Later that day, Michael was beginning to get bored, his deck was running smoothly and everything seemed fine, there was a slight short in one of the power couplings that was located in the forward docking arm. Probably happened after we left Delta base, he thought. The engineers fixed it relatively quickly, and he had signed the repair orders himself.
He had his usual end of shift meeting with the Chief operations officer, but that wasn’t until nineteen hundred hours.
He decided he would pay Dylan a visit and headed over to deck 11, the munitions storage area. He thought Dylan would probably be loading the massive magazines in the rail-cannon turrets, and when he arrived he found he was right.
The munitions storage area was huge, it was two decks deep, and was racked from floor to ceiling with shells for the rail-cannons, together with energy pods for the smaller point defence lasers that were dotted around the ship.
“Hiya mike, what’s up?” Dylan shouted to him from across the room.
Michael walked over, “slow day. Now that all the rush is over with, and my deck is all sorted, I’ve not got a lot left.”
“Good for you,” Dylan harrumphed. “It’s mad as hell here.”
Within the Munitions area there were dozens of crewmen heading back and to from the racks; many of them had a specially modified motorized autoloader, which they used to retrieve the heavy shells from the racking.
Since each shell the rail-cannons fired, can be anywhere up to 4 meters long and weigh 2 tons, the autoloaders were the only means to transport them when onboard. Each turret magazine could carry ten rounds, however the magazines had to be filled by hand using the autoloaders.
This could be a long process, especially since each autoloader could only carry one shell at a time. And in total there were seven rail-cannon batteries on board the Ulysses.
“How far have you got?” Michael asked.
“Why, you wanna give us a hand?” Dylan asked playfully.
“Sorry, I’m not authorized,” Michael responded in kind.
“Well, the two main forward batteries are done, as is the rear, we have just the two port, and the two starboard batteries to do, they should be finished in about an hour. Then there are the lasers to do; but they are much easier.”
Dylan spotted something out of the corner of his eye; he turned to see a crewman with an autoloader carrying a rail-cannon shell, veering wildly.
“Whoa you there, stop! What are you trying to do, kill us all!?” Dylan shouted at the young crewman.
Both Michael and Dylan came running to the crewman’s position.
Dylan noticed that the shell wasn’t sitting centrally on the autoloader. “You’ve got to get the shell in the middle of the autoloader, or it will tip; like this.”
Dylan showed the crewman, and the three of them. Together with half a dozen others who had come over to help; barely managed to heave the heavy shell centrally on the long ‘v’ shaped platform at the rear of the autoloader.
“Sorry sir, I’ll get it right it right next time,” the crewman replied.
“You had best do; if you drop one of these, it’s more than all our lives are worth. You understand.”
“Yes sir,” the young crewman responded. As he started up his autoloader, and headed out of the room. Dylan and Michael watched the young crewman go.
“Damn kid,” Dylan said. “The academy seems to be pushing them out even younger these days.”
“Yeah; we were like that once,” Michael said. Thinking of what Theo would be like if he ever decided to join the Navy, like he was talking about.
“True; do you remember that time, when we were studying for our class two pilot certificate, and we were servicing that fighter. I think they were called the Cirrus fighter back then. And you accidentally broke an elevator linkage, and didn’t say anything in case it would harm your chances of passing the course,” Dylan said laughing.
“Yeah,” Michael replied breaking into hilarity, “the next pilot went to take it out, and wondered why it wouldn’t get off the ground.”
“You were grounded for about three months,” Dylan replied hysterically.
Michael finished laughing and said, “I’ve gotta get back to my deck, I’ll catch you later, okay.”
“Sure, I’ll be in the bar after my shift anyway.”
“Okay, I’ll meet you there.”
And with that Michael left to get back to his deck, a little while later the Ulysses had reached the edge of the Orion system, and was preparing to enter plasma drive.
The plasma drive was one of the biggest breakthroughs of the twenty first century. When positively charged plasma particles collide with negatively charged plasma particles, the result is known as the plasma wake, a type of tunnel through space-time, were standard restrictions on the speed of light, no longer apply. It is travel through these tunnels, which allows vessels to travel between the stars at a fraction of the time it would take a ship traveling at sub-light speeds.
Both of these positively and negatively charged particles are fired into a predetermined point directly in front of the ship, using the ships plasma emitters, two long cannon like protrusions at the front of the ship, with a coil at the end of each.
A loud klaxon sounded on board, and a green warning light lit up on selected panels throughout the entire ship; a young crewman hurried over to Michael, “What is that noise, are we under attack?”
“Relax,” Michael replied, marveling at the inexperience of the man. “It’s just the ship preparing to make the jump into plasma drive; you might want to sit down, gets a little bumpy when the ship begins to make its jump.”
The young man hurriedly rushed out of sight. Michael calmly sat down in a chair in his office.
Outside the Ulysses, the forward plasma emitters began to glow an intense bright blue light; which slowly increased in its intensity until two massive bright blue beams of pure plasma energy lanced out from the emitter coils.
Ahead of the battleship the beams converged upon one another, until they collided, releasing a terrific burst of plasma energy; and in the space of a split second the huge plasma wake opened.
It looked like an enormous mass of swirling blue, purple, and red colours; it was almost liquid like in its consistency. The blue would swirl and collide with the red and purple in a vivid splash of colour. At the edge of the anomaly, there was a thin halo of bright white light.
The Ulysses slowly accelerated into the wake, and as the ship passed through it; the anomaly disappeared upon itself as the ship passed into plasma drive proper, it entered an infinite tunnel of flashing blue, red, and purple colours. Through this transparent tunnel normal starlight could be seen, although the Ulysses couldn’t be seen, as it had left normal space-time completely while it was within plasma drive.
Onboard the battleship, the shuddering ceased, and the green warning lights stopped. The klaxon had also stopped its wailing; everything returned to normal and the crew carried on with their duties.
The rest of the day passed uneventfully, the only difference to normality came when you looked out of the view ports and into the swirling translucent mass, which was the tunnel through space-time that the ship was travelling.
Michael checked his watch, it was 18:40, and his relief would be coming in soon, then he could knock off.
Sure enough his relief walked into his office, Lieutenant Junior grade Curtis was the relief deck officer on deck 18. Michael informed the Lieutenant of the events of the day, including the problem with the docking arm.
He gathered together his things; including his own data navigator, and bidded Lieutenant Curtis good day, before heading toward the elevator.
Then he remembered about the meeting, damn, he thought, as he headed toward the meeting room located on deck 4. A few minutes later he had arrived, luckily he was early, and most of the other deck officers had filed in, however not all.
Michael sat down; they were all waiting for Lieutenant Commander Rennick, the chief operations officer on board, and third in command, after Commander Angel.