good. Chamberlain out.”
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Nearly two days later, Tiger's senior officers gathered on the Bridge ready for their first test.
“Ok Crash, you ready for this?” said Dave from the Captain’s chair.
“Walk in the park, sir!” the Helmsman replied, not sounding even remotely confident.
The ship’s clock pinged as it reached 0426 hours Arcturus Station time, and on the main view screen, a six hour countdown clock appeared and started ticking away.
“Hit it!” said Dave, and Crash fired up the drive systems. Tiger leapt forward, accelerating hard, and moved out of orbit.
Everybody on the Bridge was silent, and Dave could sense the tension in the air. “Ok team, you heard the man, it’s just a walk in the park. Stay focused, this is all about the timing.”
The tension eased a little, but it didn’t really lift until the mournful strains of Cassie Jones, 21st Century country and western super-star, squealed out of the Bridge speakers. There was a near universal groan: everyone except Crash hated country and western music, but Crash insisted that it helped him to concentrate. As Crash was key to the mission, Dave had given in, swallowed his pride and reached for his ear-plugs.
Swift under warp-drive, the T
iger was something of a pig in normal space. Newton’s laws still applied even in the twenty-third century and one hundred and eighty-eight thousand tonnes of mass took a lot of starting and stopping.
For the first hour of the mission Crash accelerated Tiger as hard as he could, increasing her velocity to a significant percentage of the speed of light. Relativistic effects began to become noticeable and the ships computer put up a second clock showing elapsed ships time which was progressing slightly slower than time aboard Arcturus Station.
The view-screen was set looking forward but the computer altered the image to reduce the glare from Arcturus Delta. At full brightness, the view would have blinded the Bridge crew, and they certainly would never have been able to spot Arcturus Delta Two, the tiny bare-rock world that was the marker of the far end of the flight path.
Crash adjusted Tiger’s course sending her slightly further away from the path projected at the mission briefing, but still within acceptable parameters.
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Back in the Mission Control Office, the Officer of the Watch noted the change and relayed the information to Commander Chamberlain’s desk. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, looked over the data and said quietly to herself “Ok, Hollins, let’s see what you’ve got!”
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On Tiger’s bridge, Lieutenant Dolplop’s electronically produced voice announced “Fifteen minutes to orbital intercept”, and another countdown clock appeared on the view-screen, clicking off seconds to that point on their flight path. Crash was watching the new countdown clock, all the time singing along to one of his favourite Cassie Jones songs, “There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Bourbon.”
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In mission control the Officer of the Watch sent another report to Commander Chamberlain’s desk. “They’ve missed the deceleration point Commander …. She’s heading towards AD2 far too fast. They’ll never get her around the planet on the trajectory needed to get them back to the station on time!”
Checking the data, Chamberlain frowned. She couldn’t believe Hollins would have made such a rookie’s mistake. What were they up to?
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Crash altered Tiger’s trajectory again and cut the reaction drive, using thrusters to bring her as close as he dared to the tiny planet’s airless surface. The view-screen’s magnification changed as the planet came closer, changing more and more rapidly as the distance closed.
Although tiny by planetary standards, AD2 still had a significant gravitational field, and it grasped at Tiger as she sped past, dragging her off her original trajectory and throwing her wildly out into the system. As Tiger was flung out, Crash powered up the drives again, accelerating Tiger further still, approaching ninety-five percent of the speed of light.
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Chamberlain watched the mission data flowing in. The Tiger was travelling at a massive velocity and could cover the total distance required by the test much faster than necessary, but was now wildly off-course, on a trajectory that was almost at a tangent to the course plotted during the mission briefing. What the hell were they playing at?
An hour later, she checked the navigation data and found they’d maintained course, still at break-neck speed but at an oblique angle that wasn’t getting them any nearer to Arcturus Station.
Just when she was about to write it off as a crazy, failed stunt, she saw Tiger’s velocity begin to drop as the ship approached the asteroid belt.
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O’Mara scanned the asteroid belt until she found what she was looking for. “Got it, bearing zero-zero-two by zero-zero-one point three: We’re almost spot on! Recalculating to correct for approach error ….. down-loading to Helm now.”
“Locked and loaded sir, adjusting velocity and heading” said Crash, confirming that he’d altered course and speed. Another clock appeared on the view-screen this time counting down to their intercept with the asteroid belt.
O’Mara was still scanning the asteroid belt ahead of them, her face a mask of concentration.
Dave took a deep breath: “Ok, team, this is where it gets a bit hairy.”
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“Commander, they’re going to hit the asteroid belt at 0.5C!” squeaked the Watch Officer.
Commander Chamberlain subconsciously gripped the arm of her chair. Half the speed of light?!?! What the hell was Hollins playing at? The asteroid belts around Arcturus Delta were exceptionally dense and at that velocity Tiger would never be able to manoeuvre around all the objects she was likely to find in her way. At this pace, they’d either have to use the navigational deflector to sweep a path, which would be an automatic failure of the test, or risk hitting something at that speed which would reduce the Tiger and her crew to their constituent atoms.
Had Hollins gone crazy?
She checked the orbital paths of the objects in the belt and was horrified to see that Tiger was on a direct collision course with the largest asteroid in the entire belt. Asteroid AD5-10117B wasn’t much smaller than the planet Tiger had recently passed, being over a thousand kilometers in diameter. It was so massive its own gravity had pulled it into a spherical form, just like planets did, and it had accumulated much of the surrounding debris ……
Crazy like a fox. Chamberlain suddenly understood what Hollins was up to.
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O’Mara sounded nervous. “It’s a biggy, two hundred meters across and massing around a hundred kilotonnes”
“Can we get past it?” Dave asked, looking nervously at the countdown clocks.
“Crash, ASBeau and I have practiced for this sir, I think we’re good.”
“Well at this velocity, if we get it wrong we’ll only have to worry about it for the last three nano-seconds of our lives. Ok team, crunch time.” Dave winced at his own poor choice of words and was glad his team was too pre-occupied to worry about it. “Let’s do this.”
“Aye sir!” came the resounding chorus, and Crash punched in the last course correction. This would take them within a kilometer of the giant asteroid AD5-10117B, whose gravity would alter their trajectory and take them back to Arcturus station.
The only problem with the cunning plan was that a smaller asteroid, AD5-102285H, was exactly on their flight-path.
Dave watched the view-screen, seeing the glows of ionization as the thin gas and dust of the asteroid belt was hit by Tiger’s deflector shields and pulverized into plasma. If they had missed anything in preparing for this moment, they would never have time to think about it, or regret it.
The clock counted down and down and everybody on the bridge watched nervously as the intercept point went from being minutes away, to tens of seconds, to single seconds.
Crash counted down “Five …. Four …. Three …. Two ….. One ….. Now!
The Science Officer opened all of the air-locks on the port side of the ship, explosively ejecting nearly a hundred tonnes of air and nudging the ship sideways. At the same time, the Tactical officer activated the ship's tractor beam, already locked onto the asteroid, in reverse, pushing it away from the ship.
There was a kick as the tractor grappled the asteroid and transferred some its inertia back through the beam to the Tiger. The ship's inertia dampers compensated within nano-seconds, but the huge transfer of momentum was still noticeable, shaking them all, hard.
It was all over in less than the blink of an eye, and Dave uncrossed his fingers, knowing that the simple act of being able to open his eyes meant they'd successfully negotiated the asteroid. If they'd got it wrong, one hundred and eighty-eight thousand tonnes of Tiger would have smashed into a hundred thousand tonnes of rocky asteroid at half the speed of light, instantly vapourising both.
Crash checked their course "Woohoo! Spot on sir! Heading and velocity are in accordance with Lieutenant-Commander O'Mara's calculations. We'll reach Arcturus station with over twenty minutes to spare!"
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<
br /> "Well I'll be damned!" said Commander Chamberlain softly. Most ships hit the brakes as they approached the belt and slowed to less than a tenth of light-speed to enable them to negotiate the asteroids safely. A ship the size of Tiger should have had to crawl slowly through the asteroid belt as she was so large, and thus, difficult to maneuver. The six hours allocated for the mission shouldn't have been enough for Tiger to cross the asteroid belt, let alone make a fly-past of AD2 and travel all the way back to the station.
Tiger's crew had banked on the gravity of the largest asteroid hoovering up the smaller debris, leaving a nice, clean hole in the asteroid belt they'd been able to negotiate at high speed. It was now clear that the forty-two hour delay before starting the mission was to allow the giant asteroid to drift into a position where they could reach it and use it to correct their course without having to decelerate ship so much they’d miss the mission deadline. Genius!
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“WHAT??? How the hell did that bloody ship complete the mission??” the Commodore spluttered, incandescent with rage.
Chamberlain knew the big smile on her face wasn’t improving the Commodore’s demeanour, but she really couldn’t help herself: Tiger’s unexpected solution for the mission was an astonishing piece of work.
“I’m sorry if you were expecting a different outcome sir, but as Mission Controller, I’m obliged to confirm that USS Tiger complied with all aspects of the mission’s requirements and completed said mission successfully. Better than successfully actually. No ship has ever beaten the time limit by twenty minutes before.”
The Commodore looked like he was about to explode, and she could hear his teeth grinding from her seat, a good five meters away from the little despot.
“Well they’ve won the first round, I’ll just have to be a little more inventive myself for the second mission” he growled, and dismissed his adjutant.
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When Tiger returned to her station astern of Arcturus Station, Chamberlain contacted Dave, “I’m impressed Commander Hollins. If I’m honest, when I gave you the spiel about having faith that you’d find a way, I wasn’t sure that you would. Your solution to a difficult problem was as unique as it was brilliant. Congratulations on a job well done.”