The ship felt different. Oh, nothing was out of place – it was the same tiny world I've lived in for sixteen years, but it wasn't quite the same either. The difference was subtle, and mostly in my head, but as I made my rounds late in the 5th watch, I could sense it. We had resumed our course change with only our balancing rockets, and the sound of only those rockets, at full power, was something out of my usual orbit, a sound I'd never heard before – we rarely ran them at anything more than minimum, even when maneuvering in the Anjur Passage. The ship under their power alone sounded different, tinnier, and each engine contributed its own voice to the subtle vibration and muffled roar. And then too, the pseudo-gravity was unfamiliar, the eight engines did not produce our familiar standard acceleration.
And then there was the uncertainty. We were in no immediate danger, and should be in none. If we stuck with only the balancing rockets we'd fail to meet our promised delivery dates. And while that was a result of the known hazards of space travel, it still felt like a failure on my part – and on the ship's as well. I'd always counted on the Lost Star to be absolutely reliable, and this incident had shaken that assumption. You can never be absolutely certain of anything in space. It's one thing to know that, another to feel it. I'd come to take it for granted that it was a certainty, so I found it all rather unnerving.
Other than the engines, the ship was quiet. Being under power, we operated with the full three-person watch, and except for the engine room crew, the others, not on watch, had retired for the night. I quickly made my way through the upper decks, and down to the engine room where I knew I'd find some shipmates at work.
Riv had the watch on the control platform and Lilm, who'd be standing the next watch was beside him. Myes was on a platform in the depths of the engine room below, intently studying the main engine.
I nodded as I crossed the catwalk from the main access well to the control center.
'How's it looking?' I asked over the multi-voiced roar of the eight smaller rockets.
Riv shrugged, 'Well, Skipper, so far we've not come up with anything that would rule it out. But we'll need to take a much closer look at it once we're done with engines.'
'We'll have almost a week before we'll need to begin decelerating, so take your time and devise a step-by-step plan. It is, as far as I'm concerned, plan B. Though it won't be my decision,' I added.
'You're thinking Talley will go for the delivery date...' grinned Riv.
'I don't know. Vyn feels like I do, better to do it by the book. Better the unfortunate, but necessary delay rather than the uncertainty of an unproven fix. If we ran into a fatal hitch at the end of the process, we'd end up deep in the drifts and it would take months to dig ourselves back out and to Zilantre with just our balancing rockets alone.'
'Aye, but pushing them at full power for 70 some days is not going to be a picnic, either,' said Riv.
'They'll last, won't they?' I asked, somewhat alarmed.
'Aye,' replied Lilm, 'they'll last. They're designed to run at full power for tens of thousands of hours. It's a matter of changing their set ways. They've always run at 10-12% power, and usually only for several days at a time. To ask them to run full out for the better part of two thousand hours is a big change in their usual pattern and when you change a set pattern, you get a lot of little things going wrong, pumps, fuel lines and injectors, sensors and such. Nothing we can't handle.'
'But we'll be nursing them and holding their hands the whole way,' added Riv with a grin. 'There'd be no rest for the wicked.'
I considered that and said, 'Just between old shipmates, would you care to tackle moving the main engine assuming you discover no major hitches in the plan, or just stick with the balancing rockets? It'll be between Min and me if comes down to that, so you needn't worry about getting involved. I just want to get a feeling about how much resistance should I put up if she chooses to gamble on the main engine.'
Lilm glanced at Riv and back to me. 'It'd give us something to brag about.'
I nodded. That was what I was afraid of. And they'd make an epic of it.