Too Good To Be True: Chapter 3

"Sorry, no," explained Chuck, "The cockpit is off-limits generally, and especially during take off. You understand?"

Sultia scowled, obviously not understanding. "Yes. I understand, but I am still not fully confident in the storage situation."

"Your containers aren't going anywhere," said Chuck, who instantly changed his mind. "Except with us, of course, when we take off."

The door shut. "Finally," said Chuck, as he waved his hand over the locking mechanism and made sure it went red. "I thought they were in a hurry?"

"What's that?" asked Chuck, sitting down to Quincy's left in the main pilot's seat.

"Well, I don't want them to see me using the controls for the first time ever, now, do I?"

Chuck pulled a manual from the center console and flipped it on. He'd previously Quill-eared the sections he knew he'd want to refer to. "Okay, I went over most of the changes between this and the ships I flew in college, and it didn't seem that hard. Yoke, rel-drive, main drive. I don't see the autopilot..." He looked around.

Chuck, distracted instantly from his hunt by Quincy's question, replied, "Actually that setup's kind of cool. All the grav controls are together under this cap."

He opened a plastic blister cap, under which were four switches. "Dampeners, a-grav, main grav, and the a-grav/grav in the lift. The lift is especially cool. On a planet its got a-grav and in space it doesn't have the main ship's grav, so it's got zero-g all the time."

"Cool," said Quincy. His voice was distracted, obviously not listening to the explanation.

"But anyway, before we take off I need to find..." Chuck flipped through the digital pages of the user's manual. "Autopilot. Autopilot. A... Au...to... Autopilot. Here."

He stared at the manual for a few seconds, trying to figure out what the diagram was showing him. He turned the manual sideways, and then turned his head sideways to match. "I think it's on the floor."

"Oh," said Chuck. "That's... different. Oh well, I'm sure I'll get used to it. I'm going to start the pre-flight."

Pilot's Log

Date: October 20th, 523 AG

Location: Olpath, The Outliers

Time: 11:58GT (08:58 local Monday)

SSSSSSSS

WWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAADDDDDDDDDDD

END LOG

"Oh. Oops," said Chuck, and ended the log. "I think we're ready to go. Has it been 15 minutes yet?"

Chuck opened a channel on the radio. "Tower, this is parking bay..." he looked at the parking slip. "9-A. Requesting clearance to take off."

"This is the tower. We'll have a one-minute window for you to lift off in six minutes. Will that work for you?"

Chuck leaned back. "I have to say, I'm more than a little excited. I can't believe we're almost on our way!"

The engines started almost silently, and with a very small shudder throughout the ship. Several indicators came on red, then turned yellow and finally green as the automated system checks completed with success.

Chuck went over several random bullet points from the pre-flight checklist again to use up the idle time and quell his increasing excitement. He spoke the checks out loud. "Bay door... sealed. Airlock... locked. Inertial dampeners... on line. Why do I have this feeling that I'm forgetting something?"

Quincy shrugged, and the radio clicked to life as the tower operator spoke. "9-A, your window will open in thirty seconds."

"We're ready," said Chuck, putting a trembling hand on the yoke. The thumb of his other hand stroked the main a-grav switch that would kill most of the weight of the ship for take-off.

He went over the steps in his head. A-grav on, internal grav on, maneuvering jets to lift off of the tarmac, pull back on the yoke - carefully - to lift the nose upward, and once pointed in the correct direction, slowly - ever so slowly - apply thrust on the main rear engines to gain altitude.

He didn't even realize - until after it was over - that the tower had given him clearance and he had performed each task by rote.

"Tower, we have successful lift-off," he croaked. Despite having not breathed in over a minute, he managed to get the words out.

Within the tower, the operator - who prided himself on personalized service - squinted at the ship as it lifted away, looking for a name. "You're off. Happy flying, Crimson... Crimson... Lien?"

Chuck snapped out of his stupor at the words. He turned to Quincy. "I just remembered what I forgot to do."

AutoLog

Date: October 20th, 523 AG

Location: Olpath, The Outliers

Time: 12:07GT (09:07 local Monday)

Event: Take off

END LOG

The Crimson Lien lifted into the sky, following the red line that Quincy had plotted during the pre-flight preparations. The line splayed across the front window's heads-up display and was centered perfectly, aiming the ship forward. Chuck focused on the line, willing it to remain straight and ready to correct if it veered even slightly. In space, wandering off a red line is sloppy. During takeoff and landing, it can be deadly.

Quincy scanned for other ships in the area, and finding none peeked sideways out of the ship's main window at the slowly lowering ground. The sky's blue was already deepening and the few clouds that were sprinkled around were passing their little ship as the ground sunk below them and they rose toward space.

Chuck grinned, and stole a glance out of the port side. "Yeah. It's been too long."

Quincy looked forward. He had to admit that while the Crimson Lien didn't do much well, those things that it did do well it excelled at. The main front window encircled over half of the entire circumference of the cockpit. It was quite nearly the entire front wall, and it wrapped around both sides of the ship to stretch back over half way to the rear wall. Vertically, it stretched from almost the ceiling all the way to the floor (continuing into the main front stateroom below). It offered a beautiful panoramic view of whatever the ship happened to be facing, which at this moment was the encroaching emptiness of space.

He too could see stars. First the brightest stars - Alpha Umlae, Alpha Etnis, and Beta Hyule - came into view. Slowly at first more stars joined them, and as the sky transformed from the blue of daylight to the black of night to the type of black you can only see in space, more and more stars appeared. It was as if they would never stop coming. The brightest stars - those that moments before had been all that Quincy could see - were nearly drowned out in the display before him.

Chuck tore his gaze from the window as a control beeped, demanding his attention. "And we're free of atmosphere. I'm kicking on the rel drive."

Quincy consulted his own controls. "Hold on, we drifted a bit. Let me modify the red line."

Chuck checked the rel drive status. "You did that in 45 seconds, you know that?"

He squinted, looking forward through the window on which Quincy's red line was being displayed. "The Point is about 4 hours away. Inertial dampeners are on. A-grav is..." he flipped a switch, "off, now."

The cockpit fell into silence while Chuck watched the rel drive's preparedness status rise toward 100 percent.

"For this. For getting the ship. For talking me into it. You're right. I AM too cautious. I probably never would have done this on my own."

Chuck grinned. "Quincy, you are welcome. Thank YOU for coming along. I couldn't have done this without you. I probably wouldn't have even wanted to."

Chuck considered. "No, I probably still would have. But I wouldn't have liked it as much."

Chuck hit the control and the Crimson Lien accelerated away from Olpath toward the Jump Point. Their journey had begun!

Navigator's Log

Date: October 20th, 523 AG

Location: Olpath, The Outliers

Time: 13:20GT

Wow. These Bollians are something else. We're not even to the first jump point yet and we're out of water. 200 liters. Poof. And then they complained when their shower cut off.

I guess they were hoping for a better introduction to the AU-high club.

END LOG

Chuck rubbed the back of his neck with his left hand and drummed the table with the fingers of his right. He really hadn't expected this to be a problem, but he should have realized that Bollians would be troublesome in this regard.

"Yes," he repeated. "We have two hundred liters of water. The recycler can clean twenty liters an hour. The shower has a water saver on it but even then you have to be quick, and sparse."

"Look," Chuck said, standing from the kitchen's table. "Like it or not that's the situation. We all need showers, and we need water for things that aren't showers. So just bear with it."

Sultia turned to storm out. "This trip's just getting worse and worse as we go!"

But Sultia was gone, down the lift tube to - presumably - his and Prialla's cabin below.

Quincy flopped down into a chair and popped open the Flav-R-Pac he had taken from the fridge. "Maybe he won't want to talk to us all month."

Chuck smiled. "I doubt we'll be that lucky. And anyway, we still have to go over meals, off-limits areas, the itinerary to Jaunta..."

Chuck stood and walked to the cupboard. He pulled out a dry-goods Flav-R-Pac of his own. "How about we hide in the off-limits cockpit until the jump point? I could use the rest."

Pilot's Log

Date: October 20th, 523 AG

Location: Olpath, The Outliers

Time: 16:50GT

We're at our first jump point!

Things have been uneventful - at least with the ship. The passengers... not so much.

But we're at our first jump point! I've been through hundreds of simulated jump points in school, but this is my first time through a REAL one.

I hope I hit it.

END LOG

The Crimson Lien slowed to maneuvering speed as they approached the jump point. Chuck cut the rel drive - which had been decelerating them to a more manageable velocity from one tenth the speed of light - and flipped the ship back around so they were facing the far-off point in space that held the doorway to another star system.

Quincy's red line appeared on the window, tracing off into the distance to a green circle that - Chuck knew - was the Jump Point itself.

The line was not quite centered, so Chuck fired the port thrusters. Just like in the simulators so long ago, the line centered on the screen. He squinted at it, daring it to fall to the side. It did not.

He could not yet see the scaffolding that held the two poles of the jump point's sphere. At a thousand kilometers away, a ten-kilometer wide structure would be impossible to see - especially without lighting. However, he didn't need to see it to know it was there. The Crimson Lien saw it for him, and momentum took them there. All that was required of Chuck was to keep ship on the line that ended at the structure, and in the sphere that was contained within.

The sphere itself was nothing more than an area of space. It had no boundary - no visible horizon of effect. It didn't even show up on sensors because there was nothing there to show up. The scaffolding was the only telltale sign of the jump point's presence, and the scaffolding was only there to hold the stabilizers in place to keep the Jump Point from dissipating. The point itself - perhaps poorly named because it was actually ten kilometers wide - was powered by the potential gravitational field between Olpath Prime and Ildor Prime, the jump point's target star. This same potential field was what kept the point stationary on the line between those stars, and was what allowed ships to pass through.

Chuck did not understand the physics behind how it worked. Even Quincy didn't fully understand the details. They didn't need to understand it, however; they just needed to guide their ship into it. And - as the structure finally became visible to the naked eye - that was exactly what Chuck was preparing to do.

"One minute to jump," he said as he fired another thruster to keep the ship on the red line.

Quincy did not respond, but Chuck did not expect him to. The announcement was more for the passengers than it was for his friend.

Instead of listening to Chuck, Quincy was performing deep breathing exercises and attempting to clear his mind. Jumps were stressful on humans, and deadly to computers. Quillians, with their larger and more complex brains, were the worst off going through the points. Regular humans could get through with little more than a feeling of discomfort so long as they lay back and relaxed. A Quillian - unless completely at calm - would at best be wracked with headaches and at worst could be knocked out.

Quincy's red line was - as Chuck fully expected - true. He did not need Quincy the navigator for the final few minutes and he wanted Quincy his friend to have the easiest trip possible. So, he performed the final maneuvers in silence.

The Crimson Lien was on its red line. The Jump Point was 100 kilometers away and approaching fast. Chuck hit the kill switch that stopped all processing on the ship. Computers, heaters, air conditioners, even the main drive silently stopped operation in seconds.

Chuck watched the scaffolding visibly grow in size as the ship approached. It was not much to look at; in deep space there were no gravitational forces to speak of so the scaffolding did not need to be impressively built to keep its structure. Still, Chuck looked at it intensely. It was the first time he'd seen a Jump Point up close. In fact, it was the first time - except pictures - that he'd seen one at all.

And in a few moments, he'd pass through it and - in a moment's time - be further from his birthplace than he'd ever been.

He was leaving behind everything he knew. Everything he had built up in his life before purchasing the ship. With the exception of Quincy, he was severing his ties with his entire past. His family, his friends, his job... everything was being left behind.

The Crimson Lien passed through the Jump Point, twisted through space down a hundred-light-year-long potential line of force, and popped out in the Ildor system on the other side.