To Boldy Go

2029 August 22 17:00
Test Year 2, Day 310, 10:00 CST
Tau, California Coast, North of Caltech

The shipyard, if that was a fair description, was ten kilometers north of the waterfall of the Throop. Here the cliffs gave way to a sloping shore, and a natural inlet, carved by a glacier in the last ice age, had been converted into a harbor. The rafts of the first few months were still present, but they’d been supplemented by a half dozen out-rigger canoes of various sizes. Deep-sea fishing wasn’t an option on Tau, but near-surface netting was fairly successful.

Amongst the fishing boats were three much larger double hulls. These were the fleet. A Polynesian sailor of almost any epoch would have recognized their general configuration: the design was of the lineage that had produced the Hokule’a and so many Pacific ships. But the second Hokule’a and the Enterprise and the Eagle that were berthed next to her were never intended to be recreations of an ancient vessel.

The proas’ double 30-meter hulls and the joins between them were made of a mess of different materials. There was some of the wood from Tau trees, which was very strong but also very tough to work. There were the trunks of dead palm trees. And there was most of the steel that the smelters had turned out, and all the aluminum, fiberglass, and carbon composite that could be spared. The slightly saltier and denser Tau ocean still did not corrode chromium steel, fortunately. Despite all attempts at standardization, the vessels had their quirks: the ballast on the Eagle was mostly the iron in her keels, while the Hokule’a held a pile of liquefied natural gas tanks. The Enterprise’s masts were made from aluminum latticework scavenged from old antenna stands.

The sails were large: layers of brown rip-stop Kevlar sheeting that had previously provided an occasional cover for the floor of the Brown Gym. Even stranger to the eyes of an ancient mariner would have been the second means of propulsion: a hundred-square-meter kite that both pulled the ship forward and decreased drag by pulling it up in the water. With favorable winds and everything set, one of the proas could make twenty-two knots, but they were being equipped assuming fifteen over the long haul.

More of the precious solar panels had been separated out, and powered the kitchen, the radio, the inertial trackers (finally a use for GPS units), and the hardened computers. Any extra power got diverted to the fuel cell storage and the tanks, which could hold enough fuel for the Enterprise or the Eagle to go a thousand kilometers on the backup engine. The Hokule’a’s tanks were larger, and she could go fifteen hundred on one tank. Of course, there wasn’t going to be any way to refuel for a very large distance.

The Eagle had been the first to float, and had scouted the coastline for up to three days sailing in either direction. It and the Hokule’a were bound for MIT while the Enterprise continued to explore the coasts of California. The two hulls of both ships of the flotilla had been covered with tarps, contoured so rain water would be directed to holding tanks. Each would have a crew of fifteen, but carried stores (mainly dried zard meat and orangestem and flour) for thirty for forty days. Based on the forecasts, that would be four times what they would need to sail up the coast of California until they got into the westerly wind belt and across the Big Wet to Massachusetts, but they weren’t taking chances.

Dorman and Matt Wing handed command of the ninjas to Melinda: they and one of the ultralights were installed on board the Eagle to provide reconnaissance. Three kilometers up, in clear weather he could see twelve hours sailing in all directions. Each ship had two sets of scuba gear, in case they needed to conduct underwater repairs. Will and Townsend had consulted a random-number generator to see which of them would go with the flotilla, as navigator and doctor, and Townsend had gotten the job – Mina liked this arrangement. The other twenty-seven sailors were a mixed bag of former Swim Team members, mechanical engineers, other of the ninjas, and people who had particular reason to want to help fight the Failures.

The Screamers’ radio sniffing implied that no one in Massachusetts other than the inhabitants of the White Towers knew about the flotilla, but that did not stop the ships from being armed. One of the exiles might have sent a message that was bounced around by some coherence of the ionosphere that didn’t allow a bounce towards Caltech. The crew had their hand weapons, of course: handguns and rifles with a few thousand rounds of the new caseless ammunition, but also some heavier ordinance. Each ship carried a computer-targeted kilowatt laser from the physics labs, two partially tested visual and infrared homing missiles, and a cannon that fired any of a selection of rounds: projectile, explosive, incendiary, buckshot, spinning chain. For sensors, the ships had passive and active sonar and radar, with trailed seismic sensor buoys that could be used as decoys and flares. Those served equally well for science, of course, but the flotilla was quite capable of defending itself and detecting the approach of an enemy. It could probably have gone toe-to-toe with the Berets’ choppers, not that that would have been helpful.

Townsend’s goal was clear: get to Massachusetts as quickly as possible. Survey and science were important, but would have to be done without stopping. There was a rendezvous to make. The Berets’ two furthest-west fuel stations were now on the western coast of Massachusetts. Each set of solar panels and fuel tanks would fill one of their helicopters six times over. Two tanks worth would be used to airlift passengers to the White Towers. The engines of the proas would burn the rest to keep their speed up as they sailed the additional five thousand kilometers to MIT. Thirty people might not change the military situation drastically, but they would at the least support the Berets. And if they would also be far out of the range of any fallout should Chao be successful in the construction of ICBMs, that was not mentioned.

The flotilla left harbor on a rare outburst of offshore flow, sails set and kites flying. North along the coast, they sailed in known waters, keeping to the current that was an analogy of the Gulf Stream. They managed sixteen knots for the first two days, a hundred kilometers from the coast. Dorman and two others took positions from the stars and the Sun while Townsend set the navigation by a combination of computer modeling and intuition. The two ships kept about a kilometer apart, so that they wouldn’t catch wake or slipstream. Dorman and his instrument package did one flight, once they were beyond the reach of the Eagle’s earlier trip, and spotted a few small coastal islands.

After four days, they had reached 25º N and were in the westerly wind belt. After a brief stop ashore to plant a monitoring station, refill the water tanks, and forage some fresh food, they headed straight into the Big Wet. The charts told them the position of the Massachusetts coast, and the weather maps recommended this as the fastest route. Fortunately, once they cleared the coast, the winds were indeed almost straight from the west.

The next eleven days were fairly quiet. On the third day, sonar picked up the echolocation pings of a very large beast traveling fast and at eighteen hundred meters depth. Five days out, the seismic data confirmed the presence of a large group of volcanic islands in an arc at about 15º N, far to the south of the ship. On the seventh day, they encountered a current from the north, which carried an iceberg that Dorman spotted a hundred and fifty kilometers away on one of his recon flights. About this time, the novelty of being on the deep ocean wore off and the crews started to complain about the food.

At Caltech, Will finished the dispersion. With the shipyard shut down, the population was now spread out as far as was safe and Will himself ran the Screamer Lab from a terminal in the tent he shared with Mina in the Iron Hills shelter. A ninja patrol found the body of one more of the exiles, bringing the number unaccounted for down to three. At the White Towers, Hildenstoy and her squad of Black Berets practiced simulated assaults on Chao and his guards. Marriner kept up his broadcasts. The Revere Company took a serious risk and subdued the two Failures guarding a rebellious hunting party, and gained a number of weapons and six recruits.

By the eleventh day, Townsend’s navigation, the inertial trackers, and the chronometer and sextant put the ships a day and a half out from the coast. A message from the Revere Company came through, relayed in the normal encrypted packages from the Caltech Screamer Lab. Delbert had dispatched one of the helicopters to the rendezvous station. It would be checking all the fuel stations as it flew over, so it would reach the coast about the same time the much slower ships did. Four members of the Caltech expedition and some of the more critical supplies would be airlifted. The rest would need to endure another two weeks of coast running around Massachusetts to get to MIT.

Then, on the twelfth day, as the flotilla finally came into sight of land, everything happened at once.