Escape Velocity

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

The same cannot be said for comms, and our chief engineer was treating me to a high-volume litany of curses. Her choice comments about the parentage of the bean counters who’d set the parts budget for this cruise and the quality of the workmanship of those parts were being fed directly into my left ear, while the emergency alert klaxon drowned out all other sound in the right. It was time to get a handle on this rapidly worsening situation, to save my focus - and my sanity.

“Eimear, quit the krangin’ and tell me if you can fix it!”

“‘Course I can fix it, Skip, but I can’t promise how long it’ll hold…”

“Get on it, then. Let me know when we’re good, so I can get our tarks out of here!”

“You got it, Skip,” she replied.

Blessed silence filled my left ear as she closed the channel and got to work patching the main plasma regulator on the engines. Nothing I could do about the nerve-shredding sound of the emergency alert. Another great choice by corporate, hard-coding that into the systems. After the “upgrade,” crews couldn’t turn off the alert except by “resolving the emergency conditions.” Probably another decision by a skilled financial professional who’d never left a gravity well. Bet they got a bonus for it, too.

“Timo, get us a course out of here and be ready to hit it the second Eimear gives us the go.”

Timo Alokotila, our navigator, turned his head at my words. He was young, but he was a genius at a nav console. Actually, he was a genius everywhere, which was why, at five years younger than the average deckhand, he was already sitting on the bridge of an interstellar freight hauler.

“Aye, Skip. I’ll have us ready the moment she’s ready!”

With Timo’s attention back on his console, I needed to see what I could do about making Eimear’s job just a hair easier. I turned my attention to our loadmaster, who was pretty fast on his feet.The big Mongun had all six eyes on his monitors, watching the cargo indicators. We were running heavier than spec – another bean-counter bright idea – so his job was already a bit harder than it should have been even before this little situation developed.

The LWCS Javelin didn’t run an all-humanoid crew. Probably because I liked to pick the best being for the job. I didn’t care what planet your ancestors were from; if you worked hard and did your job well, then you’d always have a berth. Not always a popular decision, but my crew looked out for each other. More than one mouthy spacer sounding off out of his tark had been shown the view up there by my people. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but the Javelin would take on all comers.

“How’re we looking, Yadru?” I asked the loadmaster.

“If Eimear’s thrust projection numbers are right, we are too heavy. We will not be able to pull out with all the pods attached,” he replied, with his usual level of emotion - very little.

It’s not that Monguns are emotionless, not at all. They are just very even tempered. I’d watched Yadru clear a spacer bar in a brawl without so much as getting his fur ruffled. Our potential imminent demise in the depths of a gas giant hardly merited more agitation.

“Drokk! Okay, Yadru… any ideas? We need to be ready to push hard as soon as that piece-of-drud regulator is back online.”

“Yes, Skip, I do have an idea, but you will not like it. Once we start our burn, we should activate beacons on one-third of the cargo pods and release them. We get free of the well, rotate the ship with a Soshun maneuver, and use the front beam to pull the pods out. If we move quickly enough, we will be able to use at least some of the inertia to help us catch the pods.”

A Soshun was a maneuver meant for military ships, named for the lunatic captain that first did it in combat. To pull it off, a ship burns full to maximum velocity, cuts the engines, suddenly flips orientation 180 degrees, then does a full deceleration burn to come to a dead stop in space. The maneuver puts incredible stress on a ship’s structure and is risky in brand-new military cruisers. We were about to try it in a lightweight cargo ship that slipped spacedock nearly thirty years ago.

“Right, again, Yadru. I really don’t like that idea. But, I like losing this ship even less. How long to set it up?”

“About thirty seconds, Skip.”

“Okay, do it,” I replied, my attention diverted by a now-open comm channel.

“Skip, we’re as good as we’re going to get down here,” my chief engineer said. Her assessment was helpfully confirmed by the automated emergency klaxon finally falling silent.

“Ok, Eimear. Yadru’s run the numbers and we’re dumping some pods to lighten the load. The minute we’re out, we’re going to do a Soshun and snag them with the main beam.”

Since we were the only two on this comm channel, Eimear’s tone became less formal and more urgent. “Firash, I’m not sure the regulator will hold for a Soshun. We might not get the pods back.”

“I don’t care. CLOVIS can lose some cargo, or they can lose the ship. I’m choosing the Javelin over some fake Snelloran antiques any day. The bean counters can shove it up their tarks!”

“You’re the boss,” she replied, with just a hint of the sarcastic humor I’d come to love over the last six years.

Turning my attention back to preventing the destruction of the Javelin, its cargo, and the loss of the twenty-four souls on board, I checked in with my crew.

“Timo, got a course?”

“Aye, Skip! And I’ve got the coordinates set for the Soshun.”

“Yadru, are we good to go with the pods?”

“Skipper, the beacons are active and I am standing by to release the clamps on your order.”

“Eimear, you ready down there?”

“Aye, Skip, we’re ready. Regulator is showing 93 percent flow, which should get us enough juice to break free and snag the pods… hopefully.”

“Good enough! Strap in, everyone. Timo, lock in that course and ramp us up to full burn. Sing out when we hit 50 percent.”

“Aye, Skip!”

Losing no time, I opened the shipwide channel to warn the rest of the crew about the upcoming maneuvers.

”Attention, Javelin, this is the captain. Secure for full burn in ten seconds. We’ll be burning hard to get out of the gravity well, then doing a Soshun, so stay strapped in at your stations until the all-clear.”

Ten seconds was on the bleeding edge of what we could spare if we wanted to break free, but I didn't want to lose a crewer because they didn’t have time to strap in. Full burns are hell on a body if you don’t know they are coming. Meeting a bulkhead, hatch, or conduit at full thrust is a great way to get a stint in medbay, if you’re lucky.

“Yadru, when we hit 50 percent, fire up those beacons and drop the pods. Hold on the beacons until the last minute, so we don’t attract any unwanted attention.”

“Aye, Skipper,” Yadru rumbled.

I could feel the vibrations begin in the deckplates and settled into the command couch, snugging up my harness. I’ve loved the vibrations of a full burn since I was a kid – it means you’re heading out on a new adventure, or you’re in a decel burn on the way into port. It holds the promise of both adventure and of safety. Probably shouldn’t, given my history, but that’s a story for another time. I just hoped we’d all get to feel a solid decel burn into Celestron Prime station after resolving this little predicament.