24 — Hitting the Marks
Scootaloo had the honour of discovering Lady Rowena Ravenclaw's library. Why she decided it would be a good idea to fly down a chimney left everypony puzzled. "Eh," she said by way of explanation, "I was slaloming around the chimneys, bored, when I noticed this one chimney didn't have any heat or smoke coming out of it." She shrugged. "I was bored. So, I decided to see where it went, and where I would end up."
She sighed. "It was just a room with big desk and lots of scrolls stuffed in little cubby holes. Surprisingly, there wasn't any dust anywhere. It looked as if the owner had just stepped out.
"It had an enormous window overlooking the grounds, and a smaller one that let me look into what I later realized was the Ravenclaw common room."
"How did you know that?" asked a first-year.
Scootaloo rolled her eyes again. " 'cause that's where they told me I was when I left the room! The entrance is behind her statue in their common room."
She sighed. "Unfortunately, the door wouldn't open again once I left."
"What if you got stuck in the chimney?" Apple Bloom said with a shudder. "No one knew where you were!"
Scootaloo rolled her eyes, "I'd call for a house-elf," she said. "Duh. One of them could easily POP me out."
The others all nodded, understanding.
"Still, next time, tell someone before taking off into someplace unknown," Harry said quietly.
The Headmaster was especially pleased about that discovery, and gave Scootaloo ten points.
The window to the common room was apparently a series of one-way-transparent stones. It had let the Founder monitor her House's common room, and the students in it, without being noticed.
No one had, as yet, found the method to entering her study, which was beside the Ravenclaw common room chimney. The professors were stuck with either flying down the chimney as a pegasus would or having a house-elf pop them into it. Only the Headmaster could use apparation.
Harry had his doubts about that exclusivity. He was sure that his teleport would work just fine, but he first needed to take a look at it. He was surprised that teleporting was so slow at catching on. It was a tremendous improvement on apparating. However, witches had shown themselves reluctant to try anything new. It was better to stick with what they knew than experiment with something else, seemed to be the sentiment.
The house-elves knew of Rowena's office, of course, they kept it clean, after all. But they had been told never to tell anyone, not even the Headmaster. As the order came from a Founder, the castle magic had informed subsequent generations of the ban. Now that it had been found, the order had been cancelled.
Unlike Salazar Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets, Ravenclaw's Library had not been pillaged by previous sleuths. Rowena's diaries, notes, and many priceless manuscripts and scrolls were still intact, as if only set aside by her the previous day.
Copies were placed in the Hogwarts Library, where scholars and students were reading them avidly. To Scootaloo's surprise and delight, she was awarded a special plaque for finding the Founder's hidden room.
Naturally, this discovery led to a flurry of pegasi diving down chimneys and popping out of cold fireplaces all over the castle. Not that the pegasi were all that interested, at first. Some of the other students, however, were more than willing to bribe the flying ponies to do the checking for them. Probably because they were too big to fit, themselves, and doing it while riding a broom was impossible.
Other upper-year students teamed up with first years and used levitation charms to explore the attics and chimneys. The Firsties were, naturally, smaller than the older students and less likely to get stuck in a tight place.
Sadly, no other "hidden" rooms were found with that method, although they did discover a rather unusual number of disused sleeping quarters for professors or guests.
In an interesting development, the newly discovered rooms appeared on the map in Headmaster Dumbledore's office, as well as the more extensive one in the Prefects' Monitoring room. It seemed that the map only acknowledged Castle areas that had been "in use" when the map was first initialized last year.
The Prefects did not appreciate the number of new hiding places they had to check for couples engaged in illicit activities during the day.
This left only Godric Gryffindor's Armoury and Helga Hufflepuff's secret room — possibly a solarium? — undiscovered.
The hunt was on!
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Elly was stumped. For the last month she had kept noticing an unsettling disparity with one of the Slytherins. His feelings were . . . too erratic. They varied from boredom or relaxed, to afraid, worried, and anxious — normal for most students with assignments to hand in — to upset, enraged, and downright near-violent. It was almost like two people in one body, at different times of the day. There seemed to be no pattern to it at all.
Almost exactly as Professor Quirrel had been last year.
She hadn't yet narrowed it down to one student because the Slytherins were remarkably inexpressive — most had a "public" face when they weren't in their dorm. At least that was her conclusion based on how often the expression of any particular Slytherin was at times radically different from the feeling he or she was projecting. The other three Houses were much more carefree about showing their feelings through their expressions.
The Slytherins faces, by comparison, were almost wooden.
Complicating the situation was that the Slytherins always seemed to move in packs of at least three, and usually in whole groups of boys or girls, or both together.
On the other hoof, she had narrowed it down to a select three boys in her year. Because they were Slytherins, it was difficult to get close enough to single out which of the three was responsible for the feelings.
But his feelings of rage and desire for violence were worrying, to say the least. Especially after what had happened last year. That time it had been a professor working through an older student. Was the same thing about to happen, but with a younger student? The last thing she wanted to see was the Equestrian EUP Guard take up permanent residence in the castle. It was bad enough with the so-called Professorial Aides, even if they did seem to be more interested in magic and their students than sniffing out Lings.
Tracking the three was difficult without using anything more powerful than a notice-me-not spell. Which wasn't all that unnoticeable for a First- or Second-year. Unfortunately, her or her Lings constant attention would make her and them stand out — they didn't have a reason to hang around the Slytherins. None of the four could change to something the Slytherins wouldn't notice to follow them, like a cat or rat, because the castle had that stupid Ling-detection spell on it. The Lings changing their appearance to look like someone else was fine, but anything more than a cosmetic alteration knocked out the Ling, they had discovered — they couldn't even imitate one of the pony forms.
Mapping the limits of what they could accomplish without getting caught had been tiresome, but easy. Going too far meant the Ling was zapped and instantly returned to base-form as a young human. Having the other three carry away the unconscious Ling each time that happened had kept them from discovery. Doing it in a hidden passage had also helped. As had doing it during the day when the Castle Map was not in use by Prefects looking for illicit activities between consensual, although underage, couples.
Not that the Lings had wasted time while she was distracted by the Slytherin mystery. She had given them very extensive tours of all the hidden places she had discovered. Unfortunately, the pegasi first years had found most of those places, too. The only ones still a secret were the rooms and passages hidden in the walls and dungeons that didn't have fireplaces installed.
Helga Hufflepuffs office, situated overlooking the greenhouses, was mostly empty, with the floo tightly shut and the chimney on the roof hidden behind an aversion spell. The books were merely very old versions of current books in the library. Even her diaries were dull, except for the parts about the squabbles between the other founders that she had noted down in detail. She was quite a gossip, it appeared.
The only items of interest to the Lings were the passages from her office to the four greenhouses, which had limited use if you weren't in her office or didn't want to go just there.
Godric Gryffindor's office was just an armoury with a desk that overlooked the castle's main entrance and courtyard. It was filled with swords, knives, bows and arrows, crossbows, and cauldrons filled with oil suspended over holes by the front wall. It was warmed, apparently, by the one wall that was a dozen chimneys that led down to the kitchens below the Great Hall. He didn't seem to have left much in the way of diaries or letters. The only books were those that described defensive techniques for the castle, and using physical weapons against both the non-magical and the magical. Not to mention combining magic with those physical weapons — such as causing arrows to explode on contact with anything, even magical shields. Very dull stuff, and not very applicable to the modern day for the magicals of today. Using a sword or crossbow was too . . . muggle . . . for the modern witch or wizard.
She had to snort at that. The ponies knew the value of a good sword or knife in a magical fight. The element of surprise was always a valuable tool in any fighter's repertoire. The witches did not know what they were forsaking, she sadly reflected.
But that was all to the good, from her point of view. The witches' and wizards' surprise at being on the receiving end of a physical attack as well as a magical attack would be invaluable to the Lings.
Should such a confrontation ever occur.
She planned that over the coming hols she and the other Lings would drill relentlessly in the close-fighting techniques that Godric had written down. While their instructors in the Hive had taught them two-legged combat skills, Godric's writing were far above those simple techniques.
Using Ling techniques to sneak close, and physically take down an unsuspecting opponent could save the hive. They certainly had done so in the past, in Equestria. But that was risky in this new world with the Ling detection-and-stun spells scattered around haphazardly. Which meant they had to master the methods used by a true professional in the art of using tools instead of claws, fangs, and subterfuge.
Not using magic to sneak around meant no one would pick up their activity, too, unless their victim was being actively watched by others.
They took care to leave everything as they found it, after each currently-short weekly session. While the Lings thought they were the first ones to discover these hidden places, there was no proof someone else hadn't. Even if no one had, that didn't mean someone wouldn't in the future — and they wanted to leave no clues about themselves.
They had already started studying the scrolls carefully, but always returned them to where they had been found. The same with the weapons. Careful application of cleaning charms removed any physical evidence that they might leave.
Lings were very good at hiding their presence. Anyone finding the room would think it had been the elves doing the cleaning.
It also made for good practice on their hiding-in-plain-sight techniques. Humans, like ponies, it seemed, would see what they expected to see, if you provided the correct visual or sight cues.
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Ad Astra II had hit its marks like clockwork, Thomas, and everyone else in the BNSC, were pleased to see. The Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune translocators had come in right on time at thirty-eight, fifty-one, seventy-three, and eighty-eight hours. The fifth, the Kuiper Belt, at fifty times the Sun-to-Earth distance, came in at about one-hundred-fifty-five hours and twenty minutes.
They were good-to-go for translocating to any place they could reach by rocket in the entire solar system.
The probe had been hauling arse at 36,124 kilometres per second, at that last portkey, and accelerating constantly. The yanks had been incredulous, at first, but when their Hubble telescope picked up the brilliant flame of the missile's engines as it passed Jupiter's orbit, they became believers.
Thomas was sure that if they hadn't layered impervius charms on the missile's nozzle, it would have eroded away and been vaporized long before Ad Astra II made it that far.
The sixth translocator, scheduled for one light-day came in almost nine days after launch. The seventh, at one light-week distant, appeared at twenty-three and a half days.
Less than half-an-hour shy of twenty-eight days, the engines shut off. They had reached the target of seventy-percent the speed of light, at a distance of nine-point-seven-seven light days. They would reach the one light-month marker in three weeks — fifty-seven days after launch.
BNSC had also learned that translocators operated on a geometric scale for distance versus time in transit. That is, take the distance and divide by two hundred thousand. Then find what power of two you need to hit that number. Multiple that power by two and add nine. Thus, jumping two-hundred-thousand kilometres takes nine seconds. The moon is four hundred thousand kilometres away (two to the power of one, thus, one times two, then add that two to nine) and eleven seconds. Mars is fifty-six million kilometres at its closest (two to the power of eight-point-one-five, two times eight-point-one-five, sixteen-point-three added to nine), which gives a time of twenty-five-point-three seconds. At its farthest, Mars is four hundred and two million kilometres (two to the power of ten-point-nine-seven, twice that added to nine), and takes thirty-point-nine seconds.
The distance to Alpha Centauri varies according to the source — there is no precision in calculating interstellar distances. The average worked out to just over a minute in translocator transit time.
No one was sure why there was a nine-second offset. Nor why the time was a geometric factor of distance. One theory was that the translocator was actually speeding up to punch through to a different dimension where there was no limit to your speed. Once there, the translocator sort of . . . shifted into warp speed . . . and off you went.
Shorter distances than two hundred thousand kilometres apparently didn't give the portkeys time to rev up to full speed. With an Earthly range that never exceeded thirteen thousand kilometres, one-fifteenth the two-hundred-thousand minimum distance, the portkey was active for just a fraction over half-a-second. Which matched what most people claimed a portkey took to get them where they wanted.
The Buran was being refurbished — again. It now had the unlimited fuel possibilities that the Ad Astra II had pioneered. The BNSC was waiting for the yanks to finish their "Mars-base" modules before sending it on a Mars mission. Which required more modifications to the Buran, they had realized — and why it was still in its hanger and not being run as a tow-truck service.
The Russians had refused to sell the Ptichka after they saw the moon-shot. Instead, they had immediately started working on finishing its construction. They offered a fifty-one-to-forty-nine partnership to the British. They planned, according to the Director General of the BNSC, to turn the spaceplane into an Earth-to-high orbit taxi-service retrieving "old" satellites and placing new ones at a fraction of the current cost to do so. Not to mention acting as the workhorse for the space-station.
It was much cheaper to pay twenty million quid for a satellite placement than the current fifty-million that the cheapest traditional launch cost. Especially because there wasn't the risk of the whole thing going up in smoke with a failed launch. The cost to the Russians, and Brits, would be less than million quid. The flight itself shouldn't last longer than a standard eight-hour shift, from loading the cargo, to take-off, to landing, and returning to its hanger! Renting a 747 to fly around the world would cost more and take longer.
They expected the Brits to kick in a quarter of the funding, and access to the Special Technology in exchange. It was, according to Administrator David Williams, far cheaper than building a spaceplane from scratch. The return on their investment would take less than a year, even if they only placed one satellite a week. The average for the last ten years was one hundred and twenty launches per year, better than two per week.
If they could manage two satellites per flight, their profit trebled after expenses.
There was already one billionaire making noises about building a "space hotel." On paper, fitting the Ptichka cargo bay with a special "passenger" section would provide seating for one-hundred and sixty-eight people, assuming a pitch of seventy-eight centimetres, and a width per seat of fifty centimetres — the average economy seat on most jet planes. In a few years, you should be able to fly to a space-station for less per ticket than you could fly from London to Paris.
The Russians had, of course, already modified their "Little Bird" spaceplane to take the new "Special Technology" engines.
Thomas had to snicker. Unlike the airlines, they didn't have to pay for thousands of kilograms of fuel for the flight.
However, Thomas knew they'd charge a premium for the tickets. They had to recoup the cost of the spaceplanes, which cost significantly more than a regular jetliner. But even at ten times the price of a normal First-Class ticket from Tokyo to London, people would queue up for a chance to see home from space!
They wouldn't make as much profit as they did with the satellites, unfortunately. But then, more flights per week meant the cost to maintain the ground facilities and personnel would be less per flight.
As their part of the deal, Britain had dispatched ten Special Technology officers to Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. They were carefully examining the exterior of the spaceplane, tile-by-tile, using their Special Technology instruments to look for defective or suspicious tiles. A follow-up on that would an interior examination. They didn't tell the Russians they would be reinforcing the structural members and all the potential weak spots they had identified previously in the Buran.
They were also installing the Special Technology cameras that were on the Buran, and a few other safety measures they deemed necessary that would be impossible to detect if you weren't well-versed in Special Technology.
That Stalin had pretty much genocided their own wizards and witches removed the dangers of clashing with a Russian Ministry for Magic.
The British weren't giving away any secrets, but neither did they want a crashed-spaceplane on their consciences.
Besides, it saved the Buran from grunt-work duty. As a result, the Brits could capture the world's eyes with sexier space spectaculars.
Like the first landing on Mars, planned for May First, which would be televised in gorgeous full colour and broadcast by the BBC. Then the exploration of the Asteroid Belt — with, perhaps, the retrieval of few tons of material for the scientists. Just how similar are Ceres, Vesta, and Pallas? How difficult would it be to emplace a space-engine on the surface of an asteroid and bring to down to Earth orbit?
Not to mention would be the Special Technology experiments: Can you use the Technology to find particular mineral-rich asteroids? Would the switching-spell work in mining? If an asteroid was small enough, could you use a translocator to move it to Earth orbit or the Moon?
The yanks, secure in the superiority of their NASA, had already pulled both their Atlantis and Endeavour spaceplanes from service — the Endeavour not even having flown, yet. They were quickly refurbishing them in preparation for the Special Technologies being offered by Britain. Again, in exchange for a partnership. A much smaller partnership for the Brits, considering they were "only" contributing the Technology and not any cash.
The U.K. government didn't really care about the percentages. It was all about prestige, at this point.
In the future, every picture of every spaceplane would feature the flag of the United Kingdom, right beside the flags of the United States or Russia. Once again, they could say the sun never sets on the British Empire! Although, this time, it was a bit more tongue-in-cheek than in the past. And it didn't require thousands of soldiers posted around the world with restless natives objecting to the "foreigners."
Mars was about at its closest, now, and had just gone into retrograde motion. Which meant, Earth, being in a closer orbit than Mars, had just passed it. With time for turnover, that made a leisurely forty-two-hour trip to Mars at a steady one gravity acceleration. Or thirty hours if they pushed it to two gravities.
The selected Astronauts were already training in plywood mock-ups of the cargo bay and spaceplane with loading and unloading the equipment for building their Mars-base. The cargo-crane had already been beefed up to handle the heavier equipment loads expected on Mars. The crew wasn't being told that the crane was as robust on Earth as it would be on Mars. Ah, the wonderful advantages and beauty of Special Technology!
Speaking of which, one genius had managed to create a "Replicator" — Star-Trek-style. Like the original series on the telly, it appeared as if it was simply a vacant cube built into the wall with a control panel below it. In truth, the bottom of the "box", the part with the blinky lights, hid an expanded space with several dozen prepared items, in stasis and shrunken size. The control knobs merely selected the item, and pressing the "GO" button duplicated it. He promised that he would have a much slicker version in a few more months. It would have a hundred choices, and designed for the same form factor for simple replacement.
Ha! No more wasted space storing food on long trips.
Considering that the Buran would now be running its engines for many hours at a time, the flight decks of the spaceplane had to be redesigned. While lying on your back with your legs elevated wasn't much of an issue during take-off, doing so for hours on end, was. Plus, the rear wall of the cabin became the floor, necessitating a few changes for such long flights. Such as the toilet facilities, which would be on their side, the ladder to the lower deck, and the airlock to the cargo bay being on the floor.
Fortunately, no longer needing to carry as much support materials freed up a lot of space. No need for tanks of water, oxygen, and nitrogen, nor locking cupboards for food. The Special Technology that removed waste from the sink and toilet didn't really save much room — space-craft typically just shot waste into space — but it did remove all the plumbing and safety equipment those required.
The pilot and co-pilot seats kept their positions relative to the instruments, but the seat-section folded down so their legs were in line with their bodies. Naturally, the flooring had to swing down, too, to accommodate the extra length. Those two seats, being on a raised platform, had the room for such expansion with only minor adjustments and adding handholds for moving around in space-flight.
The three seats behind them, for the Flight Engineer and Mission Specialists, in the original design, were a big step lower, and would have intruded into the lower deck if they did the same as the other two. Instead, those seats moved up. There was plenty of headroom for that, fortunately. The Flight Engineer's and Flight Mission Specialist's instruments were remounted into sliding panels that the two could adjust to suit their needs.
The seats on the lower deck were similarly altered.
The next generation of spaceplanes would, undoubtedly, feature a rotating Flight Cabin. After all, once you were in space, everything was instrument flying anyway.
If submarines could operate safely in the oceans without seeing exactly where they were going, then so could spaceplanes, albeit at higher velocities and much less chance of hitting anything.
The first trip to Mars would be an international crew, it had been decided. Like the first flight in August, the Flight Commander was Oscar Baker, Pilot-Cosmonaut Vicktor Afanasyev was co-pilot, the Mission Specialist was Cosmonaut Yelena Kondakova, and he was the Flight Engineer. Having done it once, it only made sense for them to do the next. They were the most familiar with the Buran, after all. In addition, they had five Mission Specialists on the deck below: Hans Schlegel, a German; Leroy Chiao, an American; Takao Doi, a Japanese; Umberto Guidoni, an Italian, and Claudie Haigneré, a Frenchwoman. Takao and Claudie would be responsible for setting up the scientific instrument packages on the surface. Those were a suite of instruments like the ones Thomas had helped set up on the moon, with the inclusion of a battery of atmospheric monitors.
Hans, Leroy, and Umberto would be setting up the Martian "base," with occasional assistance from the other Mission Specialists. The base would be basically two large, inflatable, rubber domes. They were more to protect the equipment than anything else. One would be empty and act as a translocator target. The other was more of a meeting and storage-room. However, both would have to be very securely attached to the ground to survive Mars' famous world-girding dust storms.
Unfortunately, what with the training, waiting for equipment, and the modifications to the Buran, there wouldn't be any flight to anywhere for some months.
Those missions to retrieve "dead" satellites would have to wait a bit longer, it seemed. As would the missions to the MIR Space Station. The Proton system would have to be used for a bit longer — but its days were numbered.
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In the second week of December, Professor McGonagall posted the signup sheet for those who wanted to go home for the holidays. Which turned out to be the entire Gryffindor House.
Both Charlie, the dragonologist, and, Bill, the Gringotts curse breaker, were being sent to Equestria by their bosses as a working holiday. The standing invitation for the Weasleys to visit Equestria, at no cost, meant their parents could go there, too. Not that cost was a problem anymore with the income from the twin's exploits. But old habits are hard to break.
So, as long as the others were there, having the Hogwarts contingent join them was no inconvenience. The Weasleys could renew their tradition of the whole family being together at this time of year for the first time in a number of years.
Almost the same was true for the Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff Houses, with even most of the O.W.L. or N.E.W.T students leaving. It seemed the Ministry hadn't yet realized just how much book-walking had improved the students' understanding of theory or memorizing of details. As a result, they hadn't adjusted their testing, thus far. But even if they did, the students still had the advantage. It would probably take a few years, as each subsequent class had that much more time to use the book-walking spell and improve that much more than the previous year was able to achieve.
Which meant those students preparing for their tests were having a markedly easier time than their predecessors, with the attendant lower stress. Madam Pomfrey definitely noticed the decrease in students with anxiety and lack-of-sleep issues.
Slytherin, by comparison had a significant number of students stay. In their year, alone, they had Vincent Crabbe, Gregory Goyle, Draco Malfoy, Theodore Nott, Millicent Bulstrode, and Pansy Parkinson stay. In fact, the Equestrians in that house were a significant percentage of the Slytherins who went home!
The rumours coming from Ravenclaw about the Slytherins suggested that many of those students' parents were experiencing . . . money troubles. Several had downsized their living arrangements, while others had had to adapt to severely reduced income or circumstances. They wanted their children at Hogwarts while they navigated these new treacherous financial waters in which the families now found themselves.
It was all good in his book, as far as Harry was concerned. The Slytherins with financial problems in the family were more subdued than in the past, much less boisterous. Which made things less stressful in Hogwarts for him — and almost everypony else, too.
Excellent.
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