Road to nowhere, Arc 4 of "Gone with the Sun"
Chapter 38 On our way home
Hard point
The cargo bay of Overlord, like other Normandy-class frigates, was currently burdened with the hardpoints for experimental weapons whose latest iterations would, every couple of weeks, be tested (and usually found wanting). Right now, though, it was the only place in the ship suitable for field practice.
Zabaleta watched Jack's biotic teenagers' rather sloppy retreat from the firing pits. Performance had not been terrific. These kids might be crackerjack biotics, but with a couple of exceptions, Prangley and Merizan, their pistol scores were woeful, and that would have to change on any realistic battlefield.
"Jack!" She looked up. He motioned her over.
Contingency planning
"What is it, Zeb? I'm kinda busy."
"Jack, you know how to teach biotics. But you need some help with the firearms."
"The hell? I do just fine."
"You use a shotgun, mostly. Up close and personal. Someone shoots back, you're not there when the bullet is. A lot of these kids aren't athletes like you, they don't have your muscle tone, they're not used to the recoil. Most of your kids are kinda intellectual."
"They're a bit geeky, yeah. But I've been working on their fitness. What they need is more time. Look, we can talk about this over coffee, come on."
Mainly, Zabaleta suspected, they didn't have the automatic skills of long familiarity. Every recoil was new and variable, instead of being a fairly constant impulse one's muscle memory would account for, with training.
"Time? They might not have a lot. The ones who do well, get motivation from making training a sort of competitive game. Losing all the time turns off the others, especially the girls. Also biotics won't help if your amp overheats. They need small-arms drill and unarmed combat, too."
Jack shrugged, feeling a bit helpless. The old soldier was right, and she knew it.
"So what do we do?" They entered the lift and headed up.
"Just a suggestion, Jack, but I think they could benefit from a bit of groundside distraction target training. Before that, though, they have to really get to know their weapon. Those marines –"
"– forget them, they think we're not proper soldiers, just mercenary schmucks."
"Yeah, well, OK. They're god-awful young too. They'll adapt if they spend any time here. They do have a drill which takes months to get down pat. Maybe we can organize one of them to spend the two days to Earth with the kids. Just how to field-strip and reassemble their weapons."
Jack paused a moment, then: "Jacob used to do that shit. I'm not sure my kids have the patience. I know I don't."
"So find a way to make it interesting. Without being competitive. If there's a competition, someone has to lose. We need them all competent. It would be nice if some of them are expert, but that's optional. I could get Toombs to give instruction."
"Kids don't like being lectured at. Especially not by someone like Toombs."
"Why not?"
"He's not cool. Jeez, Zeb, for a smart man you can be awfully dumb."
"Yeah." The old man looked like he was remembering something. "So maybe we get someone who is cool. What about Lawson?"
"Beyond cool. She's a frozen ice queen, except around Shep. Class, not cool. Besides, she's all grown-up. Thirty-seven, remember."
"Dang. That's four years older than Shepard… would be."
"Good save. Didn't stop them, did it?"
"Yeah. You'd never know it. Well, someone more their own age. Those marines?"
"Hell, no, the best of them are like Jacob, they take life way too seriously."
"That's a good thing."
"My kids are normal teenagers, Zeb, they ain't never gonna die. Well they might know that up here (she touched the top of her head), but not here (she tapped her heart). Whatever you teach, you gotta make it live. Guns don't live."
"We need another teenager, then? With Toombs. So he can pick up when they're missing something. Otherwise, we don't have cool, we don't have a kid to talk to kids, and the marines are too gung-ho."
Jack considered that.
"Maybe Goldstein. Hadley says what she don't know about guns ain't worth knowing. I dunno, Goldstein's got wit and a sort of style, but cool?"
"Get Lawson on her case. See if life in the fridge exists."
Sleeper service
"Fifteen minute departure warning." Yoof's voice carolled through the cargo bay of Overlord, open with only retention fields to space. The biotic recruits from Grissom had just stowed the targets set up at the open loading bay door.
The Marine corporal had lined up his little five-man squad in the armory at the end of exercise. A shuttle appeared from the rear of Orizaba.
"Right, boys, that was a good warm-up." There were groans. The small marine squad had just finished aerobics plus push-ups plus forty laps.
"You've one more duty before heading to the elevator. That shuttle is carrying a casualty from Orizaba's sick bay for treatment Earthside, but our own sick bay has too much activity with treating the ex-Cerberus people. So he gets the Captain's loft for the journey. He's wheelchair bound, we meet him with the gurney and take him up."
"Jesus. He get's Lawson's berth? What does Lawson think about that?"
"She's his medic, this trip, I presume Overlord is being paid in something other than coin. Most of the time she'll be with him or Zabaleta on duty in sick bay. I'm told we also pick up some struck-off medic from the moon."
At that point the elevator opened and Lawson stepped through, just as the shuttle coasted through the bay door. "Ten-shut."
"Thank you, Corporal. Gurney party, with me."
The shuttle door gaped and a bandaged figure was passed out in a wheelchair by two hulking marines under the watchful eye of an Alliance Admiral. She nodded as Lawson approached, and saluted the guard.
"Miranda. Delivery as scheduled Commander Ivan Higgins Bruce. Corporal, if you would." The squad got busy.
"Thanks, Hannah. You'd better zip, I think our pilot wants to show off again, and I have to go squelch his enthusiasm."
The patient was carefully lifted on the gurney and moved away. The Admiral waved at Lawson as the shuttle door sealed. It moved backwards through the still open port, rotated in place and dwindled towards the dreadnought again. The party moved to the elevator, where the psychotic biotic awaited, drumming her fingers.
"Loft."
The trip up went by in silence. Once at the top, the patient was helped out of the gurney; Lawson and Jack took him on their shoulders into the Captain's cabin area. Jack returned.
"Thanks heaps, boys. Dismissed. You'd better get to your crash restraints, Yoof wants to go home."
Sick transits
Yoof did not in fact want to go home. He had met up with Jeff Moreau, who had beaten Lawson to N-5, if only just, courtesy of some VI refinements. But it was vital, in their view, to get a speedy transit algorithm exactly right. They had been calculating.
"Okay, Moreau. I see what you've done with the core optimization, in principle. But Overlord doesn't have the VI capacity to run the path of least action."
The N-5 gate was part of an experimental configuration orbiting a rogue gas giant. The mini-Jovian originally had a dozen small chondritic moonlets remaining from whatever it had before it was ejected from its parent stellar system, to its current position out of the galactic plane; N-5 was one of six relays now arranged in a hexagonal "Klemperer rosette", so-called.
"Don't get hung up on the programming complexity. That's why we have pilots."
When Kilimanjaro's engineers noticed that three of these mini-moons were of approximately the right mass (over 40 kilotonne), a little more than 60 metres in diameter, they fitted fusion torches, burned off some mass to equalize them, and dragged them to form a triangle. They orbited ten kilometres from a central point – a much lighter but larger hollow "maintenance station" of a couple of hundred metres diameter.
"Can I make use of the rotational symmetry?"
Such polygon orbits are not normally in stable equilibrium to small perturbations. These almost were, being at mutual Lagrangian points, hence required minimal thruster adjustment. In addition, the engineers then spun three relays in a smaller triangle around the big artificial moon, at orbits of a little over four kilometres radius.
N-5 was one such. Besides these interior relays, three more sat on the outer 60m-diameter moonlets. N-6 sat on an outer 60m-diameter moonlet, around twelve kilometres away.
One nucleus of its QEC pair had just been implanted in N-6. The other would be emplaced in N-7 when it was constructed in two months' time, and nearly six hundred light years away.
"Yeah. Work out a close-to-optimal course for a given point in the rosette's orbit."
Yoof's digital paper now contained a rough cut of combined thruster / mass effect effort for a reasonably rapid transit between the two. The speeds for such small distances were typically very low; around the speed of a walking man, the safe option for a massive object like a frigate. Get that up to the speed of a running man, and one could cut an outrageous amount of time off the transit. Together the six 'moons' now formed a (3a,3b,1c) Klemperer rosette, a gravitationally stable hexagon, each of which sat in a Lagrangian point of two others. The fusion thrusters were hardly needed any more.
"Uh, here comes Lawson. My boss. I'll go with what I've got for now. She might want some Eezo from O-6."
The O-relays linked to "interesting" places a few hundred light years off in the dark – like O-3, which by default, linked to O-6, fixed to a high peak on the dark side of a Mercury-sized planet, in turn orbiting one of the very few actual stars to be found this far out of the galactic plane.
"Man, ain't you going to have fun."
Yoof's skin crawled thinking about his only passage of O-6. Recommended transit technique was to remain in the planets shadow till far enough away for an FTL jump a few dozen AU out-system. There was Eezo to be found near O-6, but one did not commit the transit without thinking twice. By default, O-6 was set to dump incoming straight into the planet's surface…
"Your VI should be able to run a perturbation analysis for the mass anomalies that'll get you at the wormhole window without tripping gimbal lock."
The digital paper was getting full. Yoof entered the waypoints of his rough cut into the VI; fingers pinched the bottom left corner twice and it flickered briefly before clearing. "Okay, buddy. Here's Lawson. Five minutes to undock. Time for me to zip."
"Yoof, a word."
"Hasta la vista, baybee." Yoof muted the TBS.
"Ma'am? Captain?" She didn't look upset with him, just serious.
"You will be aware that we have a senior officer on board. A casualty on transfer."
"Yeah, ma'am, there was some scuttlebutt."
"So we will NOT be detouring to O-6 this transit. We'll replenish Eezo on arrival."
"Uh… okay, ma'am. That's a bit of a relief, to be honest."
Even if O-6 allowed passage, you had to have shields up, because on exiting the planet's shadow the photosphere of a hot, hot Harvard class B star was only five million kilometres away.
"I wanted to speak to you about taking risks."
"Er, ma'am, I've learned my lesson. I won't risk the boat."
"Wrong, Yoof. You WILL risk the boat."
"Ma'am?"
"This is not an Alliance ship, Yoof. I expect risk to be balanced by reward. What you did at L1 was correct, but only because first, you had permission from the XO, and second, you were proven right by events."
"Uh… thank you ma'am. I think."
"Had you got it wrong, though, and killed one of my crew recklessly, you would be spaced. Unless I had some other use for you. Like organ transplants."
Yoof kept silent.
"Likewise, if we had suffered damage because you did not focus and do your utmost, I'd have dropped you at the next port."
This demanded some sort of response. "Permission to speak freely, ma'am."
"Always."
"Perhaps you should drop me off at the next port, ma'am. I wouldn't be able to keep up with Normandy as we're configured at present. Need more real-time computing power."
"I'm looking into that."
"The second thing, ma'am, is that I know what I do looks risky. It's not. I calculate where I can and stay safe where I can't. I think I'm damn good at my job, but I wouldn't do what you did on the way here. One day I'd make a mistake. You wouldn't, I think. But I'd do my level best, always, and I don't believe you'll find ten pilots in the fleet who could beat me. It's just unfortunate that two of them are on the Normandy, and you're another."
Miranda hunkered down and looked Yoof in the eyes.
"You might as well space me now, ma'am." Well, baby, maybe I'll see you a bit sooner than I'd thought. But she didn't look fierce. Just thoughtful.
"All right, Yoof. Not that I necessarily believe what you're saying. But I see that you believe it."
The captain stood back up.
"One thing. There aren't two pilots better on the Normandy."
"Ma'am?"
"Didn't Joker tell you? He's been seconded to the Orizaba and Kilimanjaro. You might beat Normandy yet. But if you do, you're probably taking more risks than Cortez. Do you feel lucky, Yoof?"
"Er… not so much, captain."
"Good man. Keep us alive, this trip. The man in the loft has things to live for, even if we don't."
Next chapter: #39, "AD"
Friday, July 24, 2015