The lack of noise on the auxiliary bridge was rather disquieting to Michael, as he watched Senior Lieutenant Eugene Kelly playback a recording of a Sailing Master at work. At the moment, most of the quiet was because they were the only two using the compartment. What made it all the more disquieting though, was that the recording, which had been made with full sound, was largely silent. In the holo-vid, Michael watched as another officer, one he didn’t recognize, focused so heavily on a holographic tactical readout that he appeared to be in trance except for brief spouts of furious activity. Even then as often as not, the officer remained silent, tapping commands into controls that surrounded the readout. When he did speak, breaking the monotonous silence, it was usually to yell a obtusely quick command to one of the Astrogation or Tactical crew members.

As Michael watched, the officer again launched into one of his little fits of activity, hurriedly slamming some new command into the controls. Unlike previous commands however, this one produced a tell tale response, as the acceleration numbers scrolling along one side of the recording suddenly shot up, to almost three times normal cruise rate for any ship that Michael had ever heard of. And as soon as those acceleration numbers shot up, the officer in the recording for the first time Michael had seen, finally smiled and seemed to relax. It was this sudden change in atmosphere, that the recording abruptly ended.

“What were you able to take away from this recording, Midshipman?” Senior Lieutenant Kelly asked, as he looked at Michael from across the holo tank.

Michael sat in one of the half dozen chairs surrounding the large holographic tank, the only one it’s size on the ship, across from Senior Lieutenant Kelly. Looking at him, Michael saw a slightly battered Senior Lieutenant, a little older then most Senior Lieutenants and a little more ragged around the edges then others like Arzola. The raggedness however Michael couldn’t quite put his finger on, as Kelly at one point seven eight meters, physically at least matched what an officer should be. He also still had a full head of brown hair, didn’t have any obvious deformities or injuries, and his uniform was finely tailored and kept. Yet Kelly draped an air of raggedness around him to such a degree, that Michael wouldn’t have been surprised to find him suddenly taking off in the middle of a lecture and disappearing for days at a time. For all that though, all Michael had was an impression, and unfortunately the impression he had was also belied by the professionalism and skill with which the Senior Lieutenant was currently drawing Michael out.

So Michael sat across from Kelly, pulling himself erect in the chair he had slowly slumped while watching the quiet recording and contemplated Kelly’s question. Unfortunately as Michael was largely ignorant as to what a sailing master actually did, he couldn’t quite grasp all the little intricacies of the account that had been played back before him. All he knew for sure, was that the officer had been reading an information crammed holo tank, and from it he had extracted something that had allowed him to push the ship, to an aggregate velocity roughly three times normal for any known starship. What he had done, and what information he had exactly used to do this, was still largely a mystery.

“I’m not quite sure, Sir,” he finally answered after a lengthy pause. Looking at the Senior Lieutenant he decided to at least lay out all the facts he was sure about. “All I was able to gather, was that the officer..”

“Lieutenant Commander Hubert,” Kelly supplied.

“Lieutenant Commander Hubert,” Michael continued, “after a lot of observational work, somehow made the ship jump to roughly three times it’s normal cruise speed, without somehow crushing the ship in the process. At least it was three times what the Thunderhead is purportedly able to do. Is Lieutenant Commander Hubert onboard the Thunderhead?”

“At least your honest, Midshipman Ellisworth,” grinned Kelly, in a slightly placating manner. “No Captain Hubert is currently retired. What you saw, was then Lieutenant Commander Hubert, Sailing Master and Astrogation Chief of the RNS Valiant, tip the ship into what’s been called a hyper stream and align the gravity sails in such a manner that the ship figuratively flew like the wind down it.”

“How exactly did he enter the stream, Sir?” asked Michael.

“That’s a subject for a little later,” Kelly waved dismissively. “First what you need to comprehend, is that it can be done, and what Lieutenant Commander Hubert did physically, to control the ship. How and why he entered the stream like that exactly is just a tad more complicated and will come naturally later, after the what, when and why.”

Michael nodded taking what Kelly said for granted, as just by watching the recording he figured that he’d have to know the physical process, before understanding the larger how and why.

“What do you see, Midshipman?” Kelly gestured, sweeping his hands about the compartment.

“The auxiliary bridge, Sir?”

“Specifically, what inside of the bridge do you see?” Kelly prodded, searching for a specific answer.

“The various department stations,” Michael half shrugged. “Tactical, Astrogation, Engineering, Communication, and Damage Control.”

“What’s missing? What does the main bridge have, that this bridge does not?”

“Command jump seats?” Michael guessed.

“And why is that?” Kelly prodded again, as he gestured to Michael to continue.

“Because command is normally carried out on the main bridge,” Michael explained. “This leaves the auxiliary bridge open for backup operations, and even some essential primary operations better run, away from the always active center of the ship, such as damage control.”

“Yet this bridge is nearly the same size as the main,” Kelly agreed. “Why is that?”

“To accommodate the larger holo tank?” theorized Michael.

“Correct,” Kelly grinned briefly before plodding onward. “Now tell me something Midshipman, from the vid do you recall how big the holo tank Lieutenant Commander Hubert was using?”

“Near the same size as this one, if I remember correctly.”

“You remember well enough,” gestured Kelly. “If as you postulate, they are the same size, what else would you then extrapolate from the vid?”

“That Lieutenant Commander Hubert controlled the ship from the auxiliary bridge,” Michael answered, “and that the controls he used might be found down here.”

“Right again,” Kelly congratulated. “Now why would he have been controlling, for all intents and purposes the entire ship from the auxiliary bridge instead of the more natural main bridge?”

“Possibly some accident,” Michael guessed “Or possibly maybe he needed a larger display to fit all the data into?”

“The ship itself was perfectly fine, in fact the executive officer was on the main bridge at the time as he stayed in virtual constant contact with the auxiliary bridge. Not all the information on Lieutenant Commander Hubert’s display was entirely vital, in fact a lot of it wasn’t. Lieutenant Commander Hubert is just one of those people who like to know and see everything, even if he then just tones out two thirds of all the information passed to him. As hyper sailing is a bit of an art, preferences for controlling the sails, and for generating data can be different from one officer to the next. So given the assumptions that the ship was fine, and a larger display wasn’t necessary, what might be other possibilities.”

“I’m not quite sure, Sir,” Michael shrugged.

“I’ll give you a hint,” Kelly grinned. “Why did the recording seem so dull?”

“Because it was so quiet? Lieutenant Commander Hubert needed silence in order to perform as Sailing Master?”

“Not just Lieutenant Commander Hubert,” Kelly explained, “but a majority of those who even manage to qualify as a Sailing Master, and be allowed to handle a ship, rely on peace and quiet in order to interpret and attempt to predict the chaos of hyperspace. The reason why I said that most of that information displayed on Lieutenant Commander Hubert’s display was irrelevant, is that it was. The data he was really using and paying attention to however isn’t recorded on that vid or any vid, because so far it can’t. What he was relying on, and what you will hopefully learn to use, was the vibrations, the feel of hyperspace for lack of words.”

“What’s it like, Sir?” Michael questioned.

“Honestly, I’m not quite sure,” Kelly answered thoughtfully. “I’m not really a Sailing Master in the truest sense of the title.”

“You aren’t?” Michael asked, puzzled as to why Kelly was training him when he wasn’t a Sailing Master as he had just admitted.

“No, I’m not Midshipman. I can feel hyperspace like Lieutenant Commander Hubert, to a degree, but to a degree I’d be called tone deaf where it’s concerned. I can control the gravity sails well enough to sail the Thunderhead in hyperspace, better then our computers which is why I am the current Sailing Master. However I do not lay claim to that spark I’m trying to impart on you.”

“Even if you are as limited as you say, you must have some idea what hyperspace feels like?”

“It’s like the rhythm of your heartbeat, the flow of blood in your veins, the wind whipping across your face. It’s like a natural unstabilized sea vessel, swaying with the waves and with the motion of the world. It’s like that and more. Yet I’m afraid that all those descriptions still leaves it inadequately described. If you have the gift, you’ll know the first time we enter hyperspace. If you don’t, you might still perceive it a level that all hyper mariners do, and when you do, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“The other thing to keep in mind, is that although you might be perceptive of hyper space, you might not also be able to interpret it well enough to control it. Frequently enough, when someone in the merchant marines display this type of talent, but not the other, they become a talisman of sorts for their crew, without adding much in the way of real knowledge. In the Navy if that proves the case, you’ll still have a healthy career in whichever department you are assigned to, you will just never be quite trusted in hyperspace again.”

“Yes, Sir,” Michael gulped.

“However, since we should be entering hyperspace by tomorrow, I expect we’ll know sooner rather then later. Till then, lets concentrate on some of the mechanics of hyper sailing. What Lieutenant Commander Hubert was perceiving in the recording, was in basic terms, a shift in the hyper patterns. What he did then was to adjust the course of the ship and slide it into the hyper stream at an angle, allowing it survive the stream’s outer shear. After surviving the wall, he then placed the ship into the sweet center where it could dump even higher amounts of gravity and inertia, and grab at hyperspace to ride with the stream.”

Reaching over to a control on the holo tank, Kelly pulled up a scene from the recording. He then split the display into two parts, one focusing on the Lieutenant Commander and one showing some of the highlighted data in more detail. Among the highlighted data was a tactical representation of the ship as it was suspended between the two gravity sails. Along with the flatter representation, were also strings of numbers that seemed to correspond to points on the two sails.

Kelly fiddled with the holo for a few moments, before he then began playing about twenty seconds worth of the scene. In it, Hubert appeared to type in a set of commands, then reach into the holo display and manipulate it somehow physically. As he did so, the sails seemed to change, angling slightly into four sections at each end, rather then the single sail it was most often depicted as.

“Can you tell me what Lieutenant Commander Hubert did, just now?” Kelly asked Michael.

“It looks like he angled the sails slightly,” Michael responded, as he watched the brief scene again. “But why did he break each sail into four parts?”

“We call it trimming the sails,” Kelly answered shortly. “And in truth, the sail as you call it, is actually four sails sheeted together. In old wind sailing times, a sail of two parts similar to these, would be called a goose wing. Unlike wind sailing though, we have three dimensions in which we can put out sails, and not two. Thus we’ve adapted a four corner method were we tie the fours sails together at their foot, that’s the point closest to the center of the ship, and along their walls, the segments that parallel the next sail over. The four sail method allows us to trim the sail in parts and catch the hyper flow at angles without having to turn the entire ship, or change our entire direction.”

“So Lieutenant Commander Hubert was angling the course of the ship, without changing the ship’s alignment?”

“To a degree,” Kelly admitted. “In effect what he did was to slide the ship to the port, while the ship was still traveling forward. It’s an effective tactic with sail, that can’t be accomplished with out current graviton dive technology. Unless of course we put larger graviton thrusters on the side and nose of the ship to brute force slide us.”

“How did he angle the sails?” Michael asked.

“Because the sails are four cornered,” Kelly pointed out on the smaller screen of the holovid. “He basically adjusted the lengths of the lines, shortening some, and lengthening others to offset and angle the sail. Admittedly, while there are only four sail ties on the Thunderhead, twelve monofilament lines are used, three from each tie. Each sail is then clewed two the lines, forming a triangle shaped stress section, all the final sail is more kite shaped. The kite shape results from a graviton offset beam, basically instead of a straight receptor to receptor, we angle the two beams to intersect at a point slightly diagonal to the straight line. It doesn’t work in a lot of instances, but because of our web sail design, it actually strengthens the entire sail and allow us better capability in trimming the sail. Let me bring up a closer look at what our sails are capable of doing.”

Kelly tapped out a new command, shrinking the scene to one side of the holo tank, and expanded another image onto the vacant area. In the new holo image, was a more detailed cross section of fully formed gravity sails. At another command from Kelly, the holo image began to change as the gravity sails began to dissipate and collapse in fast motion into the monofilament lines that held them. As Michael watched further, the suddenly bereft lines drew back into the barely on screen aft end of a model starship.

After the fast forward process of a sail being disassembled, the animated image reversed itself at a slower pace, as three lines from each of the four hull points began to be reeled out. It was then, that at a certain distance, that the three lines abruptly began to expand into four isosceles triangles. As he watched, while the triangle sails expanded, monofilament graviton receptors began to generate multi threaded beams and formed an intricate web in the triangle’s area, all in a short amount of time. As the sails formed in shape, each main mono line became a focal point for the three predominate edges. Once formed, the sails then joined together, to create at least the impression of one gigantic octagonal shaped solar sail. However the animated diagram wasn’t yet complete, for even as he watched the four triangles began to angle themselves. At first independently, each in a different direction, they next started angling in random pairs as monofilament lines were lengthened and shortened. One sail even began to rotate slightly, breaking up the normal look of the grav sail.

After a bit, the animated sails returned to their original static positions.

“What you just saw,” Kelly amended. “Was a solar sail being put through it’s paces, a process at times is called furling. In this instance the sails were also twisted and bent to their limits in order to show how you can angle, bend, or even inverse the shape of a gravity sail.”

“Why would inverse the gravity sail?”

“No real reason,” Kelly shrugged. “I’d say if you were flying formation with another starship, the inner curved sides might allow you to tuck in the other ship at an angle, but other then that no real purpose. The octagonal shape we use now is considered the most efficient with three lines per sail. We could go more lines and flip to a rectangular form, however more lines also means more mass and more possibilities of failure. With mono filaments we’re less worried about redundancy and more worried about interference between the lines.”

“I was watching Lieutenant Commander Hubert,” Michael pointed to the officer’s image still displayed in a corner of the tank. “As he manipulated the sails earlier. Did he enact some sort of preprogrammed routine and then just act like he was physically twisting the sails in place?”

“Oddly enough, no,” Kelly admitted. “All these larger holo tanks are also built with physical sensors, allowing a person to reach in and manipulate the display, without having to touch any physical controls. Albeit each overt routine needs to know what can and can’t be done with the holo controls, however it still was possible for Lieutenant Commander Hubert to reach in and tilt the sails to the direction he wanted.”

“Is that the normal way of controlling the sails?” Michael asked.

“Not in the least,” Kelly grinned. “Sailing Masters are a bit of an eccentric bunch. Each one has their own methods of controlling the sails. Some with verbal commands, like a person calling commands to his crew on a wind driven ship. Some with control pads on each hand. Hyper Sailing is still relatively new and nonstandard it’s up to the teachers and the students to figure out what the best way to control the sail is. As I said earlier, Hyper Sailing is a bit on an art, each person learning to paint their masterpiece in their own way.”

“How do you control the sails?”

“With these,” Kelly said as he reached under the lip of the holo tank and unfolded a pair of programmable controls. “If you look under the tank’s edge, you’ll find a set of these controls at the six positions around the tank. Each one can unfold from their storage shelf under the lip and can snap into whatever angle or position you find most comfortable. They do however stay attached to the tank. If at a later time you find that you prefer to walk around while as a Sailing Master, we can try a couple of more methods, including Lieutenant Commander Hubert’s virtual manipulation.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Right now the controls by default are fairly generic,” Kelly indicated, before changing the holo tank’s display. “If you enter in program RSM-18-F however, we’ll try out the controls of a Sailing Master for a few minutes.”

In the holo tank, Kelly replaced the three previous visuals with a larger floating model of the Thunderhead, both her gravity sails deployed, one forward and one aft. Since both sails were deployed, Michael was sure that what he was seeing was a training display and not the real ship. As such he bravely touch one of his newly activated controls and watched one of the sails tilt a few degrees port in response. Scanning over the controls he tested a few out and gauged the response of each.

“If you notice,” Kelly pointed. “In this configuration you basically divide control of the sails, placing control of one main of one controller and the other on the opposite. In normal mode, all four sail panels are locked together and act as one main, versus secondary mode where all four are locked together but move as if they were independent. You can also unlock from simultaneous control in secondary and adjust each sail accordingly, using one of the four smaller toggle clusters. The toggle pivots the sail around a center, while using the buttons around the toggle adjust the specific line length.”

“What about ship control?” Michael asked as he tried combinations of controls to turn the ship into alignment with his sails.

“In general you won’t have direct control over the ship. Astrogation still keeps control, which is why you’ll have to learn how to interact and pass along commands quickly to your helmsmen.”

Reaching over, Kelly reset the display, bringing the sails back to the standard octagonal shape and positions.

“Good, now what are the directions onboard a ship?”

“Port, Starboard, Forward, Aft, Up and Down?”

“Close enough, although as a Sailing Master you’ll be expected to also know Mast and Keel, which are substituted for Up and Down. Like all things, when you deal with three dimensional movement, you have to take into account that what you see is up, isn’t the same to another. However if you were to give someone command to turn to Mast or Keel, you trigger a different association, that of the ship, then of your personal observations.”

“Mast and Keel, got it, Sir.”

“Do you know what tacking is?”

“Heading into the wind, Sir?”

“Yes and no,” Kelly answered. “Tacking is heading into the wind at an angle to it. In wind sailing, if you were to head directly into the wind, you’d be considered “point up”, your sails slack because the wind is pushing against them, or even pushing you about off course. The same is mostly true for hyper sailing. When the hyper winds come at you point on, your gravity sails will become largely ineffective.”

“Can’t you just reverse the polarity and use them to grab the hyper winds in reverse?”

“In a static gravity field, what happens when you reverse the sail’s polarity?”

“You go in the opposite direction, Sir.”

“More precisely?”

“You either draw yourself deeper into the gravity well, or you push yourself out of the well.”

“Now imagine if that gravity well was traveling, at fifteen hundred kilometers per second, and instead of being circular in nature, it was a wall two light seconds deep.”

“You’d either be pushed in front of the wave, or be pulled into it and then pulled along with it?”

“Correct, you can’t ride through a hyper wind like you would a more static gravity well. What we do instead is tack the ship into the wind, enter it at the very least at a forty five degree angle, avoiding a ninety degree cone centered on the front, and our sails balanced to both push and pull us at a much safer pace through the hyper wind. If the wind is deep enough, we even do this multiple times, tacking to port and starboard, in order not to go to far off course in the process.”

“Why not split the both sails into two halves,” Michael showed, splitting the sails on the holo tank to give an image to his question. “Each section the forty five degree offset from the ship?”

“Mostly due to stress, the sails word work in that configuration, although less efficiently since they’d be pulling in opposite vectors as well as different velocities, and the ship would also suffer extreme stress due to hitting the hyper wind point on.”

Kelly looked briefly at the display, then with one touch hit the holo model with an virtual hyper wind, showing Michael how the ship might crack up under such an assault.

“If it’s so stressful to enter a hyper wind bow first,” Michael asked. “Why don’t starships without hyper sails have to tack also?”

“By now you should be a little familiar with the cosmography of hyperspace, and why it’s like that. You should have heard about gravity troughs between stars, where ships go faster, or energy waves which can overwhelm some ships, destroying them, and in general make life rough for the others. That is all part of the nature of the hyper realm, and all of it has a different meaning for the Sailing Master. Those energy waves for example, are hyper winds, and yes they do affect other starships without solar sails. However as a lot of people don’t understand the math behind hyperspace it’s thought more of as a storm then as a natural wave front that can be used, and fairly easily survived.”

Kelly paused from his lecture and looked at the chrono on the holo tank. Noting the time he stood up, and leaned over the tank’s main controls, wiping the display clean and resetting it back to the way it was before the entire lecture had started.

“Unfortunately, Midshipman Ellisworth,” Kelly frowned. “We appear to be out of time for the day. Even though Tactical has you for the rest of the day, I want you to report back here at 1030 hours tomorrow. We should enter hyperspace around 1100 and I want to gauge both your reaction to hyperspace as well as have you on hand for rigging the sails.”

“Yes, Sir,” Michael smiled, rising to his feet. He still had a lot of questions to ask, as hyper sailing was an extremely new concept for him. It also seemed both exciting and very hard and he didn’t want to fail Kelly or the Captain that badly. Michael silently promised that he’d find some time to study over the files that Kelly had given him at the beginning of the lecture, and be at least moderately prepared for tomorrow. Looking at the chrono in the holo tank, he noted the time and realized that he only had forty minutes to grab a meal before he had to report in to Senior Lieutenant Landin. Snapping to attention, he steeled himself to a quick lunch of whatever he could grab from the Officer’s Wardroom.

Kelly watched the emotions dance across Michael’s face, and half suppressed a rather mysterious smile. What he thought however Michael did not know, before he had time to contemplate the Senior Lieutenant, Kelly reached up and saluted Michael in return.

“Dismissed, Midshipman Ellisworth,” Kelly completed, before turning to examine a data pad on the holo tank’s lip. Michael dropped his salute and dashed out the door, barely letting the compartment hatch open before he was off down the corridor, while Kelly continued to smile that mysterious smile.