Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book 5) by Joel Shepherd

Author:Joel Shepherd [Shepherd, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-24T21:00:00+00:00

It took Phoenix six jumps to reach croma space, then another four to reach Do’Mela. Rooke assured them all that it could be done faster, but for those first six Makimakala was their escort, and could not be left behind. For the next four, inside croma space, they were escorted by a succession of croma vessels of respectable but still lesser performance than Makimakala, in whose company Erik was very determined not to let Phoenix’s true capabilities show.

Even without company, physics did not allow such journeys to be done quickly. Systems could only be traversed so fast in sublight, and the ideal entry and exit points from solar gravity-wells were perpendicular to the center of each well, offset to a degree determined by the power of a ship’s jump engines. Put simply, when the jump exit point was on the far side of a gravity-well to its entry point, a ship had no choice but to traverse the entire system sub-light to exit on its far side… leading to the odd navigational effect that a zigzag course between stars was often faster than a direct line, because zigzags required a relatively short sub-light traverse — the thing that took the real time to happen.

As it was, each stop averaged two days, giving Phoenix and Makimakala twenty in total, and thirty-two in real-time once the time dilation from jump was calculated. It gave Phoenix’s crew plenty of time to continue repairs under Rooke’s direction, and run systems checks on all the fancy new tech they were still unsure exactly how to operate. It also gave the patchwork crew of humans and tavalai a chance to get to know each other better — sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

On the upside, Erik heard stories of some friendships forged, and cultural understandings reached. Tavalai were not an obnoxious or pricklish people — they worked hard with great discipline, and were driven by a powerful sense of duty to a greater cause. They did not always understand human humour, as humans sometimes struggled to grasp theirs in return, and were methodical and under-excitable by most human standards. ‘Slow’, was the usual human observation, while the tavalai found humans sometimes alarmingly unpredictable and emotional. But Phoenix’s human crew would never complain that the tavalai did not pull their weight, and that much respect at least seemed mutual.

On the downside, there were many language difficulties, as only the most senior tavalai officers spoke fluent English. Translators were often unreliable in the inconvenient circumstances of spacer duties, where crew needed to coordinate fast without endless explanations, and thus it had been deemed logical that humans and tavalai should work in segregated teams for a while at least, to improve coordination. It was leading, Erik’s human Petty and Warrant Officers reported, to an inevitable division through the crew beyond the simple division of species — humans and tavalai working mostly with their own kind, with some groups rarely mixing. In that environment, Erik didn’t see how true integration was likely to happen, but neither was it obvious what, if anything, could be done about it.

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