Page 49 of Alien Prince's Fake Bride
“Very well, Colonel,” I respond. “There’s room for improvement, I’m sure.”
It takes a while to start the ship. I left most of the systems running after we landed, but some of them had to be turned off. It’s a big ship, and there are endless safeguards and control programs that have to check that everything is all right. Especially now that I’m the only real member of the crew, apart from Bellatriz. Caret’ax isn’t much of a pilot, although he can land this thing if he has to. And while Umbra is probably one of Earth’s greatest spaceship pilots, she’s never flown a real one.
“Umbra,” I say on impulse, “sit in this seat.”
She looks over. “The pilot’s seat?”
“The prince’s seat, strictly speaking,” I reply absentmindedly. One panel is doing strange things. “You can do everything from here. Come on, I’ll show you how some of these things work.”
She comes over, a cautious smile on her face. “You’ll really show me?”
I study the panel with the unexpected reading, switching back and forth between modes. For a moment it was showing sixteenpeople aboard, not just the three of us up here and the five down in the hangar. But now it’s behaving normally. Maybe it got confused about the new gunship in the hangar.
I shrug. “You’re a pilot. And you will soon need to know how this works, when we present Earth with some of our ships. It’s only appropriate that you know something about flying them. It’s not hard at all. You will have AIs to help you, most of them much quieter than Bellatriz, thank the gods.”
“I’m actually not that talkative,”Bellatriz says from her scabbard. “It’s just that most of the time I’m the only one who knows what’s going on.”
I help Umbra get up into my seat. She sits uncomfortably high up, but she can reach most of the controls. “How does that feel?”
“Nice,” she says, looking at the controls. “Most of this is very different from what I’ve used before.”
“For now, just focus on these two panels,” I tell her. “This is the main drive. This is the take-off panel.”
I show her how to take off, and when the ship is ready, she does. I stand ready to fix any bad mistake she might make, but after a short time she does everything right. She even adds a little bit of a flourish and shows a fine feeling for the systems.
“Not bad,” I say when we’re in orbit around Grefve. “You have a feel for the orbital mechanics.”
“Read about that since I was twelve,” she says, concentrating. “It’s easy — when you go faster, your orbit shifts higher. That’s all. Shall we break orbit?”
I raise my eyebrows at her eagerness. “Anytime you want.” I let her bring us onto a new course towards Khav. She does it well,following my instructions so quickly and so well that it makes me curious.
“Something is stopping me,” she says calmly. “My inputs are being dampened and changed.”
“The AIs won't let you get anywhere near the ship's limits,”Bellatriz explains.
“Can you turn them off?”
I shrug and reduce the AI input to just intervene if Umbra's about to make a catastrophic mistake. “Umbra, how did you learn to fly that tinfoil contraption of yours?”
She keeps her eyes peeled on the instruments. “The shuttle? It’s a simple craft with only a few thrusters. I’ve done it in the simulator probably a thousand times. The simulator on the station is much better than on Earth, because the gravity is much weaker.”
I frown. “Are you translating this right, Bellatriz? Surely she said ahundredtimes.”
“A thousand times,”Bellatriz insists. “I believe it. Do you not see how smoothly she’s doing this? She feeds the power from the drive with crazy precision, she knows exactly where it pushes on the ship. She’s mentally adjusting for the gravitic pull of both Grefve and Bru, for the trajectory we had and the one we’re going to have, not to mention the inertial mass of theGladiuxand where to focus the virtual intersections of its points of momentum. As far as I can tell, she’s working with nine inertia nodes in her mind at all times, simply imagining where they must be. The system AIs only work with six.”
I glance at the display that shows the ship as a green dot and the course we’ve had until now as a blue line. That line is remarkably smooth, with none of the usual sharp kinks. “Surely the AIs are adjusting her inputs somewhat?”
“No,” Bellatriz chirps. “Nothing. It’s not necessary. All the AIs are confused. They think this is a test program that’s running. It’s a little different from your own sloppy piloting.”
“And this is her first time,” I marvel. “Umbra, I think you have a talent for this.”
“No,” she says, adding more power as we break orbit so smoothly it’s barely noticeable. “I don’t. That’s why I had to train so much. There were other cadets that were better right away. But I wanted to fly. So I practiced.”
I look over at Caret’ax. He has a rare smile on his face and raises his eyebrows at me as if to say ‘told you Earth women are good’.
I give him a shrug and a lopsided smile. ‘And you were right’.
Umbra leans back from the controls, dangling her feet. “I think that’s it.”
