by Randal Sloan
The park was an engineering marvel made possible only because of the gravity plates. The spot where Juliette liked to visit was just on the other side of the winding stream that was fed from a small waterfall. She would sometimes paint the rainbow that radiated out from the waterfall. The little stream eventually flowed into a small lake where many of the park patrons would gather to picnic, rest, and relax. From her vantage point, Juliette could listen to the sound of the water in the stream while she painted. She would sometimes paint the people and their antics. One of the features of the park was a large number of trees and other plants, a good amount of which were surrounding her little spot, and so she had a lot of privacy where she was located.
In a move that surprised everyone, Space Tech had added a number of earth animals and birds that lived there due to the need to give the park a balanced ecology. The whole area was kept sealed by using a field surrounding it that kept the animals in but allowed the people to pass through by recognizing their AI identity code which they all had to use on the station. So sometimes Juliette would paint the birds or on a rare occasion an animal that she would be able to spy on. She had a great painting of a raccoon playing in the stream.
But on this day, none of that appealed to Juliette. She was restless and started down the small steps that led from the little platform to the ground so she could try to get closer to a new subject. She was on the last step when she realized she had two eyes staring at her. Or more specifically, staring at the remnant of the sandwich she had been snacking on. She stopped moving and concentrating on her eyes, she activated her super vision so that she would be able to see what was behind the eyes looking at her. In total surprise, she realized it was a Space Cat.
Space Tech had not deliberately brought cats onto the station, but apparently when the rest of the animals had been brought up for the park, the cats had stowed away. Only a few people had even seen one of them, but someone had started calling them “Space Cats” and it had stuck. She had never expected to see one, but this one was apparently right here in front of her. She quickly blinked her eyes to let the cat know she wasn’t trying to stare it down and slowly she reached down with the sandwich to lay it on the ground.
The cat didn’t move for a very long time, but finally it crept forward, carefully grabbing a piece of meat out of the sandwich while watching to be sure she didn’t move. When she stayed absolutely still, it began to eat, keeping its eyes on her the whole time. He was a beautiful solid white color and he looked to be only a few months old. Juliette had to wonder if he was getting enough to eat because he looked rather thin. When the cat had eaten all the meat out of the sandwich, he looked at Juliette to see if she might have more. When she didn’t move, he slowly crept away back into the trees, still keeping his eyes on her. By concentrating on her vision Juliette was again able to see the cat and follow it to a small cubbyhole in the wall of the park module. He was obviously living there.
Juliette was thrilled. This one appeared to be still between kitten and cat, and while he hadn’t been exactly friendly, he hadn’t been spitting and hissing either. All the others that had seen a Space Cat had said they were very unfriendly. She figured this one was less so since even though he was wild, he was still very young. She was determined to come back and see if she could coax him out a little further. She also decided that she would keep this her little secret.
The next day Juliette came back earlier in the day. She was able to see the cat again and he had let her give him another treat, this time a much bigger portion. He was still very, very cautious, but she didn’t make any attempt to do anything other than give him the food. And he did come out a little farther.
For the next several days, Juliette continued to visit the cat daily, and gradually he became more and more accepting of her. She was ecstatic the day he rubbed against her and climbed into her lap. She sat there holding him and listening to him purr softly and realized she was smitten with him. That led to thoughts about how she might keep him. She knew that was going to be trouble.
CHAPTER THREE
Fly Girl, Fly
The ship was finally ready. Juliette and the others had to wait through the whole day of class. Juliette could barely pay attention. Fortunately for her, her nanites gave her perfect recall, and she could review anything she needed to see at a later date. Juliette had barely been able to sneak off on her lunch period to see her cat and was only able to spend a few minutes with him.
But today the cat was second on her list. Today was the day she was going to fly her new ship. When she had asked her dad if he would be able to help her that evening, he had just smiled, telling her he would have to check his schedule. She knew he would be there.
Juliette knew she was lucky to have the family she had. Her mother as CEO of Space Tech often had a challenging job, but she chose her schedule and insisted on her family time. Caitlyn, Katie’s mom, as her mother’s personal assistant made sure of it. Although her dad didn’t have to work at all if he didn’t want to, he had chosen early on to define himself as the troubleshooter for Space Tech. But that meant he could choose his schedule too.
So when she reached the hangar, her dad was already there and he had already brought all the systems online. Suddenly nervous, Juliette stopped to look at the ship before going aboard. It was really beautiful, she realized, especially with the fields up. To her, the fields glowed a pleasant blue except for the pulse drive which appeared as a much deeper blue. She etched that picture in her memory. Later she would try to paint it and add it to her collection of personal paintings. This one would be up there with the picture of her new cat as one of her favorites, she suspected.
Finally she walked the rest of the way across the hangar and entered the ship. The ship was considerably smaller than even the corvettes her mother still loved to fly. But it was large enough for several people to enter and travel comfortably. Besides the main control room, it had a few other rooms separated off. To her left was the small central corridor that led to the rooms in the back half of the ship. If she went down that corridor, a tiny bunk room would be on the right and it could sleep eight by using the reverse gravity mats to sleep on. Across from that on the left were the lavatory facilities. The corridor then opened back up into the galley area that could comfortably hold the same eight and a couple more in a pinch. At the other end was the access way to the power room and from there out to the field and shield generators.
But when Juliette climbed into the hatchway, she turned immediately to her right and went directly into the control room. She walked up to the command chair in the control room and settled into the acceleration padding. It automatically adjusted to fit her. Not that she intended to generate a lot of g forces anyway; that wasn’t the way she flew. By using the fields of the ship, she could isolate the ship just enough from the Newtonian universe to prevent excessive acceleration from being passed to the ship and its passengers.
Juliette smiled at her dad, who was already sitting at the auxiliary station. She was grateful to him for leaving it to her to take the ship out.
“Thank you,” she told him. “I know you’re probably itching to give it a whirl too. I promise I’ll let you try it after I get a feel for it.”
“It’s your baby,” he told her. “I do want to try her out, but I can wait a little while. But everything is green, so we’re good to go whenever you’re ready. You’re already registered in the hangar AI, so it knows you’re a friend.”
The others arrived quickly after that and they each went to a station as if they already knew which one was theirs. When he thought about it, though, Zeke realized that they did indeed know which was theirs. They’d all worked to design it and had obviously taken it down to enough detail that it all was already planned out to perfection. They were going to make one heck of an Explorer team.
Juliette sent the instructions to the AI to shut down the gravity plates holding them down in the hangar, pulsing the fields in the ship just enough to float them off the d
eck. She then tapped the drive fields a tiny amount, enough to move them forward at a slow rate of motion, easing them through the field generator that held the atmosphere in the hangar until they moved out into space. What she was doing was a field only departure, and as far as she knew, only she and the others in her family were capable of doing it. It required absolute control of the fields that not even an AI could do. But she managed it easily and Zeke noticed that the others didn’t even bat an eye the whole time she was doing it. A top-notch team with a top-notch pilot. They would blow the rest of the teams out of the water.
Juliette gradually brought the little ship up to idle speed and instructed the ship’s AI to work them into the departure queue. While they were waiting for departure, she turned to her dad. “The drive fields are almost perfectly tuned,” she told him. “Obviously you’ve done a good bit of tuning, because no one else could possibly get them this close.”
“I wanted to play with them to see how they felt in this tiny little ship. And I can tell already this ship is going to be unbelievable. After this year, the ships that everyone will race are going to be like this one. You can probably even sell the design if you want to.”
“We might do that. I intend to have a one year racing career. Plus if we don’t sell it to them, they’ll screw it up and spend months figuring out how to fix it. And then ask you what they did wrong. You don’t need to have to waste your time doing that.”
Katie laughed at the last bit. “Without Joey to tell them things like where to put the control runs, they certainly wouldn’t get it right.”
“It isn’t rocket science,” Joey piped in. “Oh, I guess it is.” That brought smiles to everyone’s face. Zeke could tell it was one of their standing jokes. “But seriously, I only asked why would you want to run them all the way around the outside when you already had the perfect place you could put them.”
It was Zeke’s turn to laugh. “I wondered who’d come up with that idea. I can’t believe no one has ever thought of that before. You guys are quite the team.”
Juliette spoke up from her spot at the controls. “Katie’s the visionary, Sam’s the big brain, Joey’s the one who grounds us, and I’m the pilot who pushes and pulls the rest along. We figured out early on that what we have here is something special, Dad. We all treasure it and do our best to nurture it.”
Zeke looked at them all. “It’s really going to be funny to watch everyone the day of the race when they see your ship. They’re all going to be laughing at you until you start the race and then they’re going to be staring at it in amazement.”
“That much the better. That way they’ll never know what hit them.”
They finally reached their number in the queue and Juliette sent them moving away at a rather sedate speed. She didn’t intend to let any potential watchers see just what her ship was capable of doing. “I’m going to keep it really slow here close to the station. No point in giving them a clue about what this ship can do.”
Her dad just nodded. He would have done the same thing. You never show all your cards when you don’t have to show them. Only the top card so they don’t know your real hand. He was pretty sure of the hand Juliette and her team had; a royal flush, if he didn’t miss his guess.
Once away from the station, she headed away from earth, setting her course toward the R4 point. R4 had a lot less traffic than R5, so she was soon alone on her scanners. She pushed up the speed a little, but still kept it well under what she knew her ship was capable of doing. In a few minutes she passed the R4 point, the now permanent research station there a bright spot on her scanners. But still she kept her speed down.
“How long did you tell Mom we would be?” she asked. “I really want to get a good way out before I test the pulse drive.”
“Actually,” her dad told her, “I picked up travel meals for all of us. We just have to be back sometime this evening.” Looking around the group, he went on, “I told each of your families the same thing. So in fact, since we need to eat in shifts, I suggest Katie and Joey eat first.” He smiled at them; he knew about Joey’s appetite which exceeded them all.
“Juliette and Sam, I need you two here for a few minutes. In fact, put us on autopilot, Juliette. Your mom has requested that we have a family conference.”
Juliette quickly glanced at her scanners, which were all clear, and then told the AI to take control of the ship. The AI autopilot was much more complex than the old earth aircraft autopilots, as it would constantly scan the area and make any immediate adjustments necessary in an emergency. It would also alert her if anything of any significance appeared even briefly on the scanners.
Katie turned to Joey. “Let’s go eat now. It’s going to be really boring around here while they all do the silent talk thing.”
As they headed down to the galley, Joey told Katie, “At least we get first dibs on dinner. I bet at least one of the meals includes apple cobbler and I’m going to lay claim to it.”
“Yeah, you can have that. I’m gonna go for the chocolate cake.” She was smiling as she passed Juliette on her way out of the control room.
Juliette made a face at the two before they left. She’d better not eat the last of the chocolate cake. Turning back to her dad, Juliette told him, “Ok, I’m ready. What do I need to do?”
“You need to just relax and do the same that you would do if we were all sitting in the family room. Our connection with each other is in no way affected by the distance.”
Nodding, Juliette closed her eyes and concentrated, dropping into a near meditative state. Sam quickly followed suit. Immediately Juliette felt the presence of all her family members. “Wow, this is cool,” she sent to everyone. “Like Dad said, it’s no different from us all sitting together in a room.”
“Yes, and you need to remember this later,” Julie told her daughter. “When you’re a long way off and need help, you’ll be able to contact any of us.”
“Is that from a vision, Mom?”
“No, not exactly, more just a feeling for now. But still it’s very important. For now, I just wanted to talk about some of the things to do with your pulse drive that Sam pretty much confirmed today before you left.”
“Sam, you promised you wouldn’t tell!”
“Not fair. Mom somehow knew about it and picked it out of my brain.”
Zeke quietly injected, “I told her about the pulse drive, of course, and suspected there was something you weren’t telling. Your mother figured the rest out herself. And she knew immediately that some of that had to have come from your brother. I amended the patent agreement to include the additional wording that your mom gave me. And your team, the four of you, your mother thinks whatever is coming is going to take all of you working together to face it.”
“Mom figured out what we were up to,” Sam told her. “And she thinks it can work but not like we have it set up. She thinks we’ll get a secondary feedback loop and we all know what that can do.”
Juliette knew Sam was referring to her grandfather’s early first test of the predecessor to their ship drives. In that test, their design had not handled the primary feedback loop and they had been thrown forward in space and time completely out of control. They had to be rescued by her mom and dad and it was only because they were able to perfect the new space drives in time, that they were able to rescue them.
Juliette didn’t want anything like that happening to her. “Ok Mom. We’ll only use it in standard mode until you can look at it. We’re not ready yet anyway.”
“Good. I expect when you’re ready, you’ll do it no matter what, but that gives us time to try to figure it out first. But I also think your feelings about this are indicative of something else. I believe your ability to see visions is beginning to awaken. These feelings you’re getting are the first indications of that. But I can tell that it’s not quite time yet.”
“So, go play with your little toy. We’ve got a race to win!”
Juliette caught the meaning behind the last. Her mom wa
s telling her she was all-in too. “Thank you, Mom. I love you.”
“I love you too, my dear daughter. Always, from before you were born.”
Julie had seen her daughter in a vision while she and Zeke were still engaged and they had fallen in love with her just from that vision. Of course, Juliette knew what her mother was referring to. They had told her about seeing her, but she had never known just what they had seen. Sometimes that would slow her down in whatever trouble she’d found, but she usually forgot and jumped in anyway. She also caught her mom’s drift in bringing up the pulse drive. She did intend to try it someday, just not yet. She reassured her mom,“I know and I promise I’ll be careful.” She concentrated and opened up her mind so that they could see her intent. That brought a mental smile from her mom.
The interplanetary family meeting dissolved. Juliette spent a few moments thinking about what being able to do that meant, and she knew without a doubt that someday she would need to use it. She suspected she would be even further away that next time. She hoped that meant the next one would be interstellar. Although she had never said it out loud, that was her goal. Someday, she would help man find the stars!
After Katie and Joey returned, the three left them to watch over the AI autopilot, and ate their meal back in the little galley. Juliette did get chocolate cake; her dad knew her pretty well after all. Of course he and Sam ate their apple cobbler quite happily, so she didn’t think they suffered too badly. After that the test flight went along smoothly without incident. Juliette brought them up to full speed and after a time running at that speed with no problems, she carefully initiated the pulse drive in standard mode and checked all the readings on her panel. It looked perfect.
Breathlessly she told them, “Here goes; I’m going to send out a pulse from the pulse generator.”
Everyone held their breath, but no surprise, it worked like a charm. Juliette was easily able to take the ship up to bursts of the one twenty percent she expected and in fact maybe just a little more. She had been able to sustain it for several minutes, something unheard of before today.