Trans Solar, Book 2

Approaching Colossus, part 2

Conman nodded mutely in agreement with Commander Abrades’ assessment. They had been going faster than their calculations showed.

They were unprepared to make landfall, with officers and crew in stasis or hyper-sleep. The group of ships was racing away from solar space at high speed, and time was unlikely to be in their favor. The next question would be whether they could stop in time to make landfall on the Colossus formation.

Abrades brought back the discarded transit pack to the screens. He pointed his index finger at a string of red dots symbolizing LMA brakes. “If we used more LMA while leaving Neptune’s sling, we must replace them.”

If? Conman stared blankly at the screen for two seconds, then he brought up storage bay and loader graphics for the Commander to see. Fewer accelerant material was there than the transit manifest required for stopping at Colossus. Conman pointed to the bulk tonnage readout.

Abrades did not accept what the technology was indicating. Their braking power had been halved by the missing items. While that had conveniently boosted their speed it had also altered their mapping accuracy and hence their ability to return using the same path of travel.

Anticipating the leader’s needs, Conman brought up tracking screens which he adjusted for changed formulas. They could return using the adjusted values, compute for dynamic changes en route, and retract the mapping data that had been sent out.

Without delay, Commander Abrades began activating recovery systems to bring the officers and crew to life. “Don’t brake until they are awake. Any wave effects during the transition could have negative consequences.”

The sensors were already dancing under the pilot’s attention, seeking ferrous bodies on their trajectory at matched speed. Another part of his mind attended to balancing real and projected wave fatigue calculations. There appeared to be a horrendous surplus of fuel objects on the route of travel, within reach of easy changes to course and speed. The question at this moment was whether bypassing Colossus would require too many braking bursts to get the ships into operation at normal space speeds.

Optional plans to use the gravity fields of KBO for braking the group of ships had been scrapped because of the dangers of small bodies. Getting too close to the belt would endanger the ships. The collective gravity holding denser portions of the Kipper together prevented most of the smaller bodies from drifting too far away. There was insufficient gravity to pull the bulk of matter together enough to clean the small trash out of the way. Small meant toe-sized. At their speed a small item would bullet through the ships even after impact had disintegrated it. Thus the reason for choosing Colossus destination. 

Two bodies, called Ligo and Arum, were small planets that had cleared some of the space around them. They lacked the individual gravity sufficient to bond with other cold objects. This was the norm for the Kuiper Belt. They existed in close proximity to each other and had been termed Colossus for the Kipper X mission, like the legs of the proverbial Colossus which had guarded the port, at Rhodes. The plan had been to use both small bodies as brakes by steering the group of ships around the two bodies in a continuous figure eight. This would enable the bleeding off of speed without suffering LMA wave fatigue.

Kipper X had discovered another factor about LMA wave fatigue that became part of the Colossus braking schedule. During acceleration, from Mars down, officers had tested small burst effects without finding the predicted uniform wave fatigue. The tests had continued sporadically, throughout eleven days of acceleration, finally being stopped as the fleet neared Neptune. At that time, due to the unexpected increase in acceleration, the sling transit was reset and the exit trajectory and LMA burst were altered to accommodate new realities. The paramount question would be how to slow down once they reached Colossus.