Chapter 2: Breaching the Veil of Night

Rob spent the entire afternoon in meetings, listening to people talk about money, personnel, public relations and surprisingly, religious intolerance.

There were several groups of very fanatical evangelical fundamentalists out there who saw the planned trip to Mars as a refutation of 'God's word', because of course, whoever wrote the bible two thousand years ago was not a scientist, and failed to mention Mars or spaceships. 'The bible doesn't mention bullhorns either, but that didn't stop them from standing in front of Obsidian's offices around the world and shouting through them at the top of their lungs.' Rob thought.

Speaking of shouting at the top of your lungs. That night he discovered that it was indeed true that Wendy Fellowes was damned fine at a lot of things. He thought he had managed to keep up with her for the most part, but sleep came far too quickly to give it the post-coital analysis that the world class performance deserved.

When Rob came into the lab the next morning, he had good news and bad news waiting for him. The good news was that there was indeed a simple cause of the huge targeting inaccuracies. The sensor array system and the tracking system used off the shelf coupler components from two completely different product lines and the metal oxide coatings on the comb assemblies didn't match the metal oxide on the matching pinhole arrays. They solved the problem by throwing out the manufactured components and building their own.

The bad news was that this only got rid of the seriously wild errors. There were still an entire boatload of small scale inaccuracies being measured and the system guys could find no discernible source at the system level. That brought the sensor team back to either the quantum hashing problems that had hampered so much of this project or something else entirely. At least the elimination of the gross errors would make troubleshooting the fine errors possible, even if it wasn't going to be easy.

Rob thanked Victor and his crew, but the old Russian was dismissive of his teams efforts.

"It was nothing. We have developed an entire series of standard tests to run on components and their connectors. Materials that conduct electricity in any fashion can produce unsuspected traits at the drop of a hat, especially since they sit inside a planet-sized magnetic field that is eternally influencing them."

"We even have to subtract magnetic and gravitic field influences on some of the more delicate nano-scale components before we can be sure we have eliminated all the influences." DeeDee Ponders added.

Rob put Alex on the task of pinning down the source of the remaining errors. In addition to her other qualities, good and bad, the woman had the determination and focus of a mongoose stalking a cobra.

Wendy and Rob probably should not have tried getting a standing ovation from the judges at the mattress Olympics the previous night. Neither of them was in any shape for a rematch that night, but they did fall asleep with Wendy's head nestled in the crook of Rob's arm and her leg draped over his.

Rob's exhaustion may have played a part in his dreams that night, and if so he would probably be insisting on regular repeats in the future. He couldn't get DeeDee Ponders's words out of his head. 'subtract magnetic and gravitic fields' she had said, and in his dreams he had one chasing the other in some form or another for half the night. Of course he was right behind the both of them in a futile chase of his own. Somewhere in the second half of the night he began dreaming of one catching the other, repeated in infinite combinations, until one snarled pairing of fields blended together and seemed to flare brightly, right in front of his face.

Rob jumped back from the flare and found himself sitting up in bed with Wendy on the floor beside the bed.

He apologized like crazy and picked her up and laid her back in bed. Then apologized again and threw on a t-shirt and grabbed his Q-tap and sat down on the couch in the living room with a pad of paper and a pencil. It was three in the morning local time when he flipped the tap on. He was still hard at it four hours later when Wendy came out of the bedroom freshly showered and made coffee. He had most of it then or he probably wouldn't have noticed. Rob took the cup of coffee and the toasted muffin when it was offered by a fully dressed Wendy. He took the goodbye kiss as well.

"I'll tell them to expect you when your synapses stop firing. They'll understand." She said on her way out the door.

By ten he had it fairly well fleshed out. Even most of his side notes made sense. 'I need to get to the office to use the scanner to get some of these hand drawn diagrams into the system.' Rob thought to himself, only then realizing where he was and what time it was. He took a shower but didn't bother shaving. On his way to the office he tripped a link in his Q-tap to Dr. Fylakas, to see if he was available today.

Andy McKesson's return to the Nauru shipyard was premeditated, but early. Thanks to the incredible inventiveness of the 'kiddy corp' they had brought into the shipyard, the eighteen month schedule that had replaced the original five year project cycle the Joint Study Group had proposed had been condensed to nine. The IME had also finally won concessions from the U.S. Senate, only after Senator Montgomery was threatened with censure. As it was, all they got was an official okay to invite NASA to lend them as many of their people as they could use.

Of course at this point they didn't really need any of them, but Andy had a plan for them that would free up Rob Young to come work for him.

The department and sector heads at the shipyards had been among those invited to attend Andy and Cor's wedding, and so their arrival at the shipyards at long last was not quite the arrival of the outsiders it could have been. They had spent a good bit of time socializing with them during the reception, and in particular they made good use of Janet Dearing and Ryan Ardmore as buffers. The shipyard folks knew them and they knew Andy and Cor. Both had been with and among the shipyard crew from the beginning, documenting in words and pictures their heroic efforts in building and testing the Pai Lung.

They had asked NASA for eight people, and Cor and Andy brought them with them when they finally reported to Nauru. One of them was an NSA spy, but Andy had expected no less from their government. He was going to be free to spy all he wanted while working on the drive tuning crew. He was going to have a dedicated crew of the Awakened watching his every step outside of the power bays though. They're still not sure why the spooks felt it would be easier to sneak a spy in disguised as a fake scientist rather than as a fake pilot, but they had them out-gunned in the spying department anyway, thanks to the Gifts.

The trip out to Nauru was on a modified Obsidian Aurora III. This was the same model the President rode in now as his official Air Force One. This one was laid out in something of a similar fashion, and Andy had his own office towards the back of it. He had a brief sit down meeting with each of the NASA guys one at a time.

The first three NASA guys were all pilots, two were system specialists with no expertise in any of the systems they would be using, but Doctor Owen Gardner's specialty was in Astrodynamics, and him they really wanted.

"Doctor Gardner, Welcome to the IME. We have big plans for you sir."

"Big plans for me? What, I get to be the one standing at the big steering wheel in the publicity shots?"

"No sir, though now that you mention it, you would look good in one of those old cruise ship captain's uniforms. But, a few budding romances aside, this is no love boat. You are going to be busy teaching astrodynamics to our officers and bridge crews. They will be trusting our piloting to computers, but that doesn't mean we wish to remain ignorant of the theory and methods needed. This crew is ninety percent science geek, and those ninety percent are one hundred and fifty percent geek. They want to understand this stuff."

"I'm going to be teaching, in a classroom then, and nothing more?"

"No sir, assuming you can learn the nav and sensor systems well enough, you will become the Pai Lung's Chief of Navigation. You have too much experience and knowledge to put you anywhere else. The key will be how well you can adapt to the new systems. The people you will be teaching Orbital Mechanics to will be the same people teaching you how to use our systems."

"How much time will I have for my lessons?"

"We will give you all the time available. Right now that means at least two hours in the afternoon, every day but Sunday. I want you doing two groups, an overview course open to everyone who wants to attend, and a full immersion brain scrubbing course for the command crew, myself included. When you're done, we know what you know, or as close as you can come in six weeks."

"Why six weeks?" He asked, but I could see he felt he knew the answer that was coming.

"Because in six weeks, the Pai Lung is on its way to Mars."

Rob had a bad case of Owen Gardner on the brain. He was seeing the officious bastard in his sleep. Orbital Mechanics. Stellar fixes. flight path angles, mean anomalies and position vectors dueled in his brain like kids at the carnival, clamoring for his attention, which was always somewhere else, usually riding the roller coaster with velocity, momentum and time. The bastard actually had taken to pinging him via Q-net in the middle of the night and at odd hours during the day to ask him seemingly nonsensical questions, the answers to which always seemed to fire off in his brain just beneath all those other dancing demands clamoring for his attention during his dreams.

The speed of light, C, is measured these days in meters per second and is 1,079,252,848.8 kilometers per hour. We usually use the Light Second, a distance of 299,792,458 meters, as our reference when calculating solar distances. The distance from the Earth to the Moon is just over one light second, at approximately 1.282 light seconds. Why approximately? Because the Moon's orbit is not perfectly circular, sometimes she is a tad closer than average, sometimes a tad further away.

They hadn't tested it yet of course, but The drive crew thought they could get the gravity drive to push the Pai Lung around the solar system at a decent 2 or 3 percent of C. Limitations in the ability of the inertial compensators meant that they wouldn't be able to hit those peaks unless they were pushing something with no crew, or really dragging it out on a long haul, stretching the acceleration and deceleration out at both ends. No Earth to Moon in 30 seconds, not unless you didn't mind scraping the red smears off the inside of the hull afterwards.

As it was, with their projected launch window, and with this being one of the optimal years as far as Earth-Mars distances and orbits went,...

... The buzzer from the alarm was going off again. Dammit! Rob hated waking up with his mind already full of orbital graffiti courtesy of the good Doctor Gardner!

As happened so frequently these days, Rob got pulled away from the lab by a request to attend a meeting. They had learned to adjust for this on the fly, and he had plenty of confidence in either Ike or Alexandra to handle things in his absence. Alexandra had mellowed quite a bit once she had gotten used to things, but Ike was still a bit better at the 'human touch' side of things, so Rob tended to delegate Alexandra to handle the hard charging tasks and Ike got to handle the delicate personnel issues.

He was thinking these thoughts because his meeting turned out to be with Andy McKesson, and the first words out of him when Rob walked into the room had been about that very situation.

"Rob, if I pulled you off your section, who would you propose take your place?"

In the end, he had to pick Ike.

"Ike Dunham, and I'd suggest he make Alexandra Nascimento his second." I answered finally. "Either would do fine internally, but Ike is more personable and has a finer touch when dealing with the other sections."

It took him another moment to wonder where he was being shifted now, but he did finally think to ask.

"I'm moving again am I? Where to this time?"

"You are coming to work for me." Andy said. "Captain Brenneman likes to say my job title is assistant god. If his title is accurate, that makes you at least junior assistant god. I am understudying the Captain's job, and based on what Doctor Gardner has to say, you will at least be understudying his job as chief navigator, but you will also be learning everything I'm learning."

"Why me?" Rob asked, that familiar dazed feeling creeping over him again.

"Because you show the potential. Because I am a firm believer in meritocracy as a concept. Because you have earned a chance to be more than what you are currently asked to be. But there are other reasons. What would you guess they are?"

Rob thought about that. Running back over some thoughts he'd already had.

"You aren't planning on remaining on the Pai Lung after the Mars mission, you're a McKesson and have other fish to fry. You don't need to be here now, other than as a demonstration of McKesson commitment, and I expect you won't stick around after our return from Mars. If you're not going to be here, you want to leave someone behind when you leave that shares your perspective on things but can still get things done and you think I might be that guy."

Sometimes Rob hated it when he was right!

So almost against his will, and surely against someone's better judgment somewhere, Rob Young became an officer and a gentleman, a bridge officer anyway.

Alexandra Nascimento had a few words to say about the gentleman part when Rob told her that Ike was getting the nod as his replacement. The volume and vigor of her vitriol were the very things that won him the argument.

"It is this very attitude that makes me recommend Ike for this position over you Alex." Rob told her. "Ike is willing to take the time to hear explanations. He does not assume that someone else's actions must be intended to be hurtful. He asks for and listens to his co-workers opinions, and does not give them more or less weight because they did something a week ago that upset him."

Then Rob played back for her the sound of her yelling at him. He let her listen to herself call him every name in the book, cast aspersions on his manhood, ancestry and mental fitness. When it was done playing, he pointed out that the recording had been made from the lab two doors down. When the facts sank in finally, she ran off, embarrassed.

"Ike, I tore her down, but you're going to have to build her back up if you want her to be your second. Take DeeDee with you if she's free. Take Nat or Wendy with you if she's not."

Ike nodded. He knew as well as Rob did that Alex would try to turn the situation sexual if she thought it would give her an advantage. It was just the way she was wired.

It took three days to calm her down. 'Alex should have been thankful I wasn't working in the lab during those three days!', Rob thought, 'Because I would have ripped her a new one!'.

Ike had a different management style. He was far more laid back, but he did get their Brazilian bombshell back on track, and with her filling in as the sector second, she seemed happy, so Rob certainly wasn't going to pick nits over it.

In addition to everything else Rob would be doing, it was assigned to him to get the eighteen scientists who were coming along as passengers up to speed on the ship's safety systems. Mrs. McKesson, appropriately, would be handling their orientation to the Caldwell suits. Her nose crinkled cutely any time anyone referred to her as Mrs. McKesson.

There were some objections from a few of the scientists when Rob began assigning them ship duties. They had all had to win lotteries held among their professional communities to get their berths on this trip. Perhaps some of them felt like they held positions of privilege. The crew disabused them of that notion very quickly.

The geeks in the lab and the techno-jocks in the construction crew were used to waiting on themselves, but with extra hands aboard, it made no sense to pull someone from the Drive team to serve lunch, or have the people keeping the sensors calibrated from dropping what they were doing to do clean up. They did have a 'service section' of the crew, people whose job it was too cook the meals, wash the laundry and in general deal with the grunt work involved in day-to-day living. The rabble rousing professors settled down pretty quickly when they were shown what the rest of the crew schedules looked like. Besides, they were only assisting here and there. None of them were working more than an hour or two a day.

When Rob wasn't babysitting, he spent the rest of the next five weeks either bouncing brain cells against Doctor Gardner's personal game of Astrodynamic Breakout, or madly following Andy MecKesson up and down every corridor, accessway, hatch, tube and conduit in the Pai Lung. Every step of the way they were deluged in the data, opinion, theory, surmise, suspicion, hope, fear, dream and nightmare of every person responsible for every thing everywhere on and in her. Did you know that every single airtight hatch and every doorway up and down the length of her is numbered? And that the numbers can tell you exactly which section and subsection of the ship you are in, if only you knew the scheme?

Rob knew the scheme now. He'd personally verified that every hatch matched every doorway. He'd done the same thing to every fire extinguisher, emergency air pack, first aid station, radiation detector and 'you are here' sign on the Pai Lung. Every freakin' one!

Today they were examining the emergency overrides for the rewiring routines in the command clusters. There are five of them, the one on the bridge, plus the one in the engineering bay, as well as three emergency reserve 'slap and go' panels in the keels. If their ship was an old Windows PC, those 'slap and go's were the equivalent of a hard reboot. They are supposed to restore basic functionality to all the drive and life support systems no matter what. Big pieces of the ship would have to have been vaporized for them not to work. That was the theory.

Tomorrow afternoon they were going to test those slap and go switches, and they were going to do it while they were orbiting the moon! But before that, they would spend the morning getting a refresher course in using their new space suits, and in weightless maneuvering. Rob suspected breakfast was going to be lightly attended!

Weightlessness was fun, what little of it there was. The transition time for the slap and go switches to do a complete rewire and restart of the control systems was 1.74345 seconds. During the middle .765889 seconds, they were weightless. Everyone had been given plenty of warning and they still wound up with a broken wrist, a twisted knee and a half dozen sprains and bruises. Someone suggested that the default settings for the environmental gravity controls should be 'on' instead of 'off'. They'd have to see. They were repeating the whole series of tests again in a few days.

Ike Dunham and Tyrese Glover got the employee of the week title sewed up between them by the time they were halfway back to the shipyard. Ike came up with the clever idea of tying the slap and go switches through the Q-Net and into the Q-tap key-ID of the command staff. The on duty watch officer would have the ability to do a fast verbal authorization, and the rest of the command staff would be able to do one after giving a confirmation code. Tyrese then had the bright follow up idea of tying the entire command console into the Q-Net.

Once they were back on the ground and the excitement had faded it was decided there were too many inherent security problems with having the command consoles tied directly into the Q-Net, but by the time Rob got out of the weekly staffing and resource meeting, they had developed an entire separate Com-Net, that was strictly for command level traffic, including accessing a virtual command console that put you in front of a holographic set of bridge controls.