Given the conditions, though, chill was a great time to try out the dragonflies. The beasts, attached to support lines, had continued to live for over two weeks, much to the surprise of everyone involved. The nutrient feed was very close to identical to that their production cavern fed them, but everyone had expected them to die from the supernal cold of deep space or the long duration on the hull. However, they were hanging in there.
Designing a spacesuit for Cheerick had been another technical hurdle surmounted by the increasing number of scientists and engineers backing the Blade’s missions. Cheerick rarely wore clothing, since it was unpleasant with their fur. The space suits were, therefore, more like space armor, being hard-shells with carefully sprung flex-points. It was also hoped that if the shields failed, the armor might afford the dragonfly riders some survivability. They looked, in fact, very much like the JIM suits that deep ocean divers wore, an egglike shape with legs and arms sprouting out from it. They’d immediately been christened Humpty-Dumpty suits.
Lady Che-Chee used the jets on her Humpty suit to scoot over to her dragonfly, then assumed her mounting position. Like the boards, the dragonflies generated a sticky traction field to keep the rider in place. Unlike they boards they, fortunately, had an inertial stabilization field. Otherwise, their acceleration of a thousand and a half Earth gravities would have torn their riders in half.
“Dragonfly one rider in position,” Lady Che-Chee said. “Release clamps and feeding tube.”
The feeding tube broke loose first with a small jet of lost nutrient. Then the clamps that held the dragonfly’s feet to the hull released.
“Tallyho,” Colonel Che-chee said. “All riders in place and form on me.”
The Blade was parked in deep orbit around an M class dwarf star, well inside its dangerous heliopause but outside planetary orbits in the region called the Oort Cloud.
The dim red star was less than half the diameter of Sol and at about five thousand astronomical units from where the Blade was parked so the local “sun” was merely the brightest spot in the sky.
Oort Cloud material was extremely dispersed but with the right instruments it was possible to find a comet or two even when they were separated by the distance between the Earth and Mars on its closest pass. The target for today was just such a comet, one about the size of that believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Wiping it out was possibly going to save some nascent race in this solar system. Assuming that any species arose on a planet around an M class star. The things were as common as ants at a picnic but they had narrow life-belts, short periods of potential life-development and darned few rocky planets. From a human perspective, M class stars were the teats-on-a-boar-hog of stars. Unless you needed a comet to blow away where nobody was going to watch.
“Telemetry?” Captain Prael asked.
“Suit transponders nominal,” the fighter combat controller replied. “Triangulation is good. Thirty percent above optimal.”
“That’s good,” Prael said, punching in a code. “Dragonflight, maneuver test first. Entering maneuver Delta-Three. Engage.”
Delta-Three was a simple combat approach maneuver with three changes in vector. Designed for approach to a firing enemy, the maneuver was more a test of the Cheerick ability to follow orders.
On the heads-up display inside the Cheerick rider’s helmets a karat appeared with a marker for acceleration. The idea was for the Cheerick riders to follow the karat as it moved across their visor and accelerate or decelerate as the indicator ordered.
Two separate screens in the CIC noted positions of the riders, one on vertical and one on horizontal. If you had the head for it and could keep an eye on both screens at more or less the same time, you could tell where something was in three-dimensions at all times.
Prael was used to thinking in three dimensions; it was the essence of submarine combat. What he was not used to was thinking fast in three dimensions. Submarine combat was very rarely fast, it was a matter of slow stalk and rare fast run, the latter always planned well in advance and well understood.
But it wasn’t really necessary to keep up when the Cheerick attempted the maneuver. On either board they were all over the map.
“Cease exercise,” the CO said, trying not to sigh. The Cheerick had only recently encountered any technology more advanced than the steel sword and mould-board plow. Expecting them to jump straight to understanding icons was idiocy. “Colonel, do you want to return and work this over or just talk to your people out there?”
“We will continue,” Colonel Che-chee responded tartly. “I would suggest Delta-One to start and a maximum of ten gravities of acceleration. I will explain to my people what is about to occur and then walk them through it. Slowly.”
“Very well,” the CO said. “Tell me when you’re ready.” He looked over at the TACO, Alexander White, and shrugged. “I guess even a hinky fighter system is better than nothing.”
Weaver sighed. “Define hinky.”
The job of an XO, as noted, was to ensure that the ship functioned so that the CO just had to order it around. His was the tedious task of making sure that the personnel files were updated, that there was enough food, that the systems were working. Guns were pretty important to a warship.
“Hinky,” the Eng said. “The port side chaos ball generator system has been having random malfunctions when we run tests on it. We’re not sure why.”
“I assume you’ve been running down the malfunctions,” Weaver said. “Where’s the fault?”
“We’ve been trying, sir,” the Eng said uncomfortably. “But the problem is that the system is partially Hexosehr and part human.”
“I know that, Eng,” Weaver said dryly. “I was part of the design team. Is it in the interface? That tested out perfectly well when we installed it. For that matter, it was working when we were on Earth.”
“It’s one of those intermittent things, sir,” the Eng said. “We get a fault in the feedback system, then when we try to run it down it’s gone. The TACO put the gun teams on it when it first cropped up. They eliminated it being in the software and they pulled down three of the ball generators and couldn’t find any fault readings in them. So I put two electronics mates and a network mate to work on it. They couldn’t find any physical faults in the system. Then the whole port side crashed the day after they got done. And then it came back up on the first restart and worked like a charm all day. Now we’ve got faults again.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s not the software,” Bill said. “By the time we got to designing that, the Hexosehr had been over our software protocols pretty thoroughly and they wrote most of it. All I can suggest is keep looking. I know who I’d suggest to look at it…”
“Miss Moon, right?” the Eng said, somewhat sarcastically.
“O ye of little faith,” Bill said sourly. “She’s been driving me crazy. She’s going crazy being cooped up in an empty science section. And, yes, that is who I’d put on it if it weren’t for the CO’s orders. You might get some fresh ideas in there, bring in some people you normally wouldn’t. About all I can suggest.”
“Fresh faces,” the Eng said, shrugging. “I’ll think on it, sir.”
“I want to know right away if anything goes wrong with the guns,” Weaver said, turning back to his computer. “You know the way out.”
CHAPTER NINE