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“Right are all systems green, and flight ready?”

“Yep, all systems fine, fuel topped, power is self supported, reactors steady, and drive coils pre-warmed.”

“You think we are ready to set out?”

“Yes”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes”

“Well you are wrong, you may be able to hop out on a shuttle like this back aboard my ship, but at the mo we will have to speak to dock command, and ok our departure, and by rights you should do the same even on my ship”

“Ok, but surely it is a completely superfluous action, I mean the ship has told docking that it is preparing for flight readiness”

“I know, but its best you give them warning, and sometimes they tell you something useful, like tell you if your engines are working fine, or to mind out for that huge freighter you are about to drive into.”

“Ok, ok, sending request to dock control.. received ‘all go, have a nice flight’. I think we can pull out now, shall I let computer coordinate umbilical detachment, or do you want me to command all attachment lines?”

“I think it would be quicker for you to let the computer to do all that, but while everything is being retracted just check system stats once again.”

My hands flashed across the console, registering all the alerts coming up from the detachment of umbilicals, not until the final power lines were withdrawn, and the physical harness retracted, did the flight deck seem quiet again.

“Ok give me vector”

“Just take us out of the docks for the moment, drop us into synchronous orbit around the planet below, and then I shall think about where to next send, and remember quiet drive until we are 500km out, we don’t want to ruffle feathers.”

The ship handled most of the Nav. functions, like balancing reaction centres, and maintaining even thrust, still it was a delicate procedure weaving through the docking pylons on just cold gas thrusters alone, reaction engines were really quite tricky, though as port shrank away on the range console, I would soon be on distortion drives, something that was far easier to control.

“Distance 10km, switch to low distortion?”

“I would leave it for a little longer yet, we are in no hurry, you have been checking for traffic, haven’t you?”

“Yes all clear” I reported as I hurriedly pulled back traffic display to front view

“Now remember, when you switch over to distortion make sure you gradually apply power from the fusion cores, if you suddenly ramp you will set up an energy oscillation in the cores, and those waves of energy sloshing across the core material does not give for a smooth ride, especially on a small craft like this.”

I knew this well, though not from my own experience of piloting, rough flight and sudden maneuvers would not be expected on a cartography vessel, but when you had a decidedly eccentric pilot, and a captain who was a stickler for punctuality, then it was a different matter. Anyway on this run I was determined to give a smooth ride, I had been using fusion exhaust to warm the coils from the moment I got into the flight seat, a nice little tip I found in some background reading.

“Ok preparing to give partial power from drive reactors to distortion coils, a 15% load should give enough for a 20ms^-2 acceleration, with damp on the coils?”

“Should do, should do”

I relayed the commands through the ship, console chiming with each successfully commanded action, I started to model the desired core behaviour on the wide console to my right, contours of energy distribution warped and squirmed through the core. Soon the command return reached a carillon as the result of all flight diagnostics came through second by second verifying ship health in transition to main drives. All looked well, I felt quite smug.

“Distortion drives online and operating on distortion threshold, acceleration of 20ms^-2 fully damped by inertial dampening, distance from port 80km.”

            Then to my horror, I was alerted to a growing discord in power supply to the core. Within a second or so, the console was littered with reds, it wouldn’t take long for the ship to bring itself to paralysis as it emergency shut off all major systems.

            “Surprise, I slipped in a little test for you”

            I gritted my teeth, I hated this, though I could not remember I single run where some cruel intentioned error had been preprogrammed into an otherwise peaceful flight. This one was shaping to be something particularly nasty, the sort where I would spend half an hour floating around in zero g in the dark trying to fix whatever went wrong. But that was not the degrading part, it was the fact that he was sitting peacefully in his chair occasionally making ‘tut tut’ noises.

            “Want a clue?”

            “No!”

            Diagnostics came flashing back, layering over each other, but one was particularly earmarked for attention, the drive core. I was not going to kill the power to it, not yet anyway, that would guarantee safety but it also tripled the time to work out what was wrong, and all the energy in there does not just disappear. Soon nearly all consoles were projecting some view of the core, iso-chromatic lines of stress, temperature, energy distribution.

            “I think that you worked out it was the core, well your very warm”

            Warm? That was the nagging thing, everything about the core seemed fine, there did not to be any break of damage, the turbulent vortices of energy that played over its surface was completely in expected parameters, physically the core appeared to be doing exactly what was told of it, nothing was being fried or generating a lot of sheer.

            “I don’t think it’s the core itself”

            “You’d be right, it looks fine doesn’t it”

            “So I reckon it would be a core subsidiary system?”

            “Possibly, possibly”

            It was infuriating how vague he was, but I must admit, I did not like to be given answers, it was far more productive to work out for yourself. So it wasn’t the core, that looked fine, even if it was giving wild thrust patterns, inertial damping was a wonderful thing, some of the g’s this thing was randomly chucking out would have tenderized us nicely, so what other systems could be responsible. Core handling? Nope errors in core handling would have reduced core health, which is blatantly not the case, if anything the engine seemed to be perfectly coordinated in doing this weird behaviour. The fact that the core was responding and being managed perfectly seemed to suggest something else entirely.

            “Ok the core is being told to do this, that’s just plain weird, please don’t tell me this another of your damn strange scenarios, ‘ghost in the machine’ would be favourite”

            “Where’s you proof?”

            That was a good point, there was nothing easily physical to show for this, the only effect the core was producing was sending out spikes of distortion all over the place. But surely that was proof. I hurriedly called up a display which showed the regions of the core and what direction they were chucking out field, sure enough it was chaos. In a normal core all the distortion is along one axis, under no conditions would regions in the core flip polarity, sending waves of counter-distortion.

            “Ok how’s that for proof?”

            The discord was being set up by the computer governing core behaviour, its command wires threading through the whole structure, which would normally act to coordinate core elements. The fact that most of the core was acting normally, just meant a few rogue elements were causing this, I sent a flock of diagnostics through the core handling computer, I saw the elements of the core outline and flash green, according to diagnostics all was perfectly fine, curiouser, and curiouser. Well it was this system that was causing fault, I arranged for a backup to take over, I issued the command, instead of a bright chime, I got a clonk, that should not be right, I retried, the same dull clonk. In the orchestra that is ship console audio response, ‘clonk’ meant ‘are you quite sure you meant that, cos I can't do that’. Sure enough backup was already up and running, something it should not be doing, sure it should be on ready standby, but issuing commands? I think not. I isolated the system and blocked all its input into the core. Immediately red lights started to disappear, and soon all that was left was the cluttered array of hastily pulled up display menus, under which the flight control displays were peacefully running on automatic.

            “Well done, that was quite fast, considering you haven’t seen something like that before.”

            “You rigged the backup core control computer to issue conflicting requests. I am sure that is rather dangerous.”

            “Ah but you handled it very well, and it would only have been dangerous if you had engaged a higher speed. On the whole that was well done. Even if you found the cause by accident.”

            It was too much effort to argue, I sighed and set about resetting all the consoles to default.

            “We are well over 250km from the station, do you want me to align for synchronous insertion?”

            “I thought we had already agreed on that”

            “Ok, course set, with final thrust shut off, we should be in synchronous orbit in about 15 mins.”

            “Very good, a little light music perhaps?”