John Wright - Titans of Chaos

"Don't expeditions like this usually involve, you know, more planning... ?" asked Vanity. "Like NASA and getting food and space suits and all sorts of stuff? We have the knapsacks of gear lashed to the deck, which is in a vacuum right now, I should mention."

Victor said, "I thought there were launch windows controlling the timing of space shots?"

I was bubbling with enthusiasm. "Sure, Victor, there would be, if we were dealing with the rocket equation, and if conserving fuel were our main concern. In such a case, the most efficient method would be to begin from low Earth orbit, achieve a six-point-six kilometers per second delta-V, to put us into a Hohmann transfer ellipse, where its perihelion is tangential to Earth's orbit and its aphelion at Mars! In such a case, the next available launch date would be July ninth of this year, when Mars is past its closest approach by forty-five degrees, and the orbit out would take about two hundred fifty-nine days! After four hundred and fifty-five days on Mars, the planets would be in a good relative position, and we could make a second burn of seven point two kilometers per second! Let me show you how these figures are derived! First, remember that Kepler's third law states that for all objects orbiting the sun, the square of the orbital period is inversely proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis..."

Colin, who was pinned to the curved ceiling above me, groaned. "Bat crap! She's talking in equations again! You've memorized the acceleration requirements for a Mars shot? Girl, you have thought about this entirely too much."

I said impatiently, "What else was there to think about, back when we were trapped in the orphanage, but how to get off the planet?"

"Wait, wait," said Quentin, who was halfway up the wall to my left. "Amelia, I mean, um, Leader, were you proposing we sail to Mars in a wooden boat for eight and a half months?"

Colin said, "And we don't have a bathroom aboard."

"Head," I said. "Aboard a ship, it's called a 'head.'"

"Fine, we don't have one."

Victor said, "I assume we can use our special powers to overcome the need for oxygen at sea-level pressure, or do without food or water. But what about radiation from solar activity? The walls of this vessel are made of wood. I should not even mention the fuel supply, except Vanity, what does this ship use for fuel, anyhow? What makes it go?"

Vanity was lying with both hands behind her red curls, one leg bent, the other crossed over it, so she could bounce her foot idly in the air. It was the kind of posture one would assume for watching clouds passing by, but in this case she was looking up (her "up," my "down") at her friends. "I dunno. The ship goes where I tell her. I did not think she could fly into space."

Quentin said, "If the vessel is moved by a spirit, there may be limitations on where the spirit has leave to go. Is it lawful for a Phaeacian ship to sail beyond the circles of the Earth? The laws of magic may differ in the superlunary realms."

Colin said, "I am not living in a coffin one hundred twenty feet long and twelve feet wide for eight months. And then how long on Mars to wait for the planets to move back to the right positions?"

I said, "No, no, no! That figure was for a fuel-flightpath efficient orbit. We are supernatural creatures in a supernatural boat. We can cheat. If the Nautilus can achieve and maintain a one-g acceleration throughout the trip, it should only take about two days."

Victor said, "Actually, Leader, we don't know if this ship can even achieve escape velocity."

"Then that will be the first thing to test!" I declared.

Victor said, "Very good, Leader. How do we measure our velocity?"

I said, "We don't We measure acceleration. Vanity, ask your ship to maintain an acceleration equal to one gravity as measured at sea level on Earth. Victor, can you measure the fall of an object in seconds per second? You go up on deck, get a tin cup or something out of the knapsacks, and we drop it from the bow to the stern."

Colin looked to the stern. "If this works, that will be the floor, right? We'll be stuck at the bottom of a wooden well, which is six feet in radius, for two days with no bathroom... 'scuse me, Leader, no head. Where are you and Vanity going to take showers? I want to watch you scrub each other's backs with sudsy soap in zero-g."

I said, "Maybe we can take a shortcut and be there in a few minutes!"

Vanity closed her eyes and asked her boat for a path to the planet Mars. Nothing of any particular import happened. She opened her eyes and said, "I cannot find a secret passage through a wall if there is no wall. It's all empty nothingness up here. Also, I think my power is at least a bit like yours: a place someone has looked before is already 'fixed.' You know what I mean? It's taken, established, claimed. I can convince the world there might be a shortcut in some place no one has ever looked before; I cannot do that in a night sky the whole planet of astronomers look at every day, er, night. Unless you can bend the fourth dimension for me, Amelia?"

Which I could not think of how to do just at that moment. Her ship was much bigger in the fourth dimension than in three, and I could not see how I could move the vessel at all, as it was attached to a complex and huge structure of space-warps and energy-obligations. I could throw things past the walls, but I could not move the ship herself. As far as my race was concerned, the ship was anchored in one spot. I could make the ship heavier or lighter, but I could not add momentum to her. Go figure.

I tried to tell Vanity how big her ship was, but she covered her ears and warned me not to look at the ship too closely, or else I would kill off any chance of finding other secret doors in the hull.

So I said, "We have to go through outer space, just like any other astronauts, then."

Quentin shook his head. "Which might prove impossible, Leader. Are X-rays and gamma rays and cosmic rays from the sun sterilizing us right now?"

It was not impossible, but we spent longer getting the vessel ready for the trip than the trip itself took.

The Huntress did not overtake us. We took up a middle-distance orbit about one thousand miles above the Earth and set to work.

First, Vanity found the laws of nature from what must have been an ancient Greek atomist theory, something like what Lucretius or Democritus imagined. These laws did not have the problems with Aristotelian natural motions pulling us toward the Earth, but the "atomies" were made of essential airy bits, not something that broke down into oxygen-nitrogen. Vanity found she could apply them to the interior of the cylinder and leave the outside Newtonian, so mass and acceleration and all those laws of motion acted normally.

Second, Quentin worked his astrology, using just the tables he carried in his head, which was good enough to tell us that Mars was in opposition, at its closest approach to Earth. He did not know the distance of Mars at closest approach, but I did: 56 million kilometers. The equation for a Brachistochrone curve was simple to solve using calculus of variations.