Chapter 13: Getting Underway

The display appeared to be updated continuously; when I noticed it there were three white icons at the shuttle hatch. After a minute or so all three went away.

"Ship, do you continuously monitor all shipboard spaces?"

<Yes. In combat this is useful for damage detection. Further, I have been required to do so at all times due to reported unreliability of some humans. Each human onboard will be monitored and all spaces will be continually monitored as long as there are any humans onboard.>

"Well, I'd like to say I don't like that, but I know more about humans than you do and I have to agree with those instructions."

Dickie butted in. "Captain, all personnel not assigned to acceleration stations have evacuated to the shuttle."

"Very well. Ship, can you connect me to the shuttle's pilot?"

<You are connected.>

"Shuttle number 7, this is the Captain of the, well, the still unnamed ship you are docked to. You are authorized and requested to undock as soon as your passengers are taken care of. Please back off 10 kilometers and pass on to the other shuttles to stay well clear of the ship's main axis until we understand the drive system better. If you've never read Larry Niven's story 'The Warriors', I'm making it required reading for anyone out here. We don't know enough to stay safe from ourselves, yet, much less any enemies." Everything I know about space warfare I got from books.

"Ship, do you know enough about our shuttles and your propulsion system to advise us about safe distances while we are underway?"

<Your requested 10 kilometers is sufficient in all directions except directly astern. This ship employs a drive dissipation function which renders the drive exhaust harmless after 200 kilometers. Ships employing the Confederacy's Navigation Shield should be safe to within one kilometer even in the drive axis, but your shuttles are not equipped with this system. Unshielded structures should stay clear of the drive axis for 200 kilometers to avoid damage. Note that the Navigation Shield system was developed after this ship was retired, so this limit applies to all eight of these ships also.>

... that system ... developed after ... this ship ... We don't have the Nav Shield, either, here. Hold it, the shuttles we were using did too have that, or at least an underpowered version, you could see its faint glow if you looked out the windows. It both protected us from micrometeorites and held out all the charged particles and most of the EM radiation that the Sun and Jupiter both put out. This close to Jupiter, we would all be fried within hours without it.

We NEEDED that system. If we didn't have it here, or some equivalent, we may well already be in trouble. "Will it be possible to install the shield system on this ship? And please tell Doc Smith to report to the Skipper immediately."

<Doctor Ortega is on his way. The data transferred to me indicate that it is possible to install the Confederacy's current shipboard Navigation Shield system. However, it will require more power than the auxiliary power plant can provide. It could only be used when at least one main power plant is online.>

"Does the ship's power budget have enough slack to run the shield during normal operations?"

<Yes, this ship can power the shield. However, the shield will use all remaining excess power generated when the weapon systems are in use. Any further improvements will require something else to be deactivated in order to have the required power available.>

"I understand. We will have to judge the utility of other improvements. Very well. Oh, good. Doc, I wanted you in on this conversation. Apparently, we don't have the Nav Shield here. How fast is the radiation going to kill us, where we are here in Jupiter's orbit?"

Doc had at least a temporary answer to that. "I looked into that. As long as the shuttle is docked, we are inside its own ion shield and we are protected. We will need something, though, if any of us stay onboard the ship when the shuttle undocks. Unless this ship's hull can stop ions, electromagnetic radiation, and micrometeorites. AI?"

<This ship's hull and equipment can only protect the crew from such hazards from the stern, where the propulsion plant and other equipment act as shielding. However, the radiation field surrounds us here and installing a shield is strongly recommended. A compromise may be appropriate. The weaker ion shield used by your shuttles is adequate to protect the crew during normal conditions. Such a generator could be powered by the auxiliary power plant. If you desire I can construct the parts for one in less than an hour but I will need your help assembling it and installing it. I would recommend doing this before undocking your shuttle.>

"Yes, please start on that immediately." I looked at Doc. "Would that take care of us?"

"As long as we don't get into combat, sure. I don't have any idea what kind of weapons are going to be used on us, but anything powerful enough to be used as an anti-ship weapon will probably involve fatal levels of radiation."

Oh, yeah. "Shuttle 7, change in plans. Do NOT undock. Right now we are taking advantage of your ion shield and we will lose that if you undock. Our underway time will be delayed while we build and install a shield generator of our own. Assume a one-hour delay."

"Understand, do NOT undock. Assume one-hour hold. Shuttle 7 out."

Meanwhile, back to what I was doing...

"Ship, what steps must be taken to get underway? I will have to contact Jupiter Station Traffic Control before we actually move, but I want to be ready to move before I call them."

<You must have both helm stations verify that no propulsion is currently ordered, then... > and we got the incredibly detailed walk-through that we needed before we actually did anything. That was truly helpful.

By the time we were done, everyone involved had a clue about what we were supposed to be doing. Of course we needed to know our jobs in far more detail, but the walk-through at least gave us the big picture. The walk-through probably took an hour, during which I was also getting frequent updates on the ion shield installation. I got a final completion report well before we were done with our walk-through.

The ship said that it was able to test the generator, but that it would be unwise to actually start it while inside the bubble of a different generator. We had to undock the shuttle and get it about 50 meters clear before the ship was willing to start the generator and give us our own ion shield. Apparently, it was okay to merge two shields, so after ours was up the shuttle could dock again if we wanted, but it wasn't okay to create a shield inside another shield. Don't ask me, I don't understand it either.

After that, I warned Jupiter Station and all ships in the area that we were preparing to get underway, and then we actually did the things we had walked through earlier. Or, at least, this time when the AI told us what instructions and reports to give, the AI actually acted on those instructions.

Eventually we got to the point where I could inform JSTC that we were getting underway for transfer to Jupiter Station. When I got the acknowledgement, I gave Miguel the order to activate the main drive at 2% power, and we were under way.

Part of our walk-through was verification that the Navigation Console had our planned route programmed in, and after a minute at 2%, then 5%, and then 10% power to verify that the main engines responded to direct helm control, we transferred helm control to the Navigator's programmed course and let the AI do all the real work of making the ship follow the course laid in. Not that we were actually using a pencil to draw a proposed course on a paper chart, but that's the way it's said. We laid the course in and directed the AI to follow it.

As a first-time test, I had imposed a limit of 20% full power. That made the trip take longer than otherwise, but we needed to get used to everything here before we floored the accelerator.

At each power change I could feel the acceleration couch shift a little. By the time we were up to 20% power, which should be 6 g's of true acceleration since 100% was supposed to be 30 g's, the room had tilted noticeably and I could see that the other couches had rotated back some to match mine. Supposedly we were also under 0.6 g 'experienced' or 'felt' since the inertial damper was letting 10% of the true acceleration through. In the couch it didn't feel bad at all, but I didn't try to get up. Tests like that would come later.

Setting up our course had been pretty simple. We wanted to go from here, where the aliens had parked these ships30,000 kilometers the other side of Ganymede, to there, Jupiter Station, which was about 250,000 kilometers out from Jupiter's center, just outside of the inner moons and their rings.

Primary concerns were to not hit Ganymede, which was in the direct line between the two, not hit our four shuttles, and also to avoid having our exhaust wash any of our ships or other facilities. We got the idea that having Ganymede between us and the delivery people was one of their goals, and when Ganymede had moved enough that it was no longer behind Jupiter from Earth's point of view, further deliveries would be made behind one of the other moons.

Avoiding exhaust wash was easy, since on our approach we would be slowing down, using our drive to oppose our direction of flight which was almost directly into Jupiter. The exhaust would be swallowed by Jupiter's atmosphere without notice. In the future this might be an issue when we had hundreds of ships here, but for now it was easy. Dr. Watkins had told the AI what he wanted, the AI made it look pretty on our displays, I approved the course, and the AI had transferred it to JSTC.

JSTC had agreed that our proposed course caused no problems, in part because all other shuttles in the area had been grounded for this event, and when everyone was agreed I had ordered Miguel to get us underway at 2% power. Once we all felt like we had this under control, this would become routine and most of it would probably be done by AI without our input, but for this first movement we wanted to be involved in every step to make sure we understood what was going on.

The next two hours were pretty boring. We had far too much to learn to waste any time, but we also didn't want to do anything to cause trouble the first time we moved the ship. Turnover was just over an hour into the trip, and I spent most of that time talking to the others and examining diagrams of the ship itself. I may not know what everything was, but I needed to at least know where everything was.

Turnover was unsettling, but that was due to the couches moving around on us. The drive was cut and the couches returned to 'normal' while the ship spun, and then the couches went back to their positions partway up the aft bulkhead when the drive climbed back up to 20% again. I don't think I felt the ship spin.

Objectively, I should have been concentrating on getting my people the best training possible. That, however, would have to wait until I knew my own job well enough to feel comfortable. I verified with Dickie that the consoles in the bridge compartment were mirroring what we had in CIC, then spent the second half of the movement looking at the navigation display, repeated on my main screen from Dr. Watkin's console.

It really wasn't much different from what the shuttles had. Taking the time to get checked out as a bus driver had been a good decision. This wasn't anywhere near as stressful as the first time I'd taken a shuttle out on my own to deliver a mine operator. When we were about ten minutes out I had Ensign James call JSTC and check in, just to give him something to do. They didn't have any changes, and we smoothly slid into our parking spot about 120 kilometers away from the Station.

When I was a kid, the arcades had a "lunar lander" video game where you controlled the attitude and the main engine on one of the Apollo landers trying to come down for a landing on the moon. You had enough fuel if you knew what you were doing, and you didn't have enough fuel if you didn't know what you were doing. I crashed that thing probably a hundred times before I learned how to land without damage, but then I was just a kid so maybe I would do better now. Still, having an AI do all the calculations for you and then control the engines was definitely the way to go.

I had always liked the RN's "Finished with Main Engines" command, so I instituted that here. That told the black gang deep in the bowels of the ship that we were done, we were moored or anchored and we weren't going to call back in three minutes to adjust something. In this case, we didn't have much of an engineering crew, but ChEng needed to be told that he could shut the propulsion plant down and lower the power plant's output down to maintain self-sustaining, stationkeeping and hotel loads.

Any power plant had three different sets of loads: Those needed just to stay running, those needed to keep the place safe, and those needed to keep the customers happy. Mobile plants usually had a fourth category added to the list, propulsion.

For a ship with, say, oil-fired boilers, the self-sustaining loads were the fuel pumps, the feedwater pumps, the boiler draft blowers, and other similar items, plus whatever other auxiliary equipment it took to keep them running. If those devices were all driven directly by steam turbines, that was all it took to keep the boiler running. Those were the 'self sustaining loads' for that plant.

If any of those required devices were driven by electric motor, then add an electric generator with all of its support equipment to the list. Shut any of those systems down, and the boiler quickly stopped being a boiler. Some of them could be restarted if you were fast enough, but things had a tendency to get out of hand quickly. Since you had already proven that you couldn't do your job, generally you ended up shutting the whole thing down until you were at a stable, known condition, and then you brought the plant back up. That was far more trouble than just paying attention to fuel tank levels and changing fuel tanks before the one you were drawing from ran dry.

Stationkeeping loads were those required to be safe: The engineroom and passageway lights, the fire pumps, and the anchor lights at the masthead. If not safely anchored or moored, add some kind of auxiliary thrusters that would keep the ship in place to this category.

Hotel loads were all the things required to keep the passengers happy: berthing lights, air conditioning, the muzak system, the elevators, the ship's main freezers, the ovens and stoves and toasters and TVs.

Propulsion was usually the big one. Unless you were an ocean liner, propulsion was probably 80-95% of where all the plant's power went. If you are a power company's plant, think "power delivered to the customer" instead of propulsion. If you were a cruise liner, of course, speed wasn't as important as comfort, so all the lights, fans, pool heaters, and air conditioners may well use more power than the propeller did.

The point here is that the power plant was separate from the propulsion system, even though the propulsion system was probably the largest consumer for whatever power the plant provided. In our case, we could shut the main engines down for maintenance, inspection, or whatever, but we had to keep the power plant running if we wanted lights and air. Call me narrow-minded, but I hated that stupid helmet. I wanted lights and air.

Did I not mention that? One of the times that we got new and improved helmets, I had noticed that the release button had something else on either side of it. Touch either one and they both became lights that illuminated the area in front of you. Sorta useful at times, and they would be essential if we had to work outside, or even inside on a broken ship.

Just as helpful in an emergency, the next time we got suit upgrades after that, the backs of our heels, the backs of our elbows, and the backs of our helmet saddles all had red strobe lights that turned on automatically any time the suit lost an inhibiting signal from the AIs that basically said "No, we don't need you yet". If the ship was broken, or if you were outside the ship, or if you somehow lost your ship, within seconds all those strobe lights would come on automatically to make it easier to find you. And, if you weren't wearing your helmet your collar did the same thing. Hopefully you had your hood on. Someone back in F2 was really thinking things through.

I told Ensign James to let JSTC know we were in place and shutting down, and then reported to my own boss. "Admiral Sykes? We're here, but we really need a name for this ship. As the Commanding Officer, the AI wants me to name it. Do you have any guidance for me there?"

"Captain Edelmann, let me start by congratulating you on your voyage. Maybe next year we'll all laugh at how simple this was, but not now. I've been listening in, and I'm more convinced than ever that you were the right choice. Yes, we need names and I'll get back to you on that ASAP, but we also need the ships. How long of a break do you and your people need before you go get another ship? How long would it take you to train a simple delivery crew?"

"Dickie? You should be listening in on this. Can your bridge team act as a delivery crew to go get the rest of these ships?"

"Do I get Chief Littles? If so, we can go do this right now. I think we could both do this with two different ships, using the bridge to train additional teams. However, how are we going to train our engineers?"

"Maybe we can run a few candidates through the same kind of walkthrough that we got. Do that for both the main console and the environmental console and have a shuttle pace each ship in case things go wrong. Ship, do you have recommendations, or do you see any problems with this plan?"

<I understand the urgency implied by Admiral Sykes' request. Your plan as outlined would work, but it violates our core programming as stated. Each ship can only grant access and turn over control to the system government's properly appointed Commanding Officer for that ship. The Darjee AIs have given me personnel lists that show 18 humans designated as 'Prospective Warship Commanding Officer'. I recommend that you and your Executive Officer each head temporary delivery crews, but for each ship you add that ship's properly appointed Commanding Officer to the delivery crew. You and your Executive Officer will be considered temporary Commodores with authority to override the Commanding Officer's orders if necessary.>

"Admiral Sykes?"

"I concur. It gets the job done. Now, how do we do this? Do you have transport pads on those ships?"

Uhhhh... "No, sir, I don't think so. At least, I haven't seen them. Ship?"

<No, Captain. That technology, like the Navigation Shield, was developed after this ship was retired. It should be possible to install a pad in a convenient location, but the pad will only work when the ship is within range of a powered nexus like the one on your Jupiter Station.>

"It looks like we're stuck with shuttles for the moment, Admiral. Can you send out a shuttle with a spare pad that we can install?"

"You'll get a shuttle with a transport pad and your first two trainee crews as fast as we can organize it."

"Captain? We'll want pads for those two ships, too."

"Dickie's right, Admiral. We have to use shuttles to get to the ships initially, but if we install them before we get underway we can use them when we arrive here."

"Very good, Captain. I'll make it happen. Sykes out."

"That was a good point, Dickie. Hey, you get to be a Commodore and you haven't even been a Captain yet."

"I'm just hoping I learned enough by following you."

"Well, if we make every delivery crew go through that same walkthrough, we'll at least have some experience on them. XO, see what you can learn about the weapons on this thing. I'm going back to look at the engines. Ship, please keep me informed of anything interesting that happens."

The 'anything interesting' was our ship's name. Admiral Sykes got back to me that VICE-Admiral Andrews -he had been promoted- had been in conversation with Admiral Kennedy back on F2, and had been granted a free hand in naming these ships, as long as there was a recognizable system that was better than the RN's current habit of using any word that started with the same letter as the class ship's name.