CHAPTER 7 – SHAKEDOWN

DATE POINT: DECEMBER 29th, 6 A.U. (AFTER UNIFICATION)

LOCATION: SOL SYSTEM, ABOARD UTRN INDOMITABLE WILL, BLACK SITE S33

CAPTAIN HENRY O’TOOLE

A bead of sweat rolled down Henry’s brow. So far the ship had performed every test admirably. Each station one by one had called out their systems were green. The front doors of the dry dock they were sitting within finally finished their painfully slow opening process.

"Alright, Paul, it's time." Henry spoke from his spot elevated above the rest of the CIC on the systems map platform.

Off to his right, a screen displayed a small group on the observation platform overlooking the hull. Paul stood alongside the full leadership retinue of the station all wearing space suits. Paul stepped forward, one magnetized step at a time and examined a champagne bottle in his suited hands before speaking.

"This project has been the subject of my every waking hour for nearly two years now, but for the men behind me it is the culmination of a lifetime of knowledge and five years of very hard, very fast-paced work. You have clearly, with plenty of help, out-done yourselves. I know there is normally much more fanfare around a ship launch and we have all decided rather against that. I still want to show our esteem for the hard work of each and every one of you who helped make this possible with at least a few words before we break this bottle over the hull. In another set of circumstances this would be a mission for the history books, with the eyes of a hopeful world upon us as we embarked on a mission of peace and exploration. Our enemy has robbed this possibility from us, replacing it with a desperate gamble for our very survival should the worst come to pass. We all know the stakes both of success and failure, and I trust that we will embark upon this journey with the appropriate understanding of just how critical our own roles will be in the coming months and years. We have picked out the best that we could find, and you have all proven yourselves ready for the responsibility that we are about to shoulder together. Our ship was named the Indomitable Will, as nothing less will be acceptable in the months ahead if we hope to succeed in the face of the impossible odds we face. In the name of the North American Union and the United Terran Republic, I christen thee the UTRN Indomitable Will, SVM-001!"

Paul then threw the bottle toward the ship. Henry, along with the rest of the crew watched as the camera feed zoomed in and the bottle bounced right off the bow. Henry's stomach instantly tied itself in knots, and the mood in the CIC plummeted as the camera showed the unbroken bottle sailing off screen. It's just a superstition, we'll be fine. Henry pulled himself together as he saw Paul board the ship, sealing the airlock behind him. Looking around the room at the scared looks and tense whispers, Henry decided that he needed to just proceed as if things were normal.

“Helm, activate Telekinetic drive generators and set them to hover. Disengage the docking clamps! Has STC forwarded us the asteroid drift charts for navigation yet?” Henry said with all the confidence he could muster.

“Aye Captain!” his pilot said.

“Asteroid drift charts are updated, awaiting orders, sir.” Navigation reported in.

"The lieutenant is on board, sir!" His officer of the watch stated.

"Excellent, let's get under way then." Henry said.

He coolly readjusted his balance as the ship began accelerating slowly out of its berth and into the blackness of space. Small glints were visible off the otherwise pitch black hulls of the eight frigates that waited a few hundred kilometers ahead. One by one, in a preordained order, each Frigate fell in alongside their new mothership and docked themselves into their assigned saddle. Each ship would there stay, ready to launch from embedded electromagnetic rails at a moment’s notice should the need to defend their mothership arise.

As the last frigate settled into place, Henry steeled himself to give the next order. As much as he trusted his genius of a girlfriend and the massive amount of testing they had done, even she admitted that the first test fire of each individual system would be a risky endeavor. Well, here’s to not blowing us all up moments after launch….

Henry shook it off, again telling himself it was just a superstition, and called Chantal’s station in between both of the C.L.A.P.P.E.R reactors. Her smiling face greeted him.

“Hiiii Henry! We are all warmed up and ready down here. Just give the word my captain, and we can fire at will.”

“Well then, no sense in beating around the bush, let's begin our space trials then. Looks like our capacitors are about full, so prepare to warm up the port side C.L.A.P.P.E.R reactor. Have the feed lines primed and full and spin up the magnetic barrel. Weapons, prepare a firing solution for the target I have marked on the system map.”

Henry watched as the last few percentage points filled on their capacitor charge before he yelled out “Fire!”

The lights dimmed as all available power save that drawn by the essential systems bus was routed into the port compression fusion reactor along with their full capacitor load.

The infinite repulsive effect of the null matter being fed into the system squeezed the Deuterium together, forcing mass particle collisions and raising the contained pressure and heat exponentially. The lights came back on full brightness in the CIC as the negative mass field-collapsed fusion pressures pushed back against the ever-shrinking barrier until it shut off and more standard electromagnetic containment fields forced the fresh plasma from the reactor and down the barrel in a tight packet. The moment the blazing packet exited the muzzle, it was captured by a new null barrier generated by the drone that launched alongside it. As a null barrier acted like a perfect mirror, all heat and pressure could be maintained without losing any of it to the void and could be carried inert alongside for as long as the LFTR powered drone could sustain the field.

Accelerated and controlled by the drone’s TK drive, the barrier wrapped plasma flew at an incredible acceleration straight towards the asteroid designated for testing. At the last second, the drone cut the barrier and swerved to the side, returning back to the Indomitable Will, ready to fly again. The asteroid evaporated into its component pieces as it was struck with high-speed plasma still burning in the low hundreds of millions of degrees. A cheer emerged from the CIC as the main screens replayed the scene from multiple angles. Henry looked over to see an ecstatic Chantal on screen.

“THAT ASTEROID JUST GOT CLAPPED!” She shouted before shrugging at Henry mouthing the words I had to say it and winking shamelessly. Henry just laughed, well-used to her humor and antics by this stage.

“Charge capacitors to full and prepare the starboard C.L.A.P.P.E.R to fire!” Henry shouted, as he assigned their next target, a double-thickness section of alien hull plate cut from the underwater portion of the downed craft in the heart of the Manhattan Crater Bay. He watched the display as the ship’s four LFTR cores worked at full capacity to fill the dedicated stacked and twisted graphene super-capacitors for the starboard C.L.A.P.P.E.R. Once they read full, without hesitation Henry yelled. “FIRE!”

Again, the lights dimmed as the starboard C.L.A.P.P.E.R released it’s contained plasma packet into the void, scooped up by a fresh drone for target delivery. Alien hull plate was notoriously difficult to damage with most conventional weaponry, which was why the idea of having working plasma weaponry was so attractive to the weapons designers of the UTRN.

The running joke was that Naval R&D was constantly five to ten years out from working plasma weaponry and always would be, as most of the technologies involved were the very same ones that were necessary for fusion power generating technology. Once the C.L.A.P.P.E.R system could be proven to be viable, stable, safe, and effective without major maintenance headaches as a field proven system, it would forever change the balance of power in the favor of humanity. The prototype had seen extensive testing and improvements, Henry hoped he would be able to come to rely upon the working models in his ship when it counted most or if they were to become a ticking time bomb. At least they could be rapidly ejected far, far away in a real emergency.

Just like before, at the critical moment, the drone dropped the barrier and turned away. No matter how effective the exotic alloy blend or how well the outer ceramic layers dissipated heat, there was a point at which physics would not be denied. The super-heated plasma cut straight through the double thick hull plate piece, boiling it away near instantaneously. The insane difficulty of smuggling away a hull plate section for this one test meant it could only be done once, but the results were undeniable as the damage inflicted was utter and complete. The still-hot plasma dissipated in the void far beyond the initial impact point, implying that the damage to unlucky ship’s insides after a direct hit would be every bit as catastrophic.

“Dr. Washington, this weapon system might just change everything for us.” Henry said, beaming with pride.

“Thank you, my captain. I will work my tail off to make sure these babies stay working as promised.” Chantal smiled without reservation, and Henry was happy to let her bask in the feeling.

“Temperatures that high and pressures that extreme take a toll, we ought to save this thing for a really dire situation, just to reduce wear and tear.” Paul said, spoiling the mood as he entered the CIC. Henry stared daggers at the man who remained stubbornly unperturbed.

“Yes, Paul, that has been considered in the materials science, it informed our alloy choices and the like. You are right though; all systems have a defined lifespan that reduces with use before we have to take them offline for preventative maintenance and parts replacement, and we do have plenty of other offensive options at our disposal that we could use first.”

Chantal shrugged, shedding the negativity like water off a duck’s back. That was one thing that Henry was truly beginning to appreciate about her above all else. She had a relentless positive mental attitude ingrained to an almost inhuman level.

“I am satisfied with these tests here to say that the system is working as intended. Does my captain agree to certify the C.L.A.P.P.E.R system as ready for duty?” Chantal asked.

“I will agree to certify the C.L.A.P.P.E.R as ready for duty, pending a full inspection and report to be delivered in my quarters at the start of C shift.” Henry replied with a smile.

“Awesome! I had better get down there and inspect things while they are hot.” She said, “I can’t wait to give you the full and exhaustive report on the matter, Captain.” She then cut the feed with a smile that made Henry stiffen in anticipation. He snapped out of it moments later and fired up the ship-wide intercom.

“All right, Helm, I am charting a course for you to guide us through, Should be around a three hour flight at one gee. Weapons, I want a full systems test of every laser battery on this ship in the meantime. Once we clear this cluster of asteroids and we have some room to maneuver we will test the drone launch and recovery systems as well as test our pilot’s response readiness times. Magazine control, I want you to test the feeding systems for our tactical missile inventory. We are going to test every system on this ship by the end of today. If I haven’t mentioned your section yet, you can expect a visit from me shortly.”

Henry looked over his extensive list of tasks and systems he had to personally sign off on and resigned himself to a very long day. He then picked up his tablet and walked out of the CIC wasting no more time. He soon reached the quick lift and grabbed a loop heading down one level into deck one and engineering where he hopped off. He received salutes as he passed and exchanged words where needed to check systems until he reached the door that allowed maintenance access to their FTL system. Something stopped him dead in his tracks as he got a crawling, horrible sense of trepidation while staring at the door. Suddenly the lights flickered, the room looked very different bathed in amber emergency lights. The effect lasted only a second before the regular lights came back and the feeling of fear dissipated.

Henry shook it off, and continued his checklist, making a note to find his head electrical engineer to look into the lights. Everything in the armored core of the ship including their field hospital which was just outside it on the outer portion of deck one were on the essential power bus. Under no circumstances should any of the systems on the essential bus be experiencing intermittent power failures or surges. That would have to be addressed during the coming weeks for her shakedown cycle. Idly, he wondered how many other little technical gremlins existed in the ship's other systems. He shuddered at the thought, reminding himself that most technologies used in his ship were already battle proven in the rest of the fleet. There were some novel systems, though, and the launch of a new class of ship always required addressing technical challenges. Those were the ones that worried him most.

He then looked at the checklist again, a bit more thankful for the thoroughness of it and got back to work. Each of his frigates had been checked and had been flying drills and running supplies around S33 for some time. They were all relatively proven, simple designs and could be relied upon when the moment came. His own ship, was a different matter, and he was determined to catch every little issue he could before they left their home port and the possibility of easy repair behind.

It was going to be an intense few weeks, but Henry felt excited by the prospect more than he felt overwhelmed by it. He took that as a good sign, and thus encouraged, got back to work. Next stop was electrical, which seemed to be a source of several headaches for him already. They had very little time to work out any issues before their official launch goal, though thankfully Henry had some say in pushing that back if need be. Fighting back a headache, Henry opened his neural implant interface and messaged the head of electrical to meet him immediately.

MEANWHILE…

DATE POINT: DECEMBER 29th, 6 A.U. (AFTER UNIFICATION)

LOCATION: SOL SYSTEM, S33

FIREMAN APPRENTICE ANDREW REESE

“The captain wants to meet with me any minute, and none of you worthless lot have anything for me to report to him?”

Andrew felt the tension in the air as the question lingered. Never had he felt so at the bottom of the power dynamic before, and it infuriated him. The Chief had rank on him, and he had to continue to play the role of loyal crewmate if he wanted to keep above suspicion.

“What about you, NUB? We pulled you from the line at Liberty Station, or one of you? You three are supposed to have college backgrounds. Anything?”

Reese felt no tension himself, even as the chief briefly locked eyes with him. Beside him, the others seemed ready to crack under the pressure. I will have to be careful when I test that one. Andrew then realized that he had been forgetting to blend into the background emotions of the moment, he had allowed himself to be seen as an anomaly. Sloppy, time to turn this around.

“We have been at this for hours it feels like, I don’t know about an answer, but we can stall for time by blaming it on the mass power draw for the C.L.A.P.P.E.R being fired back to back. Should mollify the captain and buy us some time here to find the real answer.” Andrew said, hoping he had struck a perfect balance.

The chief simply laughed for a moment before collecting himself.

“All right, I like it, simple, plausible, and nebulous enough that it should work to at least buy us some more time to find the real answer. Now split up and look to your training partner for assignment. We will comb through every system and sort this issue out or command will have our heads! Dismissed”

Excellent, he just had to make himself just the right amount of indispensable without directly kissing ass while he continued to subtly probe the loyalties of those around him. His mission, unfortunately had borne little fruit so far, but his opportunities thus far had been rather scarce. He had met quite a few people who were clearly excited about the idea of being explorers and cared little about the obvious risks. Once the ship was underway, it would hopefully get easier. People’s guards would come down a bit as well once he had more opportunities to flash his charm he might be better able to sap some of that naive confidence and replace it with hard realism.

Andrew knew that he had to play the long game with each and every one of these people. The price of failure in any way meant death for them all, and Andrew planned on surviving this mission, whatever it took.