The smaller intake Paris Denard had declared to be part of a sub light drive was not an intake at all. It was the barrel of a gun. There were guns on both wings of the Griffin. The Griffin had weapons and shields more advanced than anything on Earth, beam weapons generated from the engine core, whatever the hell that was.
I heard a thump and looked up in time to see RJ flattened against the window of the door. He backed off and raised both hands with an expression of puzzlement. I plunked the book back in its slot, closed the case, and went over and unlocked it. He pushed the door open and paused.
“Do you want to be alone with your book? It’s not a romance novel, is it?”
“Hardly.”
He came in, sat down and crossed his legs. “I was about to order Chinese. Just wanted to know if you wanted anything.”
“Sweet and sour, please.”
“Chicken or shrimp?”
“Better make it chicken. I was baiting a shrimp when this whole thing started. Maybe shrimp’s unlucky.”
“By the way, you commander-types are sometimes so busy you forget the important little things. Everybody’s collecting their favorite videos and images for the Griffin deck displays and the sleeper compartment displays. You do any of that yet?”
“I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks.”
“I heard Danica robbed you guys of your alleged manhood.”
“We have been put in our place. What about you? You never got around to telling me how you lost your life yesterday.”
“Mmm. That’s an ugly little story about how someone’s elevated opinion of themselves caused them to fuck up.”
“You were pretending to be outside the ship on an EVA repair?”
“Yeah. I used the aft airlock and was outside replacing an antenna interface. After I climbed back in, a heater in the airlock pressure door failed. The door would not seal properly. I hung in the airlock waiting against the wall in my suit fixture using up my remaining air while Mr. Denard fidgeted with the thing. What Mr. Denard should have done was immediately go to the forward airlock and depressurize it so I could come in through the front. But, Mr. Denard did not want to have both airlocks sealed off, isolating both the flight deck and the service module. He thought he could force an override on the rear airlock door and pressurize that way. While he was messing around trying to do that my O2 regulator froze up. The emergency umbilical uses that, so emergency air was not available either. Suddenly all I had was suit air. Mr. Denard was smart enough to know it was then too late to depressurize the forward airlock and open a door, so he continued to try to override the aft airlock lockout. I died while he was trying. I was actually sitting in a chair in the TCC of course, watching the monitors and talking my part to the ship while all of this was going on, but in the habitat windows and video displays I was outside or in the airlock in a spacesuit.”
“What was Mr. Denard’s reaction to all this?”
“Unfair test. Dual failures never happen. Airlock lockout could have been bypassed more easily in real life. Everybody’s fault but his.”
“Is it pick up or delivery?”
“What?”
“My sweet and sour chicken.”
“Delivery to the guard shack.”
“Hey, would you add an order of egg rolls to that and give it to the guard from me? I saw him eating them one day. I gotta get on better terms with that guy.”
“Will do, Kemosabi. Diplomacy through Chinese cuisine. How quaint. I’ll be back with yours.”
RJ disappeared out the door, waving as he went. I began to reopen the security case to resume my weapons study when two more faces suddenly appeared: Terry Costerly and Julia Zeller. A TD and a Resident Director, all at once. Something was up.
They took seats and stared. Terry leaned back and crossed his legs. Julia folded her hands in her lap. They looked at each other for a moment and silently agreed Julia would speak.
“Things are firing up, Adrian.”
“You guys don’t know the half of it.”
“Did you get word already, or something?”
“To which firing are you referring?”
“We’ve received dates for the test mission and your Nadir mission departure. We’re told they are not flexible.”
“Well, that switches on the adrenaline a bit. When’s the test mission?”
“Next week.”
“Wow, that’s ambitious.”
Terry answered. “They are recommending pilots only for a two-orbit test flight. Two orbits to check the spacecraft out then return to point of origin. The Spacecraft Processing Facility team then gets twenty-four hours to go over the vehicle with a fine-toothed comb. If everything looks okay, you and the rest of your crew are off to the brown dwarf.”
I sat back and tried to look relaxed. “Well, I can’t say I disagree with any of that.”
Terry continued. “Best planetary alignment for the Nadir mission is in three weeks. Not much window with it if you want to get the best first leg.”
“I see. We should let everyone know immediately so they can begin taking care of personal business. How is everyone doing with the scanning arrays? I haven’t had time to check on that.”
Terry said, “It’s been okay. They should all be able to scan, decode and analyze to find the practice target. We’ll put in some more time before you go. I’ll give them some really weak signatures blended in with pulsar noise. That should sharpen them up a bit. You’ll probably be searching for a needle in a haystack, but I’d bet it’ll be alright. I can’t imagine this team coming back from the practice mission without locating the item.”
“Thanks. Let me know if there are any problems.”
Julia asked, “What about you, Adrian? Have you assembled all the personal items you’ll need? Are you taking care of the comfort stuff?”
“Thanks for asking. RJ reminded me about that. I need to get my butt in gear. The launch dates will help that.”
“Anything else we need to do for you?” she asked.
“You’ve both been exceptional. I can’t thank you enough. Hope I can return the favors someday.”
They stood and headed for the door. As he was leaving, Terry looked back. “So technically, we’ve started the countdown.”
“At zero. On your mark.” I watched him nod and close the door.
The spec books on the Griffin’s weaponry and stellar drives suddenly had even more meaning. The beam weapons would normally fire in two-second bursts, but that could be varied as necessary. They were not lasers. They did not burn holes. They delivered energy in explosive quantities. They used the matter being targeted as part of the fuel for the explosion. The more target matter, the larger the boom, the greater the destruction. It was a hell of a power to put in the hands of humans. They had even included a simulation program in the software so that users could practice shooting at things while en route. I committed the firing sequence to memory, along with the controls and firing path schematics, and went on to the stellar drives.
The power cores were not explained. I had the feeling the physics was just too far beyond comprehension. As best I could derive from the overview, each engine had a small sun burning within it. The recommended maximum output worked out to be a P-factor of X, the speed of light to the standard power of X, the same standard used on all earthborn engines. There was a footnote indicating PX was not the maximum the engines were capable of, whatever that meant.
There was also a stark warning in the intro to the stellar drive book that set me back a bit. Information on the drives, shields, communications, and weapons was not to be revealed to the crew until the Griffin was underway on the Nadir trajectory. Nor was the dissemination of such information to any ground personnel permitted. The Griffin’s secrets would remain contained within her superstructure, and me.
With a couple hours of study under my belt, I went back to the shields and communications manuals, pausing periodically to watch as the flight simulator jerked around into unusual flight attitudes. In the back of my mind
, I was working on a plan to ditch Pairs Denard. I could not contact Bernard Porre and ask him what the hell he was thinking. I suspected he had ulterior motives and would not be accepting compromise. I could not request psychiatric evaluation for dismissal, Denard would be able to talk his way through those sessions and then be the worse for them. I could not, as commander of the mission, invoke my authority to disqualify him since there would need to be documented evidence for my reasoning and a review board to approve it. Killing RJ in the airlock was not enough. He had not failed enough other simulations for Terry to recommend disqualification. There was no way to depart on our scheduled T-0 and accidentally leave him behind. As classified as we were, there would be too much attention. We’d be in orbit and get the “whoops, you almost forgot Denard,” alert from the agency.
But, there was the space station. We were scheduled to stop there briefly to double check long range scanning and navigation outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, standard operating procedures for long duration trips. All I needed was to have everyone on board and Denard somewhere on the main wheel of the station. Once I ordered the hatch sealed the crew would all know what was going on. It was a dirty trick. It was the best dirty trick I could come up with. We would separate, maneuver to the jump coordinates, and be light years away before Paris realized he had missed his ride. How could I do such a despicable thing? I have never been one to play strictly by the rules. It has brought me a lot of trouble over the years and there are a few scars in various places that are memoirs from that philosophy. On the other side of the coin, there were a number of instances where I, and those around me, would not have survived had the rules not been put aside. Those are the wildcards that remind you to trust your own mind and not someone else’s.
Would there be consequences for dumping Denard? Hell yes. Big ones. There would be nasty little meetings and fancy hearings and many harsh things would be said, rule books quoted, sayings by wise men invoked, breaks for lunch followed by a matinee of injured feelings proffered by indignant participants. On occasion, they would ramble off subject and need to be redirected to the matter at hand. It is the infamous spaghetti navigation of the committee, usually a diverse group of uninvolved people who know very little of why they are there or what the subject is. But, they have been deemed experts so their testimony, no matter how irrelevant, must be taken. And when the smoke clears and the dust settles, the sentence that was already determined before the circus began is handed down.
I am usually on the beach with a fishing pole when that part happens.
Chapter 16