You are thrown from your cot as the Night Horse shakes violently. Picking yourself off the deck you grab your tablet, give thanks that it survived being tossed to the deck intact, and check the clock. It's been a bit over twelve hours and something has already gone wrong, which means that this warp jump trial will need to be re-done. You want to curse your misfortune but know that it will do little good. Instead you call up a damage report.

The hydrogen harvesting scoop has a new hole in it and ten compartments are depressurized but are already sealed off. Four 'crewman' and one 'egghead' automata were lost in the vent, leaving your ship with a compliment of one hundred and ninety six of the former and nineteen of the later. Sensors in the area and automated damage assessment calculations are calling it a micro-meteorite strike. You roll your eyes and make yourself a note to have a team of actual humans check the damage over once you make port because 'micro-meteorite strike' is the rough equivalent to a doctor saying 'take two painkillers and call me in the morning'. It might be an actual strike, it might be the computer having no idea what the hell it's doing, but it's certainly not normal or nominal.

Lacking anything specific to do but wait you grab a MREV and sit down to a dinner of 'beef and beans'. It's going to be a long twelve hours before revision with not much else you can do about any impending misfortune. Idly you check the data recorders that have been logging the warp jump test so far. They come back with a data storage error and you curse in frustration. It never seems to just be one thing wrong at a time.

December 5th, 8251

You thank the commander of the repair crews, accept his report, and begin the trek back to the Night Horse. She give the same cause of damage as the onboard automated assessment, a micro-meteorite impact, with a fairly high degree of confidence and competence. She also notes that the Night Horse had escaped a fire aboard from the same impact by the skin of your teeth. The damage had torn right through several hydrogen feed lines from the harvesting scoop, but all of them were still full of inert gasses, mostly nitrogen, from the prior harvesting test.

You breath out a sigh of relief, followed by a curse that you'll now need to re-do the harvesting scoop test as well as the warp drive test due to repairs. You punch up an automated re-test form on your tables as you walk and start filling it out. By the time you make it back to the Night Horse and settle back into your cabin you have a response. The re-test is approved but the only available testing ground is a reactive-atmosphere gas giant. Thus regulations require manual helm controls and a human at the helm at all times during the test.

You ponder requesting a local pilot to be the helmsman, and possibly 'stealing' them for your crew but decide against it. Sure you could get a crew person, but that would probably make them resent you in addition to messing with the Office of Ship Manning's planning for your eventual crew. It might even make them decide that you can recruit your own crew just fine and leave you to it, which would be a disaster to say the least. Instead you send back an acknowledgment along with a request to be inserted into the refueling queue to run your test.

December 6th, 8251

You sit at in the captain's char with your displays and controls reconfigured for manual helm mode and watch the ship ahead of you - one of the massive Goliath class factory ships – descend from low orbit to make it's stately swoop through the gas giant's upper atmosphere. You lean back and check your queue position. You have to shake your head at the local orbital controller's decision to give you two back-to-back slots in the queue for your test. When you asked why they told you the first would be a practice run before the actual test. You shrugged it off at the time but seeing the ship ahead of you shudder in the crosswinds you give silent thanks for their foresight.

You can all but hear the captain of the second Goliath class behind you cursing out his fortune at being stuck in orbit longer then needed because some 'prima donna survey boy' needs two tries to get it right. Your position in the queue advances and you tap the thrusters to drop out of low orbit. During your first pass you wind up a bit under three kilometers above your target altitude. While this does require a repeat pass it also lets you get a good feel for the crosswinds in question. On your next pass you start the data recordings for the trial and everything goes smoothly. Fuel and propellant tanks topped up you glide clear of the reactive atmosphere before re-lighting the Night Horse's primary thrusters and accelerating smoothly back up into a parking orbit. Leaning back you send over a request to orbit control for your exit vectors as well as permission to switch back to automated maneuvering.

December 8th, 8251

You second warp jump in the Night Horse goes more smoothly then the first. For some definitions of smooth anyway. You are left grousing, grumbling and cursing at an unending litany of little anomalies and malfunctions that keep you awake for all but four hours of the transit back to the Celesmore system. You can feel your mind fraying as you sort out issue after issue that the automatons cant help with like manual data entry after a raft of auto-populating forms jumbles up. Sleep deprived an just a touch madder then you set out you slump in the captains chair and accept the expected welcoming call.

“Celesmore Orbit Control to Night Horse, welcome back. Rough jump?”

You give the understated reply expected of all Navy ships after a bad jump. “A bit COC, just a bit. The return leg went smoothly enough at least. We'd like a parking orbit if you wouldn't mind, and then a transfer vector back down to the Celesmore ship works. We've got the usual raft of post-shakedown fiddly bits to get addressed.”

“Not a problem Night Horse, we'll have that orbit and vectors for you soon enough. Things are a bit congested at the moment so take the Bravo Six route back in to the inner system. Your parking orbit will be waiting by the time you get here.”

“Sounds good to me COC. Mind if we leave things on auto-pilot for a bit and snag a rest cycle?”

“Not at all Night Horse. We'll keep an eye on your vectors too, just in case.”

“Appreciate it COC. Night Horse clear.”