Solar Express (11 page)

She smiled, then ended the excerpt and went back to finishing the message.

When she finished, she sent if off and called up her father's latest message, with the formal address of R. James Grant—although his full name was Royster James Grant, and he only answered to James. She began to reread his message, if quickly, before sending a reply. She had time, for the moment, and she might not later.

Dearest Alayna,

I was beginning to worry about you when I hadn't heard from you, but your latest reassured me, although I cannot say that I'm exactly sanguine about having an astrophysicist daughter all alone in a station in the middle of an isolated crater on the far side of the Moon, particularly when tensions appear to be rising between the Sinese Federation and everyone else. There's more talk about Noram and the Sinese Federation militarizing space, and it strikes me that you might be rather vulnerable …

Militarizing space?
She hadn't seen anything about that, even in the news summaries … except … hadn't there been something on one of the sensationalist vidloids?
HotNews!
maybe. What would be the point of militarizing space? All that would do would be to raise taxes and put the whole world at greater risk. But then, her father was always worrying, always overreacting. She smiled faintly and shook her head.

I did appreciate your description of the repairs you made to the radio telescope antenna, and I cannot tell you how proud you have made me and how much your mother would have given to know of your accomplishments …

Alayna swallowed. She couldn't help it. Her mother had died when Alayna had just finished defending her doctoral thesis at Princeton. She'd visited Alayna and then gone to Boston, or what was left of it, to visit Alayna's cousin Willie. Willie and Wilhemina, except they were both Wilhemina, had died when Hurricane Ernesto had merged with a nor'easter. So many had died that neither Alayna nor her father had ever discovered the exact circumstances. That was understandable, intellectually, given that more than twenty thousand had perished in the extreme winds and flooding, but Alayna's father had pressed for answers ever since. Only in the last weeks had his messages ever referred to her mother.

 … I can only hope in some vain and impossible way that she must know, unpredictable and unfair as I have come to believe this universe is and has always been.

I also hope that you will have success in your research, and that, even if you do not immediately achieve that success, you will take such satisfaction in your work that eventually you will be rewarded, for, because we are seldom granted recognition for our accomplishments, we should take satisfaction in them, regardless of either recognition or lack of recognition …

Alayna smiled at yet another phrasing of the words she had heard since childhood.

We have another important case coming before the Noram Court of Appeals, this one dealing with residual groundwater rights in the Ogallala Aquifer, although there is little enough groundwater there after the water mining wars of a half century ago …

She nodded and began her reply.

 

13

D
ONOVAN
B
ASE

16 A
PRIL
2114

Sweat oozed across Tavoian's forehead. He blotted it with the forearm of his shipsuit, just to keep it from drifting into his eyes, trying to focus on the combat screens arrayed before him, half wishing that he had a functioning AI or even a commlink.

He could see that he hadn't corrected enough for the spaceward drift caused by a less than perfectly balanced course shift. He gave a five-second blast to the rear port thrusters to point the burner's nose more to port, trying to gauge what an AI could have done instantly.

He checked his target—zero seven one, negative fifteen, with four minutes to torp release.

Tavoian gave a burst to the orientation thrusters, then followed by adding power to the burner. He kept checking the gee-meter, more properly an accelerometer, making certain that the acceleration remained below three gees. He held the acceleration for less than three minutes, checking the closure rates, his eyes scanning the displays of other craft, as well as the outlying Sinese upper orbit station, none of which were anywhere close to visual range.

Abruptly, all but two of the displays blanked with a flare.

Forward sensors disabled.
The warning flashed below the remaining displays.

Now what?
The flare suggested he'd been hit with a concentrated laser flash, and that meant it was likely it had been managed from a distance.
You hope.
At least lasers couldn't do much more than blind sensors except at extremely close range.

There was little else he could do, not without aborting the mission, except sit tight, because he needed to maintain course and acceleration in order to boost the release velocity of the torp before firing, and then beginning his own return to base. Even if he'd looked through the emergency porthole, he wouldn't have seen the target, not when the release point was more than ten thousand kays from the impact point—a distance covered in less than three minutes from time of release.

He concentrated on the system indicators, especially the hydraulics. Could he even release a torp? The systems remained green or amber.

At the precomputed time, he fired, manually, hoping that he'd be as precise as the AI, or that the tracking computer on the torp could correct enough.

Immediately after that, using the thrusters, he put the burner through partial turnover, in order to shift his course vector, then began to increase the power to the drive, building a separation, knowing that if he merely slowed the burner on his previous course, he'd end up passing practically in front of the target and any weapons systems they had deployed and surviving around the orbit installation. Once he had separation he could begin to kill some of the built-up speed that was still carrying away from his own base.

After another five minutes, with the distance between him and the target increasing, as indicated by the surviving rear sensors, he repositioned the burner and held the drive at two gees until he could finally determine that he had killed his approach to the Sinese installations and was beginning to pull away. Finally, he dropped the power to maintain one gee. Even so, he'd need to cut the drive before long and then wait more than an hour before he would be able to begin decel to return to base.

“That's enough.” The colonel's voice came through his earpiece. “Shut it down.”

Tavoian slowly ran through the checklist manually, necessary because the AI was disabled, then finished the shutdown procedures. Only then did he unstrap himself from the combat couch of the simulator. Simulation or not, he was soaked with sweat, partly because there was minimal ventilation in the simulator, identical in all respects, including weightlessness, except for gee forces, to the control deck of a combat burner.

He made his way to the hatch, opened it, and pulled himself through, then used the handrail to guide him to the hatch out of the simulator, located in Donovan Base's docking ring, and into the simulator control center where the colonel waited, loosely belted into the seat in front of the array that controlled the simulator.

The senior officer half turned and tossed a folded towel at Tavoian. “You look like you need this.”

“Yes, sir.” Tavoian caught the towel and blotted his face before making his way toward the debriefing chair, where he also belted himself in.

Colonel Anson looked at Tavoian for a long moment. “Not bad. Not great, but not bad. You should have cut the power a minute earlier on the attack. You can't afford to waste Hel3, and it would have put you that much closer to the target after the torp release. You ended up having to spend more fuel on deceleration in order to return to base.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you think about just altering heading and doing an elliptical around Earth?”

“Only for a moment.”

“Why not?”

“It would have required more fuel to change course and the velocity added by the course change would have required more fuel for decel.”

“Why did you do a series of change-overs rather than a turn?”

“Because, without forward sensors, I had no idea what I might be turning into or away from. Also, that used far less Hel3 than a turn.” Also there was the fact that, without an operational AI, trying to compute every bit of motion in any direction, any acceleration, got more and more complex with each maneuver, and trying to work that out without sensors would have been an even bigger nightmare. Then, too, without either gravity or air resistance, directional control was a beast. Tavoian knew that from experience, but piloting a burner on a transport run, except in emergencies, was like driving railed maglev. You powered up, and then you reversed power to decelerate.

That didn't even take into account the stresses on the drives and magnetic nozzles. Standard fusionjets—the ones he'd been piloting for the past six years—were designed to provide a constant one-gee acceleration for up to two hours straight without overheating, three perhaps under optimal conditions. The reconfigured combat fusionjet could take three to five gees, but the length of time the drives could operate without overheating or actually melting down dropped in proportion to the time at continuous acceleration. More than an hour at two gees, and the drive system was on the verge of meltdown. Half an hour at three gees was pushing the system. Fifteen minutes at four was likely to inflict maximum structural failure on the drives … and incidentally on the entire burner and its pilot.

“What if the sensors had just been overloaded?”

“I thought of that, but there wasn't any way to check that from the control deck. I did cycle the power, but there wasn't any response. Those panels are accessed from the forward bulkhead on the passenger deck. It also didn't seem wise to leave the controls at that moment.”

The colonel looked skeptical. “Have you ever checked the sensor panel of a fusionjet, Captain?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I suppose you know the location of all of the maintenance panels, too?”

“I've checked out the control system and the lock panels. I know the location of the fuel and drive system panels, but I've never checked them. Those are beyond me.” Not to mention that getting to them required special tools.

“You're one of the ones who needs to know how everything fits together.”

“I find it helpful, sir.”

“I suppose you can repair an AI, too?” The colonel's tone was sardonic.

“I don't think trying that would be a good idea, especially in combat, sir.” Tavoian decided against mentioning that he'd built simple AIs as a way to earn money after university and before he'd been accepted for the Space Service. In some ways, it had been only slightly more difficult than sophisticated black-boxing.

“Why do you think we put you through all of this, when it's likely that the ship's AI will handle it all?” The colonel looked straight at Tavoian.

“I can think of three reasons, sir. First, it gives us a far better understanding of what's entailed. Second, that understanding should enable us to know when to override the AI if it's damaged or scrambled … or even hacked. Third, there is always the possibility that the AI might become inoperative.”

“Next question. You know that a space installation is a sitting duck to a high speed torp attack. Ours as well as theirs. Once anyone starts such attacks, no one will have any installations left. So why are we training any of you for such attacks?”

Tavoian managed not to frown. The colonel had already made that point before. Was that another test? “You'd mentioned that before, sir. If we don't have that capability immediately ready, they can take out our installations, and they'll have the only ones left.”

“Which will require us to destroy their installations Earthside, because the time required for a ground-based missile to reach geosynchronous orbit height is sufficient for antimissile missiles to lock on.”

Tavoian didn't say what he was thinking—that an armed standoff wasn't the most secure way in which to avoid hostilities, except he didn't have a better answer. From what he could tell, neither did the colonel.

“Don't you think the Sinese and the Indians know that, Captain?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then why are we spending all the time, effort, facilities, on this training?”

“Because history shows that failure to respond emboldens the opposition.”

“Those were my words. Do you believe them?”

“I think that there are often leaders in any field who gamble that their opponents won't prepare for the obvious because that preparation is too costly. And sometimes it is … the fall of the USSR … or the near collapse of the United States. I don't know where you draw the line.”

“It's always a question. We'll be discussing this later. Now … your vector analysis and reaction leaves more than something to be desired…”

Tavoian nodded and listened intently, unpleasant as he sometimes found the way in which the colonel expressed himself in debriefings.

Almost an hour later, the colonel finished and released Tavoian, who made his way back to his quarters in the main section of Donovan Base. After showering and donning a clean shipsuit, he sat down before the small comm terminal in the cubicle that was his “stateroom.”

More than a week had gone by since he'd received Alayna's last message, and almost two since Kit's. He hadn't wanted to send anything until he had a better understanding of the base and his duty and training—especially knowing that every comm was reviewed, and if it revealed something, it was rejected and returned with the offending section highlighted. Then the studies and the simulator training had consumed him, especially trying to estimate combined speed and power vectors almost instantaneously. The colonel's continual emphasis on the fact that the cold equations trumped mere effort and sentimentality every time didn't help much, either.