The whole thing started at the first big con after handwavium was discovered. Yeah, it was that con, the one where some joker thought it'd be funny to spike the consuite with 'wave powder. We dodged that bullet by sheer chance; we were having dinner at an Italian place a couple blocks away from the convention center when the shit went down. By the time we got back to the con things the mayhem was in full swing & we quietly slipped away. Actually helped out a little with the big breakout from Manzanar, too - we weren't there, but we knew people who knew people and helped point them in the right direction. Even back in the beginning, the Nation took care of its own. But that's another story.
Anyway. So there we were, seven old friends who hadn't seen each other in forever finally getting a chance to talk face to face. We'd all met on the intertubes, and since life had us scattered across the northern hemisphere opportunities to get together were few and far between. As we enjoyed the meal and the wine and the conversation, talk started drifting towards handwavium.
We all knew about it, of course. We'd seen the reports of the Yokohama demonstration, read the popsci articles and newsgroup discussions and so forth. We started kicking around ideas on what to use it for - this was all blue-skying, we didn't think for a minute that we would ever get our hands on even the smallest sample of handwavium - and naturally it was KJ who came up with the idea.
"You know," he said thoughtfully, "if we had an airplane, or something that could already handle positive pressure, that would solve some of the big problems with building a handwavium spaceship." There was general agreement to this statement, and then the bombshell. "In fact," he continued, "the best thing to handwave into a spaceship would be an existing spaceship."
Silencio.
"Oh sure, like anybody's going to *give* us a spaceship."
"You never know. I mean, they're going to retire the shuttle fleet soon enough, right?"
"Yeah, but those are going to museums. Even if NASA was willing to sell one, which I doubt, the price tag would be *way* beyond anything we could afford."
Gloomy agreement, and then Zib spoke up. At the time he was working on an advanced degree in Soviet history; thirty years ago he'd have been one of Trudeau's top Kremlinologists. At this point, he just said, "Well, you know there *are* other shuttles out there."
Calc blinked. "The old Russian one? Isn't it scrap metal?"
"Yes and no. The one that actually *flew* was borked beyond repair, yeah. But they built two flight models before the funding ended. *That* one is almost complete, just needs a little touch-up work and it should be ready to go."
"Okay," said Kat. "But what about the money? Even assuming that it's up for sale, we couldn't buy it."
To this day, I don't know if it was the wine or Destiny knocking me upside the head, but all of a sudden I had a vision. I could see the path laid out in front of us. It *was* possible, we *could* do it. The risks were huge, but the rewards... I stood up (a bit unsteadily; I wasn't much of a big drinker then) and exclaimed "And why not? We're capable people, there's very little that stands in our way if we get our heads together and do the job."
Again, silence. "Um, there's the money issue-" Kat began.
"We'll get the money."
"-and the engineering problem-"
"We've got KJ, which is one hell of an edge on anybody else working with handwavium-"
"-plus we don't have any handwavium-"
"That's easy enough to fix with the right discreet inquiries."
"-and, I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure launching a non-NASA shuttle from the US is *illegal.*"
"We only have to do it once." I sat down and started speaking in as much of an undertone as the restaraunt would allow. "I'm not saying it'd be simple or easy, and I'm sure as hell not saying that if we blow it, a bunch of us might end up in trouble with the law. All I'm saying is, between our respective abilities we *can* pull this off." So saying, I started explaining the plan's broad strokes as they formed in my mind.
Twenty minutes later, I sat back in my chair and waited for them to finish digesting the idea.
"It could work..." mused Calc.
"Beats trying to hammer scrap metal into a ship," KJ said.
"Beats working for a living," Elena said with a grin.
I could see it in their faces. This was the sort of thing we all lived for, to do completely insane shit *just* to prove that it could be done. I smiled. "Well, I guess it's settled."
There was no going back, we were going to ride a space shuttle into orbit come Hell or high water. The die was cast.
------
The plan, on paper, was simple and elegant. Which of course meant that we'd find a hundred different complications while putting it into practice, but we knew that going in.
Our first task was to set up a series of shell companies. This was Calc's job; as the only one of us with any business management or legal experience, it was up to him to build the notational house of cards that was Sandwich.Net Interstellar Dungeon-Crawling Enterprises, LLC.
The company itself existed only on paper, as owner-of-record of all our property and as the parent company of The Wisconsin Flight Experience(tm), a fledgling flight museum that rented out one of the big hangers at Wittman Field, Oshkosh, WI. The WFE hangar was where we planned to house the shuttle until liftoff.
Once the business end of the company had been established, we embarked on the second stage of the project. This was the riskiest and most openly less-than-legal stage, and you'll forgive me if I don't say much about it. Not only are the technical details kind of boring, but a lot of people in New York still hold a bit of a grudge over that, blanket pardon or no, and I'd rather not let them know the exact particulars.
Anyway. The plan was, using our techgeek skills, divert half-cents from various corporate transactions on Wall Street and elsewhere into a numbered Swiss account. This particular plan allowed us to pull down hundreds of thousands of dollars into the account every day. More so when the market was trading fast. It worked so fast and so well that we had twice the amount of money we figured we needed in the first month. We kept it running for another two months, just to be sure. Once we figured we had enough money, we scrapped our diversion programs, destroyed the evidence and moved on to step three.
Step three was actually a little trickier than stage two. We had to convince the owners of record of the surviving Buran shuttle that a) we were totally legit, and b) were willing to pay top dollar for the orbiter. Simple in theory, right? Well, think again.
The Buran shuttles were a product of the Soviet space program. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, effective ownership of the space program and all it's materiel reverted first to the Commonwealth of Independent States, and then to the Russian government. The Russians then sold most of the flight hardware to the RKO Energiya cartel, which worked kind of like Boeing did for NASA at the time; the government owned most of the stuff, but the cartel did all the upkeep and flight preparation work.
Thing is, the non-flight hardware at Baikonur Spaceport - the runways, the buildings, and all the abandoned-in-place gear - technically didn't belong to either the Russian government *or* RKO Energiya. It belonged (on paper anyway) to the Republic of Kazakhstan.
The Kazakhs were willing to part with the orbiter; they had no intention on even trying to refurbish it, much less fly it. So they were more than willing to sell us the shuttle at the agreed-upon price of $20 million US. (I think they ended up using the money to finish building that giant transparent tent over the new capital's market district. Just goes to show that even Mundanes can be weird given enough money to play with.) The Russians and RKO Energiya were less happy with the sale. It took us a couple of months to smooth ruffled feathers and convince them that we had no intention of desecrating a significant Russian historical artifact.
We kept to that, too, even after all the modifications and our adventures across the steam line and the snow line. That's why the Star still flies the Hammer and Sickle on her wings, and why our "dress uniforms" all use Soviet insignia. It's not that we're commies - well, not all of us, and certainly not all the time - but it's a measure of respect for the Star's origins and the men and women who built her hardtech body.
I'm pretty sure our latent desire to do right by Korolev's great-grandchild is what sparked Ptichka, too. But we'll get back to that.
Once the money had been paid - plus a bit more thrown at the authorities to ensure smooth passage - all we had to was sit back and wait for our prize to arrive.
That's when one of the big unexpected things blew up in our faces.
------
You have to understand, when we started out on this path we figured that we could do it *completely* under the radar, without the 'danelaw noticing until we were ready to leave. And the first parts, the computer fraud, the negotiations with Kazakhstan, they all went exactly as we'd planned.
It was when the lake barge with the orbiter finally docked at the nearest cargo port to Oshkosh that we realized that we were in for a huge problem. It's not every day that a Soviet space shuttle shows up at a cargo transfer terminal, and the media had a field day with it. All of a sudden, we were national news, and we were *totally* unprepared for it.
About the same time the orbiter arrived in Oshkosh, our initial supply of handwavium arrived. We'd gotten samples of the two basic types; we'd intended to use the black boxes as our primary powerplant, engines and internal gravity system. The guacamole would be put to use in the life-support system. We also derived a form of the guacamole that resembled a clearcoat varnish; we'd use that on the outside of the hull as support for the heatshield.
Not that we could *say* any of this to the media, of course. The latest idiot in chief had been elected on an impromptu platform of cracking down on "this substance that makes a mockery of God's laws and corrupts our children." The new congress was unable to just say "no" to a save-the-chillins law, and the handwavium bans were just around the corner. If we'd come out and said that we were planning to turn this Cold War relic into a real by-Ghu spaceship using those 55-gallon barrels of handwavium over there in the corner? We'd have been in jail twenty minutes later!
Thankfully, the media stopped bugging us about it after the transfer was finished and we'd sent out a few noncommital press releases. A few folks were suspicious about where we'd gotten the money, and tried to track our funds. All I can say to *that* is thank Ghu for Swiss bankers. The Gnomes provide the finest financial black holes anywhere in the system, and I wouldn't be here to say so if they hadn't stonewalled like they did.
Our impromptu brush with celebrity made us realize, I think, that we were working on borrowed time. Between the media spotlight on us and the government crackdowns on 'wave, sooner or later some enterprising young reporter or ambitious prosecutor was going to pierce the veil and see what we were really up to. We knew the SEC was trying to piece together our diversionary scheme, and that the local cops were wondering what we needed the mystery barrels for. If we were going to get to the black, we had to start moving quickly.
------
It took us six months to be ready. We almost didn't make it.
The hardest part was getting the cabin extended and ready. The 1.02 airframe was built for flight, so it had a pressure hull installed. Thing was, it was designed as an automated model, so none of the actual crew gear had been installed. This was good to the point where we didn't have to rip a lot of crap out of the walls to install our own gear, but it meant we had to install a lot *more* gear on the middeck than we'd originally planned.
We persevered. Toiling around the clock - or as close as we could - all week for months on end we managed to get the orbiter flight ready. We stripped out the old orbital maneuvering engines (leaving the engine bells for aesthetic effect) and used the open space to install our cluster of Black Boxes. Three cubes and a sphere, arranged around each other in what (we hoped) would amount to a reactor and engine. We extended the pressure hull using sheet alumninum and handwavium varnish, running down the entire length of the cargo bay. We replaced the old Soviet flight instruments with equipment scavenged from junked Learjets and stolen from CompUSA dumpsters. The original ship's computers were replaced with a troika of 'wave-treated Athlon 64s. The exterior we repainted, replacing missing heat tiles with 'wave-treated polystyrene and covering the whole thing with the varnish. We kept her flag and the original two-tone color scheme, but renamed her with bold microgramma capitals just beneath the windscreen: EXPLAIN STAR.
The name is a bit of an old inside joke on our part. A long time ago, we'd been participants on a Trek MOO, and we'd played the part of Klingon privateers. We had *intended* to name our ship the Black Star, but somebody typoed the Klingoniasse and we ended up with Explain Star. Instead of correcting the error, the name... stuck. And so history is made.
When we first powered up the Star, the handwavium interacted with the CPUs and sparked something. It wasn't quite an AI, like other 'wave pioneers had reported, and it wasn't something as outre like a full humanoid avatar like you'd hear rumors about. As far as we could tell, the handwavium - *all* the handwavium, the guacamole we'd used in life support, the black boxes, the varnish, every last ounce - suddenly networked and started talking to each other. A few minutes later, we heard this questioning chime from the main control panel.
It took us a bit to figure out what had just happened, but once we did, we named her Ptichka, after the orbiter's original unofficial designation: "Little Bird." Since she only communicated with chirps, chimes and the occasional text message, it seemed appropriate.
By the time Ptichka arrived, fall was setting in, starting to turn to winter. We'd gotten all but the most trivial work finished, most of us had already moved our gear into the Star, and we were ready for takeoff.
That's when Murphy decided to bring the hammer down.
------
I remember the whole thing very clearly. I was on the flight deck when the call came in, working on sharpening my flying skills. None of us had any real clue what we were doing when it came to flying an airplane - logged time on Microsoft Flight Simulator nonwithstanding - and I'd taken itupon myself to be the chief pilot. My idea, my fault if we got ourselves killed. Anyway, I was on the flight deck racking up some simulator time with Ptichka when Shad vaulted up the middeck ladder yelling "MAL! WE'VE BEEN MADE!"
I didn't have to ask what he meant. "How many?"
"Townies, state cops, FBI, ATF, DHS *and* they've got choppers!"
"Where's everybody?"
"Getting aboard. KJ's disconnecting the hanger connections, everybody else is cramming as much gear as we can into the aft."
I switched on the intercom, toggling the hanger PA. "KJ! How long until she's ready?"
the intercom crackled back.
"Shad," I snapped. "Go back and help KJ." I switched on the intercom again. "Everybody else: Get everything you can aboard in the next two minutes and thirty seconds. We lift one minute after that!" I snapped off the intercom, took half a second to glance backwards, saw Shad jump down the access hatch, and turned back to the controls, getting us switched out of sim mode and starting preflight. Ptichka made a worried sound, and I patted the console out of reflex.
"It's okay, little bird," I said softly. "They won't catch us."
Two minutes later, Shad and Elena came up the ladder. "We're aboard!" Elena shouted. "Hatches closed, cables disconnected, let's GO!"
Just then, the hanger doors swung open to reveal a whole lotta cops. You remember that scene in The Blues Brothers, the one where they're at the register window and it looks like the whole Chicago PD was crammed in there pointing guns at them? That was sort of what the scene outside looked like. All these cop cars turned sideways in a clear effort to blockade the exit, lots of uniformed men pointing pistols and rifles at us. Very charming, really. At the center of the formation a dude in the traditional Fed windbreaker leveled a bullhorn at us.
"ATTENTION! YOU ARE UNDER ARREST! SHUT DOWN YOUR ENGINES AND EXIT THE AIRCRAFT OR YOU WILL BE FIRED ON! THIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING!"
"Such a charming invitation," I noted.
"How could we refuse?" Elena asked from the right-hand seat with a feral grin.
"I just hope the deflectors work," Shad noted gloomily, "or we're all going to look really stupid."
I flipped Mr. FBI the bird and switched on the engines. The Star shuddered a little as the drive's gravity cushion took over from the Earth's pull. The landing gear retracted smoothly, without even the slightest bump. Outside, the cops tried to start shooting at us, but the cloud of debris the gravfield was kicking up inside the hangar kept scattering them. I raised the ship up to three meters and sailed straight out over their heads. Thanks to the hull cameras, we got a great view of the cops running for cover as we drifted past.
Once I had her hovering over the apron, I raised her up another twenty meters - scattering the police choppers in the process - swung her nose out to face the lake, and started flying off, nice and slow. I wanted to go exoatmospheric a fair distance away from the town, just in case. I let her pick up speed as we travelled, and once the shore was out of sight I pulled back hard on the stick and shoved the throttle forward.
The Star stood up on her tail and accelerated like a bat out of Hell. They probably heard the sonic boom in Minneapolis. The sky turned reddish-orange as the air compressed into plasma around our nose, then vanished into the deepest black you've ever seen. I gave it a few more seconds, then tipped her nose over. Below us was the curve of the Earth, the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen to that point.
We'd made it.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
Anyway. So there we were, seven old friends who hadn't seen each other in forever finally getting a chance to talk face to face. We'd all met on the intertubes, and since life had us scattered across the northern hemisphere opportunities to get together were few and far between. As we enjoyed the meal and the wine and the conversation, talk started drifting towards handwavium.
We all knew about it, of course. We'd seen the reports of the Yokohama demonstration, read the popsci articles and newsgroup discussions and so forth. We started kicking around ideas on what to use it for - this was all blue-skying, we didn't think for a minute that we would ever get our hands on even the smallest sample of handwavium - and naturally it was KJ who came up with the idea.
"You know," he said thoughtfully, "if we had an airplane, or something that could already handle positive pressure, that would solve some of the big problems with building a handwavium spaceship." There was general agreement to this statement, and then the bombshell. "In fact," he continued, "the best thing to handwave into a spaceship would be an existing spaceship."
Silencio.
"Oh sure, like anybody's going to *give* us a spaceship."
"You never know. I mean, they're going to retire the shuttle fleet soon enough, right?"
"Yeah, but those are going to museums. Even if NASA was willing to sell one, which I doubt, the price tag would be *way* beyond anything we could afford."
Gloomy agreement, and then Zib spoke up. At the time he was working on an advanced degree in Soviet history; thirty years ago he'd have been one of Trudeau's top Kremlinologists. At this point, he just said, "Well, you know there *are* other shuttles out there."
Calc blinked. "The old Russian one? Isn't it scrap metal?"
"Yes and no. The one that actually *flew* was borked beyond repair, yeah. But they built two flight models before the funding ended. *That* one is almost complete, just needs a little touch-up work and it should be ready to go."
"Okay," said Kat. "But what about the money? Even assuming that it's up for sale, we couldn't buy it."
To this day, I don't know if it was the wine or Destiny knocking me upside the head, but all of a sudden I had a vision. I could see the path laid out in front of us. It *was* possible, we *could* do it. The risks were huge, but the rewards... I stood up (a bit unsteadily; I wasn't much of a big drinker then) and exclaimed "And why not? We're capable people, there's very little that stands in our way if we get our heads together and do the job."
Again, silence. "Um, there's the money issue-" Kat began.
"We'll get the money."
"-and the engineering problem-"
"We've got KJ, which is one hell of an edge on anybody else working with handwavium-"
"-plus we don't have any handwavium-"
"That's easy enough to fix with the right discreet inquiries."
"-and, I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure launching a non-NASA shuttle from the US is *illegal.*"
"We only have to do it once." I sat down and started speaking in as much of an undertone as the restaraunt would allow. "I'm not saying it'd be simple or easy, and I'm sure as hell not saying that if we blow it, a bunch of us might end up in trouble with the law. All I'm saying is, between our respective abilities we *can* pull this off." So saying, I started explaining the plan's broad strokes as they formed in my mind.
Twenty minutes later, I sat back in my chair and waited for them to finish digesting the idea.
"It could work..." mused Calc.
"Beats trying to hammer scrap metal into a ship," KJ said.
"Beats working for a living," Elena said with a grin.
I could see it in their faces. This was the sort of thing we all lived for, to do completely insane shit *just* to prove that it could be done. I smiled. "Well, I guess it's settled."
There was no going back, we were going to ride a space shuttle into orbit come Hell or high water. The die was cast.
------
The plan, on paper, was simple and elegant. Which of course meant that we'd find a hundred different complications while putting it into practice, but we knew that going in.
Our first task was to set up a series of shell companies. This was Calc's job; as the only one of us with any business management or legal experience, it was up to him to build the notational house of cards that was Sandwich.Net Interstellar Dungeon-Crawling Enterprises, LLC.
The company itself existed only on paper, as owner-of-record of all our property and as the parent company of The Wisconsin Flight Experience(tm), a fledgling flight museum that rented out one of the big hangers at Wittman Field, Oshkosh, WI. The WFE hangar was where we planned to house the shuttle until liftoff.
Once the business end of the company had been established, we embarked on the second stage of the project. This was the riskiest and most openly less-than-legal stage, and you'll forgive me if I don't say much about it. Not only are the technical details kind of boring, but a lot of people in New York still hold a bit of a grudge over that, blanket pardon or no, and I'd rather not let them know the exact particulars.
Anyway. The plan was, using our techgeek skills, divert half-cents from various corporate transactions on Wall Street and elsewhere into a numbered Swiss account. This particular plan allowed us to pull down hundreds of thousands of dollars into the account every day. More so when the market was trading fast. It worked so fast and so well that we had twice the amount of money we figured we needed in the first month. We kept it running for another two months, just to be sure. Once we figured we had enough money, we scrapped our diversion programs, destroyed the evidence and moved on to step three.
Step three was actually a little trickier than stage two. We had to convince the owners of record of the surviving Buran shuttle that a) we were totally legit, and b) were willing to pay top dollar for the orbiter. Simple in theory, right? Well, think again.
The Buran shuttles were a product of the Soviet space program. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, effective ownership of the space program and all it's materiel reverted first to the Commonwealth of Independent States, and then to the Russian government. The Russians then sold most of the flight hardware to the RKO Energiya cartel, which worked kind of like Boeing did for NASA at the time; the government owned most of the stuff, but the cartel did all the upkeep and flight preparation work.
Thing is, the non-flight hardware at Baikonur Spaceport - the runways, the buildings, and all the abandoned-in-place gear - technically didn't belong to either the Russian government *or* RKO Energiya. It belonged (on paper anyway) to the Republic of Kazakhstan.
The Kazakhs were willing to part with the orbiter; they had no intention on even trying to refurbish it, much less fly it. So they were more than willing to sell us the shuttle at the agreed-upon price of $20 million US. (I think they ended up using the money to finish building that giant transparent tent over the new capital's market district. Just goes to show that even Mundanes can be weird given enough money to play with.) The Russians and RKO Energiya were less happy with the sale. It took us a couple of months to smooth ruffled feathers and convince them that we had no intention of desecrating a significant Russian historical artifact.
We kept to that, too, even after all the modifications and our adventures across the steam line and the snow line. That's why the Star still flies the Hammer and Sickle on her wings, and why our "dress uniforms" all use Soviet insignia. It's not that we're commies - well, not all of us, and certainly not all the time - but it's a measure of respect for the Star's origins and the men and women who built her hardtech body.
I'm pretty sure our latent desire to do right by Korolev's great-grandchild is what sparked Ptichka, too. But we'll get back to that.
Once the money had been paid - plus a bit more thrown at the authorities to ensure smooth passage - all we had to was sit back and wait for our prize to arrive.
That's when one of the big unexpected things blew up in our faces.
------
You have to understand, when we started out on this path we figured that we could do it *completely* under the radar, without the 'danelaw noticing until we were ready to leave. And the first parts, the computer fraud, the negotiations with Kazakhstan, they all went exactly as we'd planned.
It was when the lake barge with the orbiter finally docked at the nearest cargo port to Oshkosh that we realized that we were in for a huge problem. It's not every day that a Soviet space shuttle shows up at a cargo transfer terminal, and the media had a field day with it. All of a sudden, we were national news, and we were *totally* unprepared for it.
About the same time the orbiter arrived in Oshkosh, our initial supply of handwavium arrived. We'd gotten samples of the two basic types; we'd intended to use the black boxes as our primary powerplant, engines and internal gravity system. The guacamole would be put to use in the life-support system. We also derived a form of the guacamole that resembled a clearcoat varnish; we'd use that on the outside of the hull as support for the heatshield.
Not that we could *say* any of this to the media, of course. The latest idiot in chief had been elected on an impromptu platform of cracking down on "this substance that makes a mockery of God's laws and corrupts our children." The new congress was unable to just say "no" to a save-the-chillins law, and the handwavium bans were just around the corner. If we'd come out and said that we were planning to turn this Cold War relic into a real by-Ghu spaceship using those 55-gallon barrels of handwavium over there in the corner? We'd have been in jail twenty minutes later!
Thankfully, the media stopped bugging us about it after the transfer was finished and we'd sent out a few noncommital press releases. A few folks were suspicious about where we'd gotten the money, and tried to track our funds. All I can say to *that* is thank Ghu for Swiss bankers. The Gnomes provide the finest financial black holes anywhere in the system, and I wouldn't be here to say so if they hadn't stonewalled like they did.
Our impromptu brush with celebrity made us realize, I think, that we were working on borrowed time. Between the media spotlight on us and the government crackdowns on 'wave, sooner or later some enterprising young reporter or ambitious prosecutor was going to pierce the veil and see what we were really up to. We knew the SEC was trying to piece together our diversionary scheme, and that the local cops were wondering what we needed the mystery barrels for. If we were going to get to the black, we had to start moving quickly.
------
It took us six months to be ready. We almost didn't make it.
The hardest part was getting the cabin extended and ready. The 1.02 airframe was built for flight, so it had a pressure hull installed. Thing was, it was designed as an automated model, so none of the actual crew gear had been installed. This was good to the point where we didn't have to rip a lot of crap out of the walls to install our own gear, but it meant we had to install a lot *more* gear on the middeck than we'd originally planned.
We persevered. Toiling around the clock - or as close as we could - all week for months on end we managed to get the orbiter flight ready. We stripped out the old orbital maneuvering engines (leaving the engine bells for aesthetic effect) and used the open space to install our cluster of Black Boxes. Three cubes and a sphere, arranged around each other in what (we hoped) would amount to a reactor and engine. We extended the pressure hull using sheet alumninum and handwavium varnish, running down the entire length of the cargo bay. We replaced the old Soviet flight instruments with equipment scavenged from junked Learjets and stolen from CompUSA dumpsters. The original ship's computers were replaced with a troika of 'wave-treated Athlon 64s. The exterior we repainted, replacing missing heat tiles with 'wave-treated polystyrene and covering the whole thing with the varnish. We kept her flag and the original two-tone color scheme, but renamed her with bold microgramma capitals just beneath the windscreen: EXPLAIN STAR.
The name is a bit of an old inside joke on our part. A long time ago, we'd been participants on a Trek MOO, and we'd played the part of Klingon privateers. We had *intended* to name our ship the Black Star, but somebody typoed the Klingoniasse and we ended up with Explain Star. Instead of correcting the error, the name... stuck. And so history is made.
When we first powered up the Star, the handwavium interacted with the CPUs and sparked something. It wasn't quite an AI, like other 'wave pioneers had reported, and it wasn't something as outre like a full humanoid avatar like you'd hear rumors about. As far as we could tell, the handwavium - *all* the handwavium, the guacamole we'd used in life support, the black boxes, the varnish, every last ounce - suddenly networked and started talking to each other. A few minutes later, we heard this questioning chime from the main control panel.
It took us a bit to figure out what had just happened, but once we did, we named her Ptichka, after the orbiter's original unofficial designation: "Little Bird." Since she only communicated with chirps, chimes and the occasional text message, it seemed appropriate.
By the time Ptichka arrived, fall was setting in, starting to turn to winter. We'd gotten all but the most trivial work finished, most of us had already moved our gear into the Star, and we were ready for takeoff.
That's when Murphy decided to bring the hammer down.
------
I remember the whole thing very clearly. I was on the flight deck when the call came in, working on sharpening my flying skills. None of us had any real clue what we were doing when it came to flying an airplane - logged time on Microsoft Flight Simulator nonwithstanding - and I'd taken itupon myself to be the chief pilot. My idea, my fault if we got ourselves killed. Anyway, I was on the flight deck racking up some simulator time with Ptichka when Shad vaulted up the middeck ladder yelling "MAL! WE'VE BEEN MADE!"
I didn't have to ask what he meant. "How many?"
"Townies, state cops, FBI, ATF, DHS *and* they've got choppers!"
"Where's everybody?"
"Getting aboard. KJ's disconnecting the hanger connections, everybody else is cramming as much gear as we can into the aft."
I switched on the intercom, toggling the hanger PA. "KJ! How long until she's ready?"
the intercom crackled back.
"Shad," I snapped. "Go back and help KJ." I switched on the intercom again. "Everybody else: Get everything you can aboard in the next two minutes and thirty seconds. We lift one minute after that!" I snapped off the intercom, took half a second to glance backwards, saw Shad jump down the access hatch, and turned back to the controls, getting us switched out of sim mode and starting preflight. Ptichka made a worried sound, and I patted the console out of reflex.
"It's okay, little bird," I said softly. "They won't catch us."
Two minutes later, Shad and Elena came up the ladder. "We're aboard!" Elena shouted. "Hatches closed, cables disconnected, let's GO!"
Just then, the hanger doors swung open to reveal a whole lotta cops. You remember that scene in The Blues Brothers, the one where they're at the register window and it looks like the whole Chicago PD was crammed in there pointing guns at them? That was sort of what the scene outside looked like. All these cop cars turned sideways in a clear effort to blockade the exit, lots of uniformed men pointing pistols and rifles at us. Very charming, really. At the center of the formation a dude in the traditional Fed windbreaker leveled a bullhorn at us.
"ATTENTION! YOU ARE UNDER ARREST! SHUT DOWN YOUR ENGINES AND EXIT THE AIRCRAFT OR YOU WILL BE FIRED ON! THIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING!"
"Such a charming invitation," I noted.
"How could we refuse?" Elena asked from the right-hand seat with a feral grin.
"I just hope the deflectors work," Shad noted gloomily, "or we're all going to look really stupid."
I flipped Mr. FBI the bird and switched on the engines. The Star shuddered a little as the drive's gravity cushion took over from the Earth's pull. The landing gear retracted smoothly, without even the slightest bump. Outside, the cops tried to start shooting at us, but the cloud of debris the gravfield was kicking up inside the hangar kept scattering them. I raised the ship up to three meters and sailed straight out over their heads. Thanks to the hull cameras, we got a great view of the cops running for cover as we drifted past.
Once I had her hovering over the apron, I raised her up another twenty meters - scattering the police choppers in the process - swung her nose out to face the lake, and started flying off, nice and slow. I wanted to go exoatmospheric a fair distance away from the town, just in case. I let her pick up speed as we travelled, and once the shore was out of sight I pulled back hard on the stick and shoved the throttle forward.
The Star stood up on her tail and accelerated like a bat out of Hell. They probably heard the sonic boom in Minneapolis. The sky turned reddish-orange as the air compressed into plasma around our nose, then vanished into the deepest black you've ever seen. I gave it a few more seconds, then tipped her nose over. Below us was the curve of the Earth, the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen to that point.
We'd made it.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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