Space Trippers Book 1: Trippin' (12 page)

Especially when you consider all we are really running are lights, life support, food duplicators, some shields and engines. With the scanners, most of the shields, the entire weapons system and none of the labs being used at all there is plenty, a surfeit and a plethora of power available for what little this ship is running at the moment.” Valesque finished with an evil little smirk, knowing the reminder of all the things nonfunctional on the ship would aggravate the Captain even more.

“Perhaps there is not as much power as you had thought.” the Captain replied tersely. “With it all sealed up like that how can you tell if that light ball thing is even on? Do you have to go over that gangway and look in the door?” she inquired as she started to move towards the aforementioned walkway to investigate for herself.

Valesque stopped her before she could get too far.

“That wouldn’t be advisable.” she warned the other woman. “When the light chamber is active the laser light web mixed with the suspended elements can be extremely bright. Any, normal, humanoid exposed to such an extreme light source would be blinded even with their eyes closed, let alone the skin reaction to such intensity, you could be blistered in a second.” the Virrilian warned her. “Even I couldn’t take the intensity of the Light Core.” she finished ominously.

Sanic and Fazar who had been quiet and unobtrusive during most of the discourse both gasped in amazement at this announcement.

If not even the unbelievable sturdy Virrilian could take exposure to the Light Core, it must be very intense indeed.

Captain Fairbanks pursed her lips in annoyance as she eyed the two awe struck men disapprovingly.

Valesque saw she had gotten the Military woman’s attention and so went on.

“These panels over here…” she began as she indicated a large console located closest to the empty span of deck floor before the ball, “are where you monitor the Light Core’s operation. This panel indicates the capacity and the condition of all of the power storage containers above us.” she said indicating a large panel that was lit with progressive bar graphs and thousands of small indicator lights half of which appeared fully green, some others half green and the rest completely red.

“As you can see the power we have available is at this mark.” the Engineer went on as she ran her still-clawed finger over one of the bar graphs that appeared halfway up the chart. “And these smaller icons show each of the containers and how much energy is available in each one.” she continued, running her hand over the small green and red circles on the panel below the bar graphs.

The Engineer stepped in front of the next console to her right. “Over here we have the indication of how much of the gas suspension is present in the chamber and how much is left on hand.” she indicated a row of glowing and pulsing bars with climbing and descending numbers next to them.

“What happens when we run out of our supply?” Sanic who had been silent until now queried in his Operations Overseer’s concern.

“We just collect more. The elements we need are freely available throughout space.” Valesque returned happily.

“As you can see...” she said, directing her speech mostly to the Captain, “the Light Core is very economical to run. If any parts are needed they are all pretty universally carried, you can pick up mirrors, solar panels and laser beam projectors just about anywhere. And it is a safe system too, in that if it does become unstable or gets damaged it will not cause a fall out or meltdown.” she finished smugly with a secret condescending side glance at the Military Captain.

“But it takes a month to charge up and you can not view its operation externally.” the Captain rebutted, again smoothing back her tightly bound red hair.

The Virrilian’s happy glow turned dark.

“The operational condition of the chamber can be viewed at this console over here.” she retorted.

Showing the way to the opposite side of the aisle were a large number of read outs and one small screen showing a live camera feed were housed.

“As you can see we have a special, tiny, camera set up to view the interior operation of the Light Core. Here we can see the web of laser light beams and check for any abnormalities. As you can see from the screen, the interior of the ball is completely empty; there are no walkways or ladders, which would interfere with the bounce of the light beams and the absorption of the solar panels.”

“How can the core be maintained if there is no way to get around inside it?” Sanic asked again in his Operations Control mode.

“Bots.” she answered. “Cleaning Bots. Once a month or so the Core can be shut down for the Bots to go in, polish the panels, and remove any mineral buildup.

They are anti-gravity bots so they do not need to touch any of the surfaces, which could damage the sensitive panels and misalign the mirrors.

Which is another reason why regular personnel can’t enter the core, besides the fact that while it is running, like now, it is impossible for any humanoid life form to with…..stand……the…..intensity….” the Engineer’s voice trailed off uncertainly as she finished her statement and glanced at the live video feed from inside the Core, for she thought, she was almost sure, for a split second she saw a luminous figure move about inside the light field.

Valesque shook her head at the idea but stranger things had been happening lately, the nightmare just keeps getting worse.

She tried to obstruct the view of the screen by turning towards the others as she positioned herself in front of the console, hoping nobody else had caught the glimpse of movement she had detected.

“Uhhhh….. well, that is about it for the Light Core.” she announced trying to sound unconcerned and move the tour away from the screen.

The Captain looked perturbed. She stood before the Engineer with her arms crossed thoughtfully and one hand resting on her chin as she stared at the Engineer suspiciously. Valesque began to worry that she had seen something in the screen as well, until she finally spoke.

“So, if it is not the power source that is causing our slow down. Then, what is it?” she finally asked in an almost accusing tone.

“Well, it can’t be the power source.” the Engineer replied, grinning nervously. “Since there is absolutely, utterly and unequivocally nothing wrong with it.” she added as she made sure she was still covering the view of the screen.

“It might possibly have something to do with the engines themselves.” she suggested quickly.

“That would be over there, on the other side of the Light Core.” she continued as she gestured across the deck with no sign of intent to move from her spot.

“The engine, weapons and scanner controls are all over there.” she added enticingly, trying to lure them away from the area so she could move.

The Captain gave her a strange look as if to say she thought the Engineer was quite unstable and started across the open area of deck and around the huge sphere to the other half of Solar Deck 1. The other two slowly followed their leader in a slightly confused state.

As soon as they were out of sight, Valesque quickly turned around to examine the screen behind her. She stared at it intently examining every nuance of the image, but no matter how hard she looked, there was nothing abnormal in the Light Core.

I must have just imagined it, she thought, with everything else going wrong I am probably just over stressed and am seeing things. Or one of the mirrors could be slightly off alignment, I will have to look into that later, she mused, much later. Right now, she needed to concentrate on the main problem, the Space Tripper.

Valesque scanned the area for anything that might be of use in disassembling the device in question.

The crew they had to run these controls might not have any idea what they are doing, but they sure seemed to have cleaned things up very well.

There was not a piece of wire, a clamp, or anything else useful in the whole area.

With a resigned sigh, she pushed herself up off the stool before the Light Core monitoring panel and headed across the open area of deck to the side the others had gone to earlier.

They were probably wondering where she was and who knows what surprises they might find next, the Engineer thought with one last suspicious glance at the giant metallic ball as she passed.

This day just was not getting any better.

She caught sight of her tour group as she reached the second control section of the deck. They were all huddled together around one of the engine monitoring consoles, with two new additions.

Two thin, pink aliens with matching light red body suits stood nervously within the group around the controls. They seemed to be the ones in charge of the area as the Captain was trying to get answers out of them on the ship’s present lack of speed, but the two pink beings seemed to talk more to each other than to answer any questions the increasingly irritated Captain asked of them.

“Well, I see you finally decided to join us after all.” the Captain began tersely as she noticed the Virrilian approaching.

Her Second in Command, Fazar, winced a bit at her conversation starter with the headstrong Virrilian. At this rate they would never get on her good side.

Captain Fairbanks let out a long groaning sigh, revealing the level of her frustration as she began again, “These two seem to be the ones assigned to monitor the ship’s functions down here.” she explained quickly, trying to calm her nerves. “And, of course, they don’t seem to have any idea what is going on. Like 90 percent of the rest of the crew.” she muttered.

“They say this is the main engine console but they don’t know how to read it.” she concluded, looking to the newly arrived Engineer for any insights.

She hated to admit it but she was almost relieved to see the Engineer arrive, she may be obstinate, quick-tempered, stubborn and antagonistic, but at least she seemed to know what she was doing.

Valesque was a bit worried by the slight look of relief the Captain had at seeing her. She tried to shake off the uneasy feeling of being wanted by the Military Officer by looking down at the panels in question.

“You can monitor the engine’s functions from here.” she agreed to the others' assumption, keeping her distance from the almost welcoming Captain.

Valesque glanced over to the two red clad figures.

She had never seen them before, which meant they had not been a part of her building staff and therefore were not in any technical occupation.

She could only guess where they had rounded the poor souls up from; they probably had been running a little juice bar somewhere, or considering how they had apparently cleaned up the entire deck of any building materials, they could have been janitors on Saturna 3.

The pair seemed overjoyed at seeing her, as soon as they heard her say she knew what the panels were for their big black eyes got round with excitement and relief.

Finally, someone who knew what was going on; perhaps she also knew what they were doing here!

“Did you hear that, Brother?” one said eagerly to the other as they turned to each other and clasped hands excitedly.

“Oh, yes, Brother!” the other replied just as eagerly, “She knows what the panels say, doesn’t she, Brother?”

“Yes, Brother.” the first one replied, “She does seem to know what the panels say. Perhaps she knows the answer to that other thing we wanted to know as well.”

“What thing was that, Brother?” the second returned, seemingly confused.

The Captain put one hand up to her head and smoothed back her tightly bound hair once again. “Before we start that all over again.” she interrupted the apparently repeating conversation, feeling she would go mad if she had to endure the endless banter again. “Miss Valesque, would you please, be so kind as to tell us what these panels say about the engines?” she requested, looking as if she was trying to restrain herself from gagging the annoying twins.

The Virrilian Engineer shrugged. “Well, these horizontal bars over on the left side are power availability indicators.” she began, deciding to start with the simplest component.

“As you can see,” she continued, running a clawed finger along the length of the bars of light, “the lights are in the green, which means there is ample power to run the engines. If it was in the reds it would mean you had to use low-powered thrusters, no lights at all would mean no engine power was available.”

The Captain made a mental note of that, there was enough power to run the engines, so that still did not explain the problem.

Sanic also made a note of how the indicator functioned. No doubt, there was a similar power bar on his main operations command console on the Control Deck.

Valesque ran her hand down the lighted panels to another indicator. “This is a diagram of the engines; any parts in red would indicate a fault. As you can see engine function is all green. There is no functional problem with the engines at this time.”

Again that did not explain the problem.

“Over on the right we have the engine output controls. You can adjust the pulse intensity to determine your speed. A subtle pulse would move us slower and a stronger pulse would push us faster.” she explained carefully for the slow ones in her audience. “This bar graph indicator shows us to be set for a high strength pulse….. and over here ..is the output chart……that's strange.” she mumbled to herself as she pointed out the graphs to the others. Valesque quickly slid in front of the panel and started running both hands expertly across the controls, trying to figure out the problem she was seeing.