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Stories from the Verse
In Verse Proportion
Chapter 83: Brown 221
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 200
Derek continued learning his calculus, and helping Vashti with her trig. He also continued his pilot training and worked on the navigation lessons as well. A large part of his spare time was focused on developing the translation program, but he realized that he had to learn these other things.
The pilot training took an odd turn the next week. To this point the simulator was not significantly different from his station on the bridge. Abruptly the coursework wanted him to learn to pilot something else--it seemed that the ship had shuttlecraft, or that’s what Derek decided to call them, small ships designed for short trips including trips between the colony ship and a planetary surface. This made sense, Derek thought in retrospect, since a ship like The Wanderer was undoubtedly built in space and although it was probably designed to land on whatever planet was chosen for the future home of the indigs, it probably could not achieve escape velocity once it had done so. Thus these smaller ships would be used as scouts, to send landing teams to the surface to investigate conditions in ways that would not be as reliable from space.
At first he was going to skip this part of the lesson, but then he realized that either he or the Captain was the best pilot aboard, and that was not likely to change. If they did find a reasonably suitable home for the indigs, he would be the person who would have to fly down and take a look. Besides, once he started he realized that the smaller craft were more fun--maneuverable, which was fun even in simulation, very like playing a video game. He got to practice dodging through space debris, circling comets, orbiting larger bodies, even landing and launching. The craft were equipped with energy weapons of a sort, repulsor beams intended to shift dangerous objects to avoid collisions.
It was also possible to set up the stations for a pilot and co-pilot or navigator, and Derek made sure to include Vashti in this. She was new to the concept of video games, but it didn’t take her long to get the hang of it, and sometimes he had her fly while he played the support role.
He wondered whether they would ever fly the real shuttlecraft, but decided that it wasn’t that important a question. After all, given the vastness of the multiverse and the anticipated length of their lives, they would undoubtedly have an opportunity eventually to use whatever spaceship skills they managed to gain here.
That suggested to him that he really ought to start learning about engineering--drive systems, life support, gravity generation, the works. As first officer, the more he knew about how the ship worked, the better equipped he was to do his job. Beyond that, he would be better prepared for whatever was coming in the future.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with twenty other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #443: Versers Acclimate. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
