Alacritous Regress

Installment 8: Navy and Nerds

"Your want us to go where!?"

The holo feed shushes Tail. "As I was saying, you're being deployed to SQ-5. It's situated in the middle of the neutral territory." Nick is briefing us from back on Terra, several light years away. "SQ-5 is a habitable planet, but only barely. It orbits in the inner portion of its star's goldilocks zone."

"So why are we going to an uninhabited planet in the middle of nowhere where we'll fry to death?" I ask the hologram. "You need one of the early warning sensors fixed."

"Not anything that simple," he replies, "We've detected several Shike ships moving to that location recently."

"So you thought 'Lets send the expendables to deal with the Shike all by themselves,'" Arron glares at the hologram.

The entire crew of the Alacritous Regress is assembled in the mess to receive a deployment for the continual conflict against the Shike. To inform us of our new mission, NASA was utilizing rather expensive realtime FTL comm to generate a holographic image of ground control.

"Not quite," Nick tells Arron. "You have been assigned as the shuttle escort for the TSS Galileo."

"NO!" Quick shouts. "Not happening! Not in your life!" NASA and the Terran Space Service, or Navy, have always disliked each other. Most of this dislike originated from the power difference the two branches hold. The average NASA ship is a largish shuttle packed to the brim with weapons and scientific equipment, the average Navy ship is a frigate that is around three times the size of a shuttle. Despite these causes for dislike between the two groups, Quick's outburst is still much more aggressive than normal. "We don't need the help of the Navy!"

"Quick," I start, "We're going up against several Shike vessels. I'm pretty sure that we're going to need an actually warship." Despite its heavy armaments, the Alacritous is not a warship.

"No!" Quick insists. "We don't need the Navy's help on this mission." She stares at me with an adamant gaze.

"Ahem," Nick catches her attention. "This isn't your mission, this is the Galileo's mission. You're just there as a shuttle escort."

Quick quickly starts criticizing that, "So you just decided to let the Navy screw us up because we are the least important of all the hundreds of shuttles out their." Her gaze burns through Nicks hologram.

He takes a deep breath before talking. "Actually, the Alacritous was chosen for this mission because it is the only shuttle in our arsenal fast enough to keep up with the Galileo."

"What!" Nick flinches. "What do you mean only shuttle fast enough! What about all your fancy Pegasus shuttles? Are they to expensive too hand over to the Navy to f__k up?" The rest of the crew has slowly crept as far away from Quick as they could.

"The Alacritous is nearly twice as fast as a Pegasus shuttle," Nick informs her.

"Don't f__king mess..."

"Actually," I interrupt, "The Alacritous is faster than a Pegasus. We just never reach max speed because our nav computer doesn't match up to our engines."

"Yeah," Blue speaks up, "I've noticed something like that. The warp drives aren't standardized, they appear to be some sort of large interceptor drives rather then the normal compression drives. But this is the only Sleipnir I've seen, so I had no idea it wasn't the norm."

"Huh?" Quick's temper starts to decline.

"We get a software upgrade and proceed on our way to rendezvous with the ship," I summarize. Quick, seeing her defeat at hand, humphs and storms out of the mess.