The imagery of the pirate cruiser shattering played on repeat on Sayeeda's terminal. It was grainy on the inferior sensors but a degree of computer sharpening made it almost too smooth so she kept the raw feed. Her skin tingled with unspent adrenaline from the short engagement and her anger began to fade as she watched the video recycle.

"Well lets try not to fire missiles when the guns will do the job, the ammunition is cheaper to replace, we need to start thinking in terms of running at a profit." There was a tendency among troops particularly beyond their supply lines to conserve ordnance against future need. At its worst that sort of thinking could lead to a position being overrun for want of a few grenades.

"We don't have a logistic section that is going to replace this stuff and we might need to sell some rounds for ready cash as it is." That was true, they were going to need to lay in some spare parts for the more critical systems too so that they were on hand when things started to break down.

"Exiting grav shadow Capt'm," the AI chirruped. Junebug shook her head a the tortured accent. She clicked a few keys on her virtual keyboard and began the calculations. Star ships traveled by means of the RIP tides, a shifting wash of energy that interpenetrated the universe in ways astrophysicists still didn't understand. The RIP eddied and surged in patterns that were theoretically predictable in the same way that the water particles of a waterfall were. It was technically possible to forecast the tides but the complexity of the system but the sheer volume of data dwarfed any reasonable attempt to do so. To muddy matters still further RIP space did not rotate as the milky way did, so the galaxy literally rotated past while one was in the RIP and contending with its currents and eddies. Sayeeda had heard the the RIP had once been as still as tidal pool, sometime thousands of years in the past, but she didn’t know if that was a fact or just some of the pseudoscience which routinely cropped up around the RIP. She did know that cadets who were assigned to Starside Logistics at the academy had the highest rate of suicide, allegedly brought on by stresses of trying to factor so many obscure variables into some sort of coherent strategic thinking.

Using the rip was a matter of inserting a ship into RIP space via a quantum tunneling drive, riding the current for a certain amount of time in the siderial universe and then dropping out again, using a combination of spin, the galaxy's rotation, and  RIP currents to draw your vessel to its location and then tunneling out again. It wasn’t a precise science and it was dangerous but if you were careful and lucky it made interstellar travel possible. Humans, and other space faring races, had partially solved the problem of predictability by the time tested method of reconnaissance. Most systems that had any kind of trading system, even pirate nests, usually kept a central database which collated observations of the RIP from incoming ships. Up to date nav data made it much easier to predict the tides, at least in a localized area. A second measure was to keep jumps short. Although it was technically possible to make a RIP jump across the galaxy it was far safer to make small hops from system to system, picking up fresh nav data as one went. It was impossible to predict the ocean but with enough data you might be able to handle a small bay.

Sayeeda keyed in the parameters to the computer and the ships navicomp began to chuckle mechanically as its processors, the most powerful in the human universe, began to crunch the numbers to develop a safe travel solution. The process might only take minutes between two well traveled systems but the rarely visited jungle world added a level of complexity. The computer threw up an ETA, estimating the time to solution to be ten minutes for a rough solution, with improvements thereafter.

“Ok, Ten minutes till jump off,” she said with a satisfied click of her keyboard.

“Booster, do we have anything onboard appropriate to toast our maiden voyage?”


[@POOHEAD189]