Day 320 – continued
Personal Journal Serene Falk:
Captain HMMS Broadside
- Mission parameter – Hunting Ghosts
- Classification Secret – Captains eyes only
Finding the flea on the elephant.
Or more accurately locate the tracking tag on the Broadside that was giving our position away every time we Shifted Space. The problem though, was the Broadsides massive surface area. Searching it manually would take weeks, we had hours. Or more accurately 121 minutes to be precise before we exhausted our reactors ability to power the Singularity Drive.
Standing and reaching for the coms mic, I did what I always did when faced with an impossibility and that was share the love with the crew. It may not be in the Cadet School training manual or regarded as Political correctness, but pride has no place in the Captain’s chair and eight hundred and thirty-three brilliant minds are far more likely to come up with something than my lonesome. Flicking on the ship wide coms I cleared my throat.
“All, we have a problem”. I gave it to them straight, as something else they don’t teach you in Cadet School is that death and dying is a REALLY good motivator if you want something done. It took, approximately forty-five seconds for the first answers to appear. I tasked some of Bonnies spare CPU run time to collate the replies, as apparently, she only needed fifty six percent to navigate time and space. Clyde was pissed though as he wanted to join in, but I wanted at least one of them paying full attention to the Nav comps. Within ten minutes, we had the best options lined up and the plans to execute them underway. Plan number one, and our best option was to try and fry the sucker or suckers that were giving our position away. This was quick to organise, as the Broadside like all deep space vessels had the ability to charge her hull plates and get rid of the organic flotsam and jetsam that had multiplied in the deep cold of space ever since we started to dump our waste out of the window, so to speak. Apparently, at some evolutionary point this waste had become sentient and started to feed off the power ducts that ran just under the surface skin of most star ships. Yes, I know, sentient shit. Anyway, a good jolt usually sent it into a complete state of ecstasy, during which it forgot to hold on and was swept away in the vessels wake. Only thing was this particular jolt was going to need to be a big one to detach the tags. Which in turn meant we would have lower power reserves, which then meant we could only use the Singularity Drive four more times as opposed to five to shift space. Fuck, we just shifted space. Make that three more times.
121minutes 