Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Progress

Wrote 1165 easy words in the last three hours. Wow. That's enough for the whole week. If I continue averaging this much each writing day, I'll have to up the target rate!

Week 1: total 1363 words
Week 2: currently at 2528 words (project cumulative total).

Snippet


They found a board in Engineering. The first thing Minea did was to check bow sensors. There werent't very many left, as the same catastrophe, whatever it had been, had taken out most of the forward section. She did have a short-range radar platform and a visible-spectrum telescope. Neither showed any big rocks in their immediate way.

She called up the flight plan and started matching it up with observed constellations to figure out where they were in relation to where they were supposed to be. She let the navcomp work on the problem on its own, but the answer it came to her was clearly impossible. She then did the proper observations on the telescopes, selected a number of reference stars, five to be on the safe side, laboriously matched by hand their star images with the corresponding stars on file and plotted their angular positions on the sky. She then pulled an earlier set of manual observations from the file, and noted that they had been made by the Captain herself a couple of moths earlier. She hoped they were accurate, but she didn't think she had months herself to wait for the ship to have moved far enough from its present position for her to be able to obtain a set of fresh observations. She compensated the redshift difference between the two sets caused by the ship's deceleration and calculated the parallaxes of her reference stars. Finally, she used these numbers to determine her location.

The computer had been right. They were light-seconds off course. The navcomp suggested a corrective maneuver. With considerable tredipation she accessed the propulsion system controls and noted the amount of deltavee she had on hand. It turned out to be just a bit too low.

She deflated on her wheelchair with a resigned sigh.

"Something wrong, Lieutenant?" Richard asked from her side. He had appropriated for himself the duty engineer's chair.

Minea turned her head to look at him. "You've spent decades on this ship and you can't read a piloting board?"

"Erya..." he said, referring to his late wife and the ship's deceased first mate, "Erya tried to talk me into learning. I was never interested."

"Oh," she said, feeling a bit guilty for having made him think of his too recent loss. She inhaled audibly, to gather strength. "Okay. We can't achieve orbit of the Neval moon."

"Oh."

An idea occurred. Maybe they could bleed enough speed by aerobraking on the Neval atmosphere. She put the question to the navcomp, which promptly gave a solution. She started to cheer, but then she remembered to check the resulting hull temperatures. Even with maximum deflector strength, the hull would breach and her remaining fuel would explode. So much for that idea.

She then asked the navcomp to run scenarios based on gravity assists on the six other planets on the system.

"What's happening?" Stress was clearly audible in Richard's voice.

She looked him in the eyes. "The computer is computing."

The sat in silence for an eternity. Finally the display changed. "No luck there," she said.

"We're not going to make it?"

"It looks like it." When she turned to look at Richard, she saw his face deformed by pain and wetted by tears.

"Last year," he said. "Last year, when we hadn't been killed yet by space, I figured that we'd be all right. That Erya and I could retire on that life-abundant rock. It has life, you know. We had suspected it when we launched, but we've actually been able to see that much on the telescope for the last decade."

She didn't know what else to do but reach for him and hold him, and let him cry his anguish. She herself didn't feel anything, and she wondered what that said of her.

They remained in that position, him crying on her shoulder, for what seemed like hours.

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