Dust to Dust 4

Aggravatingly, this made sense. He couldn't blame ARC for not understanding that nothing on the visible spectrum was a flag a shade of red intense enough make strawberries blush. It was understandable to cloak a vessel like this, but doing it on such a large scale was more likely to attract attention as a relatively large portion of the night sky would be turned black without explanation.

It was odd that this only happened on the interior of the field however. Perhaps this field was not as advanced as he thought.

"If we can't see anything, how are we going to determine where this wreck is?"

"Last known location of the cloud's center?"

"Not good enough. An explosion directed out of one side of an enclosed body would not create a cloud with an center coinciding with the source of the explosion. I have no reason to believe it is anything different, and I will not waste time on a wild goose chase."

"Then what do we have to work with? The Sun?"

"Let's just calm down and think for a bit. You watch the sensors and power draw, see if there are any anomalies. I'll try to fabricate a way out of this scenario. Mercedes, you just keep being cute." She jumped up to lick his face at the mention of her name.

They spent the next few hours thinking, aimlessly drifting through space in a straight line. Occasionally, Don would throw the ball for Mercedes to jump around after. A few times they discussed a theoretical way to determine the location of a truly invisible lump of matter, but when ARC set up a simulated model to see how these would work in practice.

None of them ended up with their test ship finding the object with the data provided.

This continued until ARC took note of an oddity with the power draw. "Donovan, the Pulse shield appears to be increasing its power draw. I had assumed the previous consumption variation was correlated with the shield's internal regulation and force balancing, but it has gone far past the five percent limit for such an systems."

"So the shield is fighting harder against something. That sounds an aaaaaaaawful lot like we are getting closer. How fast is the draw growing?"

"Far too insignificant for you to extrapolate anything from it, but it is definitely growing."

"Is it enough that you can't triangulate a vector through oscillation? Are we going to have to stop to do it?"

"It might be enough if our circle is exceedingly large, but without knowing where anything is the best course of action is to halt first. Having our lingering velocity turn a circle into a coil will make my calculations take longer."

"Will we be able to come to a stop without signals from traffic beacons?"

"The momentum logs keep a record of all energy imparted on the ship both internally and externally. Even if the sun was blocked in its entirety I would be able to plot a course to put us in stable orbit."

Don turned the Noah around, lining up the dots once again and pushing the accelerator to a slightly less comfortable than usual level. Mercedes was still in his lap, so he didn't need to worry about her flying around the cockpit.

Feeling Mercedes' agitation at not being able to run about as she pleased in her struggle against his hug, Don resolved himself to properly play with her this time around. He had taken note of her recent fixation chew toys, and he was interested in getting some arm exercise in the form of tug-of-war.

He felt she was finally big enough to provide some resistance, his evidence being how hard it was to stop her from nipping at his arms. Seriously, for such a small animal she was awfully persistent when it came to biting the hand of something so much stronger than her, though ARC insisted that she was showing affection and a desire to play.

With nothing much to do besides stare at a black screen, Don started whistling some of the various marching songs he remembered from his days in the academy. Seeing as the divide known as nationality was practically eliminated, there was a plethora to choose from. A few of his favorites were Yankee Doodle, the British Grenadiers, and Erika.

He was never on the marching grounds himself, nor had he ever bothered to remember the words, so he resorted to whistling. He was not exactly the best at whistling either, some of his higher pitched notes attracted the ire of the sensitive eared dog.

Once they reached a velocity that was close enough to stationary that it didn't really matter in calculations, Don accelerated 'sideways' to a ARC's specified speed and set the angular velocity and acceleration towards the center of the circle.

This would lock the ship into an orbit around a point in space.

According to ARC, one full orbit would take about twelve hours. This would be a small orbit lengthwise if this was one naturally set around a celestial body, normally. Given that the acceleration of the ship was well in excess of that a planet would give at a similar radius, this orbit was only set to last twelve hours.

Nothing in the way to drive out of the way of, Don was excited to have that luxury called 'free time' once again.