John Ringo - East of the Sun, West of the Moon

“Pilots, your team commander is Joie,” he said, gesturing at the bird-woman. “Joie is a former intel agent. Do not let her soft side fool you, if you piss her off she will beat the crap out of you. If you’ve ever been hit by a goose wing you know what I mean.”

There was a chuckle at that and the pilots, who had been more or less ignoring the bird-woman in their midst, now looked at her with interest. Joie gave Herzer a cold look and then went back to her normal expression of calculated indifference.

“Evan Mayerle,” Herzer continued, pointing at Evan. “Stand up, Evan. Evan Mayerle will be in charge of the engineers and engineering questions. Courtney Boehlke will be in charge of the computer techs and computer issues. That’s for pre-mission support and on the mission if there’s a question you can’t answer. And if Evan or Courtney can’t answer it, we’ll kick it through the whole group.

“Pre-mission items. We’re going to be training a lot and we’re going to be training here. I know that the quality of the quarters and chow are… well, they suck,” he said, pausing for the chuckles. “I’m working on the chow. There’s not much we’ll be able to do about the facilities. We’ll only be here for about a month and a half and most of the time all you’ll want is a rack anyway. If any of you have the time and energy to improve your quarters, feel free within the materials available.

“Last point before I start taking the billion and one questions.” He flipped a cover off the easel and pointed to a simple representation of the solar system.

“The refueling ship is actually headed out from the region of the Sun right now, having slingshotted around Mercury. Our intercept point will be in this region,” he added, pointing to an area off-set from the Moon. “The celestial designation system that the ship uses was developed in the twenty-third century, when there was a good bit of space travel, and is extremely helio-centric, or so I’m told. The people more familiar with space can explain it better than I can, but the intercept point will be east of the Sun and west of the Moon.”

“Herzer,” Edmund said, walking through the door. It was after midnight and Herzer was knee deep in paperwork. “If I told you once, I told you a thousand times, all work and no play…”

“Then you should have given me a different mission,” Herzer said, tossing down his fountain pen and squirting ink all over the paper. “Crap! Now I’m going to have to redo those!”

“You ever heard of ‘staff,’ boy?” Edmund asked. “You should be signing them, not doing the write-ups.”

“When I get one, I’ll use it,” Herzer pointed out. “Nobody thought to check what sort of casualties there were in the staff. Most of these are requests for personnel. I’m doing it until I get a facilities commander; Carson was handling both loads but he had time to set it up.”

“Noted,” Edmund said. “I’ll make sure you get what you ask for. Don’t just ask for what you need, okay?”

“Got it,” Herzer said, grimacing. “Boss, can you try to get me a real command some day? Not this harum-scarum, thrown into the breach bullshit? I’m getting really tired of being the forlorn hope, you know?”

“I know,” Edmund said, sitting down wearily. “I’d intended to move you to Second Legion pretty soon. There are a dozen places I’d like to put you, but I figured you deserved a real command for a while. Not exactly a vacation, but better than this shit. Hell, why am I abusing you about all work and no play? I’m the one here when I should be safe in the arms of Morpheus.”

“Rack out here,” Herzer suggested. “Or, maybe not. The facilities suck. The food sucks. The training is going to really suck. Morale is going to be a bitch to maintain, especially since everybody thinks they’re going to die.”

“Do you think it’s that bad?” Edmund asked.

“No,” Herzer admitted. “Unless New Destiny has the same plan. I’m going to try to avoid direct conflict as much as possible and build forces as much as possible. At the same time, I don’t want more people up there than we can evac if we have to. Twenty-five at a time is the max, if we don’t lose a pilot. Sixteen to twenty-hour turn time. If we take heavy casualties, I’m pulling back to two ships and riding it out.”

“Oh, how fascinating,” Geo said, looking at the hand-printed schematic. “They use Tammen field sequencers!”

The various teams had broken out into their specialties for a week and having completed the first block of training on shuttle-board systems the engineers were looking over the shipboard systems. And finding various quaint equipment that had them chuckling at all hours.

“I don’t even know what a Tammen field sequencer is,” Linda admitted, leaning over his shoulder to read the specifications of the system. “Oh, my, it’s only rated to one gigawatt! I’m not sure that could even turn the ship except in geologic time.”

The engineering team had been given the ground floor of one of the wooden buildings and that was now scattered with various bits and pieces of equipment. Some of the material was original equipment used in the Excelsior that had been found around Norau, but most of it was plastic and wood mock-ups created by the previous team. The walls were covered in blackboards that had diagrams and equations on them, and down the middle were several tables. The entire engineering team was gathered around, watching Geo cluck over the ship’s antiquated systems.

“The Tammen didn’t use intermediate field generators,” Evan said, chuckling. “It was a late addition to the ship, anyway, used for reactionless vector control. They were additional thrusters, in other words, for fine attitude control. They’ve got a fraction of the output of the ion drive or the lat thrusters.”

“They don’t have to, though,” Geo said, shaking his head. “I always liked the Tammen design; it was very robust. And with some tinkering it’s capable of much higher output. I wrote a paper about it that I don’t think I ever published.”

“How?” Evan asked. The Tammen field generators were a secondary system whose primary control node actually ran through Engineering. Assuming they captured Engineering, that would give them latitude control. Especially if Geo could “soup them up.”

“The reason Tammens didn’t use intermediate generators was that the theory didn’t work for them in the twenty-fourth century,” Geo said, looking over at Linda. “Why?”

“I’m not…” Linda said, then frowned. “Ah, the tertiary chaos equations of field junctions weren’t worked out until… 2679 by… by…”

“Izakaiah Romanov,” Evan said, grinning. Geo was always playing the “professor” game with the two.

“You’re so far beyond me,” Paul Satyat said, shaking his head. Satyat was the designated engineering tech for Team Van Krief, a short, stocky brunet with burly hands and shoulders. He had studied various forms of engineering throughout history but only brushed on quantum engineering practices. He was more than capable of doing the nuts and bolts work, but the theoretical side left him cold.

“Same here,” Nicole Howard admitted. Nicole was, arguably, the prettiest of the several females on the mission. She was medium height with long blonde hair, dark tanned skin, greenish blue eyes and long, shapely legs. But most guys didn’t look much beyond a truly phenomenal chest. For all that, she was smart as a whip and, if anything, better at the nuts and bolts work than anyone but Evan. She actively enjoyed tinkering with equipment and her hands showed it, being rather overdeveloped and strong for the rest of her looks, with broken fingernails and heavy calluses. “And I don’t see how you can rebuild one to generate intermediate fields,” she added, leaning over Geo from the other side and running a finger over one part of the schematic. “They collapse without an Izakaiah transform module. And I don’t know about you, but off the top of my head I don’t know where I can scrounge one.”