Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

The trolley began to tow them out of the docking ring. The slight jerk buffeted her gently against her straps. The gravity was so light she barely retained any sense of up and down. On the displays, the curving walls of the modules fell behind as trolley trundled towards the pinnacle of the station. The landscape became nothing but silver panels sliding away underneath the black dome of vacuum.

If she squinted at the top of the left-hand screen, she could see the shining edge of Oberon, just barely visible beyond the station. Titania though, was somewhere on the other side of Uranus’s blue-grey bulk.

She was glad. She didn’t want to see the Free Home right now. She just wanted to get through the next two years.

“Port Oberon to Pasadena . Thirty seconds to release.”

“Thanks Oberon.” Yerusha chided herself for daydreaming. She had a job to do and starboard Watch Commander who didn’t seem as though he was a great believer in second chances for Freers.

Doesn’t matter , she reminded herself. For now, you are Pasadena.

Yerusha rested her hands on her boards. The flat keys glowed with the designations she had written across them, including the OVERRIDEkey. That one would cancel out all the programs she had labored over for the past two days and would let her command the engines directly if anything unpredicted happened on course to the jump point.

The ship had been slow to learn her writing and short-hand because there was no AI running the internal systems. Al Shei was obviously almost as paranoid about humanity’s progeny as Lipinski was. Yerusha shook her head. With attitudes like that surrounding her, it was going to be a long run, that much was sure.

The Pasadena slid out from under the module rings and the gleaming panels that the view screens showed came to a halt. Out of the window, she saw the silver-white curve of the station and just a glimpse of the ghostly globe of Oberon.

“Three to release, Pasadena ,” said the Port voice. “Two…one…release.”

The trolley opened its clamps and Yerusha watched Port Oberon and the stark, white moon fall away from the Pasadena .

She knew that the relative motion was the ship’s. Pasadena was falling away from the station, from Oberon and from the sun. Without any acceleration pressure to tell her otherwise, though, her mind believed what her eyes saw. As the minutes ticked by, Port Oberon dropped back, becoming an elaborate silver mobile surrounded by moth like ships that darted between the spindly arms of cranes and the bloated hulls of the fuel tanks. All of them hung against the backdrop of Oberon’s white and black speckled surface. The moon itself was nothing but a cardboard circle suspended in the limitless black pool that made up the universe.

“ Pasadena this is Port Oberon we have you at a eight clicks at five minutes, fourteen seconds. Hour 15:24:16. Mark.”

“Marked, Oberon.” Yerusha checked the clock at her station automatically. The clock showed both the length-of-flight time and time of day. The Pasadena ’s flight clocks had to be in synch with each other as well as with the outside, but not just for timing torch bursts for sub-light navigation. Navigation past light speed was impossible. To change direction, they would have to drop down to sub-light, change the ship’s flight angle and jump again. The trick was, if they made a mistake in their calculations, they might not know which system they were making their correcting jump from, and it might take days to work out where they were, much less where they were headed, if they were able to do it at all. Ships did disappear for want of good timing.

“In sync, Pilot?” came Schyler’s voice from her right hand. The bridge was laid out so that all the vital stations were on one side of the drop-shaft. The other side held the back-up boards, the conference station and the virtual reality simulator. During her shifts, Yerusha would don the VR gear and run through flight simulations, looking for ways to cut down the run time and fuel consumption, as well as bringing herself up to spec on just what the ship she was flying could and could not do. If an emergency course change were called for, Schyler could put on the gear and run through the programs she fed in from her chair, using full-blown simulations of Pasadena .

“In sync and on line, Watch,” Yerusha replied in her best doing-my-job voice. From Schyler’s station he could call up a display of exactly what she saw, but safety and approved protocol called for a direct check.

To Yerusha’s left sat the pilot’s relief, only other member of the bridge crew on duty at this time. He was a round, little man named Cheney who had Asian eyes and had let himself go almost completely bald. This was his third run with Al Shei as a pilot’s mate, he’d told her. He had described each trip with the single word every shipper with more than one working synapse wanted to hear. Uneventful .

The other two members of the bridge crew were waiting out launch in their cabins. Most of the work had been done while the Pasadena was still in dock. Schyler, Yerusha and Al Shei had mapped and timed the route while figuring the requirements for fuel and reaction mass. Yerusha had programmed the simulations. When the stats lined up to her satisfaction, she wrote them into Pasadena ’s computers. Both Schyler and the ship had verified them.

Al Shei and her crew had been on board even before Yerusha, re-checking the ship inside and out. When it came to flight capability, it didn’t matter to Al Shei that the Pasadena had been checked over less than forty-eight hours previously by a Lennox expert. Yerusha couldn’t fault Al Shei’s caution. She and her crew would be depending absolutely on the ship for the next six to eight months, she and her crew should be the ones to decide if it was ready to go.

It had taken a day of drill calls and simulations to get the new crew used to each others’ speech patterns and how the orders were given and confirmed. After that, Al Shei and her engineers had remotely warmed the reactors and accumulators with the “hot” mix of deuterium and tritium. Once warmed, the Pasadena’s engines could run on the much safer mix of hydrogen and boron (11). The ship was humming and ready when they all were allowed back on board to strap down and start out.

“Oberon to Pasadena , we’ve got you at fifteen klicks at eleven minutes and fifty-nine seconds. Good luck and see you soon.”

“Thanks Oberon. See you soon,” replied Schyler. “Clear to go whenever you’re ready, Yerusha.”

Yerusha checked the angle of the jets one more time to make sure they were pointing away from the station and the incoming traffic. “Intercom to Pasadena ,” Yerusha called. She lifted her hands and held them flat over her boards. “Counting down to acceleration. Ten, nine, eight…”

She heard no sound of movement under her countdown. There was nothing to do. The systems were all up and running. The final set-up had been completed four hours before the docking clamps had let them all go. Now was the time to rest in the harness, pay attention to the monitors and remain quietly confident that nothing unexpected was going to happen.

“Three… two… one.” Yerusha brought her hands down on her board. The ship read her fingerprints and sent its signal down to the engine compartment. “Torch lit,” she reported, just before a low rumble that echoed all the way up the drop shaft confirmed her call.

Gradually, Yerusha’s head settled on her neck, her neck rested against her shoulders and the floor reached up and pressed against the soles of her feet. The harness went slack against her shirt and trousers as her body settled into the chair.