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Subject: {ASSM} {Pirates} Pirates of the Carob Bean by Gary Jordan [1/3] (ScFi, nosex)
Date: Wed,  9 Jul 2003 09:10:04 -0400
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Pirates of the Carob Bean
By Gary Jordan
Copyright (c) 2003

Captain Indigo shouted at the Communications Officer, "Any response
from anyone at all?"

"No Ma'am," came the quick response. "Just another message from the
bogey telling us to cut our acceleration and prepare for boarding."
She turned to the Skipper. "They sounded a little angry, Ma'am. I
think the chase is cutting into their sack time."

Captain Christina Indigo smiled at her Communicator. The situation
was desperate, and getting more so. The Anne had more legs than the
average merchant ship, but not as many as the pirate overhauling
her. Nobody had bothered uttering the old bromide, "A stern chase is
a long chase," but unless Anne could contact armed help, she'd run
out of time when the bogey got into effective energy weapons range.
At least the pirate wouldn't try to destroy her with missiles - they
wanted to take her cargo intact.

They weren't out of hope yet, wouldn't be for hours. And messages,
even her SOS, travelled at the speed of light. So there was still
hope. Hope that dwindled as the clock ticked.

 

"Time to intercept?"

"All parameters constant, we can make zero-zero in about 40 hours,
Captain," the Tactical Officer replied. She was updating her plot
constantly, taking into account the target's little zigs and zags
and adjusting immediately.

"Any sign of patrols?"

"None, Ma'am."

Celia B hurtled nimbly through normal space in pursuit of her
ungainly prey. It was too much to hope that the merchant skipper
would see the futility of flight and allow her to come alongside
without a protracted struggle. And that damned merchie was faster
than they'd anticipated. 

Damn it! Captain Gyra Geordon cursed to herself. We don't even know,
at this range, if she's the right ship. She calmed herself. All the
data matched what intelligence they'd been able to gather. Arrival
time, size, approximate locus of arrival... She snorted, earning a
glance from her Executive Officer. If our intelligence had been just
a little better, we'd have been sitting light-minutes closer to her
emergence locus, and we'd have her ass by now. 

It wasn't really a failure of intelligence, she knew. Space is vast.
Without instantaneous hyperdrives, ships would spend centuries in
the voids between the stars. But hyperdrives only worked from one
Siefert Limit to the next. And the Siefert Limit for any given
system was far beyond that system's outermost planets, out in the
Oort Cloud. But the Siefert Limit is a sphere; theoretically, a ship
could emerge anywhere on the hemisphere facing the point of
departure. Practically, though, ships never arrived outside a locus
best described as a circle inscribed inside the pentagram of a face
of a soccer ball.

A soccer ball of truly cosmic proportions. 

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, science fiction writers in the late
twentieth century, had it almost right. In their epic The Mote in
God's Eye, they postulated "tramlines" between stars at singular
"points of equipotential flux." Their "jump drive" moved a ship
instantaneously from one "Alderson jump point" to the next. In
actuality, every star had a Siefert Limit, rather than individual
"Alderson Points." As long as you engaged the hyperdrive within that
limit, and aimed the extremely directional drive at the anticipated
location of your destination (stars move), you would arrive
somewhere on that destination's Siefert Limit.

What those imaginative writers had correct is that the majority of
interstellar travel is consumed in the traverse of normal space from
the Siefert Limit to the habitable planet or station near the star.
They postulated starship engines capable of multiple gravities of
acceleration, usually limited only by the frail humans who had to
endure them. In actuality, Spaceship drives developed only
fractional gravity thrusts - the smallest ship capable of mounting
the more powerful plants could sustain at best five gravities - but
could carry no weapons, minimum crew and life support, and no cargo.

Ships do exist that can accelerate at high gees. After all, they
have to escape a planet's gravity well. But they can't sustain it,
not for the distance required for interstellar travel.

None of this was more than peripherally in Captain Geordon's mind.
She simply knew it, like a groundcar driver knows that water makes a
road slippery.

 

Captain Indigo forced herself off the bridge periodically, despite
the situation. She insisted her bridge crew rotate to keep them
fresh; they expected no less of her. She wished she'd had the
comfort of her husband's arms, but he was in cold sleep. He
tolerated jump shock no better than any other male. That was the
main reason women crewed interstellar ships. Whatever the physical
and psychological difference between the genders, it was simply a
fact that women shook off in ninety minutes what incapacitated their
men for ninety hours. Now, a single day after jump, he'd be more of
a hindrance than a comfort. Waking him would be worthless - cold
sleep avoided jump shock only by stretching the recovery period over
weeks instead of days.

No. She was the Captain; Anne was her responsibility. Asleep or
awake, she couldn't and wouldn't share the burden. But she could
have used the comfort. 

Still no response from the Home Defense Forces. Christina had had
the Communications Officer run systems diagnostics on both
transmitters and receivers, even though they'd received periodic
demands from the pirates behind them to cease accelerating. Anne
continued accelerating at her top rate of 6.86m/secý. Unimpeded,
she'd turn over and decelerate at the same rate after 24 days,
making a travel time of 48 days from the Siefert Limit to Desdmona,
this star's nearest habitable planet and her home port. Given the
distances and times involved, no help sent from Desdmona would
arrive in time no matter what That wasn't what Christina was hoping
for. 

Outbound merchants were frequently convoyed most of the way to the
Siefert Limit. Even if there was no convoy currently outbound, a
recent convoy might have left an escort in position to assist. And
there were independent long range patrols.

Christina snorted in frustration and a little anger. On the face of
it, piracy was ludicrous. A pirate must be fast enough to overtake a
victim before assistance could arrive, armed well enough to fend off
any defensive armament, manned with extra people to permit boarding
a prize crew (with all the extra life support that entails), and
long-ranged (more life support) enough to sit idle while waiting for
said victim. Just the armament alone was non-trivial. Any potential
victim would be trying to kill the pirate - the pirate had to take
her victim intact.

Or at least take the ship and cargo intact, Christina corrected
herself. Pirates often considered crew expendable. Not at all a
comforting thought, and she again wished her husband was awake and
holding her.

 

Gyra refused to count her profits before they were safely banked,
particularly since profit was only a minor aspect of this mission.
She was well aware that this voyage could set her up for life, and
she pressed every advantage. So much of this mission was blind-ass
luck, she had to optimize the factors over which she had any
control.

Luck: At this time of this year in this system, none of the gas
giants was in a particularly advantageous position. There were
always refueling stations around gas giants, and refueling stations
were always guarded.

Advantage: Celia B was faster than the merchie. She could sustain a
steady acceleration of 9.98m/secý and a burst acceleration of 2 full
gees. 

Luck: Celia B was on the inbound leg of a quartering pattern Gyra
had set up with her Tactical Officer. That meant she already had a
side vector to bring her onto the merchant's track and most of her
superior acceleration could be applied to the in-system vector.

Advantage: Celia B was a tough little bitch. She had started her
life as a convoy escort, preventing others from doing to her convoy
what she planned to do unto the merchie. Although she had sacrificed
most of her offensive missile batteries and storage for increased
fuel bunkerage and life support, she still sported her full
offensive energy suite, defensive batteries and anti-missile
missiles, and very importantly, her military-grade sensors and
electronic counter-measures. She'd found the merchant long before
the merchant had known she was looking.

Luck: The merchant couldn't know it, but a pirate attack on the
system periphery 130ø around the plane of the ecliptic had drawn off
some of her potential defenders. If the signals Celia B had
intercepted this far out had been accurate, the other... pirate - no
sense mincing words - had chased her target just a bit too slowly
and too long to escape.

Advantage: Celia B had begun accelerating in system for 30 minutes
before the merchant had recovered from jump shock, and had coasted
to avoid detection until the merchie committed to an in-system
course. Getting detected while the merchant was still inside the
boundaries of the Siefert Limit would have allowed an immediate
escape as soon as they could recharge their accumulators for the
jump. With the merchant going all-out in-system, no energy was being
diverted to the accumulators, and turning back was not an option.

The biggest piece of luck was also her greatest advantage. Celia B
was still acting with the approval of her government, however
covert, and her crew was still disciplined and sharp. From
interrogation of the officers and crew of commerce raiders...
pirates... during CB's own pirate chasing days, Gyra understood all
too well how such a crew gradually wore down into undisciplined
sociopaths. The process would begin with the capture of their first
prize...

 

Once again on the command deck, Captain Indigo reflected that the
pirates held every advantage save two; first, Anne had a well-
disciplined crew. She knew every one of her girls well, and could
count on their unquestioned loyalty and obedience, whatever the
situation brought. Right now, she was examining the manifests to
determine what could safely be jettisoned without hope of recovery,
what might be jettisoned with precautions in hope of eventual
recovery by her people, and what must not be allowed to fall into
the wrong hands either way.

The choices were limited in every respect. Just now, the pirate was
tracking the Anne via an Optically Oscillating Scintillation
Heliograph, or OOSH array, just as Anne had detected the pirate. The
ion drives reacted with interstellar hydrogen, causing their
electrons to either be stripped or kicked to a higher energy state,
either way resulting in release of photons. Any jettison would have
to be done well before radar or optical range, or the pirate could
simply decelerate along Anne's trajectory until the mass was
detected and retrieved. They could still do that, if they suspected
a jettison.

Her stevedores were already working on several choices. And in those
choices was the second advantage. Desdmonan Merchant Ship Anne, DMS-
747, was a modular container vessel. Rather than hauling Cargo
inside holds of a set size, internal to the ship, cylindrical cargo
modules were stacked like poker chips above a propulsion module. At
the top of this stack of cargo modules were an auxiliary life
support module, an auxiliary power plant module, a passenger module,
and the control module. 

What this meant was that given sufficient time, the Anne could
detach from any or all of the cargo modules. Her two million ton
nominal mass could be reduced to a mere 350,000 tons; her maximum
acceleration could be raised by a factor of six to over three gees.
In fact, if she left the auxiliary power plant with the passenger
and life support modules, she could attain half again that.

What would the pirates do? To pay for the cost of a pirate vessel
and its minimum upkeep, the pirate needed to take the merchant
sufficiently intact to maneuver to the Siefert Limit and escape to
wherever the cargo could be disposed of. Failing that, it must be
"hidden" until other cargo vessels could salvage the cargo. The
least viable alternative was to strip the most valuable cargo and
take it aboard the extremely limited storage space of the pirate
vessel. 

Frustrated from failure of the first two, would the pirate vessel
leave the remaining cargo intact? Or would they vent their
frustration by obliterating the remaining pods? It wasn't a decision
Christina wanted the pirates to have an opportunity to make, but it
was the decision she faced.

First Officer Urquhart maintained a running plot with shaded zones.
Green indicated the time period in which Anne could afford to do
nothing while waiting for a response to their SOS, and that plot was
almost used up. Amber indicated the time wherein Anne could cease
acceleration to permit the stevedores and engineers to reconfigure
the ship, and it was a brief window. Beyond that was another brief
period which indicated that the Propulsion Module, with its canned
life support and rudimentary astrogational controls, could
nonetheless escape alone, leaving all else behind. Finally there was
a black region, wherein the pirates had her. All of her.

Christina laiy a hand on Jane's shoulder and squeezed. As with so
many of her crew, Jane's husband and children were aboard. Her sons,
Jan and August, were in cold sleep with their father, April. Her
daughters, June and July, were in their quarters, no doubt huddling
together and worrying more about mom than themselves. "Bearing up?"

"Of course, ma'am," Jane sounded mildly offended. "Takes more than a
shipload of pirates to rattle my cage. Besides, until pirates start
arriving with their own haulers, this modular design is going to
give them fits. You'll get the people away safely, and with luck
we'll recover the bulk of the cargo."

"I worry that they'll be frustrated enough to take it out on the
cargo modules."

"If they do, they do. We'll salvage what they miss, and insurance
will cover part of the rest. Besides, I think your little plan for
dispersing the pods has a good chance of preventing too much
damage."

"It'll also frustrate our own salvage efforts later."

"Some things must be endured, my child."

Christina laughed, which raised the level of cheer on the command
deck. Then she got serious again. "Come time to deploy this crazy
idea, you'll be here on the command deck. I'm taking charge of the
cargo disassembly."

Jane opened her mouth to protest, but Christina held up her hand.
"That was a statement of fact, not an invitation for discussion. We
both know you're the better pilot. You need to be here, to
reassemble the propulsion and command modules. But the dispersion
will take command authority, and that means me."

Jane glared stubbornly at her Captain. "That should be me, then.
You..."

"'Better pilot,' remember? If I stayed aboard, I'd still need you
here. Jane, I can't pull this off if you argue!" She left unspoken
that Jane had a husband and lots of kids. She was trusting her to
take care of her own husband, if it hit the fan. "That's it. Don't
argue."

 

There was a ragged cheer on the bridge when the tactical officer
announced that the target had ceased acceleration. Gyra didn't join
in the cheer, though she did smile, thinly. The Executive Officer,
Vera Bleu, noticed.

"What's wrong, Skipper? We've got 'em."

"The timing is all wrong," Gyra said. "If they were going to let us
overtake, they would have chopped their drive long ago. Boosting as
long as they did, then quitting the race before we are in targeting
range doesn't make sense. They're up to something," she concluded.

Vera's smile was only slightly diminished. "Who knows what was going
through their minds? The important thing is that they can't escape
now, even if they start accelerating again."

Gyra shook her head. "The important thing is that we don't relax our
guard. Maybe they got a tight beam reply from some random patrol.
Maybe they're jettisoning cargo. Maybe they're preparing to repel
boarders." She frowned. "The point is, we don't know, and I don't
like not knowing." She made a decision. "Have tactical plot a zero-
zero intercept for 10,000 kilometers beyond the target, just in
case. We'll creep back to them."

Vera issued the appropriate orders, which were acknowledged and
implemented. Then she drew the Captain aside. "Daddy Geault would
have approved the suspenders-and-belt approach, but I'm more
concerned with the extra time added. What if they did contact a
patrol? Overshooting leaves us that much deeper in the well and
further from the Siefert Limit."

Gyra let herself be talked out of the overshoot, with a provision
for coasting by if first optical and radar scans warranted it. But
she had Vera beef up the tracking party, and increased scans ahead
of the target. Gyra was a firm believer of the old military axiom,
"Plans go to hell when you make contact with the enemy. That's why
they're called the enemy."

She also ordered the male crewmembers of the crew awakened from cold
sleep. Women might make the best starship crews, but a boarding
party full of men had its uses, both physical and psychological. And
they were more expendable.

 

The "jettisoning" plan was simple in theory and painfully difficult
in practice, and owed its conception to the modularity of Anne and
her sister ships. Anne cut her acceleration, then used reaction
thrusters to align her long axis perpendicular to the direction of
flight. She also rotated on her axis to bring a particular
transverse cargo hatch in line with that direction.

Next, the propulsion module was detached, as were the modules
forward of auxiliary life support, which included passengers,
auxiliary power, and the command module. Then those sections
maneuvered "forward" in line of travel and rejoined, as a much
smaller ship.

Meanwhile, the Captain and a volunteer crew of her deck department,
stevedores and pursers, and a few engineers set the rest of the
modules rotating around the axis of that transverse cargo hatch.
Thirteen modules in all, and once the temporary engineering controls
were in place, all the volunteers were at the central shaft,
awaiting pickup. Reaction thrusters in the farthest modules from the
center gave the entire assembly its rotation, like the propeller of
an ancient aeroplane. By the time a much-reduced Anne was
reassembled and its two shuttles free to lift the remaining
volunteers from the spinning cargo modules, they were up to over
thirty revolutions per minute. 

The idea really was simple. The rotation gave each module a certain
angular momentum. The breakaways had been prepared so that each
module would be detached from the rest in matched pairs, and that
angular momentum would be converted to velocity perpendicular to
line of travel. Twelve of the thirteen modules would go haring off
in twelve directions away from the center. Only the thirteenth
module would continue on the base course, still spinning. 

Anne herself was moved laterally, so her drive wouldn't light off
aimed directly at the last module. The rest of the crew had been
transferred; only the Captain, the Third Engineer and her assistant,
and two deck officers remained aboard. A shuttle and its pilot kept
station 500 meters from the cargo hatch. That's when time ran out.

Per the Captain's orders, a constant plot had been kept. Assuming a
zero-zero intercept, when was the last point where Anne, at maximum
estimated acceleration, could stay out of weapons range of the
pirate, also assuming the pirate stopped decelerating and resumed
accelerating in pursuit? It was a small window, and it had closed.

"First Officer, execute plan Sierra, NOW!" Captain Indigo
transmitted. "That's an order, lady, and I want no argument." She
was entering the final command codes which would begin the
dismantling of the remaining modules. "The shuttle has enough
overtake to catch up. Now move that ship!"

Anne moved. Her drive lit off at 3.13 gees, washing over the
outermost modules momentarily as each rotated in turn, in a
coruscating display of ionization.

The Captain entered the final code, and executed plan Pinwheel.
Simultaneously, the two outermost modules detached from the rest,
and angular momentum sent them away. The other pairs would follow at
thirty second intervals. "All right, Ladies, let's move. We've got a
ride to catch!"

The shuttle was "tethered" to the center module by a monofilament
wire connected to a swivel. The first of the deck officers, Sue
Zephyr, snapped a hook on the line and launched herself across on
leg power alone. The coriolis forces and angular momentum she
retained from the module she kicked off from made her twist in arcs
about the tether, so the others waited while she drifted across. 

The second deck officer snapped on just as the second pair of
modules released. The tremor made her lose her footing just as she
kicked off, so her transit was somewhat slower. She was halfway
across when the next firing sequence occurred.

The third module detached from one end. The eighth module, as well
as the eleventh, detached from the other end. Modules four through
seven took off in one direction, spinning on a new center of gravity
between modules five and six; eight through ten and eleven went the
other way, the former spinning about their new center of gravity in
module nine. The taut line snapped; the recoil missed the deck
officer by inches but spun her about like a top before her hook
broke.

Seeing this, the shuttle pilot first maneuvered to retrieve the deck
officer, complicated by her spinning. She also notified Anne. 

 
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