“Are we still stealing fighting forces?”
“We are. About a thousand a year. We included a lot of younger people in the last batch. We don’t need everyone to be a diplomat, and we have enough officers to command our ships. It’s now possible to train people who have not come from the armed forces. Let’s face it: lots of what we do is like a big video game. It’s been an interesting challenge for the Alliance. We talked to Emily about helping out since we don’t really understand the backgrounds of these young people, and she agreed, but she discovered that she didn’t understand them either.”
“And what’s become of her?”
“She’s 24 now and out on a ship somewhere. Angie mapped out a career path that has her starting at the bottom. She’ll have to prove herself as she works her way up. Arlynn and I try to sway that path as little as possible.”
“But you can’t completely avoid swaying it.”
“No, we can’t, but we’re told she doesn’t use our status to improve her own.”
“Think she’d like to do some exploring aboard a baseship?” Douglas asked with a twinkle in his eyes.
Chapter Thirty-one
Douglas welcomed Emily aboard his baseship, but knowing how important it was to her to make her own way, he quickly dismissed her to her duties. As a Terran officer, albeit a junior one, her assignment always put her in positions where she would ‘pull the trigger’ if necessary. Captain Lester put her in charge of several gun crews. Her duty area was directly aft of the bridge.
Though Douglas could not show her extra attention, Gertie could and did. She claimed a considerable amount of Emily’s off-duty time, inviting her into the physics lab to help her with projects. Emily had a good foundation in physics, but she needed more knowledge to really help Gertie. After proving to her lieutenant that her gun crews were up to par on their duties, he gave her permission to take two weeks out of her schedule to undergo a session with the teaching machine, something many crewmembers cycled through when time permitted.
Gertie was trying to fine-tune navigation accuracy for ships that were transiting hyperspace. Lessons learned during the first voyage had been learned well, including the fact that new discoveries aboard the baseship had improved performance. Douglas intended to continue the practice as long as it did not interfere with his mission. He brought extra fighter ships for that very purpose, and he assigned one to Gertie. Gertie’s work did not require a Smythe—the science had already been done. It was now a matter of fine-tuning systems through observation and experimentation rather than complex theories.
Her hope was to improve accuracy enough to allow ships to remain under StarDrive for longer periods of time. More time meant more speed, and speed was the issue. It quickly built up, reaching a point that the pilots could not trust their instincts. Any significant body in space—stars, clusters of stars, black holes, and even small bodies the size of planets—affected the ship’s path. Some effects could be corrected by steering, but only to a limited extent. A black hole could still suck them in, as could a star or a planet if they got too close.
Working with Gertie in her spare time, Emily received a solid foundation in the process. A pilot herself, Emily asked an innocent question. “Why don’t you let the computers show you a predicted course line like we do in the normal mode?”
“I’m not a pilot, Emily. What is the normal mode?”
In answer, Emily led Gertie to the scout and taught Gertie the rudiments of flying the ship under simulated conditions. Gertie instantly understood the value of the red line reaching ahead of the ship to its destination. It made total sense to her.
“Why haven’t we looked at this before?” she asked in some bewilderment.
Emily asked a question of her own. “Have you invited input from pilots?”
“Uh . . . Lieutenant Cass, but he returned to his unit right after he completed our initial experiments.”
“Uh-huh,” Emily said, nodding. “I’ll bet your engineers have been focused on pieces of the problem, not the whole problem. Even Nessaka, your chief scientist, isn’t a pilot. I have a feeling that the people on Ariall looking into this have brought pilots into the program by now. They’re probably ahead of you on this.”
Gertie frowned. “Maybe, and maybe not. The An’Atee are a wonderful people, but because of their long lives, they move slower than we who are new the LifeVirus. I’ve learned not to assume anything when it comes to them. In some cases, they’re incredibly brilliant. In others, they’re as dense as fenceposts.”
Gertie asked for Emily to be assigned to her full-time as a test pilot since she could not do the flying herself. Douglas interviewed her in-depth about her flying experience, which was considerable.
He looked at Emily from across his desk, concern etched on his face. “It’s your idea, Emily, and by rights you should be allowed to follow it through. We cannot, however, escape the fact that Greg is who he is. I cannot show favoritism. What’s the best course here?”
Emily sat ramrod straight in the chair before the desk as she answered. “The stock answer, sir, is that I will do whatever the Alliance needs me to do. If my assignment to this new position is not the right thing on those grounds, then I rescind my request. On a more personal level, the job really appeals, and I know I can help Gertie.”
“This transfer would remove you from Captain Lester’s crew and place you with the scientific staff. How does that affect your career path?”
“You know that Angie Tolland has helped me plan out that path?” When Douglas nodded, she continued. “Her advice to me was to stick to the plan until opportunity arose. When it does, go for it. I’d like to go for it, sir.”
“Very well. I’ll talk to Captain Lester and see if it works for him.” He looked sharply at her and added, “If we get into a fight, Captain Lester might need your trigger finger.”
Emily nodded with a grin. “Aye, sir.” She got new orders that very day. She missed the camaraderie of being a member of the baseship’s crew, but her horizons expanded significantly with her new assignment. No longer was she just responsible for guns. She would have the opportunity to learn the nuts and bolts of the latest star pilot’s bag of tools.
No simulator was yet in existence to practice with the new system. She worked with Gertie and the engineers to modify the simulator mode on a fighter that she could use to test ideas. While they hammered out plans, she and Gertie spent long hours with computers in the laboratory attempting to assign values to the views coming in through the sensors while in hyperspace. Nessaka and Smythe had designed rudimentary sensors, but they wanted precision here, not just generalities. They spent months reviewing recordings of actual flights undertaken by the baseship. From those recordings they subtracted the pilot’s inputs to the steering system to determine just exactly where the ship would have ended up had it not been capable of steering itself. Once they corrected the data for steering inputs, she and Gertie had to determine the value of each object pulling on the ship.
The work was incredibly tedious. Like most scientists, Emily found herself completely absorbed in the project. Gertie, aware of this syndrome but mature enough to avoid falling into it herself, kept a grandmotherly eye on Emily and forced her to stop work from time to time.
“You have a life outside the laboratory,” she chided. “Don’t miss out on that. You have to find a young man one of these days, you know.”
“Oh, Gertie, it’s not like it was for you and the admiral. I don’t want to get tied down. I have too many years ahead of me.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t have any fun.”
“True, but as an officer, I have restrictions on my personal life.”
“Not among the civilian crew. Em, this ship carries whole families of scientists, engineers, craftsmen, and farmers. Have you attended any parties, any dances?”
“I just got here!” Emily said in her own defense.
“Uh-huh. We’ve been underway for five months. How many social gatherings have
you attended?”
“I have work to do.”
“And part of that work, from this day forward, is to socialize. I don’t mean to preach, but your life is full of opportunity. If you allow your social skills to decline, you’ll never reach your full potential. Look at your parents, both sets of them. The majority of their waking hours are spent using social skills, so much so that they aren’t even aware they’re doing it. Do you know how to dance?”
“Yes.”
“How many young men have you danced with?” Gertie demanded.
“A few,” Emily said in a small voice.
“I get the picture. Let’s call up the social agenda for the ship. We’ll attend something this very night. And I mean something with a group of people who don’t know you.”
“You’re going?”
“Yes. I’ll drag Douglas along if you make me.”
Emily rolled her eyes. “Please don’t.”
“He’s a pretty good dancer, you know.” Gertie selected a dance at one of the farm communities.
“But, Gertie,” Emily complained, “everyone there will know everyone else, but we won’t know anyone.”
“Exactly. We’ll be the talk of the place.”
They went, and they had a great time. Emily made new friends, and she actually returned on her own from time to time. She had never spent time on a farm, and the young men were only too happy to let her help with the chores.
Chapter Thirty-two
Douglas was frustrated. They had been at it for six months and had no new leads. It was as if the Oort had stopped traveling between worlds. He surmised that they were just waiting on new ships, but that was pure speculation. In any case, he had to change the plan. He dispatched one scout to each of the systems they had previously studied, then he sat down with the scientists to pick a new area. When the scouts returned, both reported the same thing: activity in the systems had not changed, but there were only 23 empty fighters circling the rat world and only one new larger ship circling the world occupied by Oortmen. They also reported a cloaked prime ship from the Alliance monitoring each world.
Douglas gave up on the original plan and headed farther out to a new search area. The new area was in the same direction as the ships they had followed previously, but farther out. Gertie’s modifications to the scouts’ computers reached fruition at about the same time. It was time for Emily to start testing ideas. The scout remained in the hangar bay, but to her, simulated flight was no different than the real thing. She began with the same recordings they had worked on in the lab. She spent weeks in simulated hyperspace helping engineers work the bugs out of the system.
Then she brought the computed course line up on the display. The engineers watched carefully, both over her shoulder and through their own technical readouts as she made jump after jump. The process never bored her. Engineers did not hesitate to bring her systems down for adjustments, sometimes in the middle of a jump, causing her brief moments of terror until she remembered that she was really inside the baseship, not out in space.
After weeks of adjustments, the program progressed to her steering the ship by changing the shape of the field. When the engineers announced they were satisfied with the programming, Emily began experimenting. She had a test program to follow, and she followed it precisely, increasing the envelope of her experiments small step by small step, testing the steering limits of the ship by approaching closer and closer to stars. When she got so close that she could not pull away, the engineers knew the theoretical limit for how close they could approach that star. Many hundreds of jumps later, they determined quite precisely the theoretical limitations for stars of various intensities.
Emily’s work was done for a while. The engineers went back to their laboratories to translate the results into something a pilot could use.
When Emily next powered up the course line, she found that the engineers had created red areas to either side of her course line which depicted the limits of the ship’s maneuverability. As she approached a particular star, the red area toward the star expanded, showing her just exactly how close she could get.
She liked the system, but she was unhappy with the display. The red areas covered up information she, as a pilot, felt she needed, including the positions of other ships that might be in the area. She sent the engineers back to their drawing boards to clean up the presentation.
Following final tests, Douglas, Captain Danny Lester, and several pilots, including Cass Ayker, attended a demonstration of the system. Everyone tried their hand flying the ship with the new display, then Lester and his pilots sat down with the engineers to attempt to find holes in the display, holes that might get everyone killed. The system passed their tests.
Douglas ordered real-life testing. Provided the tests were successful, he would install the system on all his ships.
He did not take the time to thank Gertie and Emily, and Emily was a little put off. “Don’t worry, my dear,” Gertie said, taking her into a hug. “He’s got serious problems of his own. He’s quite preoccupied at the moment.”
“You’re right, and I’m sorry,” Emily announced. “I know the mission is not going as well as he hoped it would. Is there anything we can do to help?”
“I have another project in mind. I’d like to see if we can improve our view of hyperspace. I’m wondering if we can push the probes farther out to get a better view. Care to help?”
“That’s getting into deep theory, isn’t it?”
“If it was, I wouldn’t be the one to do it. No, it’s just more experimentation, though it will have to be done in the real world. There won’t be any simulation in this project. Unfortunately, it probably won’t help the mission. If things don’t improve, if they don’t get more sightings, they’re going to start investigating individual systems. The StarDrive won’t be much help in that, even if we improve it. He’ll have to do things the old-fashioned way, one step at a time. We’re talking about many years here.”
Emily dove into the new program, though it was more of an engineering program than a flight program. Initial flights would be unmanned since it was very possible the test ship would be destroyed.
Emily had an idea of her own, an idea that she developed into a secret project. It wasn’t a huge project, not in the scope of what had already been accomplished, but it excited her. She wanted to know just how close she could get to stars before close was too close. She went to work with the computers, transposing the positions of the stars she had approached in hyperspace to the positions those stars occupied in real space. Then she carefully built tables defining real distances in real space. The answers intrigued her. In many cases she had come close enough in hyperspace to skirt the outer orbits of planets.
She went back to the simulator to run another grueling series of tests with one question in mind. During the project, they had concentrated on high speed passes of the star systems, getting closer and closer until the system sucked them in. What if she dropped out of hyper farther from the star, then started up again and inched her way closer? The speed of the ship would not be as high. Did that give it more maneuverability or did it give the ship less maneuverability in relation to the star’s pulling effect?
She knew that whatever results she came up with, they would only be theoretical, based on the pulling values of stars she and Gertie had worked out. Those values were accurate enough for fly-bys, but they might not be accurate enough for her purposes.
They did not have actual recordings of jumps close to any stars, nor did they have any recordings of planets, at least none that she knew of, because no one had been foolish enough to jump close enough to a system to care about the planets.
Despite that, she went to work, all of the work done in her free time. Gertie, sensitive to her adopted granddaughter, knew she was working on something and that Emily would share the project with her when she reached a point that she needed help. She still pulled Emily to social activities, but she backed off on the frequency of her dema
nds.
By now, setting up jumps was child’s play to Emily. She made many hundreds of jumps to test her theory with different stars, and she discovered that she could, indeed, operate closer to a star if she was going slower. In fact, she got so much closer that she questioned her results. She knew that the results were simulation and might not be completely accurate, but she believed they were reasonably close to real world values.
Taking the study one step further, she worked her way as close as she could to various stars, dropped from hyper, then reactivated the StarDrive inside the system. The effort proved a disaster unless she was pointed away from the star to begin with, but she believed the problem arose not from the ship’s inability to steer but from its inability to make a small enough jump. The StarDrive system had been designed from the outset to navigate between the stars, not close to stars. The jump computer and its clock could not be dialed down far enough to permit tiny jumps. She needed more refinements.
But first she wanted to know what effect planets would have on the jumps. She spent two weeks coming up with very approximate values of the pulling effect of planets, fairly wild guesses in reality, and she inserted those values into the computer on the test ship, assigning random orbits to the planets.
She made hundreds of more jumps from above the plane of the ecliptic where it was slightly easier for the computer to manipulate the data and come up with a red course line. She would pick a planet, any planet, and attempt to get close to it. A few of her attempts worked, but most failed. She was back to the same problem: she needed shorter jumps.
The ship passed its first anniversary of the mission. By now she was on a first-name basis with a number of engineers. She approached a woman by the name of Orma who had worked on the earlier test program. When she explained what she needed, Orma assured her that clocks, or timers, were not a problem. They had clocks capable of working in nanoseconds, even femtoseconds if necessary, and the StarDrive computer could be programmed to accept those inputs, but it would require rigorous testing when they were done. The ship would be out of commission during the installation and testing, and it could not be returned to flight status until it was returned to its original configuration and tested all over again. Orma would be happy to do the work, but she needed authorization to put the ship out of commission for the time she needed.
Genesis Page 33