Chapter 8: Commissioning the Typhon

Welcome to The good ship Typhon. A wholly owned subsidiary of the Miranda corporation.

Merry and I were over eighty and looked to be somewhere around eighteen. Biologically we were eighteen. After the Typhon succeeded in her commissioning tests Merry and I signed on as the heads of engineering and medical, respectively.

Our captain was George O'Neill, a detail-oriented, no-nonsense captain from his soles to his hair. He was astounded that I had so many patents on field generators. When he learned that Merry had designed the ship's automated damage control system he held a private meeting with us.

"What's going on here? I don't like being sandbagged."

"It's simple, really. We both were given the progeric treatment while teens as partial payment for our inventions. I designed the CAD work-up and the bill-of-materials for the Typhon as well."

"Holy shit. And you invented the star drive?"

"Not quite. Do you remember the Io incident?"

"Vaguely. It was a long time ago."

"The guys that blew up the Io did the basic math, but they didn't follow through with the details. I got it to work."

"Is that why the ship's shaped like a doggy toy?"

I was beginning to lose faith in this man. "Err, yes. The double conic is the shape of the fields that form the drive. I call them slipstream fields for the way they work."

I thought for a bit. He may just be under-informed. "You need to be informed of the ramifications of how the star drive works."

He settled back in his chair. "I was never told anything about this ship before I was given command. I'll have to rely on you two to tell me what I need to know before I get in trouble."

I nodded. "Good. First and most importantly, the drive fields require two hours to come up and two hours to bring down. That's a bare minimum and it's done under computer control. Each set of drive coils are slightly different and require manual tuning of the power-up and power-down routines. If someone tries to rush or interrupt those processes, it will be the last thing we'll experience in this life. We're dealing with stellar-order energies here. That's why the drive has three dedicated fusors powering it. If something interrupts the power flow then we and the ship around us are history."

"Holy crap."

"Quite the scuttling device, isn't it? Just pull the plug and we're free electrons."

"Do you have any more surprises for me like that one?"

"We do have a real-time mass defect sensor that has useable resolution out to just over seven hundred light years. However, the faster we go, the faster we'll overrun our imaging. At top speed my test bed was looking at Wolf 359 up close and personal in four hours from the Kuiper Belt."

"Can we keep the slipstream fields engaged while NOT accelerating?"

"Yes. As long as the fusors hold up. However, no boats can enter or leave the ship while the fields are active. We're not fully in this universe while they're engaged."

He looked over at Merry. "Any good news from your end?"

She smiled and said, "The main damage control computer has analyzed the CAD model of the entire ship. This allows it to perform massively parallel repair operations throughout the ship simultaneously. If we find out that a certain run of sensors is bad and have the spares, we can conservatively have the entire ship's complement switched out in two hours."

I borrowed his keyboard to bring up a hologram of the ship's wire frame. I brought up the magnification until it almost filled the room. "Note these small passageways. They are the transport network for the spider drones. They also carry emergency power feeds, sensor runs and air runs throughout the ship."