Ilika declared a break so Kibi could clean up and everyone could munch on dry crackers. He promised a tasty meal once they landed.
“Manessa, general analysis of the motion of fragment five-three-three, please.”
“An extreme negative pitch and a slight left yaw.”
Several crew members frowned at the new words they were hearing.
“What’s yaw?” Sata asked.
“Movement around the vertical axis,” Ilika explained as he turned his head from side to side. He grabbed a knowledge pad, and a moment later a diagram appeared on the large screen. “Everyone needs to memorize these words.”
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“Is that a bee?” Rini asked.
“We could use some of those,” Kibi asserted, cracker in hand. “Honey’s getting low.”
Ilika smiled. “If I do forward somersaults, like this fragment is doing, that’s called . . .” He looked around.
“A biscuit?” Kibi proposed with a goofy grin, her head cocked.
Ilika frowned at her lovingly.
Mati flashed Kibi a dirty look, studied the screen for a moment, then stuck out her arms, as if they were wings, and tucked her head down. “Pitching, around the lateral axis, one of the things I’m gonna do after I get my knee fixed.”
Ilika grinned at his pilot.
A few more examples clarified the new words for everyone, with the possible exception of Kibi, who couldn’t quit talking about food.
Boro passed her another cracker.
“As I look at the huge thing turning out there,” Mati began as she secured her inertia straps, “I know in my gut we’d crash if I tried to land the usual way.”
Ilika nodded. “Your intuition is correct. Manessa, what is fragment five-three-three’s nickname in the Transport Service?”
“The Meat Grinder,” the ship said in its pleasant voice.
Boro made spooky noises. Sata looked at Mati with big, round eyes.
“We’d be the meat,” Rini said through a shy smile.
Ilika turned to him. “Remember how to find a center of gravity?”
The slender lad started selecting functions on his console. “Um, um, um
. . . reference grid . . . motion analysis. Yeah, got it.”
“Send that to Sata,” Ilika continued. “Now find the highest point on the fragment, Sata, add a hundred meters, and draw a solid sphere around ol’
Meat Grinder. Then create a latitude and longitude grid, and place the north pole at the pitch axis.”
“Yeah!” the navigator said as she worked. “Now it’ll just look like a ball, and won’t make us sick!”
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“A ball with a monster inside,” Kibi mumbled.
Ilika smiled to himself. “Rini, cancel all visual channels, but keep an occasional eye on reality for us . . . without getting sick.”
Rini smiled. “I’ll put it way down in the corner of my display.”
“Anti-mass one and maneuvering thrusters?” the pilot proposed.
“Yes,” the captain confirmed. “Both thruster sets, each one on a separate flight control.”
Boro frowned with confusion for a moment, then shrugged. “All green.”
“I’ve simulated that before,” Mati said. “It’s like patting my head and rubbing my belly!” She touched a symbol to raise a second flight control.
“It’s not so hard,” Ilika continued, “if you can take care of one at a time, and in this situation, we can. Start by moving Manessa right over the pitch axis at the north pole.”
Everyone else watched their displays as the pilot concentrated for half a minute. “Here it is . . . but it’s moving.”
“That’s the yaw — follow it,” Ilika said.
The bridge was silent as Mati got comfortable with her task of following the axis of rotation as it slowly moved around the asteroid fragment. “Okay, flight control locked.”
Ilika nodded. “Now there’s only one motion left, that extreme pitch. Take your other flight control and cancel it.”
Mati began by accidentally going the wrong way. After growling at herself, she slowly brought the ship into a matching spin.
“We have tamed the Meat Grinder!” the captain announced.
Clapping filled the bridge for a moment. Mati only grinned, as one hand hovered near each flight control in case they needed adjusting.
“Now we can switch back to visual, but first black out the background, Rini.”
“Yeah, I was wondering about that. The more we matched the movement of the fragment, the more the stars and other rocks looked like they were spinning and swirling around. Visual on channel four.”
They clapped and cheered again as they all beheld fragment five-three-three, seemingly still in space, against a black starless sky.
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“Kibi, as steward, you have command for the landing,” Ilika said.
She looked at her lover with a gleam in her eyes for a moment, then began studying the visual on her display. Although their destination appeared still in space, the many shadows cast by the metallic spikes were in constant motion, moving from side to side, stretching out to merge with the dark side, or shrinking to join the glare of the sunlit side.
For the next eight minutes, as the steward talked the pilot toward a level area deep down among the fragment’s jumbled spikes, more and more details of its metallic structure came into view. Dark crystal shapes sparkled on nearly every surface.
Mati slowly reduced the power of her anti-mass drive, already at a low setting. When she arrived at zero and the ship was still descending very slowly, she chuckled.
Kibi smiled when she realized the landing site was not completely natural, but had been leveled to make room for a small ship.
As they descended past the last jumble of metallic crystals, Rini’s eyes sparkled with curiosity when he noticed a dark cave opening.
Mati gave them a nice, soft landing without using any power from her engines.
Deep Learning Notes
The concepts of pitch, roll, and yaw are important to anyone who moves in a three-dimensional environment, including dancers and gymnasts. A car normally only does one of these (when turning a corner). Can you guess which one?
“The Meat Grinder” is a term of endearment used by spelunkers (cave explorers) to describe several caves the author has explored.
The landing they did on a tumbling asteroid is another example of a situation in which normal visual displays would work against a pilot. Rini’s gravity analysis tools, Sata’s sophisticated graphics, and Mati’s two flight controls, are
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all things that would probably never be found on any craft built on Earth, but are not beyond our understanding.
Why was the landing, during which Kibi had command, still a challenge for her stomach?
Why was the landing very slow and smooth, even though Mati was not using any engines?