Free Flight

The Sled is complete. At least technically. Other than loading the rest of her fuel and supplies, and some final systems integration, Children of Earth is a fully functional spacecraft. After years of planning, political wrangling, engineering, re-engineering, more political wrangling, and finally construction, she's able to travel under her own power.

For such an important step in the project, Children of Earth's first free flight as an independent ship was something of a non-event. At least as far as the outside 'Verse was concerned. For us, it was the culmination of years of work by the yard and months of intense preparation by her crew. All to show that she was capable of being Humanity's first starship in centuries.

For me, it was something of a trial. I settled into my practiced, Zen like, calm, and took to handling crew matters. We'd drilled for this. Practiced it. Prepared for it. But nothing really prepared you for the feeling you got when the Captain gave the order to maneuver away from the gantry to our staging area, and you saw the yard slipping away astern.

This wasn't the first time the Sled has been free of the gantry. There had been systems integration flights to test maneuvering thrusters, sensor arrays, and various other subsystems that couldn't be tested while attached. But this was the first time the drives would be turned up full and, all went well, the first time Nora would take control.

The Expert System at the core of Children of Earth's integrated computer system was related to the pseudo-AI I'd written in college in name only. Where my Nora of years past had managed to pass a Touring test, the state of the art had left it far, far, behind. While our Nora lacked the full Artificial Intelligence capability of, say, Blue Man, it was fully capable as serving as the core of our system. Where Nora had been fully integrated and on-line for months, letting the neural networks learn the best way to interact with the ship and crew, she'd never taken full control of the Sled.

She was as much my responsibility as the crew themselves. For all practical purposes, Nora was part of the crew. While I hadn't written more than a couple modules in the massive code base, I did have a more then passing understanding of how a sophisticated Expert System went together.

Unfortunately, Nora was a point of contention between me and Captain Gill. Where I'd actually written an Expert system and learned to rely on them, he'd never been comfortable with the concept. At least not in letting them have full control of the ship. Never mind, of course, that every spacecraft for the last six hundred years had been computer controlled almost in its entirety. Nora acted Human when you were dealing with the interface. Not just the usual voice commands Gill'd been used to on his last command, but full heuristic interpretation and responses that passed for Human.

Nora could pass a Touring test.

In spite of Gill's reservations and the non-argument between us over the ship's computer, Nora performed flawlessly. As did the Sled's sixteen main drivers.

KHI had been building high performance drives for generations. They were at the heart of all of their high performance spacecraft, all the way back to before the Exodus. Children of Earth was no exception. Fully fueled and loaded, the sixteen mains could generate a little over eight standard G. Flat out, the Sled could simply outrun most gunboats in service with the Alliance fleet. She was that fast. As fuel burned off and the Sled's mass dropped, the drives would throttle back to keep the acceleration from overwhelming the inertial compensation and artificial gravity.

The real difference was that the Sled could keep the drives running at full acceleration for, literally, years. At full crank she'd be pushing relativistic velocity inside a year, when the drives would throttle back and compensate for the drag of a Bussard collector that would, hopefully, be able to replenish much of the fuel supply en-route. If everything worked as planned, and the interstellar medium was dense enough, we'd arrive in Sol system with enough fuel to return home.

Amazing what you can remember from your Astrophysics courses in college when it becomes part of your job to understand it.

During the week long integration flight, we put the Sled through her paces. The drivers were arranged in pairs so if we lost one, we could shot down a pair an not have to deal with asymmetrical thrust. But that also meant testing various combinations to make sure the pairs, or triplets, were arranged and tuned correctly to keep Children of Earth going in a straight line under load.

Sabrina was, not surprisingly, happy as the proverbial clam. Though truthfully I never understood that proverb. What was so satisfying about living life burrowed into the sand, or mud, or whatever clams lived in, straining lunch from free flowing water? But I digress. Sabrina was in her element here, watching the ship that had become so much of her life come alive as a fully functional vessel. Where I saw the meticulous testing of the drivers as a necessary, but tedious, requirement, for 'Brina it was a chance to get in some extra tinkering to make sure everything was working exactly as planned.

Not surprisingly, it was. The Sled functioned flawlessly. While we never left the White Tiger system proper, it was enough to show she had what it would take to get us to Sol system in one, very large, piece.

There were only two systems that couldn't be tested in-system before we left. Unfortunately, one of them would be vital to the success of the mission. Where having the Bussard Ramscoop not work as planned would, at worst, lead to it being shut off and not providing us any extra fuel, it was secondary. And yes, there were actually some failure modes that would endanger the whole ship. But the probabilities were so low as to be irrelevant.

The only real unknown was the hibernation system.

Ultimately, we'd be trusting our lives to Cold Sleep. Hibernating for the years it would take us to cover the distance between 34 Tauri and Sol. There'd been early plans to have a small 'awake' crew for the sublight trip. A brave few who'd have to deal with the immeasurable loneliness in the deepest Black between stars. In the end, they decided to put the whole crew into cold sleep and rely on a sophisticated Expert System to keep ship and crew alive. Nora. Who Captain Gill didn't like.

The up side was that hibernation systems had been well developed over the years, going as far back as the Exodus. When Humanity left Sol system they'd done it in a mix of generation ships and sleepers with roughly the same rate of success. The sleepers were smaller of course, and faster, so they'd given the first colonists a bit of an advantage, arriving between ten and fifty years ahead of the slower generation ships. But the slowboats had carried more equipment and in many cases the sleepers had to wait for the terraformers to finish their missions before they could actually colonize.

In the generations since the Exodus, sleeper systems had matured to the point where the expected survival rate was close to one hundred percent, even for the decades long duration of our flight. Due to relativistic effects, ultimately, the sleeper tanks would only have to keep us alive for a few years subjective time. Given the reliability of proven systems, very few people had any doubts we'd come out alive at the other end.

Having a skilled medical team aboard was part of that high expectation of success. Belize and the other doctors would be some of the first people woken up, so they could make sure everyone else woke up alive and healthy.

Piece of cake, right?

In the end, after a week's solid testing, the Sled's first integration flight was a success. Systems worked. Power piles worked. Drivers worked. Nora worked. Crew worked. There would be two or three similar flights over the next few months. Even with everything working now and the hundreds of individual integration tests over the last couple years as she came together, there was room and need in the schedule to make absolutely sure we'd gotten it right.

But in the end, we wouldn't know until we arrived at Sol that we'd gotten everything right.

We wouldn't know until Children of Earth got home.