Shock Diamonds
Page 6
A moment later Wilson barreled onto the flight deck wearing khaki green flight pants and a gray sweat shirt. He squeezed into the engineering station behind Danica and began buckling up.
I looked back. “Glad you could make it.”
He glanced up with a shoulder harness in his hands. “Oh, don’t get me started.”
The radio squelched on. “Griffin, Departure Control. Expect clearance at 10:25.”
“Griffin copies.”
R.J. said, “Hey, you guys didn’t conduct the passenger briefing.”
Danica looked at me with a smirk. I turned back to the two of them. “Passengers will remain seated and buckled in until everything in the cabin is floating. Okay?”
R.J. raised an eyebrow. Wilson looked at R.J. and began nodding. “Yeah, yeah, nothing could make me happier.”
Danica transferred gravity repulse to active and brought the stellar drives up to idle. The familiar deep hum swelled in the cabin, accompanied by the dull vibration of an impatient spacecraft ready to fly, but still harnessed to the corral. We sat there within the cone of power, expecting a breathtaking ride into space, a lifting that is never routine and too starkly awesome to ever be less than exhilarating.
The radio squelched on. “Griffin, Departure control, you are cleared to the 50 and hover.”
“Cleared to the 50 and hover, thank-you sir.”
Danica eased the GR control forward and we left the ground with a sway and a slight turn. The walls of the hangar on our left scrolled downward as we gently lifted. More white and yellow line markings on the apron tarmac below came into view in the lower windows. By the fifty-foot mark, she had stabilized our orientation to north. I quietly ran down my checklist, then nodded to her. “It’s all good.”
“Departure Control, The Griffin is holding at 50. Ready ascent.”
“Griffin, cleared for orbital insertion. Contact OTC on 543.7 alpha bravo.”
“Cleared for OI, contact OTC, thank-you again. Griffin out.”
Generally speaking, Danica is a hot shot. Anyone who does not know her well would think she is reckless. Her standard procedures are nearly always embellished with either style or aerodynamic decoration. She drops of out light speeds often too close to the objective. She keeps her speeds at the edge of the maximum allowed. She would probably make her ascents to orbit in the inverted except she would consider it gauche. Fortunately, those of us strapped into the flight deck knew what to expect.
Today it was the ground-facing ascent. She brought the stellar drives in too briskly. It kicked the back end of the spacecraft slightly higher than the nose giving all of us a diving view of the ground as the gravity repulse carried us upward. At the same time, the OMS engines compressed us in our seats in a maximum forward acceleration. Had there been passengers in the back, they would have likely believed we were crashing. Any one of us could have offered a disparaging remark, but we chose to remain silent, cloaked in male pride. Danica giggled over the intercom as we rose.
The brief sandy green terrain of the Space Center peninsula quickly fell behind, leaving ocean whitecaps to mark our increasing speed. At Danica’s radical downward angle, the vision of sea grew larger and larger, yet farther and farther below, as though we were looking down at an ocean-covered world. When at last she nosed the spacecraft up, the Earth’s horizon was in full view, Africa a mere few hundred miles ahead.
I keyed my mike. “OTC, Griffin leaving FL250.”
“Griffin, cleared for insertion.”
“Cleared for insertion, Griffin out.”
We climbed toward the horizon line until the Earth became the big blue and white ball turning below us. The standard procedure is to park on orbit around 300 to 350 miles so that if problems are discovered you are close enough to reach the One-World Space Station for assistance. I put 317 in the flight plan, a much less-used corridor. Our nav certification was good for another twelve months and our panels were all green, so docking at the OWSS was an unlikely requirement.
Danica called in. “OTC, Griffin has achieved orbit.”
“Griffin, please advise in advance of departure.”
“Griffin copies.”
R.J. unstrapped and floated forward between us. “Coffee, tea, cigarettes?”
I looked behind in time to see Wilson’s butt gliding along through the air toward the habitat module. “If you’re serious, I’ll take a coffee, R.J. It’s a long damn on-orbit checklist.”
“And you, my good Captain?”
“Nothing for me, R.J.,” replied Danica.
He pushed off and disappeared behind.
I pulled out the checklist tablet, called up "On-orbit," and we spent the next orbit meticulously going through all systems. Griffin was humming like a finely made watch. The final step on the checklist was a visual inspection of the aft service compartment. As I began to unbuckle, Danica said, “You want me to go back and do it?”
“He who occupies the left seat gets stuck strapped in.”
“Looks like a typhoon forming down there south of Japan.”
“One of a month’s worth of events we’ll be missing out on, milady.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way, dear sir.”
“I’ll be quick and get back here so you can freshen up in the ladies' room.”
“I haven’t heard any gagging back there. Maybe the bathrooms will still be pristine.”
“Wilson’s got a cast iron stomach. R.J. seems to have learned zero-G. I think we’re okay on this trip.”
“I’m really looking forward to pointing the Griffin’s nose away from Earth, Adrian.”
“Something on Earth bothering you, Dan?”
The question seemed to catch her off guard. She looked away and then back, her normal steely-eyed stare slightly off. “Just the need for speed, that’s all, my friend.”
“Yeah, with you on that. I think we all are. Be right back.” I pushed away and pulled myself past the engineering stations and through the forward airlock. R.J. and Wilson had deployed the conference table and lounge seats. They were wearing their mag-flight suits, seated at the table, craning their necks to look out the portals they’d opened. I paused to gaze out one of the side windows near them. An abundance of broken cloud cover obscured most of the ocean below.
Wilson sat with a smug look on his face. His big upper body made the magnetic seat look overstuffed. It made me laugh to myself at the thought that extra magnetic energy was probably being generated by the seat to keep him in it. His short brown hair was slightly receding but seemed to be holding out. Hazel-red eyes stared back at me ready to deploy or receive any form of humor available. Wilson is a well-loved character by all except jerks of the vain-strain. They tend to see his compassion as a way to demonstrate their command over individuals of greater stature than they. The problem is, Wilson transforms from teddy bear to grizzly bear too late for those particular idiots to be saved. When the confrontation is all but too engaged, Wilson generally tries to defuse the situation with the phrase, “Now I don’t want any trouble.” It is a diplomatic technique taught him by some altered-reality psychologist, and serves only to alert Wilson’s friends nearby that the situation has gone too far, and all hell is about to break loose.
Not surprisingly, all women love Wilson, be it the soft lines in the tanned face, or the deep, endearing looks when a woman gets too close. And, strangely enough, on those occasions in which the brawl transformation turns him into the green-faced, roaring Hulk, afterward they seem to love him even more.
I left the two of them to their Earth-gazing. A strong pull on a kitchen cabinet allowed me to coast through the sleeper sections, gym, and science lab. In the aft airlock, I pulled myself upright and punched in my access code to the service crawlway pressure door. As it hissed open, I pulled in and glided along the removable grated floor panels, looking for any signs of trouble in the maze of conduits, black boxes, and cable runs that fill the very rear section of the Griffin. The accessway is barely large enough for my hu
lk to fit through, and is even more of a challenge for Wilson. As I made my way to the back bulkhead, I thought there was a faint burn smell in the air, but after pausing a moment, decided it was only staleness.
Back in the habitat section, R.J. and Wilson were still floating at the windows.
“You’d better get strapped in, ladies. Aft checks look good. We’ll be breaking orbit as soon as we come around.”
They looked back as I glided by. On the flight deck, I slid down into my seat and smiled at Danica.
“We’re ready for high orbit and breakaway at your discretion, Ms. Donoro.”
“Aye, aye, Commander. Stellar drives are balanced. There should be no surprise time maladies.”
“God, don’t even say that.”
“Yeah, it’s a bitch to return to Earth and find you’re one hundred years in the future and can’t go back.”
Chapter 5
Traveling from one solar system to another is a mathematician’s worst nightmare. It is an undertaking which cannot be done without the aid of computers. Charting space is not an exercise in simply documenting what objects are where. It is the recording of all objects, the direction and speed they are traveling in, smaller objects enslaved within their gravity field, and the composition and forecast of the condition of each solar body over time. It is not enough just to know if an object will fall within your flight path on any given trip, you must also know if that object is breaking up, susceptible to the influence of bodies around it, or gradually dividing itself into multiple dangers over time. Add to these complexities the gravity wells of everything along the way which affect the time and space you are traveling in, and dozens of various kinds of radiation bursts permeating that same space in your path.
So, for any given flight plan, you sit at home and log onto the agency’s navigation and plotting system, and begin negotiating with it for the place you wish to go and the time period in which you wish to leave. Actually, it will give you a time and coordinates for a departure to anywhere, at any time. But if it is not such a good time to leave, or is a difficult place to go, the system might come back with one hundred stopping points for course changes. If you give the agency’s system enough leeway, it will make a gazillion computations for you and come back with the best time and orbital position to make the jump in which the least number of flight interruptions will be needed. On this particular trip, we had a flight path straight through, with the condition that our ship’s flight director computer did not detect any variations in debris from a large comet along the way. That monumental plotting task having been achieved, the last obstacle comes when you download your approved flight plan to the spacecraft. You sit back and wait, and hope that your navigation, autopilot, and flight director systems agree with the path prescribed. There is always a long sigh of relief when the data is accepted.
So when you bring the nose of the spacecraft around for the jump to light, everyone on board has been very, very careful to have all their eggs in a row to avoid any problems at the hard-fast jump schedule time. There are a long few moments of breath-holding when the jump command is turned over to the sequencer computer, the non-negotiating machine that checks each step and each piece of equipment, before allowing those stellar drive engines to pump out their special kind of light thrust. And when the moment hits, and you are pressed back into your jump seat as the inertia dampeners hurry to catch up, the first breath everyone usually takes is used to let out a cry of delight.
After our transition into beings of light, we settled into a very pleasant journey among friends, passing through curtains of space too profound to describe. We grew tired of calling each other to look, or being called back to look some more. Traveling as light creates a very strange viewing effect. You hang weightless looking out a portal for an hour and space outside does not change. You leave for a while, come back and look again, and the blanket of galaxy is suddenly completely different. It’s as though stage hands snuck in while you were gone and dropped a new canvas, the next act for the puny audience in the little bubble of light in the ocean of darkness.
Danica and I agreed on six-hour shifts. Because this was charted space, it was acceptable for Wilson or R.J. to monitor in the right seat while the pilot on duty took short breaks. Five days into the flight, we all remained quite giddy about being underway. I sat, mag-locked in my seat at the conference table, sipping a beer and talking to Wilson while R.J. sat alongside, hammering away at a mini-laptop.
Wilson kept looking over at me with a touch of uneasiness. “What’s goin’ on, Wilson?”
“Adrian, since you asked, I need a favor.”
“Name it, ol' buddy.”
“Would you send a note back to Jeannie explaining how important it was that I come along on this flight and thanking her for sparing me for a few weeks?”
“Isn’t it about time you filled us in on this need to be elsewhere, Wilson?”
“Adrian, I just needed some time away, that’s all.”
“Time away from what or who?”
“I suppose you’re not gonna let this just rest.”
“Hey, what are friends for?”
“Well, if you gotta know, it’s not her, it’s me.”
R.J. looked up for a moment. “Oh, boy, how many times have I heard that one?”
“We know it’s you, Wilson. After all, we’re your buddies. Which part of you is the problem?”
“That’s just it, Adrian. There ain’t no problem. Every time I get this far with a woman, they always wind up handin’ me the ring back. This one don’t seem like she’s gonna.”
“So you think you love her?”
“Yep."
“So you asked her to marry you.”
“Yep.”
“She said yes.”
“Yep.”
“You gave her an engagement ring to make it official.”
“Yep.”
“Now you’re patiently waiting for her to back out and give you the ring back.”
“That’s the way it’s supposed to work, Adrian.”
R.J. looked up once more. “Tsk, tsk.”
“Actually, I think the way it’s supposed to work now is that the two of you set a date and get married.”
“Ya mean permanently?”
“Well, when exactly were you hoping she’d leave you?”
“Oh, I don’t want that.”
“You don’t?”
“You’re saying I want to be married to her, then?”
“May be.”
“So you’ll send the note?”
“Of course, along with my congratulations.”
“Wow. I may not have thought this all the way through.”
“Yeah, but even so, maybe you accidentally did the right thing.”
Wilson pushed out of his seat and floated to the kitchen.
R.J. spoke without looking up. “The man is the consummate contradiction of logic.”
“Well, look at you.”
“Look at me what?”
“The president of people against technology spending hours tapping at a new mini-laptop. Don’t you see the hypocrisy there?”
“Oh no you don’t. I am forcibly effecting art into a representative symbol of technology. Just the opposite of succumbing to it.”
“Effecting art? I don’t get it.”
“Look at this.” R.J. pushed the mini to the edge of the magnetic table, tapped a key, and a life-sized image of Plato suddenly materialized in the middle of the room.
“It’s a sculpting program. I can’t bring a hunk of marble along on this trip, but I can sculpt all I want with this. I can create and enhance down to the pores of the skin, and it’s 4-D so I can control the light within the image to alter its aura. In fact, I can program movement and speech into the image, and accurate phonetics is incorporated into the movements of the face. This one’s just at the level one stage because I’m just getting started. It will have color and detail and personality when I’m done.”
“That’
s one hell of a hologram emitter on that little machine.”
“The latest quantum-laser array. When I finish with this particular image, I will link it to an A.I. program based on the Socratic Dialogues and other writings from the time, and sit and have conversations with Plato himself.”
“Where did you find this thing, R.J.?”
“The science has been around for a while. Just recently it was compacted down to a real user package. I can also plug my finished product into any high-definition 4-D printer, and create a solid statue or replica of my designs.”
“Boy, I can think of a dozen ways this will cause chaos in the average household.”
“Like what?”
“Teen wants to sneak out of the house. Programs his image to be working at his desk, and whoosh, out the window he goes. Parents look in on him, happy to see him working away.”
“Parental supervision required.”
“It could provide an alibi for crooks or unfaithful spouses, or devious individuals like you or I, among others.”
“I suppose.”
As we sat staring at R.J.’s rotating image of Plato, a beeper sounded on one of the engineering stations, an alert for incoming message. We pushed out of our seats and floated over to the station.
Standby
Standby
Standby
Incoming Transmission
Office of the Global Space Initiative
Bernard Porre, Senior Advisor
Commander Tarn,
Your flight profile received and recorded. Profile ID# 1603 1700 7039. Destination Enuro service port approved. Ap # XX4792ZZ
This transmission also confirms and authorizes all crew appointments as previously submitted by you. Crew Roster recorded at Z5099CC
May I say Commander, it is quite a feather in your cap, so to speak, that those aboard are still willing to fly with you even after all the tilting at windmills on your last quest, a crusade so aptly supported by your trusted squire Mr. Smith, that somehow, against all odds, unexpectedly yielded satisfactory results.