TGoaW-61

<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
==Chapter 61 - The Glow of a Worm inside a Child's Eye==
----
"Could ye do it again..."
----
...if you needed to?" Kapitain O'Toole must have been breaking some kind of rule to have Liz on the command deck.
"How good are your charts?" she asked him bluntly. "If you're willing to crowbar the an-344's on the jump computer and let me do the calcs, I can put us through a 20 minute window no problem...provided the charts are up to date. I might be able to teach your Nav officer how...maybe. Better question is why?"
"Reports along our route don't look good, there's concern the enemy may have leapfrogged." he admitted.
"Huh...I don't have the facilities on the Tabiranth to run the sims, what's YOUR interpretation?" she asked.
"Mine is I want the ability to give the bastards the slip and make Tharkad in safety." he told her.
"Then think off-axis." she told him, "Outer system jumps-the zenith and nadir points are merely the closest stable points. Going further out, you can bypass any flank security they've got, we use it for recon flights with the Sampans, and have since the pirate wars in the thirties. It's too much area to cover, so surveillance tends to focus on stable and near-stable close-in points, not the stuff further out in a star system."
"that's not in the Academy manuals at Pandora." he said doubtfully.
"Yeah, I know." she told him, "Kerensky's assault on Terra might've taken an extra week, but by the time the Reagan system knew they were there? but he followed the book, which emphasizes using stable points for fleet actions because it's cheaper on the fuel and time in transit, even from the Zenith or Nadir points. They needed to do that for passenger health and because one-gee for sustained periods still eats consumables, but an alternate approach like that and he wouldn't have had to sacrifice 'fire ships' to ram those stations."
"You ARE well -versed."
"I had good teachers." She shrugged. "For our purposes, an outsystem transit on doubtful systems works as well as hopping zenith points and doesn't require risky modifications to the jump controller, it Does require tapping the extra fuel, or a scheduled rendezvous with a tender to re-fuel after. It's why the Sampan IV's have that huge amount devoted to cargo-on a long run, black sails mission you fill it with fuel bladders so you can hot-charge in a brown dwarf or deep interstellar."
----
<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
61