Maiden Voyage
by Miles McCorison, AKA Poncho D.
All Animorph(TM) characters are copyright Scholastic, Inc.
Air Force Colonel Jacob S. Harris was thirty-three years old when he was chosen to command humanity's first starship. She was called the Archimedes. She was fourteen hundred feet long from tip to stern, and powered by two plasma-fired tokomak fusion reactors. Harris had been allowed to hand-pick his bridge crew, and the process was not hard for him at all. Now, as he looked at his beautiful ship through the window of the shuttle, he thought that her black hull and sleek lines looked less like an explorer and more like a warship. Maybe a carrier or a large battlecruiser. He thought back to his last conversation with his exec, back on the surface not more than an hour ago.
"Jake, how the hell could they do it? I don't know a whole lot about physics; I never payed any attention in science class, even in college. But I'm sure Mr. Einstein was a hell of a lot smarter than me, and he said there is no way, no way in the very bottom depths of hell, that anything can outrun light!"
"We're not planning to outrun light, Mr. Sanchez. We're just going to outsmart it."
"Well, if you're trying to get there before the light beam, then you're trying to outrun it, as far as I'm concerned."
"Marco, do me a favor, will you? Stand up." Major Marco Sanchez had stood with a skeptical look in his eyes.
"I want you to do me a favor. Start at the chair you are standing in front of, and walk all the way around this room until you come back to where you started. I bet I can get there before you." Harris smiled ruefully as he remembered the look on his friend's face. Good old Marco, he never could turn down a challenge. Marco had rolled his eyes and began to pace a slow lap around the briefing room. Jake had strode purposefully accross to the other wall. "I win." He had said.
"Hey, that's not fair, you broke the rules!" Marco had said irately.
"Exactly. While you took the long way around, I took the shortcut."
"But there are no shortcuts in space. The shortest distance between two points is straight line! You just proved that!"
"That, my friend, is where you are wrong. And that is where Einstein was wrong. You see, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, it's zero, and that is exactly how far we are going to travel to get to the Lalande system."
"But you said Lalande was about eight light-years away. That's like fifty or sixty trillion miles! We're going to travel that far, but we're not going to go anywhere?"
"Yep."
"Oh, forget it. I'll just have to see for myself."
Harris smiled to to himself. It was no use trying to explain hyperspace to a guy like Marco. Not that he wasn't smart, he was just to down-to-earth. Marco Sanchez was the kind of person who does not believe in something unless he can see it.
He snapped out of his revery as the clang and the dull boom of the shuttle docking with the Archimedes sounded through the hull. There was a hiss of air as pressures equalized, and the shuttle door swung open to reveal a gleaming white hallway. The young black woman on the other side gave a crisp salute. "Welcome aboard, sir."
"Cassie! Let's skip the formalities, huh?" He reached out and emraced her. She returned the hug happily, then went back to business. "Mr. Sanchez has the conn, at the moment, sir. If you'll follow me, I'll show you the bridge, and then take you to your quarters."
"Thank you, Ms. Jenkins."
He followed along behind her. He noticed she had lost none of her youthful figure. She was still a knockout, enough to make Karen a little envious. He carefully averted his eyes to her head at the thought of his wife.
"How is the ship doing, Ms. Jenkins?"
"We launch in three hours. Dry-dock is fueling the rocket engines for our first boost, and the techs in Engineering are warming up the plasma."
She stopped at the door, and beamed at him as it opened. "Welcome the bridge of the Archimedes, sir!"
Jake caught his breath at the sight. It was truly a thing of beauty. The consoles and tactical displays glowed with their soft green and red hues. Technicians hurried about, making final checks and adjustments, and a soft whisper of mingled conversations surrounded him. And at the center of it all was the huge black leather chair from which he, Jacob Scott Harris, would guide this cosmic whale of a ship to its encounter with destiny in the Lalande system, humanity's first interstellar voyage.
He was still wide-eyed, gawking at his surroundings, when a finger tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to see a young, blonde woman about his age with a clipboard under her arm. "Good morning, sir." She nodded at Marco, in the command chair. "Major."
Rachel Harris Rawlins was still in good shape, and her background in science had made her the obvious choice for the dual roles of Chief Science Officer and Chief Medical Officer. She was wearing the first hat at the moment, he noticed, when she handed him the clipboard. There was a bold legend at the top:
PRELIMINARY REPORT ON THE PHYSICAL EFFECTS OF HYPERSPACE
Jake gave her his slow grin, but retained his formality. The back slapping and catching up with his old friends would come later. "It's good to see you, Mrs. Rawlins."
"Umm, it's Doctor Rawlins now, sir." She said with a proud smile.
"Yes, of course, Doctor. Congradulations on your Ph.D."
"Thank you, sir. It's good to see you too."
Cassandra Jenkins coughed lightly. He turned and noticed several men stading next to her. "Sir, I would like you to meet the rest of your staff. This is your navigator, Ensign Abram Reilly. Your computer specialist and shuttle pilot, Technical Sergeant Tobias Hunter-Fangor. And your gunner, Lieutenant Junior Grade Dallas Cole." Harris balked at the last introduction.
"Gunner?" He asked. The Archimedes was armed?
"Yes sir," Lieutenant Cole replied. "The ship has some minimal weaponry: never know what we might run into out there."
Those idiots at NASA had put weapons on his ship and didn't tell him?
"Ms. Jenkins, Dr. Rawlins, I'd like to see you both in my office once we're under weigh."
"Yes sir!," both said simultaneously, saluting smartly.
"For now, I'm calling a meeting of the bridge crew in the wardroom. We do have one, right?"
"Yes sir, on the mid-deck," Doctor Rawlins replied evenly.
* * *
In the wardroom, Harris looked over his staff. They were good people. They always had been, but it didn't keep him from being right pissed about NASA turning his ship into a killing machine.
"Okay, people, how are we going to do this? Anything in particular I need to know?"
Ensign Reilly raised his hand. "Sir? I'd like to go over the mission profile."
"By all means, Ensign."
Reilly rose and walked to the front of the room. He turned on a 3D video projector, which showed a picture of the Solar System, marked with red lines and cryptic notations.
"I take it you've read Dr. Rawlins' report on the hyperdrive system, sir?"
"Not yet, Ensign. Go ahead and spoil it for me."
"Well sir, we can't open the hyperdrive until we clear the system."
"Good grief, is the exhaust that powerful?"
"Not the exhaust sir; the hyperdrive doesn't have any. It's the way the system works its magic, sir. It has to create a very strong gravity field to pull us through the jump. We're talking forces strong enough to rival a small black hole. A gravity distortion that big would throw the planets out of orbit."
Josheph and Mary, who the hell built this monster?
"What's the minimum safe distance?" Harris asked.
"About a tenth of a light year, sir." Harris made a quick mental calculation and, when he realized the answer, he sighed and shook his head in frustration. "Six hundred billion miles."
"At twenty percent of lightspeed, sir. About forty thousand a second. On this half of the trip, we'll be under weigh for about..." He pulled out a calculator and punched a few buttons. "...Six months."
"A six month trip to Lalande on a ship that is supposed to get there instantaneously?" Harris asked irately.
"Hey, its better than a forty-year trip in suspended animation, waking up feeling like you've been run over a Mac truck. Having your muscles waste away, having to wipe that disgusting goo off you when you..."
"Thank you, Mr. Sanchez, that will be all." Harris snapped. Sanchez was quiet instantly.
"Anything else?"
"That's about it, sir..." Suddenly the loudspeaker blared: "Attention, all hands, launch in T-minus 45 minutes. Make sure all gear is stowed. Captain to the bridge please. Repeat, rocket ignition in 45 minutes. Programmed acceleration: three gravities. Time from rocket ignition to reactor start up: 20 minutes for a burnout speed of 22.4 miles per second.
"Sir," Reilly said, "I was about to tell you that you'll all have to get into the grav couches when we burn out. The acceleration to point two C on the reactors won't be nearly as tame as the rockets. Anybody standing when those bitches light up will leave a three-foot dent in the bulkhead behind them."
"Very well. Mr. Sanchez, round up Doctor Rawlins and Ensign Jenkins. I want to see the three of you in my office. Meeting adjourned."
* * *
"Marco, you and Cassie were the ones handling this until I got up here. Why the hell is this ship packing heat?" In the captain's office, Jake was red in the face, but he tried not to let his anger out on his friends. Guns and bombs and God knows what else on a freaking exploratory ship; NASA had really lost its mind this time.
"Well, sir," Marco started. "It's like Lieutenant Cole said, you never no what kind of nasties are floating around out--"
"I know what Lieutenant Cole said," Jake interrupted. "The war is over! There are no Yeerks out there, and if there are Andalites or Skrit-Na between here and Lalande, there's not much chance of them catching up to us."
Rachel spoke up with the old fire in her eyes. "Sir, with all due respect, I disagree. I've seen the figures on Andalite raider ships. Our top speed is twenty percent of light. They can make it into the relativistic range. Fast enough to screw up their clocks. Jake, if they want to take us on, they could do it. It would stupid on their part with the load we're carrying,"--the pride in her in voice was unmistakable--"but they wouldn't need much effort to get to us."
Jake relented a bit and smiled at her. "Rachel, you haven't changed a bit. But I'm not traveling a zillion miles accross space to go pick a fight. What exactly are we carrying, anyway?"
Cassie looked down at her notes. "Well, sir, we've got two rail guns, a laser..." Cassie looked up.
"Go on, Cass."
"You're not going to like this."
"I can't get much more pissed than I already am. Go on."
"Twenty nuclear-tipped tactical missiles."
Jake's head hit his desk. "Okay, I retract my earlier statement. You people are dismissed. I'm going to get on the horn to those jerks at NASA."
Rachel, Cassie, and Marco turned and marched out in smart military fashion.
T Minus 10 minutes
Jake opened his safe and pulled out the small bottle of Jack Daniels Marco had given him for his thirtieth birthday. It was totally a prestige gift; Jake had never taken a sip in his life. Marco liked to have a beer once in a while, but never got drunk.
He looked at the bottle, and wondered how it be to take a long pull, and forget all his problems. "That's not the answer, dude," a voice broke into his thoughts. Marco was standing in the door. "I mean it, Jake. Don't even pop that cap." He came in and sat down. "The politicos wouldn't listen, huh?"
"Nope. I didn't expect them to, really. But you're right about the booze. No shelter in the bottle." He put it back in his safe and spun the knob. "So, we're going out loaded for bear. I mean, asteroids and space junk are a good excuse for lasers. Maybe. Just barely. But tactical nukes? Jeez, what the hell are they sending us into?"
"Don't know, man. But we can worry about that later. We need you on the bridge right now."
* * *
Colonel Harris strode on to the bridge and settled into his command chair. Tobias Hunter-Fangor had the officer-of-the-deck position.
"Report, Mr. Hunter."
"Three minutes, sir. We're fueled and ready to go. The nav computers are still kind of buggy, but I'm working on the program. You can trust me to finish in a hurry: Reilly has been threatening me with classical music if I don't finish before rocket burnout."
"Aww, come on, Mr. Reilly," Harris joked. "Twenty minutes? Beethoven is a pretty harsh punishment. Give the man a little time!"
Reilly grinned over his shoulder. "Actually, sir, it's not so bad. If I really wanted to punish him, I could make him listen to some of your better tastes. That hip-hop stuff is murder on the ears."
"All right, Ensign, let's leave Christina and Kid Rock out of this." The banter was a way to keep spirits up, and helped alleviate some of the nervousness.
"TEN, NINE, EIGHT..." the speaker blared. He felt Major Sanchez tense behind him and grab the chair.
"All hands, brace for accelleration!" Harris shouted.
"THREE..."
"Hey, Hunter! Know what it feels like to be karate-kicked by God?" Ensign Reilly shouted to Hunter over the roar of the fuel flow "This is it, man!"
"TWO..."
"Oh, man, I'm glad I haven't eaten yet," Sanchex said.
"ONE..."
No one had to look to know who shouted "LET'S DO IT!!"
At the rear of the ship, the four enormous Saturn Five disposable rockets exploded into life with the force of a million angry war-gods, hurling the ship forward at three times the force of Earth gravity.
"YEEEEEHAAAA!!!" Sanchez crowed as gravity tried to rip him away from the back of the command chair. But he held on with a death grip.
Jake Harris allowed the invisible elephant to shove him back into the seat.
Thirty minutes later
A knock sounded at the door of Jake's quarters.
"Come in."
Ensign Reilly and Sergeant Hunter stood at the door. "We've been in cruise for ten minutes. Chief Engineer Doughrty is ready to fire up the reactors whenever you want," Reilly informed him.
"Yeah, I'll be up on the bridge in a bit. Could you excuse us for a minute?"
"Of course, sir." Reilly saluted and left.
"Hey, Tobias. Come on in."
"How's it going, Jake?"
"Been a long time." They shook hands.
"So, when did you do it?" Jake asked, referring to Tobias' human body.
"Two years ago, when Rachel and I broke up. She's married Bobby Rawlins a few months later. I might have known she was seeing someone else. The whole half-human, half-hawk issue finally got to her. I found a job in the Marines. The work helped to numb the pain a bit."
"Yeah. Cassie took it pretty hard when I told her Karen and I were engaged. She understood, though. So what did you do in the Corps, huh?"
"Worked on the U.S.S. Nassau, fixing Harrier jets. I even got a little time at the stick. It was almost as much fun as being a bird. Paid off pretty good. Man, I nearly died of shock when I found out you were in the space program, then I get a letter from you asking me to serve on the Archimedes! I always wondered what flying in space would be like. That shuttle handles like a dream."
"Hey, the shuttle I was on," Jake asked. "Was that--"
"Yep. Enjoy the ride?"
Jake laughed. "You've still got the touch, after all this time. The Air Force relegated me to a desk job after an incident involving another fighter pilot."
"Another pilot? What did you do, have an affair?"
"What?! Are you nuts? I love Karen more than my own life! No, a guy kept making me mad. I ignored it at first, but he pushed me too far. Took him months to get his jaw fixed."
"You, in a fight? I never thought it. You were always a pretty patient guy."
"Yeah, well, you can't push a guy but so far. Anyway, let's get this thing on a roll. He keyed the intercom. "Mr. Doughrty, let's get under weigh." He switched channels. "Mr. Sanchez, inform the rest of the ship that we're getting ready to move out. Ms. Jenkins, if you would please show everyone to the grav couches."
"Right away, sir," Jenkins replied from the bridge.
* * *
The Archimedes had been left adrift at thirty-six kilometers per second when her Saturns burned out just short of the orbit of Mars. Now that they were nothing more than unneeded mass, huge blasts of compressed air ejected the empty rockets into cold, dark space. Deep inside the tokomak reactors, which Engineer Doughrty had programmed for delayed action, the tremedous energies which had slumbered until this point began to come to life. The electromagnets inside each of the two doughnut-shaped toruses increased their hold on the gases under them to a death grip. Under the enormous pressure, the ionized hydrogen tried to relieve itself by moving. But the only movement that can be accomplished inside a doughnut is a spin. So the hydrogen began to spin faster and faster. The magnets tried to bring their wayward charge back into line, and although they were unable to regain their stranglehold no matter much they increased power, their efforts did produce exactly what their human designers anticipated: friction. And that friction produced heat. By this time, the hydrogen was racing around inside its doughnut prison at a maniacal speed of fifty miles per second, which translated to millions of revolutions per minute. Eventually, the heat being produced reached into the millions of degrees found at the suface of a more-or-less hum-drum yellow star. The hydrogen atoms, with their like charges, ordinarily repelled one another. But under the crushing pressures now building up, it was quite impossible for anything to repel anything else.
Nuclear fusion.
The speeding of atoms of hydrogen began to slam into one another like bumper cars. The energy each collision produced rivaled that of an average nuclear bomb. The blazing energy was directed out of the three nozzles at the stern of the ship. White-hot plasma exploded into space with unstoppable fury, and the Starship Archimedes pitched upward and roared accross the solar system like a blazing comet, under a force of gravity equal to over seventy times that which its inhabitants had been accustomed to on their planet. It was very fortunate for those brave cosmonauts that they were safe inside glass cocoons with luxurious cusioning. Had anyone had the heart to stand under the immense acceleration the ship was undergoing, that person would have certainly been killed, splattering into red nothingness against the nearest bulkhead. Inside his grav couch, Jacob Harris slept, blissfully unaware as the ship began its long journey toward the interstellar void half a trillion miles beyond Pluto.
by Miles McCorison, AKA Poncho D.
All Animorph(TM) characters are copyright Scholastic, Inc.
Air Force Colonel Jacob S. Harris was thirty-three years old when he was chosen to command humanity's first starship. She was called the Archimedes. She was fourteen hundred feet long from tip to stern, and powered by two plasma-fired tokomak fusion reactors. Harris had been allowed to hand-pick his bridge crew, and the process was not hard for him at all. Now, as he looked at his beautiful ship through the window of the shuttle, he thought that her black hull and sleek lines looked less like an explorer and more like a warship. Maybe a carrier or a large battlecruiser. He thought back to his last conversation with his exec, back on the surface not more than an hour ago.
"Jake, how the hell could they do it? I don't know a whole lot about physics; I never payed any attention in science class, even in college. But I'm sure Mr. Einstein was a hell of a lot smarter than me, and he said there is no way, no way in the very bottom depths of hell, that anything can outrun light!"
"We're not planning to outrun light, Mr. Sanchez. We're just going to outsmart it."
"Well, if you're trying to get there before the light beam, then you're trying to outrun it, as far as I'm concerned."
"Marco, do me a favor, will you? Stand up." Major Marco Sanchez had stood with a skeptical look in his eyes.
"I want you to do me a favor. Start at the chair you are standing in front of, and walk all the way around this room until you come back to where you started. I bet I can get there before you." Harris smiled ruefully as he remembered the look on his friend's face. Good old Marco, he never could turn down a challenge. Marco had rolled his eyes and began to pace a slow lap around the briefing room. Jake had strode purposefully accross to the other wall. "I win." He had said.
"Hey, that's not fair, you broke the rules!" Marco had said irately.
"Exactly. While you took the long way around, I took the shortcut."
"But there are no shortcuts in space. The shortest distance between two points is straight line! You just proved that!"
"That, my friend, is where you are wrong. And that is where Einstein was wrong. You see, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, it's zero, and that is exactly how far we are going to travel to get to the Lalande system."
"But you said Lalande was about eight light-years away. That's like fifty or sixty trillion miles! We're going to travel that far, but we're not going to go anywhere?"
"Yep."
"Oh, forget it. I'll just have to see for myself."
Harris smiled to to himself. It was no use trying to explain hyperspace to a guy like Marco. Not that he wasn't smart, he was just to down-to-earth. Marco Sanchez was the kind of person who does not believe in something unless he can see it.
He snapped out of his revery as the clang and the dull boom of the shuttle docking with the Archimedes sounded through the hull. There was a hiss of air as pressures equalized, and the shuttle door swung open to reveal a gleaming white hallway. The young black woman on the other side gave a crisp salute. "Welcome aboard, sir."
"Cassie! Let's skip the formalities, huh?" He reached out and emraced her. She returned the hug happily, then went back to business. "Mr. Sanchez has the conn, at the moment, sir. If you'll follow me, I'll show you the bridge, and then take you to your quarters."
"Thank you, Ms. Jenkins."
He followed along behind her. He noticed she had lost none of her youthful figure. She was still a knockout, enough to make Karen a little envious. He carefully averted his eyes to her head at the thought of his wife.
"How is the ship doing, Ms. Jenkins?"
"We launch in three hours. Dry-dock is fueling the rocket engines for our first boost, and the techs in Engineering are warming up the plasma."
She stopped at the door, and beamed at him as it opened. "Welcome the bridge of the Archimedes, sir!"
Jake caught his breath at the sight. It was truly a thing of beauty. The consoles and tactical displays glowed with their soft green and red hues. Technicians hurried about, making final checks and adjustments, and a soft whisper of mingled conversations surrounded him. And at the center of it all was the huge black leather chair from which he, Jacob Scott Harris, would guide this cosmic whale of a ship to its encounter with destiny in the Lalande system, humanity's first interstellar voyage.
He was still wide-eyed, gawking at his surroundings, when a finger tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to see a young, blonde woman about his age with a clipboard under her arm. "Good morning, sir." She nodded at Marco, in the command chair. "Major."
Rachel Harris Rawlins was still in good shape, and her background in science had made her the obvious choice for the dual roles of Chief Science Officer and Chief Medical Officer. She was wearing the first hat at the moment, he noticed, when she handed him the clipboard. There was a bold legend at the top:
PRELIMINARY REPORT ON THE PHYSICAL EFFECTS OF HYPERSPACE
Jake gave her his slow grin, but retained his formality. The back slapping and catching up with his old friends would come later. "It's good to see you, Mrs. Rawlins."
"Umm, it's Doctor Rawlins now, sir." She said with a proud smile.
"Yes, of course, Doctor. Congradulations on your Ph.D."
"Thank you, sir. It's good to see you too."
Cassandra Jenkins coughed lightly. He turned and noticed several men stading next to her. "Sir, I would like you to meet the rest of your staff. This is your navigator, Ensign Abram Reilly. Your computer specialist and shuttle pilot, Technical Sergeant Tobias Hunter-Fangor. And your gunner, Lieutenant Junior Grade Dallas Cole." Harris balked at the last introduction.
"Gunner?" He asked. The Archimedes was armed?
"Yes sir," Lieutenant Cole replied. "The ship has some minimal weaponry: never know what we might run into out there."
Those idiots at NASA had put weapons on his ship and didn't tell him?
"Ms. Jenkins, Dr. Rawlins, I'd like to see you both in my office once we're under weigh."
"Yes sir!," both said simultaneously, saluting smartly.
"For now, I'm calling a meeting of the bridge crew in the wardroom. We do have one, right?"
"Yes sir, on the mid-deck," Doctor Rawlins replied evenly.
* * *
In the wardroom, Harris looked over his staff. They were good people. They always had been, but it didn't keep him from being right pissed about NASA turning his ship into a killing machine.
"Okay, people, how are we going to do this? Anything in particular I need to know?"
Ensign Reilly raised his hand. "Sir? I'd like to go over the mission profile."
"By all means, Ensign."
Reilly rose and walked to the front of the room. He turned on a 3D video projector, which showed a picture of the Solar System, marked with red lines and cryptic notations.
"I take it you've read Dr. Rawlins' report on the hyperdrive system, sir?"
"Not yet, Ensign. Go ahead and spoil it for me."
"Well sir, we can't open the hyperdrive until we clear the system."
"Good grief, is the exhaust that powerful?"
"Not the exhaust sir; the hyperdrive doesn't have any. It's the way the system works its magic, sir. It has to create a very strong gravity field to pull us through the jump. We're talking forces strong enough to rival a small black hole. A gravity distortion that big would throw the planets out of orbit."
Josheph and Mary, who the hell built this monster?
"What's the minimum safe distance?" Harris asked.
"About a tenth of a light year, sir." Harris made a quick mental calculation and, when he realized the answer, he sighed and shook his head in frustration. "Six hundred billion miles."
"At twenty percent of lightspeed, sir. About forty thousand a second. On this half of the trip, we'll be under weigh for about..." He pulled out a calculator and punched a few buttons. "...Six months."
"A six month trip to Lalande on a ship that is supposed to get there instantaneously?" Harris asked irately.
"Hey, its better than a forty-year trip in suspended animation, waking up feeling like you've been run over a Mac truck. Having your muscles waste away, having to wipe that disgusting goo off you when you..."
"Thank you, Mr. Sanchez, that will be all." Harris snapped. Sanchez was quiet instantly.
"Anything else?"
"That's about it, sir..." Suddenly the loudspeaker blared: "Attention, all hands, launch in T-minus 45 minutes. Make sure all gear is stowed. Captain to the bridge please. Repeat, rocket ignition in 45 minutes. Programmed acceleration: three gravities. Time from rocket ignition to reactor start up: 20 minutes for a burnout speed of 22.4 miles per second.
"Sir," Reilly said, "I was about to tell you that you'll all have to get into the grav couches when we burn out. The acceleration to point two C on the reactors won't be nearly as tame as the rockets. Anybody standing when those bitches light up will leave a three-foot dent in the bulkhead behind them."
"Very well. Mr. Sanchez, round up Doctor Rawlins and Ensign Jenkins. I want to see the three of you in my office. Meeting adjourned."
* * *
"Marco, you and Cassie were the ones handling this until I got up here. Why the hell is this ship packing heat?" In the captain's office, Jake was red in the face, but he tried not to let his anger out on his friends. Guns and bombs and God knows what else on a freaking exploratory ship; NASA had really lost its mind this time.
"Well, sir," Marco started. "It's like Lieutenant Cole said, you never no what kind of nasties are floating around out--"
"I know what Lieutenant Cole said," Jake interrupted. "The war is over! There are no Yeerks out there, and if there are Andalites or Skrit-Na between here and Lalande, there's not much chance of them catching up to us."
Rachel spoke up with the old fire in her eyes. "Sir, with all due respect, I disagree. I've seen the figures on Andalite raider ships. Our top speed is twenty percent of light. They can make it into the relativistic range. Fast enough to screw up their clocks. Jake, if they want to take us on, they could do it. It would stupid on their part with the load we're carrying,"--the pride in her in voice was unmistakable--"but they wouldn't need much effort to get to us."
Jake relented a bit and smiled at her. "Rachel, you haven't changed a bit. But I'm not traveling a zillion miles accross space to go pick a fight. What exactly are we carrying, anyway?"
Cassie looked down at her notes. "Well, sir, we've got two rail guns, a laser..." Cassie looked up.
"Go on, Cass."
"You're not going to like this."
"I can't get much more pissed than I already am. Go on."
"Twenty nuclear-tipped tactical missiles."
Jake's head hit his desk. "Okay, I retract my earlier statement. You people are dismissed. I'm going to get on the horn to those jerks at NASA."
Rachel, Cassie, and Marco turned and marched out in smart military fashion.
T Minus 10 minutes
Jake opened his safe and pulled out the small bottle of Jack Daniels Marco had given him for his thirtieth birthday. It was totally a prestige gift; Jake had never taken a sip in his life. Marco liked to have a beer once in a while, but never got drunk.
He looked at the bottle, and wondered how it be to take a long pull, and forget all his problems. "That's not the answer, dude," a voice broke into his thoughts. Marco was standing in the door. "I mean it, Jake. Don't even pop that cap." He came in and sat down. "The politicos wouldn't listen, huh?"
"Nope. I didn't expect them to, really. But you're right about the booze. No shelter in the bottle." He put it back in his safe and spun the knob. "So, we're going out loaded for bear. I mean, asteroids and space junk are a good excuse for lasers. Maybe. Just barely. But tactical nukes? Jeez, what the hell are they sending us into?"
"Don't know, man. But we can worry about that later. We need you on the bridge right now."
* * *
Colonel Harris strode on to the bridge and settled into his command chair. Tobias Hunter-Fangor had the officer-of-the-deck position.
"Report, Mr. Hunter."
"Three minutes, sir. We're fueled and ready to go. The nav computers are still kind of buggy, but I'm working on the program. You can trust me to finish in a hurry: Reilly has been threatening me with classical music if I don't finish before rocket burnout."
"Aww, come on, Mr. Reilly," Harris joked. "Twenty minutes? Beethoven is a pretty harsh punishment. Give the man a little time!"
Reilly grinned over his shoulder. "Actually, sir, it's not so bad. If I really wanted to punish him, I could make him listen to some of your better tastes. That hip-hop stuff is murder on the ears."
"All right, Ensign, let's leave Christina and Kid Rock out of this." The banter was a way to keep spirits up, and helped alleviate some of the nervousness.
"TEN, NINE, EIGHT..." the speaker blared. He felt Major Sanchez tense behind him and grab the chair.
"All hands, brace for accelleration!" Harris shouted.
"THREE..."
"Hey, Hunter! Know what it feels like to be karate-kicked by God?" Ensign Reilly shouted to Hunter over the roar of the fuel flow "This is it, man!"
"TWO..."
"Oh, man, I'm glad I haven't eaten yet," Sanchex said.
"ONE..."
No one had to look to know who shouted "LET'S DO IT!!"
At the rear of the ship, the four enormous Saturn Five disposable rockets exploded into life with the force of a million angry war-gods, hurling the ship forward at three times the force of Earth gravity.
"YEEEEEHAAAA!!!" Sanchez crowed as gravity tried to rip him away from the back of the command chair. But he held on with a death grip.
Jake Harris allowed the invisible elephant to shove him back into the seat.
Thirty minutes later
A knock sounded at the door of Jake's quarters.
"Come in."
Ensign Reilly and Sergeant Hunter stood at the door. "We've been in cruise for ten minutes. Chief Engineer Doughrty is ready to fire up the reactors whenever you want," Reilly informed him.
"Yeah, I'll be up on the bridge in a bit. Could you excuse us for a minute?"
"Of course, sir." Reilly saluted and left.
"Hey, Tobias. Come on in."
"How's it going, Jake?"
"Been a long time." They shook hands.
"So, when did you do it?" Jake asked, referring to Tobias' human body.
"Two years ago, when Rachel and I broke up. She's married Bobby Rawlins a few months later. I might have known she was seeing someone else. The whole half-human, half-hawk issue finally got to her. I found a job in the Marines. The work helped to numb the pain a bit."
"Yeah. Cassie took it pretty hard when I told her Karen and I were engaged. She understood, though. So what did you do in the Corps, huh?"
"Worked on the U.S.S. Nassau, fixing Harrier jets. I even got a little time at the stick. It was almost as much fun as being a bird. Paid off pretty good. Man, I nearly died of shock when I found out you were in the space program, then I get a letter from you asking me to serve on the Archimedes! I always wondered what flying in space would be like. That shuttle handles like a dream."
"Hey, the shuttle I was on," Jake asked. "Was that--"
"Yep. Enjoy the ride?"
Jake laughed. "You've still got the touch, after all this time. The Air Force relegated me to a desk job after an incident involving another fighter pilot."
"Another pilot? What did you do, have an affair?"
"What?! Are you nuts? I love Karen more than my own life! No, a guy kept making me mad. I ignored it at first, but he pushed me too far. Took him months to get his jaw fixed."
"You, in a fight? I never thought it. You were always a pretty patient guy."
"Yeah, well, you can't push a guy but so far. Anyway, let's get this thing on a roll. He keyed the intercom. "Mr. Doughrty, let's get under weigh." He switched channels. "Mr. Sanchez, inform the rest of the ship that we're getting ready to move out. Ms. Jenkins, if you would please show everyone to the grav couches."
"Right away, sir," Jenkins replied from the bridge.
* * *
The Archimedes had been left adrift at thirty-six kilometers per second when her Saturns burned out just short of the orbit of Mars. Now that they were nothing more than unneeded mass, huge blasts of compressed air ejected the empty rockets into cold, dark space. Deep inside the tokomak reactors, which Engineer Doughrty had programmed for delayed action, the tremedous energies which had slumbered until this point began to come to life. The electromagnets inside each of the two doughnut-shaped toruses increased their hold on the gases under them to a death grip. Under the enormous pressure, the ionized hydrogen tried to relieve itself by moving. But the only movement that can be accomplished inside a doughnut is a spin. So the hydrogen began to spin faster and faster. The magnets tried to bring their wayward charge back into line, and although they were unable to regain their stranglehold no matter much they increased power, their efforts did produce exactly what their human designers anticipated: friction. And that friction produced heat. By this time, the hydrogen was racing around inside its doughnut prison at a maniacal speed of fifty miles per second, which translated to millions of revolutions per minute. Eventually, the heat being produced reached into the millions of degrees found at the suface of a more-or-less hum-drum yellow star. The hydrogen atoms, with their like charges, ordinarily repelled one another. But under the crushing pressures now building up, it was quite impossible for anything to repel anything else.
Nuclear fusion.
The speeding of atoms of hydrogen began to slam into one another like bumper cars. The energy each collision produced rivaled that of an average nuclear bomb. The blazing energy was directed out of the three nozzles at the stern of the ship. White-hot plasma exploded into space with unstoppable fury, and the Starship Archimedes pitched upward and roared accross the solar system like a blazing comet, under a force of gravity equal to over seventy times that which its inhabitants had been accustomed to on their planet. It was very fortunate for those brave cosmonauts that they were safe inside glass cocoons with luxurious cusioning. Had anyone had the heart to stand under the immense acceleration the ship was undergoing, that person would have certainly been killed, splattering into red nothingness against the nearest bulkhead. Inside his grav couch, Jacob Harris slept, blissfully unaware as the ship began its long journey toward the interstellar void half a trillion miles beyond Pluto.