Yuri and Rue followed the rules, though. They stepped the shuttle's speed down by exact stages, slowly bringing her into FTL Station's orbit and maneuvering alongside with vernier thrusters.
Breakthrough Unlimited's FTL Station was a home away from home. It had grown from an ungainly cluster of interconnected life-support pods to a large artificial habitat able to house more than a hundred people. For nearly a year after that first failed Prototype, the survivors hadn't done much but rehash the accident, finding the mistakes. When they had decided what had gone wrong, they had gone back to work, and part of the new plan called for beefing up FTL Station to provide better flight support. They had fulfilled the goal, and then some.
The shuttle warped in close, and boarding tunnels attached. Brenna felt proud of that slick efficiency showing in all operations. FTL Station was no competition for a gigantic facility like Goddard or Kirkwood, of course. But it served Breakthrough Unlimited very well. Like all man-made constructs in high vacuum, it looked strange to those unused to free fall. There were bulbous projections, thousands of antenna feelers and dishes bristling from every angle, and tunnels snaking between the free-floating sections. It was lovely to a Spacer, though.
Interim reports were coming in from the second section shuttle, now well on its way out to the little satellite at the "completed hop" point. Right on schedule. They would arrive in time to set up and be ready, as observers if nothing else, when the test began and Morgan and the first team took the Prototype through the light-speed barrier and jumped out to the backup satellite—and beyond! Adele Zyto and Joe Habich were far enough along their journey now so that a communications lag was beginning to show up, long pauses interrupting each exchange while the voices and images crossed the lengthening distance between FTL Station and the second section shuttle.
At FTL Station, the first team and the Chase ship pilots went into intense simulator refresher courses. The Chase pilots were like understudies, supporting the stars but inwardly half hoping that they would get a chance to step on stage themselves and handle the main ship. No such luck! Morgan, Tumaini, and Rue were in peak condition, primed for the big event.
Day Five.
The pool newshunters arrived and settled in for the buildup and the test. ComLink sent Ife Enegu herself. She was God-dard-raised and thoroughly at home in a space habitat like this. TeleCom sent lesser rankers. The gypsy newshunters weren't a problem here. They couldn't afford the passage to high ecliptic. TeleCom and some of the independent pool reporters were mildly abrasive, but that was part of the pilots' fitness preparation. It kept them alert.
Day Four, and counting. Nerves already taut drew still tighter as the day of the test loomed.
Dr. Helen Ives, chief of FTL Station's medical department, put the pilots through their paces, showing no mercy. She and her assistants did this for the pilots' own sakes. Med Staff had to certify that each test pilot was in top form, or he or she wouldn't take the ride—even if that person flunked was Brenna or Morgan, the co-owners of Breakthrough Unlimited. The possibility of rejection gave everyone nightmares. But at least medications were available to cure those. The pilots wondered if they could will themselves into A-One clearances. If desire alone could do it, they would.
"Close your eyes. Open your mouth wide, Rue..."
"Tumaini, touch the calibrator with your fingertips..."
"Make a fist, McKelvey. You, too, Saunder..."
"Hector, step up on the gravity treader..."
"Run in place, Yuri..."
"Inhale! Exhale, Shoje..."
The psych tests were worse, pushing the pilots' tempers to the edges.
"Why did you react to that question with such hostility...?"
"Do you often notice these sensations when you're under stress...?"
"What are you thinking about when you look at this sketch...?"
Day Three, and counting.
Another media session was on the schedule. Smile and look confident.
There was a dichotomy to the entire relationship between Breakthrough Unlimited's pilots and the working media. On one hand, the pilots looked down on these camera-toting questioners as outsiders, not part of the exclusive breed to which they themselves belonged. Yet there wasn't any pilot, privacy-seeking Brenna Saunder or shy Yuri Nicholaiev not excepted, who wasn't actually aware of the power media wielded. That was adulation, at the other end of those inane questions and constant demands to pose for holo-mode recordings. And it was future wealth and fame. The pilots wanted both, when they were honest enough to admit that to one another. The exclusive club status and the fame could only be achieved if these newshunters spread their names and images throughout the Solar System.
"What are your personal feelings as you prepare for this historic event?"
"We're ready." It didn't matter who had said that. As it happened, it was Morgan, first pilot for Prototype II.
"Does it worry you at all that the first attempt, three years ago, failed?"
The question no one should ask. Bad luck. Bad form.
"We'd be fools if we didn't take that previous test into account," Tumaini Beno responded. "But this is a new design. All the bugs are out now."
They radiated confidence, soaking up the occasional covetous or envious glance from the newshunters and their support crew.
Day Two. The reporters were out of their hair. But that didn't seem to help. Now the last push was coming up, and the time every pilot dreaded most—the go-or-no-go decisions from the people paid to oversee their physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
The pilots went through rigorous final-stage simulation testing. They rode exact mock-ups of Test and Chase craft. Time after time Brenna and the others went through their paces, as they had been doing now, in some cases, for nearly five years. Readouts duplicated those they would see during the actual run. At random points, the program fed in flaws, testing the pilots' reflexes. Emergency situation. Think fast! Counter!
Power loss. Meteor impact. Life-support-systems failure. Think! React! Build brain pathway alternates. Speed up the natural processes to their limits. No time must be wasted if that one-in-ten-million impossibility occurred and they had to use these training procedures.
Some of the psych staffers had debated whether there was such a thing as too much emergency stress training. Boredom might set in. Majority overruled them. Safety regs would apply. Full testing schedule. Blood and urine samples. Lung capacity. Stamina. Neural exchange potentials. Emotional profiles. The pilots were honed and checked as their machines were honed and checked.
No one flunked. The backup pilots, who had gone through all the testing agonies, tried not to look too disappointed. Next time, they insisted, they would be the ones taking the ride.
Dr. Ives induced one long, final, dream-laden sleep session to get rid of lingering unconscious foul-ups that might spoil concentration.
Day One. The waiting, the testing, the anticipation, were over.
There was a brief bon voyage celebration in FTL Station's main control room. Out at the hangars, visible on remote scans, the support crews' parties were going on, too. Reporters horned in, grabbing a few last opportunities to rub elbows with these elite people. From now on, they would be watching—as would the support crew and backup pilots—from a distance, out of the real action.
"We're ready on our relays," Ife Enegu, spokeswoman for the media pool, said. "Right through on our satellite feeds to Mars and Earth."
Brenna grinned. "Just be sure to get our names spelled right in the printouts, huh? Big, fat letters." That was good for a tension-releasing round of laughter. There was a short, noisy argument about how each participant wanted to be listed in the annals. A joke. The media already had complete bios on everyone, including George Li and Dr. Helen Ives and the other non-pilot team members. The names would be spelled right. The important thing was the date, and the newshunters already had that noted. April 28, 2075, would rank right up there with July 20, 1969.
The pil
ots started their adventure, heading for Suitup, good wishes ringing in their ears.
Programs, rolling.
The med staffers' dream therapy had worked. They felt the supreme confidence they needed, not cocky, but keenly alert. Brenna was acutely conscious of every sensation—the soft spacesuit inner liner, the cool rush of bottled air over the cilia in her nostrils, the way the light gleamed on the ready room's walls, and a sweet aftertaste from the non-alcoholic syntha wine she had drunk during the celebration in Main Control.
Computers checked the human support crews' work. Cleared for departure. The pilots cycled the air locks and rode the mini-skidder over to the hangars. Brenna barely noticed the shifts in gravity as they left the skids and climbed aboard their ships. The days of hyperendors, gravity compensation medications, and super-nutriments had done a splendid job, fine-tuning biology.
The prep tests took another hour and a half, just to be sure. Maintenance craft flitted around the three test ships—Prototype II and Chase One and Chase Two. Plug-ins. Making sure observation stations and drone camera deployments were secure. Morgan, Tumaini, and Rue were busy in Prototype II. Brenna and Yuri Nicholaiev, in Chase One, and Hector Obregon and Shoje Nagata in Chase Two, had their own extremely heavy schedules to complete before launch.
Waiting. The simulator rooms all over again, the tension growing. This was different, though. No drill. No more drills at all! After today, there would be little need for simulator training, except for the flood of new recruit pilots they'd get.
Remote monitors showed the three ships floating in space within the hangar. Chase One and Two appeared to be copies of Prototype II. Right now, antenna and thruster ports were open on all three ships. That would change, once the test point was reached. By modern standards, these ships looked weird-sleek and spheroid and capable of buttoning up totally so that nothing interrupted the hull. There had never been a ship quite like Prototype II,. not even its ill-fated predecessor.
"Central, George Li, Flight Control. Five minutes..."
"We read you, Control." That came through on three channels—Morgan's, then Brenna's, then Hector's.
"All circuits go."
"We copy, George. We are go. Beginning recording sequence," Yuri noted.
Tumaini and Nagata repeated that. Rue Polk added, "All on-board observation systems are green..."
"Confirm, Prototype II."
"Power systems are green," Tumaini said. "We are ready, little sisters."
Time ticked away. George Li was saying, "Twenty seconds. Bring us a souvenir from Jupiter's orbit."
Morgan's grin lit up the screens, even from behind his protective helmet faceplate. "Will do! Will do!" His enthusiasm overrode the distortions of the audio. Brenna returned his smile, staring into the screen linking her with the main ship. She held up a thumb.
"Here we go. Follow my lead, Brenna, Hector...!"
Zero. Programs aligned. Thrusters fired simultaneously. The three ships eased out of the hangar, dropping clear. Brenna's hands were everywhere as she monitored the computers and screens. She and Yuri voice-cued and absorbed, as the other pilots were doing.
They "fell" a kilometer from FTL Station before they fired their big engines. This was an incredible kick in the pants, an exciting one. They left the Station like meteors outward bound from the Sun, accelerating.
Programs rippled across the screens. The computers did most of the work. But Brenna and the others weren't passengers by a long shot.
Economy didn't matter. This was what they had been saving the fuel for. The three ships were open wide—on conventional power systems—rushing to reach test-point start.
Dr. Ives and an emergency medical team had ridden out ahead of them and were already on station. The rescue squad wasn't allowed to get too close to the test-run area, because of the unknown energies involved in graviton spin resonance drive. If the worst happened and Prototype II and the Chase ships were disabled, someone had to be within rescue distance. Brenna smiled at the thought, her newfound assurance buoying her. No rescue teams would be needed, either here or at the "completed hop" point out beyond the asteroids!
Signals fed back to FTL Station, data for George Li, audio and computer compatible beams compressing, carrying the information on to Mars from there.
"Hope we're bombing through," Brenna commented in a rare moment when she had the leisure to chat. Yuri's expression, on the monitor, was quizzical. She couldn't see him directly; he was behind a safety bulkhead on the other side of the cockpit. "Dian will chew me out if she doesn't get a full copy for Saunder Enterprises' archives," Brenna explained. The thought caused a pang. Dian was halfway to Earth by now, heading in the opposite direction, running away from her daughter's historic journey to the edge of new frontiers.
Suddenly Morgan's face appeared beside Yuri's on the screen. "I heard that. So will Aunt Dian, when the signal catches up with her."
"Then let's give her and Dad a good show..."
"Two minutes to 'hop' point."
They had gone through this many times before, when unmanned FTL vehicles had rushed toward this point and "disappeared" when the graviton spin resonance field engaged. On the last few tests, Breakthrough Unlimited had saved money by not posting anyone out at the second section "completed hop" point—where Adele Zyto and Joe Habich and the standby emergency medical and rescue personnel were waiting right now. It seemed as if the standby teams had rehearsed enough to be ready for this test, and it was cheaper to send someone out to fetch the unmanned probe in case it didn't function properly and return. But today, humans would be aboard the FTL ship, a full-sized craft, not a scaled-down test model. Graviton spin resonance would hurtle them forward at fourteen times the speed of light, retracing the unmanned test vehicles' infinity-ripping path. Jumping to Jovian orbit in minutes, not days!
The three ships were on ballistic courses. Chase One and Two stood off thirty kilometers, sending out their close-up drone cameras. They would all hit peak acceleration, for civilian-available ships. The only spacecraft that could surpass them in the Solar System were a few military vehicles and Quol-Bez's Vahnaj ship.
Images of Quol-Bez's gray face flashed in Brenna's mind. That didn't distract her but became part of her focus. The Vahnaj. A highly intelligent alien species, star rovers, far ahead of Homo sapiens in technology.
For now. And now that was going to change.
Trajectories set. Computers marking off the seconds. Three ships plunging through the void. Nothing in their way for millions and millions of kilometers.
"Stress high nominal," Hector said. "All systems steady."
They were too far out from FTL Station now. Chase One and Two assumed backup monitoring because the signals from George Li would take precious fractions of seconds to travel to them, even at the speed of light.
"Prototype II is now shutting her ports," Yuri added. "All antennae are fully retracted. Signal drop is as expected. We are receiving adequately."
"We're at the top of the gauge," Brenna said. As fast as she could push her ship.
But not as fast as Morgan could go!
Jealousy and affectionate pride warred within her. If it couldn't be Brenna Saunder, let it be Morgan McKelvey. All in the family. Yet...
If only that damned coin had fallen the other way!
Readings jumped astonishingly as Morgan engaged the graviton spin resonance drive. His ship was about to become a 4000-metric-ton missile, ripping the fabric of space-time. The barrier field between the hulls was shimmering.
A last image, Morgan, raising his hands, cradling an unseen treasure. Holding all of space within his grasp.
Brenna swallowed a painful lump stuck in her throat. Morgan or her. It didn't matter. We're Saunders. And Saunders are the best!
"Take her, Morgan, out to the stars!"
Morgan's image vanished. A flood of computer data continued to pour in from Prototype II. The human eye couldn't take it all in, but the comps told Brenna what she needed to know.
"Chase One and Two, we are go for pseudo-speed hop." Rue Polk. Tests had shown her clear soprano penetrated the audio interference better than a man's voice would.
On Brenna's screen, Rue's announcement showed a vertical graph line. Power off the scale. "Optimum resonance in twenty seconds," Brenna whispered.
"Normal time: 1704," Yuri said. "Ten seconds to pulse."
Morgan would be saying the same thing to Prototype II's recorders.
Monitor graphs were green smears. Readouts refused to believe the incoming data. Not possible. Not in space as mankind had traveled it, until now.
Time hit zero.
The stars. Waiting...
The screens!
The vertical lines that had lanced upward were falling, tearing up into jagged, ugly squiggles. Static crashed in Brenna's headphones. Green bled to red, all across the boards. Alarms shrieked, jolting nerve endings raw.
Not Rue's voice, this time. Morgan's. Roaring frantically.
"Mayday! Field instability! Overload! We have overload and hull collapse! We are losing life-support...!"
Tumaini Beno was yelling in Mwera, his African heritage overriding his impeccable English, stark evidence of the disaster seizing him and his fellow pilots.
A high-pitched scream pierced Brenna's brain through her audio receivers. "Fire!" Morgan was crying. "We have fire!
God! Hang on, Rue! I'm here! I'll get you out ... Tumaini! Watch out...!"
The Affiliation of the Rift native came back to basic com language, shouting desperately, "Mayday! Chase ships-Mayday!"
Explosion! Somewhere off to Brenna's left, thirty kilometers away, the gallant effort was over before it ever began. The beautiful Prototype was being burned, a sleet of radiation pouring out of her and over the Chase craft paralleling her course. Hard stuff, but already gone.
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