The Lotus Eaters

'I've got nothing forward, Captain,' the crewwoman answered. 'Nothing on radar, lidar or visual.'

'Then look behind,' Richard commanded.

The simulation was good enough for the crewwoman's face to acquire an expression of horror. She turned back away and began manipulating the controls in front of her. A flip of the switch, just before she faced back toward Richard, changed the viewscreen from slowly orbiting entrails to an outline of the ship. The diagram shrank in scale until a cloud of something appeared on the lower right side of the screen. A dotted line, marked with time hacks, showed the ship's course. Another showed the course of the meteoroid cloud. They intersected.

'I ran back the orientation of the spinning decks in time, Captain. All three strikes came from the direction of that cloud.'

The simulated crewwoman turned again back toward her panel and the viewscreen. She exclaimed aloud, with a strong note of panic, 'Lord Buddha, we're going to die!'

* * *

The program could be used both with or without a human moderator. It was preferred to use such a moderator, because machine intelligence had never proved worth a damn in analyzing or reacting to the nuances of human emotion, or the speech which either moderated it or exacerbated it. A human might get it wrong; a machine was certain to.

Wallenstein listened very carefully to every syllable Richard uttered.

'Calm down,' she heard Richard snap. 'Give me some options.'

Not bad, Marguerite thought. Sure, he's got a little fear in his own voice. If it were completely absent that would scare me—or any sensible member of the crew—more, since that would mean he was an idiot. Not bad.

* * *

'I'm sorry, Captain,' the simulated crewwoman said. Subtle hints—the drape of shoulders, the angle of heads, and the few expressions he could see—told Richard he'd said approximately the right thing.

' 'Options,' I said.' Richard paused for a moment and then added, 'Think before you give them to me. In the interim, sound Red Alert, General Quarters, and Don Suits.'

A siren wailed through the notional ship. Lights flashed. The simulacra on the bridge began reaching into nearby compartments and pulling on their emergency suits. These were unarmored but would at least keep air in. The computer could not simulate Richard putting on a suit, but, after a short period of time, changed his image to show the outlines of a clear facemask even while the VR suit pressurized in places to simulate the feel of a emergency suit.

The chair shuddered once again, then began to spin. Even though the image painted on Richard's eyes stayed approximately the same, barring only that several crewmembers who were still unstrapped while putting on their suits were thrown violently across the bridge, the combination of spin and unchanging view rekindled his nausea.

Fuck. 'Where was that?' he demanded.

'We've lost the mast, sir, though the sail's hanging on by the stays! Medical team to the bridge!'

There was another shudder in the chair, followed by spinning in the vertical plane.

'Another strike amidships, Captain!

How many more of these? Richard wondered. That sparked another thought.

'Activate the alternative bridge. XO to the alternate bridge. XO to the alternate bridge.'

'I've got some options for you, Captain,' Operations said. 'But they're not good options.'

Life support announced, 'Captain, that last strike missed Reactor Number Two, but it's taken out the cooling system.'

'Captain, we've just rotated into the remains of the mast.'

'Captain, sick bay has taken a hit.'

'Captain, inspection shows the keel tube is bent and rotation of exterior decks must halt. She's ripping herself apart, Skipper.'

At that the gimbaled chair began a purely random rotation, even as the speakers in the helmet began to blare out the sounds of screeching metal and composites, being torn apart.

'Option One, skipper, is to . . .'

* * *

Disasters were coming at him fast and furious now, with still new disasters springing up from old ones. Was there an urgent repair that needed to be made? Was one of the Damage Control teams annihilated? Why, oh why, didn't I have them suit up after the first hit? Reactor overheating? I should have ordered one of them shut down to reduce the chances of a critical hit. Worse, some of his regrets were mutually exclusive or contradictory. Power outages? Thank the elder gods I kept both reactors going; what if I'd shut down Number One?

Richard was simply too busy at the moment to suspect the truth, that the simulation program was designed to keep him behind the command power curve, to throw him decisions and disasters faster than he could keep up with them, however quickly and even however wisely he might have decided, to do so the faster, the faster he moved.

In the end, it didn't matter what he did. Reactor Number Two went critical and, next thing, he found himself once again slowly spinning, alone with the simulated stars.

This time, right into his helmet, he did vomit.