Read Online A Planned Improvisation by Jonathan Edward Feinstein - Free Book Online

Dannet observed and he sat down beside her although it was clear he was observing the working of the ship as the one-time captain of an Alliance vessel.
    The large craft rolled to the foot of the base’s oldest runway and on receiving final clearance, left Van Winkle Base and set a course for the outer system. They rose up through the sky smoothly to an altitude of forty thousand feet on their jet engines and then Park gave the command to ignite the rocket.
    Once again, they felt the familiar pressure of enhanced acceleration pushing them firmly into their chairs as the sky turned from indigo to black. Then came what felt like the longest wait of all to Park as they spent several hours in Earth orbit running down the final deep-space check list. So many times in the past they had been lifting under emergency conditions and this final check had been omitted, but there was nothing of an emergency nature on this trip and so Park forced himself to sit back and out wait the long checklist procedure.
    It was not that Park had nothing to do, but as captain his immediate job was to accept the reports as they came in and he knew from experience that they would all come in at once. In the meantime, he called up the latest edition of the Ghelati Daily Report, a Mer version of an electronic newspaper and caught up on what had been going on around the world while he, Iris, Marisea and Dannet had been on vacation.
    It turned out it have been an uneventful period. Several Galactic ships – the Mer continued to refer to the peoples of the Alliance of Confederated Planets as “Galactics” – had come and gone from Collins Base on Luna. They seem to have all been traders doing business with Alliance concerns that had established branches on the Moon during the long period that the Alliance claimed ownership of the natural satellite and who had chosen to stay after said ownership had been returned to the Earth.
    Elsewhere in the world, the news was satisfyingly boring. Park actually preferred it that way. All had been quiet during the last three years giving them time to rebuild from the Alliance attacks that had preceded Earth’s acceptance by the majority of the Diet, the Alliance’s central government. There had been a local election in Bacaw during which most of the incumbents had been re-elected and ground had been broken for a new building, based on Human records of skyscrapers in Senchi along a river that emptied into the northeastern part of the Bay of Coolinda.
    Park was skeptical as to whether the Mer needed such a tall building in any of their cities. Mer construction tended to expand horizontally rather than vertically, almost never growing beyond four or five stories. But the Mer seemed fascinated by the Human methods of doing things. Larie Hawshu was constantly looking at samples of human concrete even though it was apparent that the Mer material was superior in nearly every aspect.
    Finally, the reports started coming in and once he was assured that all was ready for deep space, Park gave the order and Phoenix Child began the mission in earnest. A trip to Saturn would have taken months for a manned vessel in the Twenty-first Century. An unmanned craft would have conserved fuel and taken years to make the trip, looping around the system and past Earth two or three times in order to build up the velocity necessary to reach Saturnian orbit.
    The Mer interplanetary drives, however, could accelerate all the way out and back and therefore make the outbound trip in under a week. If they had needed to get there sooner, Park could have ordered high acceleration and arrived in half the time, but there was no need to hurry and the week slipped by rapidly enough. Park took the opportunity to sit down with Iris and Ronnie and discuss Ronnie’s other recent improvements to the ship and her armaments.
    “I have managed to tweak the engine efficiency another two percent,” Ronnie reported. “Well, actually I just followed Vel’s