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Another ONI Black File: Halo - We Got There First: Part 1
Posted By: Arthur Wellesly<arthur_wellesly@hotmail.com>
Date: 15 April 2003, 3:53 PM
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Another ONI Black File: Halo - We Got There First
1330 Hours, August 9, 2525 (Military Calendar)/
In Orbit Around Chi Cheti IV, UNSC Military Complex, mining colony
Captain Caitlin Alice Young was incredibly impressed with what she saw onboard the Silent Night. The ship was a Ticonderoga-class cruiser complete with three meters of titanium-A battleplating with four near the back at the engines to prevent a core explosion. It had forty Halcun guns capable of firing six hundred 50mm rounds per minute on each side accompanied by two Magnetic Accelerator Cannons and one on the bottom. To top off its arsenal, it had one nuclear shaft per side with three SHIVA warheads for each. She was built for war, this one.
What excited her the most, however, were the ship's propulsion systems. The Fusion Reactor Core was able to generate enough power that waste energy was automatically directed to necessary areas, most often weapons systems, to improve their destructive capability. The Shaw-Fujikawa generator they had was even more impressive. It was able to generate a multi-dimensional bubble with far better dynamics than with the standard models she had encountered. The result was that they could travel 1.5 times as fast than most ships in slipspace and with twice as much precision.
One last thing of note with the ship that impressed Captain Young was the AI. Unlike most ship-grade AI's, Vulcan was constructed specifically for the Silent Night. He knew all of the ship's unique points, its strengths, and its weaknesses. There was nothing or no one else in the galaxy that was better suited for the job.
Young had already made the announcement that everyone should prepare themselves for cryosleep. Only a handful of engineers were going to take week-long shifts at staying awake and maintaining the Shaw-Fujikawa generator, accompanied only by Vulcan. The senior officers were also staying awake for a while to see the ship off, and then they, too, would join their crewman in the cryochambers.
Young sat on her chair on the bridge, strapped tightly in to keep her seated in micro-gravity. Her bridge officers were similarly seated in their chairs, typing arbitrarily on their computers, testing the ships' systems, but all anticipating their captain's final order.
A simple message from Stanforth appeared on her personal view-screen by her chair: a green checkmark. Young nodded to herself and then opened a channel to the engine room. "Douglas! Is everything ready down there."
Over the roar of the engines an audible, "Yes, ma'am," was heard by all.
"Mr. Smith," she said, addressing the navigational officer, "take us out."
"Aye aye, ma'am," he said enthusiastically.
0945 Hours, September 19, 2525 (Military Calendar)/
Unknown location, beyond UNSC official borders
Captain Young stepped out of the cryo-tube, tripping on her way out as she coughed out a long string of cryo inhalant and without a word she swallowed it again. She was up before all the other senior personnel by about fifteen minutes just as she had told Vulcan. She liked to be up and about just before her ship came out of slipspace. What many crewmembers didn't know was that she frequently came out of cryosleep to check on her ship. It wasn't that she didn't trust her capable engineers or Vulcan, it was simply that she hated being idle and without worries in a cryo-tube while others were working around the clock just outside the walls of the room.
No, she thought as she began to put on her uniform, that wasn't entirely true. She didn't fully trust her new engineering team or Vulcan. She had long ago learned not to be blindly trustful of new people. She hated change, and it didn't fit her personality to leave her ship in the hands of people who hadn't proved themselves to her yet. To do so would be naive, and the captain was anything but that.
She chose her best looking uniform and she carefully pulled down her black sweater over her nicely groomed hair and she smoothed it out to look perfect. She clipped on her numerous medals and campaign ribbons. She was not normally so vain, but she decided it would be best to intimidate her bridge crew and earn their respect early on. She hoped, as she struggled to attach her Silver Star to her uniform, that she could return the favor.
She stepped out of the spinning cryo-bay into the stationary hall beyond the door. Her stomach lurched as she began to float towards the ceiling. She leaned forward in the middle of the hallway and pressed a small red button on her metal boots. She then gripped the walls and forced herself down towards the steel floor and her magnetized boots instantly clung to it. As she walked down the long hall, passing a team of engineers who stopped to salute, she realized that walking was easier down this hall - it didn't feel like someone tried to pull her foot down each time she lifted her leg. She stopped for a moment and took this in. The navy has even issued superior boots to the crew. She wondered once more what was so important out here.
Captain Young made her way to the "elevator" shaft. Young enjoyed going in the shaft. Since elevators were useless in zero-gee, ship builders instead constructed long, hollow shafts connecting all the decks of the ship. Protruding bars and indentations on the cylindrical walls allowed the crew the propel themselves up or down, whichever way they wanted to go.
Young bent over and disengaged her magnetized boots. She pressed her feet one last time against the steel floor and pushed herself out. The shaft was empty so she decided to hang suspended in zero-gee for a moment and eventually pushed herself up.
The captain made several more turns after exiting the shaft and at last arrived at the empty command deck. Actually, it wasn't quite empty - Vulcan stood on a short, glowing pedestal near the primary view-screen. The AI wore a crumpled, crimson tunic that left the right side of his chest bare. He had dark grey hair, almost black, with a curly beard of matching color. He wielded a massive hammer in his unnaturally tanned hand and was surrounded on all sides by a raging fire.
"Ah, captain," he said warmly from behind the inferno, "I was expecting you."
"Indeed?" she said tiredly, devoid of interest. "The status report was sent to ONI?" she asked.
"Of course, captain. They responded only by saying they want you to send them another report the moment we enter normal space and for the first two days they will expect a report every two hours, then daily." He paused. "We will be entering normal space in seven minutes, captain."
"Wake all personnel, including the Marines," she ordered, and Vulcan immediately went to work, data figures scrolling furiously up and down his eerily translucent figure. "It's time we stretched our legs."
All over the ship, cryo-tubes opened and the crew of the Silent Night began climbing wearily out to the sound of Vulcan's voice over the ship-wide COM system. Everyone drowsily put on their uniforms, only half-aware of everything going on around them. As they re-swallowed their cryo-inhalants, however, the command crew and Marines gradually remembered the purpose of their mission, and everyone hurried in their preparations, eager to see what had brought them all the way out here.
The senior bridge personnel were all soon gathered on the command deck and saluted Young with a crispness that pleased the captain. They were all relieved to see that it was spinning so as to simulate gravity - most bridges these days did not include this feature. Nevertheless many of the men and women strapped themselves out of habit... and just in case.
"Captain, we are decelerating," Vulcan announced almost impatiently as if he were doing something else at the moment. "We are now entering normal space. Visuals will be available in ten."
Sure enough, the view-screen showed the customary orange-red boiling of space as the transdimentional bubble broke away and fused with normal space. The glow died down and the captain saw a large, radiant sun nearby, far larger than the distant stars that dotted the blackness beyond.
"Vulcan, that's a little too close to the star than I'd like to be," captain Young said with irritation. She had no need to explain herself - everyone on the bridge, including the AI, had heard about ships leaving slipspace and reappearing inside a sun or a planet. The energy field surrounding the ship interacted with the foreign atoms or energy of normal space and caused a massive nuclear reaction, instantly killing everyone aboard.
"My apologies, captain," Vulcan responded coolly, no longer preoccupied, "though I feel I must remind you our new Shaw-Fujikawa generator allows us to navigate slipstream space far more accurately than average ones. I thought I would save us some time by moving us in as close as possible."
Young clenched her mouth shut furiously. She had completely forgotten about the generator's capabilities and now her AI had humiliated her in front of her bridge staff. She noticed with extreme annoyance that her communications officer froze, leaned back in his chair, and raised his eyebrows.
"Thank you Vulcan," she said in what she hoped would sound like an impassive voice. "Mr. Smith, bring us closer to the star." He gave his acknowledgment and Young immediately turned her attention back to the AI. "Are there any s-class planets in this solar system?" she asked, referring to planets capable of supporting life.
Vulcan paused for just a moment and then said, "No. I'm reading four planets but all of them have high concentrations of methane, helium, and sulfur, and all of them are far too large to be s-class planets." He paused again. "Okay, I'm accessing records of this solar system," he announced. "All of these planets have been viewed with gamma telescopes. There is one, the biggest planet, that astrologers have named Threshold. They viewed a strange anomaly here somewhere between its moon and the planet. It was a large circular object that they viewed as black. They could tell it was there because it blocked out starlight behind it. Somehow it absorbed all incoming gamma radiation. UNSC geologists opted to send an ship to explore the phenomenon but the navy wouldn't let them."
"So that's likely where we're supposed to go," she said thoughtfully. "Vulcan, transfer the coordinates of that planet to Smith, and then Smith," she called, now addressing the navigational officer directly, "go there immediately."
"Aye, ma'am," he responded, and the Silent Night lurched as the ship changed its direction slightly towards the black anomaly.
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