Confidence Game

by Britt Ringel

  Truesworth scratched his chin and mused, “Not a bad idea but it’s too slow. We’re traveling at one tenth the speed of light. That’s not an insignificant speed. By the time Zanshin’s sensors get a reading, the computer interprets the reading and presents the reading to us, and then we interpret the presentation and then input a course correction, not to mention that Zanshin then has to fire her thrusters and wait for physics to move the ship in the right direction… Sure, we’ll hit the center but we’ll sail right past it. We’re simply not going to be able to react fast enough to maintain a consistent, straight line course down the center.” He lapsed into silence but finally growled, “I hate to be a killjoy but we need something better. We need a straight course line to follow if we want Zanshin to pierce the tunnel point.”

  Lochlain wagged a finger at him. “You’re right, so let’s figure out a way to create a straight line in tunnel space.” He brought his hand to his mouth and tapped his teeth with his index finger in thought.

  “A line is just two connected points in space, right?” Brooke asked rhetorically.

  Lingenfelter and Naslund nodded impatiently.

  “So, we create two reference points,” Lochlain mumbled to himself. “But how…” His jaw dropped open in epiphany. “We can use the lifepod’s beacon!”

  Brooke beamed at him.

  “How?” Naslund asked.

  Lochlain pressed a finger back to the “X” on Lingenfelter’s datapad. “When we hit the final radiation band, we center ourselves as best as we can and then eject the lifepod. Its distress beacon is strong and will ping far longer than the eighteen hours we’ll need.”

  “But,” Lingenfelter interjected as she shook her head, “won’t the lifepod just drift with us at point-one-C?”

  “Yes,” Brooke answered excitedly, “but not if we fire the pod’s thrusters to bring it to relative rest.” She playfully punched Lochlain in the arm. “We can even use the thrusters to better position it in the center once it’s at relative rest.”

  Lochlain rubbed his arm but grinned. “That’s our first reference point. How do we make a second?”

  “The shuttle?” Lingenfelter suggested.

  Both Lochlain and Brooke answered, “No.”

  “It’s an F-class shuttle, Elease. The beacon isn’t nearly strong enough,” Naslund explained. “Those shuttles aren’t meant for deep space. They’re just built to travel back and forth from low orbit.”

  “I know a way to make it work,” Truesworth stated confidently. His head bobbed as he looked at Brooke. “We’ll use Zanshin’s beacon on the shuttle.”

  She took a light step back as her eyebrows stitched together. “Can that be done? Can a freighter beacon be installed into a shuttle?”

  Truesworth’s smile twisted devilishly. “I have some experience installing non-standard beacons into freighters.”

  “Such as?” Brooke pressed with narrowed eyes.

  “IFFs.”

  “What’s that?” Naslund and Lingenfelter asked in concert.

  Brooke answered for Truesworth. “Identify, Friend or Foe. It’s a military identity beacon, sort of.”

  The sensorman nodded in confirmation. “Fundamentally, that’s what it is. It’s a bit more than that because it receives and interprets but at its heart, it’s a beacon that broadcasts a coded signal to allied ships so everyone knows they’re friendly.” He tugged lightly at the collar of his shipsuit. “I, uh, installed an IFF from a Brevic destroyer into a freighter that’s not too different from Zanshin, actually.”

  “But not on its shuttle,” Brooke clarified. “That’s a different animal. That’s going to take some major improvisation.”

  Truesworth’s head tilted in acknowledgment but his grin remained. “You’ll be amazed at how resourceful I become when my life is on the line.”

  Lochlain tapped a finger on the island’s countertop. “We deck officers need to get to work on this immediately. We’ll bring Mercer and Casper in when we need their support but, for now, I want them to continue work on keeping Zanshin’s systems alive.” He looked at his crew. “We’re rapidly running out of time. We have the theoretical answers but we need working solutions before we hit the final leg. That gives us twenty hours to math out problems and accomplish the physical work required.” He tapped his chest. “I can make the necessary modifications to the lifepod. It already has a remote protocol built in so that rescue ships can dock with it in the event the crew is unresponsive. We’ll eject it right at the third radiation band. That way, we can use it not only as our first reference point but also to help mark the starting line of the final leg.” His hand flittered between Brooke and Truesworth. “The shuttle is less of a priority because we won’t need it as soon as the lifepod. However, once we’ve got everything else settled, I want Mercer helping Jack to tear out our beacon and install it on the shuttle. Elease and I can cover his shift.”

  Brooke waved him off. “Have Casper help Jack. He’s got a better handle on shipboard transmission devices than me.” To her left, Naslund beamed proudly at the endorsement.

  “Is this really going to work?” Lingenfelter asked.

  “There’s real potential,” Lochlain promised. “A million things can go wrong but this gives us genuine hope.”

  “Speaking of things that can go wrong,” Brooke interjected, “the degradation to the power core shield got worse over the last three hours.”

  The morning after the initial discovery, Lochlain and Brooke had informed the others about Zanshin’s failing power core shield at the next round of anti-rad. The reduction had stabilized for many hours before dropping again precipitously.

  “Where are we at with it?” Lochlain asked.

  “It’s down to eighty-nine percent,” she replied, “but that’s not going to last. Right now, I estimate the power core will be able to run at only sixty-seven percent of maximum based on the average rate of decline.”

  “We need at least eighty-five percent to generate a tunnel effect,” Naslund observed.

  Lingenfelter folded her arms over her chest angrily. “So we’re going to engineer a way to navigate to the tunnel point only to not have enough power to turn on our tunnel drive? That seems colossally unfair.”

  “Technically, we have the power,” Brooke quibbled. “What we can’t do is deliver the power fast enough to the tunnel drive to trigger it. It’s really the difference between specific energy and specific power.”

  Lingenfelter batted blue eyes at Brooke. “Mercer, I was barely smart enough to become a navigator,” she teased.

  The engineer laughed. “We have enough specific energy. That’s the amount of energy stored in our fuel cells. The nebula isn’t affecting those levels. Our problem is with specific power. That’s the speed at which the energy can be discharged.” Her hand ran an imaginary circle of Zanshin’s power loop as she explained, “Energy stored in the fuel cells runs to the power core. Through a reaction, the power core turns that potential energy state into a realized energy state and then sends it out to the ship’s systems. The problem we’re going to have is that we can’t switch those states fast enough to deliver the burst of power the tunnel drive needs to generate a tunnel effect.” She frowned and dropped her hand. “At least not without the containment field becoming overwhelmed and, well… exploding.”

  Lingenfelter frowned with her. “Can’t you just wave your hands and somehow keep the core shield together for the few seconds we have to overtax it?” She churned her hands as she searched for an idea. “Can’t you overload the thingamabob to bypass the doohickey to save the day?”

  Brooke rolled her eyes. “If this were a privateer holovid, sure—”

  Truesworth interjected with a winning smile, “I actually did that once in a skirmish a couple years ago.”

  “But I can’t do it in real life in a real ship inside the Izari Nebula,” Brooke finished over him.

  “But you do have a real solution,” Lingenfelter predicted optimistically.

  Brook
e flashed white teeth. “Of course I do. I’m a brilliant engineer.” She wrapped an arm around Naslund’s shoulders. “Casper and I are working on building a supercapacitor.”

  “Not just a normal capacitor,” Lochlain quipped, “but a super one.” He placed a hand to his chest and boasted, “It was my suggestion that they make it a super one.”

  Brooke mimicked Lingenfelter from seconds ago and crossed her arms in indignation. “Sweetheart, I know you think that joke is funny but there really is a difference between the two.”

  “Only to an engineer,” he volleyed back.

  “At any rate,” she continued while admonishing her captain with a stern headshake, “we’re building an EDLC, a double-layer capacitor.”

  “What’s that and how does it help us?” Lingenfelter asked.

  “A supercapacitor is sort of like a battery in that you can charge it up,” Brooke oversimplified. “But instead of a steady stream of energy being released from it, a supercapacitor gives up its energy in one, big burst. It’s exactly what we need.” She had held a similar conversation with Lochlain twelve hours ago. “My workaround calls for us to build a supercapacitor, charge it up while we sail down the tunnel and then discharge it in conjunction with the power core to meet the power level required by the tunnel drive.”

  “What materials are you using?” Truesworth asked. “Graphene for the electrodes? Do you have a fabricator down in Engineering? What’s your solvent for the aqueous solution?”

  Lingenfelter stared at him in muted surprise.

  The Brevic dipped a shoulder and gave her a sly grin. “I’m a sensorman. We’re way smarter than navigators.” He unsuccessfully ducked the empty anti-rad bag thrown at him.

  “We have a small fabricator built into the work bench behind the main engineering console,” Naslund answered. “We’ve been running it continuously to make enough graphene. Unfortunately, we just lost some of our profits on the thirty-nine drums of sodium perchlorate sitting in the crew’s hold. We can dissolve that into ordinary water to serve as the electrolyte. Of course we’ll still have to wrap it and devise a container but—”

  “So, problem solved?” Lingenfelter interrupted the engineer’s to-do list.

  “Well,” Brooke mulled, “we have to build it, patch it into the power core, patch it into the tunnel drive and then charge it but, yeah, the problem should be solved.”

  Chapter 39

  Head throbbing, Lochlain lugged a tool case up the subdeck’s stairwell. He had spent the better part of three hours inside the 3.2-meter sphere that was Zanshin’s lifepod. The tiny craft, built to accommodate six crewmembers, seemed to have barely room for one. While performing the pod’s start-up and systems inspection, Lochlain had banged his head four times inside the circular coffin packed to overflowing with life support displays, thruster controls, a communications console and seating for the freighter’s theoretical maximum crew complement.

  As On Margin’s first officer, he had been responsible for ensuring the large freighter complied with the safety regulations in every territory it traveled. However, until this afternoon, he had never stepped foot inside such a cramped lifepod before. The notion that six people could survive a fortnight in such restricted quarters seemed highly contrary to his experience over the last hours.

  He reached the lower deck and fought the urge to retreat to the comfort of his bed. The crew’s duty schedule had been tossed out the airlock. Truesworth and Lingenfelter were working relentlessly to devise a procedure to find the tunnel’s centerline relying solely upon sensor readings and the radiation intensities listed on the navigation charts. The successful dive required this dubious technique to be paired with knowing where along that line Zanshin resided. He trudged up the next flight of stairs.

  It was late afternoon, 17:05. Zanshin was sailing into her seventy-ninth hour of the 100-hour trip and there was an overwhelming amount of work remaining. The entire crew had toiled for the last nineteen hours. Sleep was a limited extravagance stolen during brief interludes. In fifty-five minutes, Lochlain’s crew would assemble, again, in the ship’s mess for another round of anti-rad. He had set the evening rendezvous as his deadline for completing the lifepod’s modifications and hoped that his deck officers would have the new navigation protocol finalized as well.

  Lochlain turned out of the stairwell and walked down the main deck to the ship’s storeroom. He bumped the access panel with an elbow to activate it but the mechanism failed to open the door. With a long sigh, he placed the heavy tool case onto the deck and worked the small, manual crank to open the malfunctioning portal. A minute of furious cranking later, the portal cracked open just enough to allow him to pass through. He lifted the heavy case once again with a groan and squeezed into the storeroom.

  Brooke and Naslund were even busier than Zanshin’s deck officers. The hangar’s containment field had failed again and both engineers worked feverishly to replace the delicate sensors inside the generator. While those repairs were underway, the ship’s fabricator in Engineering worked continuously to produce its quota of graphene for the supercapacitor. Brooke’s timetable for its construction was slipping as Zanshin’s failing systems demanded more and more of her attention. She calculated that the capacitor would require at least twelve hours to charge once built. The math was as simple as it was brutal. Either the supercapacitor was completed in the next nine hours or the ship would never leave tunnel space. These numbers bolstered the argument that there be no higher priority for Zanshin’s engineers. The hangar’s containment field apparently felt differently.

  Lochlain stacked the tool case onto a shelf and left the room. He debated cranking the portal closed but decided it was better to leave it open. Unburdened with the 30-kilogram kit, he moved up the stairs to the top deck quickly. He could hear Lingenfelter’s soprano before he reached the chartroom.

  “You’ve got to be faster, Jack. I need a lot more notice if you expect me to trim the ship before we sail off center.”

  Truesworth’s response was clipped. “I’m trying, Elease. I’m not getting consistent readings from the sensor suite and it’s forcing me to analyze half a dozen factors to interpret a meaning. It’s not like the roentgens and becquerels are changing at a constant rate.”

  Lochlain entered the bridge. His officers did not notice his appearance.

  Lingenfelter stretched long, slender arms above her and then reflexively covered a yawn. “Let’s run it again. We didn’t even get close that time.” She pivoted on her chair while waiting for Truesworth to reset the simulation and her eyebrows shot upward when she spied Lochlain. “Oh! Hi, Captain. Jack and I think we have the methodology figured out. We’re just working on its timing now… it’s a bit tricky.”

  “I heard,” Lochlain answered as he collapsed into the captain’s chair. He lifted his aching head and glanced at the ship’s status panel. A disconcerting amount of the screen was yellow and red. “The lifepod checked out and will accept our piloting instructions.”

  “Well, that’s something,” Truesworth stated flatly. He continued to work the controls on his sensor panel and announced, “The simulation is up again, Elease. Ready for another go?”

  “Is there anything I can help with?” Lochlain asked quickly before the exercise commenced.

  Truesworth turned slowly. The man wore dark circles under his eyes. Next to him, Lingenfelter’s ponytail was a frayed mess with loose strands flowing down her neck. Her own dark circles contrasted severely against the pale blue of her eyes and light complexion.

  “Not really, Captain,” Truesworth replied after measured consideration. “We figured you’d be busy working the lifepod so we created a technique that only requires the two of us.”

  Lochlain pushed wearily off his chair to stand. “Then I’m going to bed. We have a little under an hour before we all have to duck down to the kitchen for anti-rad. After that, I want both of you to get ninety minutes of sleep but be back on the bridge at 19:30. That will give us a half hour before we
hit the third radiation band and do this for real.” He forced himself to wait until both crewmembers nodded.

  Less than two minutes later, he was snoring loudly inside his bedroom.

  * * *

  Lingenfelter slapped down another empty anti-rad bag. “Only seven more times!” she announced triumphantly. Her hand hovered around a full glass of water.

  “You drinking it?” Brooke asked with a grin. One of her fingers glided around the rim of her own glass.

  Lingenfelter felt the cool moisture collecting outside her glass as she considered the game of Medicine Chicken they were playing. Finally, the Svean’s hand snatched it up. “Yeah, it still tastes awful.”

  Lochlain rubbed his eyes. “What a horrible way to wake up.” He looked blearily at Brooke. “Where are we with the hangar containment field?”

  “Close,” she promised. “I’ve got another twenty minutes of solo work. Casper is already back on supercapacitor duty.”

  “What’s its status?”

  Naslund ran a hand through his mussed hair. Most of it was sticking up at various angles. “The fabricator finally finished the graphene. It’s working on a lining now. I have the containers ready and I’m in the middle of fastening the electrodes. We still need to patch it into the power system but I’m afraid to do that without Mercer’s support.”

  “Will it be finished in time to get it charged up?”

  “So long as Mercer helps me, it will,” the engineer projected. “But we can’t keep stopping to repair Zanshin. These delays are killing us.”

  “The hangar’s containment field is kind of important,” Brooke snapped irritably. “With the stairwell’s location and ladder cutout on the hangar floor, if that containment field doesn’t work when we open the hangar doors, we’ll suck out the atmosphere not only in the hangar but in all of Engineering.”

  “What a stupid design,” Naslund criticized.