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// Chapter 6:  Detour 
// Story: Starbound Flight 
// by computerneek 
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Flight looked up when the com chirped while she, Star, Coils, and Willowstone were eating breakfast.  Their takeoff and departure had gone so well that not just the engineers but Willowstone and even Flight were wondering exactly when something was going to go wrong.
Coils looked up as well, while Flight pulled her datapad out to check the call.  “Huh.  It’s Dad,” she observed.
“He’s slow,” Willow observed.  “We’re already almost a light-month from Equineothame- we’ll be out of comms range in a couple days at the most.”  She let out a snort.  “Not that you’ll manage any sort of two-way connection right now anyways.”
“Convenient,” Flight muttered.  “Too convenient.”  She scowled, and checked the message metadata.  “Looks like…  Yeah.  Sent from his bedroom, bounced off three ground stations, hit Comsat One, and got blasted all around at maximum power.  But still.”  She tapped play.
It was, rather predictably, a low-quality audio message.  Her father was never satisfied with anything less than high definition video- but she was at the edge of range, so her comms suite had only managed to decode the low-frequency audio layer anyways.  She had received a few portions of the low-definition video layer, but without the whole thing, decryption was impossible.
“Shorty,” her father began.  “I need that ship the day after tomorrow- get it down here and make it available immediately.”
The message ended, and the room went deathly silent for a couple seconds.
“Day after tomorrow?” Flight muttered, then chuckled.  “More like last month.  He’s going to be maaaad.”  She giggled.  “But when I tell him it was an electronics failure, and use that as an excuse to ground it for a year…”  She shrugged.  “He’ll gobble it right up, hook, line, and sinker.”
“If he’ll take an excuse like that so easily,” Willow muttered, “how has he been managing the country?”
Flight looked at her.  “Hmm?  He hasn’t been.”
“Then who has been?”
There was a pause.
“That’s…” Flight muttered.  “That’s a very good question.”
“Is it possible they’ll catch up?” Willow asked.
“No,” Flight answered instantly.  “We’re running at top speed- some…  How fast was it?”
“Point seven five cee,” Coils muttered.  “That gives us a seven percent advantage on the top speed of any other ship, at just point seven cee.”
Flight rubbed her chin.  “If we assume someone was right behind us when we crossed point seven cee, and has continued to chase us at that speed…”
“We’ve been cruising for five weeks,” Willow noted.  “Five percent of lightspeed for five weeks is well beyond sensor range, especially considering how we’re running under stealth.  Any maneuvers we do out here will be completely invisible to anyone that was following us.”
Flight scowled.  “How much of a head start would they have to have had to catch us?”
“Assuming somepony sent them a message from Equineothame as soon as we crossed point seven cee, and they were right about where we are now…”  She paused.  “We’d have had about three weeks and, oh, five days- call it twenty-six days- to gain distance on them, then they’d take nearly two and a half days to hit full speed.  So call it…”  She paused.  “An eight-day head start.  In that situation, we would pass them about a hundred and sixty days past that point- call it four light-months from Equineothame, in about five months.  Past that point, it’s basically guaranteed that anybody that sees us out there will have no idea we ever crossed point seven cee.”
Flight looked at her.  “Anybody that sees us out there?”
Willow shrugged.  “Ships get lost to deep space all the time, usually from pirate action.  They’re not always dead when they do- and there’s been a couple stories of people that got lost, but were lucky enough to have a lower flight speed and managed to survive long enough to drift back into the system after a dozen years or so.”  She sighed.  “That said, that’s about all we’re likely to encounter even this far- that and exploration probes.  It’s basically guaranteed once we cross four light-months.”  She looked up at Flight.  “So…  Why are we hightailing it away from civilization like we’ve lost helm control?”
Flight looked at Coils, who nodded, and took a deep breath.  She hadn’t yet told Willowstone about the mission- and actually hadn’t thought about it for the last couple weeks, either.  “Because…”  She sighed.  “Because we’re on a mission,” she told her.  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it earlier, but it’s in the contract stipulations.”  She looked up at the ceiling.  “Somewhere out there, at a solar altitude of about six light-months, there’s an ancient, derelict starship that we believe is equipped with a Distortion Drive.”
“We’re retrieving it,” Willow observed, then scowled.  “Why the secrecy, though?”
“The Equineothame High Engineering Society has been keeping the Enterprise secret from the governments of the system- not just Equineothame’s- so nobody blows it up just so their competitors can’t get to it first.”
Willow narrowed her eyes.  “The High Engineering Society?” she asked.  “That’s famous across the Navy for dealing under the table?”
There was a pause.
“Uh…” Coils muttered.
Willow looked at Flight.  “Did they give us this mission profile?”
“They did,” Flight observed.  She tapped her tablet a few times, and pulled up the mission profile, and pushed it towards Willow.
Willow looked at it.  “Hmm.  It’s…”  She traced it with her hoof.  “No, that’s wrong.  Hmm…”  She scowled, her half-eaten salad lying forgotten.  “This…”  She looked up.  “We’ll want to deviate from the profile,” she told her.
“Why?” Flight asked.
“Because with this shape?  We can expect to run into pirates, or a Navy, or whatever else out there- and the Enterprise may or may not even exist.  This looks like it was designed to make us vulnerable to a number of different kinds of attacks.”
Flight narrowed her eyes.  “Of course,” she muttered.  “What would you recommend?”
“First of all, this corner in three days.  They’ve probably got a ship sitting at or near that point to confirm we make it, ID our ship, and whatever else.  It’s also suspiciously close to this planetoid here.”  She tapped the planetoid.  “There could even be a fleet there, waiting to kill us.”  She looked up.  “I suggest we deviate immediately- and turn the opposite way, cut to Silent Running, and pretend like we’ve lost helm control.  Then we coast for two weeks and make a plane change, to move perpendicular to the plane of the system- but not directly, of course.  After that, we drift until we’re at least a light-month from the ecliptic, then head straight away from the star until we’re a good seven light-months out before scooping back in to approach the mission point at a crawl from out-system.”
“Won’t that mean we’re looking into the Sun?”
“At that distance, the Sun is little more than another star,” Willow told her.  “We’ll also be approaching from an odd direction- and if we approach slowly with full passives, we’ll be able to spot any defenders and identify any weak points before we ever get anywhere near the PONR for missile range.”
Flight rubbed her chin.  “Would a high-speed pass be better?”
“Not until we’ve identified the size of any encampments,” she told her.  “A high-speed pass will vastly reduce the PONR range to the sides, but we have to know where they are or we’re just as likely to charge straight into their teeth.”
“That’ll significantly extend the mission time,” Coils muttered.
“It will,” Flight agreed, then looked up at Coils.  “Was there any reason for this particular profile?”
“To lose any possible pursuit,” Coils muttered.  “That’s what they told me.”
“And if it’s just to lose pursuit…”  Flight sighed, glancing down.  “You’re right.  Especially given our speed advantage, we don’t need a complicated flight path to guarantee our pursuit gets lost.  I could see a cargo ship using such a route to lose pursuit, but us?”  She sighed again.  “We’ve got ourselves a warship, and especially considering our speed advantage, I don’t see any reason we should use such a restricted profile when the goal is to lose pursuit.”  She looked up at Willow.  “Can you get the new profile on record after breakfast?”
“Sure,” Willow muttered, glancing sideways at her salad.  She looked at the profile on the tablet in front of her for a few seconds, before looking up.  “And actually, Coils, we’ll be getting there a couple weeks ahead of schedule.  This profile has a lot of sharp curves in it- and those eat up tons of time.  Completely aside from how we’ll be going a much more direct route.”





Hardly five minutes passed before Flight looked up again, while they were collecting dishes.  “If the Engineering Society is suspect,” she muttered.  “Coils, the fancy new engine techs came from the Society, didn’t they?”
Coils took a deep breath, and let it out again.  “The ones installed on this ship did, yes.  The GSF has a much more impressive security organ, so the Dawnbreaker’s tech is probably safe.”
“Meaning, we’re probably not the only ones with the speed advantage,” Flight scowled.  “And since recon drones can already move faster than ships, it’s entirely possible we’re being followed, and not losing them with our speed.”
Willow winced.  “Very possible,” she muttered.  “Even…”  She tapped the tablet, still lying on the table, a few times.  “...  Yeah.  They must be getting sloppy.  This signal decay was obviously faked- but I’m no expert, so I don’t know how close they actually were.”
“Meaning, there’s a closer station that bounced it, and deliberately left out or broke up the high-frequency portions,” Flight muttered.
She nodded.  “That’s what it looks like.”
“We need somepony on the bridge at all times,” Flight muttered.  “That means we’re going to be sleeping in shifts.”  She paused, and looked at Shooting Star.  “Do you think you can get some extra juice out of our particle shields without going overboard?”
Coils nodded.  “Depends on how much power you want to blow on it,” she muttered.  “The Dawnbreaker pioneers the use of the Gravity Drive as a defensive system- and also as a particle deflector.  The latter of the two is just software, and I know we brought the code with us.  We should be able to get just past point nine cee, if you’re willing to burn most of our power on particle deflection.”
Flight looked at Willow.  “Let’s do that, then.  Count on there being someone chasing us, maybe using recon drones to track us so we can’t see them, then let’s go speeding away at point nine cee.”  She looked at Coils.  “Our pursuers won’t possibly be able to do that, will they?”
Coils shook her head.  “We didn’t leave the code with them- right, Star?”
Star flinched- but he’d warmed up to the other two mares over the last few months.  He was still nervous around them, but it was no longer debilitating.  “No,” he answered.  “The- The only copy is in my files.”
Flight nodded.  “Good.  Then we can run away.”
“What’s our worst-case time to get well and truly lost with that, Willow?” Flight asked.
She shrugged.  “I’d have to check the computer, but I want to say it’s somewhere between a few days and a few months.”