Cameron sat in his bridge command chair and watched the main screen in front of him as the countdown timer ran down to zero. They had been in FTL transit for ten weeks, two days, eleven hours, and 47 minutes. His crew's nerves had frayed nearly to the breaking point, and now everyone on board was anxious with anticipation; hoping that sometime in the next couple of hours, their Captain had pulled a big, fat rabbit out of his hat.
The trip out had actually gone better than he had feared, the only real problem had been Dirk and Alex; as always when two people lived and worked with one another, there had been an argument. Cameron didn't know how it had started, but it had ended with Dirk losing his temper and calling Alex a dirty word, which was probably how he had gotten a split lip. Nobody had seen her hit him, it had happened out of the view of the ship's security cameras, and Dirk, for all of his anger, had managed to keep a level head, and refused to accuse Alex of having done it. Alex had admitted to it the next day, and had explained the circumstances, knowing full well that she was risking her career. Cameron had already guessed most of what had happened, but hearing that he'd been right had annoyed him, and he'd given them a dressing down that had left both wondering if they would have a last paycheck, much less a career when they got back to Alliance territory. He had finished by putting them on separate shifts, then giving each of them increased work loads. The combination had kept the two of them apart for almost two weeks straight, and by the time Cameron let them have their original shifts back, they were more than ready to kiss and make up. They'd set a new ship record for official noise complaints in a single shift, which was some kind of indicator, at any rate.
The rest of the trip out after Vulcanfall had been boring to the point of insanity. If it hadn't been for Dirk and Rollie's penchant for springing practical jokes on their unsuspecting crewmates, then the tension might very well have done some damage. They had even managed to get him with a prank that involved causing his communication badge to make random flatulence noises whenever he walked within two meters of another member of the crew. It wasn't exactly high class humor, but it kept people laughing, and with little to do except routine maintenance, a little comic relief went a long way. He could sense the excitement of the bridge crew as the countdown reached double digits, and everyone called out the last ten seconds.
The transition from FTL drive to sublight was always something he had to sit down for. It wasn't something that he could explain to anyone who had never experienced it, but the closest accurate description would be to say that, it was like your brain was riding a roller coaster, while the rest of you was standing still. It was like a split second of the worst vertigo ever, then it was gone, leaving you with a feeling of having been stretched out like a rubber band, and then let go. Most of the time when asked, he just said that it felt 'weird'.
People all reacted differently to FTL transition stress. Some, like Rollie, could be doing needlepoint and not miss a stitch. Others simply couldn't take the strain at all, but the only way to find out was to go through it, and hope that it didn't cause much of a reaction. Cameron had read somewhere that approximately 15 percent of the population was incapable of making an FTL transition without being sedated first, but the percentage of people who seemed to be completely unaffected was less than one percent.
His crew were shaking out the cobwebs, and there was a steady stream of data coming up on the screens around his command chair. Alex was scanning for any activity of any kind on the standard commercial communication channels, and as many military frequencies as she could think of. Dirk was using his access to the passive optical sensors on the main guns to try and identify potential planets in the system, while keeping the radar and LIDAR arrays sweeping the area around the ship for any objects that might pose a threat. Erwin Koch had come up from Engineering to assist with monitoring the long-range sensors.
"Hah! I got one!" Exclaimed Dirk, triumphantly, two hours later. "Unless I miss my guess, there's a Jovian planet at 277.3 by 87.391 and a distance of approximately 39.2 AU."
"Bao-Jian, can you confirm that?" Asked Cameron, in a rush.
Bao-Jian loaded Dirk's position data into the navigation system that controlled the high resolution cameras and electronic telescopes, and waited while they shifted position and focused on the new search location. The air on the bridge was thick with anticipation, while the Jester's pilot very carefully focused on his work.
"Confirmed, Captain! There is a large gas giant almost exactly where he said. Best guess at this point puts it at about 25 percent larger than Jupiter, and best of all - it has rings." Bao-Jian told him, excitedly.
There were cheers on the bridge, because discovery of rings made the job of figuring out where the plane of the elliptic was, much simpler. Rings tended to line up with the equator, and the equator tended to align with the plane of the system, as a result, finding the planet where the ship for which they were looking was likely to be, just got a whole lot easier.
The ship had been drifting along under minimal thrust, but generally in the direction of the local star. With their latest discovery, Cameron ordered Bao-Jian to put the Jester on a higher acceleration vector for a point about 1.2 AU from the primary. He figured that if there was a colony transport ship in the system, then it only made sense for it to be in one place, and that was near a planet capable of supporting life.
Hours passed, watches changed, as the Jester went deeper into this system; a system without even the dignity of a proper name. As their proximity to the inner system increased so did their information about its geography, and they cataloged several moons orbiting the gas giant, now tentatively named 'Blacksad', due to a curved band of dark cloud making the planet look like a cartoonish sad face. It was less than imaginative, but it was easier to say than EL51376-B3, which was the official designation according to the UniSys Stellar Cartography Group.
Three days after they had made their FTL transition into the system, they found what they were looking for. An infinitely small blue-green speck that was picked up by one of the long-range telescopes, and Cameron ordered the Jester's course altered to make a least-time approach with the planet, consistent with the need to conserve fuel for the trip out. Once the course was laid in and set, all anyone had to do was sit back and relax for a couple of days, since the planet was passing around the sun away from them, and they would have to swing around it to avoid unnecessary risk of radiation exposure.
Cameron was beginning to think that this whole trip might have been for nothing as they came up on the turn over point, when they would flip the ship 180 degrees, and begin decelerating so that they were at rest relative to the planet when they got these, but tried to remain optimistic about what they would find when they got there.
He had sent Rollie, Dirk and Hicks to check over all of the ship's EVA gear, so that when it was needed, it would be ready to go. As a result, Dirk wasn't at his station on the bridge, when the Jester's threat warning radar picked up a radar anomaly more or less directly in their path. The ship's navigation radar had missed it because, whatever it was, it had been designed to be hidden. Cameron knew what the warning tone was, but with nothing coming up on the primary navigation radar, he was slower to realize what that meant than he should have been.
The only reason the defensive system's radar had picked it up before the navigational radar, which had an extremely long range, was that it was *deliberately* stealthy. The defensive system's radar was controlled by software designed to look for anomalous patches of space that were totally devoid of all EM signature. Dirk's cautionary habit of leaving the threat warning radar to passively search the space around the ship was standard operating procedure for the Alliance Navy, and had struck Cameron as good policy for traveling through systems with an uncertain level of insystem law enforcement.
Cameron was jolted out of his seat when Dirk's voice came over his com badge at a God-awfully loud volume.
"Captain! Bring the ship around, 90 degrees in any direction, perpendicular to our present course, and at our highest possible acceleration! Now!" Dirk demanded, his voice warbling as if he was running and talking at the same time.
"What the hell, Sinclair? What's going on? I've got an alert on the threa -" He was cut off as Dirk suddenly came through the bridge hatch, and sprinted to the ship's weapons control station. "Dirk! Talk to me! What's going on?" He repeated.
Dirk didn't reply right away, but Cameron could see him begin bringing the Jester's point defense systems, lasers and autocannons both, on line, while simultaneously activating the short-range millimeter wave radar.
"Captain, you need to alter course, now; there's no time to explain, please just do it." He said in a voice laden with fear, without turning to look at him.
Cameron had never seen Dirk like this, and it worried him enough to give the orders. He watched the navigational display at his seat, and was horrified to see that the navigation radar was now tracking three small objects that had separated from the larger one, from which they were now rapidly moving on a reciprocal course. The three new objects were accelerating, and shifted to intercept the Jester with increased velocity.
Cameron was not reassured when he heard Dirk say "Oh, fuck!" in a voice bordering on panic.
"Come on, talk to me, Dirk! What's out there?" He asked, confused by his gunner's obvious anxiety.
"Captain, three missiles locked on to us from an AADS; it was lurking in our path, waiting for us to get close enough to enter its firing envelope, and once we did, it launched those missiles. I had the Jester's tactical system programmed to alert me if it detected something, but I never suspected anything like this." He explained, his voice strained.
Cameron could see that the missiles were closing faster, and for the first time in a while, he was worried that he had made a colossal mistake. He had brought his ship and its 47 crew members out to the ass-end of nowhere, and there was a good chance he had just killed them all. The missiles were still accelerating, and closing the distance with increasing speed every second.
"Captain, we need to change direction away from those missiles, and start randomly shifting course. That will give me a little more time to refine the defensive system's targeting solutions, and give us a much better chance of taking them out before they get within detonation range." Dirk told him, without taking his eyes off his work.
"Bao, do it." He ordered the pilot, quickly consulting his command terminal, and continued. "Maintain our current acceleration, but bring us another 35 degrees off our present course away from those missiles."
Bao-Jian wasted no time setting the course corrections after muttering, "Yes sir."
"Captain, I have the best possible data for taking out those missiles, but we are going to have to turn broadside to make the best use of the Jester's weaponry; meaning we're going to be completely exposed if anything gets through, but we'll never outrun them, so..." Dirk trailed off, not needing to finish the thought that was on everyone's mind.
Cameron knew that what Dirk was proposing was a massive gamble, but he didn't hesitate for more than a few seconds before turning to Bao-Jian, and said: "Bao, on my mark, cut our accel and bring us port broadside onto those bogies. In 3. 2. 1. MARK!"
The Jester's main insystem drive had been throwing out a dense plume of white hot monatomic plasma, and it suddenly went out, as Bao-Jian cut the ship's acceleration completely, and pushed the Jester's maneuvering thrusters to their limits to bring them around in as little time as possible. Everyone else was watching the main bridge display, which showed the incoming projectiles' cones of probable trajectory shrink rapidly as they got closer. Dirk's firing solutions were preprogrammed to activate when the ship's weapons came to bear on their assigned targets.
The Jester, in addition to its two 76mm railguns, mounted three pairs of 6-barrel, 30mm rotary cannon in turrets, one ventral, two dorsal, with a combined rate of fire of approximately 24,000 rounds a minute. The ship also had six, 35 megawatt antimissile lasers, as well as decoy flares and chaff dispensers.
Dirk fired them all.
The vibration from the autocannons could be felt throughout the ship, along with the intermittent thumping of the chaff and flare dispensers disgorging their own payloads. The lasers were silent save for the whine of their servos coming through the hull, only audible to crew members in close proximity to them. The railguns were totally silent, their contribution to the effort was limited to only a dozen rounds, but those rounds were canisters of tungsten cubes with a programmable fuse and those twelve rounds added 36,000 projectiles to the enormous cloud of destruction on an intercept course with their targets.
The trip out had actually gone better than he had feared, the only real problem had been Dirk and Alex; as always when two people lived and worked with one another, there had been an argument. Cameron didn't know how it had started, but it had ended with Dirk losing his temper and calling Alex a dirty word, which was probably how he had gotten a split lip. Nobody had seen her hit him, it had happened out of the view of the ship's security cameras, and Dirk, for all of his anger, had managed to keep a level head, and refused to accuse Alex of having done it. Alex had admitted to it the next day, and had explained the circumstances, knowing full well that she was risking her career. Cameron had already guessed most of what had happened, but hearing that he'd been right had annoyed him, and he'd given them a dressing down that had left both wondering if they would have a last paycheck, much less a career when they got back to Alliance territory. He had finished by putting them on separate shifts, then giving each of them increased work loads. The combination had kept the two of them apart for almost two weeks straight, and by the time Cameron let them have their original shifts back, they were more than ready to kiss and make up. They'd set a new ship record for official noise complaints in a single shift, which was some kind of indicator, at any rate.
The rest of the trip out after Vulcanfall had been boring to the point of insanity. If it hadn't been for Dirk and Rollie's penchant for springing practical jokes on their unsuspecting crewmates, then the tension might very well have done some damage. They had even managed to get him with a prank that involved causing his communication badge to make random flatulence noises whenever he walked within two meters of another member of the crew. It wasn't exactly high class humor, but it kept people laughing, and with little to do except routine maintenance, a little comic relief went a long way. He could sense the excitement of the bridge crew as the countdown reached double digits, and everyone called out the last ten seconds.
The transition from FTL drive to sublight was always something he had to sit down for. It wasn't something that he could explain to anyone who had never experienced it, but the closest accurate description would be to say that, it was like your brain was riding a roller coaster, while the rest of you was standing still. It was like a split second of the worst vertigo ever, then it was gone, leaving you with a feeling of having been stretched out like a rubber band, and then let go. Most of the time when asked, he just said that it felt 'weird'.
People all reacted differently to FTL transition stress. Some, like Rollie, could be doing needlepoint and not miss a stitch. Others simply couldn't take the strain at all, but the only way to find out was to go through it, and hope that it didn't cause much of a reaction. Cameron had read somewhere that approximately 15 percent of the population was incapable of making an FTL transition without being sedated first, but the percentage of people who seemed to be completely unaffected was less than one percent.
His crew were shaking out the cobwebs, and there was a steady stream of data coming up on the screens around his command chair. Alex was scanning for any activity of any kind on the standard commercial communication channels, and as many military frequencies as she could think of. Dirk was using his access to the passive optical sensors on the main guns to try and identify potential planets in the system, while keeping the radar and LIDAR arrays sweeping the area around the ship for any objects that might pose a threat. Erwin Koch had come up from Engineering to assist with monitoring the long-range sensors.
"Hah! I got one!" Exclaimed Dirk, triumphantly, two hours later. "Unless I miss my guess, there's a Jovian planet at 277.3 by 87.391 and a distance of approximately 39.2 AU."
"Bao-Jian, can you confirm that?" Asked Cameron, in a rush.
Bao-Jian loaded Dirk's position data into the navigation system that controlled the high resolution cameras and electronic telescopes, and waited while they shifted position and focused on the new search location. The air on the bridge was thick with anticipation, while the Jester's pilot very carefully focused on his work.
"Confirmed, Captain! There is a large gas giant almost exactly where he said. Best guess at this point puts it at about 25 percent larger than Jupiter, and best of all - it has rings." Bao-Jian told him, excitedly.
There were cheers on the bridge, because discovery of rings made the job of figuring out where the plane of the elliptic was, much simpler. Rings tended to line up with the equator, and the equator tended to align with the plane of the system, as a result, finding the planet where the ship for which they were looking was likely to be, just got a whole lot easier.
The ship had been drifting along under minimal thrust, but generally in the direction of the local star. With their latest discovery, Cameron ordered Bao-Jian to put the Jester on a higher acceleration vector for a point about 1.2 AU from the primary. He figured that if there was a colony transport ship in the system, then it only made sense for it to be in one place, and that was near a planet capable of supporting life.
Hours passed, watches changed, as the Jester went deeper into this system; a system without even the dignity of a proper name. As their proximity to the inner system increased so did their information about its geography, and they cataloged several moons orbiting the gas giant, now tentatively named 'Blacksad', due to a curved band of dark cloud making the planet look like a cartoonish sad face. It was less than imaginative, but it was easier to say than EL51376-B3, which was the official designation according to the UniSys Stellar Cartography Group.
Three days after they had made their FTL transition into the system, they found what they were looking for. An infinitely small blue-green speck that was picked up by one of the long-range telescopes, and Cameron ordered the Jester's course altered to make a least-time approach with the planet, consistent with the need to conserve fuel for the trip out. Once the course was laid in and set, all anyone had to do was sit back and relax for a couple of days, since the planet was passing around the sun away from them, and they would have to swing around it to avoid unnecessary risk of radiation exposure.
Cameron was beginning to think that this whole trip might have been for nothing as they came up on the turn over point, when they would flip the ship 180 degrees, and begin decelerating so that they were at rest relative to the planet when they got these, but tried to remain optimistic about what they would find when they got there.
He had sent Rollie, Dirk and Hicks to check over all of the ship's EVA gear, so that when it was needed, it would be ready to go. As a result, Dirk wasn't at his station on the bridge, when the Jester's threat warning radar picked up a radar anomaly more or less directly in their path. The ship's navigation radar had missed it because, whatever it was, it had been designed to be hidden. Cameron knew what the warning tone was, but with nothing coming up on the primary navigation radar, he was slower to realize what that meant than he should have been.
The only reason the defensive system's radar had picked it up before the navigational radar, which had an extremely long range, was that it was *deliberately* stealthy. The defensive system's radar was controlled by software designed to look for anomalous patches of space that were totally devoid of all EM signature. Dirk's cautionary habit of leaving the threat warning radar to passively search the space around the ship was standard operating procedure for the Alliance Navy, and had struck Cameron as good policy for traveling through systems with an uncertain level of insystem law enforcement.
Cameron was jolted out of his seat when Dirk's voice came over his com badge at a God-awfully loud volume.
"Captain! Bring the ship around, 90 degrees in any direction, perpendicular to our present course, and at our highest possible acceleration! Now!" Dirk demanded, his voice warbling as if he was running and talking at the same time.
"What the hell, Sinclair? What's going on? I've got an alert on the threa -" He was cut off as Dirk suddenly came through the bridge hatch, and sprinted to the ship's weapons control station. "Dirk! Talk to me! What's going on?" He repeated.
Dirk didn't reply right away, but Cameron could see him begin bringing the Jester's point defense systems, lasers and autocannons both, on line, while simultaneously activating the short-range millimeter wave radar.
"Captain, you need to alter course, now; there's no time to explain, please just do it." He said in a voice laden with fear, without turning to look at him.
Cameron had never seen Dirk like this, and it worried him enough to give the orders. He watched the navigational display at his seat, and was horrified to see that the navigation radar was now tracking three small objects that had separated from the larger one, from which they were now rapidly moving on a reciprocal course. The three new objects were accelerating, and shifted to intercept the Jester with increased velocity.
Cameron was not reassured when he heard Dirk say "Oh, fuck!" in a voice bordering on panic.
"Come on, talk to me, Dirk! What's out there?" He asked, confused by his gunner's obvious anxiety.
"Captain, three missiles locked on to us from an AADS; it was lurking in our path, waiting for us to get close enough to enter its firing envelope, and once we did, it launched those missiles. I had the Jester's tactical system programmed to alert me if it detected something, but I never suspected anything like this." He explained, his voice strained.
Cameron could see that the missiles were closing faster, and for the first time in a while, he was worried that he had made a colossal mistake. He had brought his ship and its 47 crew members out to the ass-end of nowhere, and there was a good chance he had just killed them all. The missiles were still accelerating, and closing the distance with increasing speed every second.
"Captain, we need to change direction away from those missiles, and start randomly shifting course. That will give me a little more time to refine the defensive system's targeting solutions, and give us a much better chance of taking them out before they get within detonation range." Dirk told him, without taking his eyes off his work.
"Bao, do it." He ordered the pilot, quickly consulting his command terminal, and continued. "Maintain our current acceleration, but bring us another 35 degrees off our present course away from those missiles."
Bao-Jian wasted no time setting the course corrections after muttering, "Yes sir."
"Captain, I have the best possible data for taking out those missiles, but we are going to have to turn broadside to make the best use of the Jester's weaponry; meaning we're going to be completely exposed if anything gets through, but we'll never outrun them, so..." Dirk trailed off, not needing to finish the thought that was on everyone's mind.
Cameron knew that what Dirk was proposing was a massive gamble, but he didn't hesitate for more than a few seconds before turning to Bao-Jian, and said: "Bao, on my mark, cut our accel and bring us port broadside onto those bogies. In 3. 2. 1. MARK!"
The Jester's main insystem drive had been throwing out a dense plume of white hot monatomic plasma, and it suddenly went out, as Bao-Jian cut the ship's acceleration completely, and pushed the Jester's maneuvering thrusters to their limits to bring them around in as little time as possible. Everyone else was watching the main bridge display, which showed the incoming projectiles' cones of probable trajectory shrink rapidly as they got closer. Dirk's firing solutions were preprogrammed to activate when the ship's weapons came to bear on their assigned targets.
The Jester, in addition to its two 76mm railguns, mounted three pairs of 6-barrel, 30mm rotary cannon in turrets, one ventral, two dorsal, with a combined rate of fire of approximately 24,000 rounds a minute. The ship also had six, 35 megawatt antimissile lasers, as well as decoy flares and chaff dispensers.
Dirk fired them all.
The vibration from the autocannons could be felt throughout the ship, along with the intermittent thumping of the chaff and flare dispensers disgorging their own payloads. The lasers were silent save for the whine of their servos coming through the hull, only audible to crew members in close proximity to them. The railguns were totally silent, their contribution to the effort was limited to only a dozen rounds, but those rounds were canisters of tungsten cubes with a programmable fuse and those twelve rounds added 36,000 projectiles to the enormous cloud of destruction on an intercept course with their targets.
The first missile died when it moved to avoid a stream of incoming 30mm AP rounds, and wound up being immolated by a pair of infrared beams of coherent light. The second was all but obliterated when a lucky 76mm canister load detonated in front of it, with a compound velocity of horrific proportions, and most of the 3000 tungsten cubes hit nose-on tearing it apart lengthwise. The last missile almost got to within detonation range, when all of the autocannons locked on to it simultaneously, and ripped it to shreds, some of which still had enough momentum to pock the ship's hull plating.
It was over as quickly as it began.
Cameron sat back in his chair with a loud release of breath that he hadn't realized he'd been holding, and heard Dirk yell "Ooh-Rah!", which seemed to jolt a second cheer from the crew.
It was over as quickly as it began.
Cameron sat back in his chair with a loud release of breath that he hadn't realized he'd been holding, and heard Dirk yell "Ooh-Rah!", which seemed to jolt a second cheer from the crew.
"OK people, let's take a survey of any hull damage caused by that last one, and get the repair remotes on any work needs doing. Dirk, well done. Now, tell me what just happened." Cameron demanded, once the noise had died down.
"Without a good look at what fired at us, I can only speculate, but my guess is that it was an automated area denial system, or AADS. What the fuck it's doing in this system, I have no idea. If it's all the same to you, I'd like to take one of the Mules, and go have a look. Chances are that its only programmed to fire on something like the size of this ship." Dirk said, confidently.
"No, way. I have no intention of finding out otherwise the hard way. Do me the courtesy of finding out if there's more of those out there, and get us around them. If we come up short on what we came for originally, then we'll revisit this conversation, but for now: No." Cameron told him, with obvious finality.
He sat back in his chair and watched the main viewer, which was linked to the optical feed on one of the ship's repair drones, and tried to project an aura of calm. This job was just getting started, and had provided more than enough excitement already. If this kept up, and they survived, he would write it all up and sell it as a screenplay. The fantasy was a pleasant distraction from the thought that lurked in the shadows, waiting for him to pay attention to it: Why would any colony need anything like an AADS?
He couldn't think of an answer that made sense.
"Without a good look at what fired at us, I can only speculate, but my guess is that it was an automated area denial system, or AADS. What the fuck it's doing in this system, I have no idea. If it's all the same to you, I'd like to take one of the Mules, and go have a look. Chances are that its only programmed to fire on something like the size of this ship." Dirk said, confidently.
"No, way. I have no intention of finding out otherwise the hard way. Do me the courtesy of finding out if there's more of those out there, and get us around them. If we come up short on what we came for originally, then we'll revisit this conversation, but for now: No." Cameron told him, with obvious finality.
He sat back in his chair and watched the main viewer, which was linked to the optical feed on one of the ship's repair drones, and tried to project an aura of calm. This job was just getting started, and had provided more than enough excitement already. If this kept up, and they survived, he would write it all up and sell it as a screenplay. The fantasy was a pleasant distraction from the thought that lurked in the shadows, waiting for him to pay attention to it: Why would any colony need anything like an AADS?
He couldn't think of an answer that made sense.
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