“Preflight, diagnostics, and status reports,” Ilika requested as soon as everyone had finished breakfast and personal needs.
“Everything’s green on my console,” Mati reported. “Me and Sata have been doing lots of talking late at night in our cabin, and I think it’s helping me with my anger.”
Ilika smiled. “Excellent!”
“It’s also helping me with my fear of . . . um . . . growing up,” Sata admitted, looking a little embarrassed. “All navigation systems are working.”
Ilika made friendly eye contact with his young navigator.
“All sensors are green or yellow,” Rini said happily, “and the weather map is coming out now.”
Ilika glanced at the symbolic chart that appeared on the main bridge display. “Looks like good weather for flying.”
“Thrusters, anti-mass, ion, anything you could want, all green,” Boro declared, “and fuel reserves are back to normal.”
“How’s that bug bite you got yesterday?”
Boro scratched his arm for a moment. “It’s not swollen any more, and I feel fine.”
“Remember, there’s no place for heroic silence on a response ship.”
Boro
nodded.
“Water and solvent are working again,” Kibi announced, “but I’m keeping one jug of good water in a cabinet where you-know-who can’t find it and say it
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doesn’t exist.”
Chuckles rippled through the bridge.
“We’re down to about half the food we brought, but we have tons of fresh fruit. Vines are all over the struts and ramp, but Manessa says they’re no problem. Otherwise, the landing site and interior are secure for departure.”
“Everything’s working,” Ilika explained, “because we have completed all the failure drills for surface flight.”
“Hurray!” the entire crew cheered.
Ilika smiled. “Boro wants to see one of the planet’s poles. Your flight planning objective, Sata, is to place the Manessa Kwi on the surface of the land at the north axial pole. To make it more interesting, you may not fly higher than two thousand meters, or over or through any open salt water.
Mati will be observing the entire navigation process, and I will be piloting.
Boro is in command, in addition to his usual duties.”
Two hours later, a very frustrated crew began looking daggers at their captain every time he glanced over their shoulders to see how they were doing.
The process had begun at Sata’s station, but once they realized they had a real pickle of a navigation problem to solve, Sata made hard copies and they moved to the big table in the passenger area. Mati, assigned to observe, had remained silent, but she often reached over and touched the navigator on the shoulder when Sata looked like she wanted to chew nails. They would share a smile and a few deep breaths, then Sata and her helpers would go back to the problem at hand.
The navigator had quickly determined that their destination was covered by a floating ice cap, and therefore setting the ship on land at that point required somehow getting under the ice. But, Rini pointed out, to slip under at the edge required going over at least a few meters of open salt water.
To complicate the problem, mountains or plateaus higher than two thousand meters spanned the entire continent, making it impossible to get from the tropics to the arctic within the rules.
When they finally pushed aside their papers to partake of a lunch that Ilika made, no one felt like talking, so the captain attempted to break the ice.
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“Mati, you’ve been quietly observing. Any insights that might help solve the problem?”
“I think they’ve been staring at charts too long. When I lean back and close my eyes, and imagine myself piloting the trip, I can easily see how to get around the altitude limitation.”
“Will
you
please tell us?” Sata begged, showing her teeth as if she were ready to bite.
“Um . . . if Ilika says it’s okay.”
Before Ilika could answer, Kibi burst out laughing and everyone looked at her. “Somehow knowing that Mati could see it made it come to me. The beach!”
Mati grinned. “No mountain goes right to the edge of the ocean without a little bit of beach or rocks at the bottom. Even if it’s a sheer cliff two thousand meters high, we just wait for low tide!”
Sata, Boro, and Rini all laughed at themselves.
“The other problem,” Mati continued, “I haven’t figured out. But as Rini realized, we can’t get under the ice cap. So we have to go through it . . .”
Suddenly Boro sprang to his feet. “Sata, how thick is the ice at the pole?”
he asked, sitting down at his station.
Sata, excited by the possibility of a breakthrough, dashed to her console and began searching through charts. “Here it is. Um . . . um . . . about four meters in the winter.”
Except for Ilika and Mati, who were content with their lunch trays, everyone gathered around Boro.
“I haven’t used this stuff yet, but Manessa’s hull can absorb, reflect, or radiate just about any kind of energy. If we can find infra-red, and Manessa can radiate it, we can melt our way through the ice. Help me with these words, Kibi and Sata.”
“That one’s visible light,” Sata quickly translated.
“Okay,” Boro agreed, “I see the names of the colors now. This next one down . . .”
“That’s it!” Kibi nearly yelled. “That word means fast heat.”
“Okay, Manessa can radiate it, and the next two energy bands also.
Problem solved!”
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They returned to the table and presented their navigation plan, in concept, to the captain.
He smiled and congratulated them, but wanted a real, detailed flight plan, with as little time spent squeezing along narrow beaches as possible.
The rest was easy. After quickly finishing their lunches, Sata went to work at her station, taking suggestions from those gathered around when multiple routes were available.
Mati continued to silently observe from the command chair.
Given the altitude limit, using the ion drive was not an option, but they would be passing over a continent they had never seen before, and didn’t mind going slowly enough for sight-seeing. Jungles and winding rivers gradually became deserts as they flew northward. Ilika slowed the ship whenever anyone spotted something interesting, from smoking volcanoes to herds of grazing animals.
Mati was quite amazed by all the work Sata had to do. Even after the difficult flight planning, the navigator still had to feed charts to all stations, swapping them as the ship moved on, and sometimes changing the flight plan itself as they flew. She was often asked to look up information about their route, and could not have done so without her good language skills. At the same time, she was constantly verifying the ship’s position by visual references, and looking ahead to see how Rini’s weather reports might affect their flight.
Deserts became sagebrush prairies as they continued to move northward, but the altitude restriction soon forced them to descend into coastal river valleys. Ilika switched to a three-D topographic projection as rain clouds and fog made their visual displays useless. He would always leave the final decision to Boro whenever route choices emerged, or interesting sights begged to be explored.
Twice Boro okayed visits to waterfalls leaping from green mountainsides, but then, at the third waterfall, put his foot down and told Ilika to press on to the coast.
Towering trees pierced the fog and reached for the sky, like those on the western side of their own kingdom, as Ilika piloted the ship over a rocky
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 158
coastline at the first place where the land quickly rose to more than two thousand meters. When the clouds parted, snow could be seen covering the higher elevations.
Kibi requested a hover when they passed near a village of people with houses and boats made of logs. Soon a mist creeping in from the sea made further observation impossible.
Ilika was again able to fly by visual references up a green river valley where herds of antlered creatures grazed, but they were soon in the clouds again after cresting a low pass back toward the ocean. At the next tight spot on the coast, he only managed to avoid breaking the rules by timing their dash along the beach between waves. Kibi laughed from her station.
Tall evergreen trees continued to cloak the mountains. At one point, attempting to slip over a pass at one thousand seven hundred and sixty meters, Ilika had to shrink the hull to its minimum size and squeeze between trees to avoid the two thousand meter limit. Mati chuckled from the command chair.
Soon they passed over glaciers of creeping ice, and all crew members were glued to their visual displays, with orders to Rini to not let any clouds get in the way. The slender lad smiled but didn’t argue as they spent a quarter hour peering into crevasses and listening to the creeks and groans of the slowly moving ice.
Ilika’s last tight spot was a beach, more ice than rock or sand. After that, he easily followed the flight plan straight northward over the tundra toward the polar ice cap.
Deep Learning Notes
What could be the result if Boro’s bug bite was infected, painful, or poisoned, and he didn’t tell his commander?
By keeping a jug of water in a cabinet, what other situations, besides a simulated failure drill, was Kibi prepared for?
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As the navigator, Sata was essentially “in command” of the flight planning process. What aspect of her personality made it hard for her to see the solution that Mati and Kibi saw?
The method of collecting information that Mati and Kibi are good at, and Sata not so good, is called “intuition.” Boro is not normally intuitive. What statement by another crew member, an intuitive, allowed him to realize he had a tool that would help get through the polar ice cap?
Cross-training, as Mati and Sata were beginning to do by observing each other at work, is important so that a person’s job can be covered if they are sick, injured, or absent. It also has another value that is almost as important. How will one crew member tend to react to another when a mistake is made if they think the other’s job is simple and easy? How will they tend to react if they know how complex the other’s job really is?
“Two thousand meters,” in case you’re checking, would be 2 x 512 x 3.28 =
3359 feet. Remember that “thousand” is 8 (not 10) to the third power.
The area they passed through with clouds, mist, waterfalls, tall trees, and people who made boats and houses from logs, was another kind of rain forest called a “temperate rain forest.” Examples in our world are Norway, Scotland, Ireland, British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon.
How far from 2000 meters is 1760 meters? Base eight, of course.