Free Black Box by Ivan Turner

it afforded each gun a six second cooling period while
maintaining a steady rate of fire.
    It was brilliant, really.
    And yet William Boone hesitated.
    “Is there a problem?”
    “The guns are powered by an electric
generator,” Boone informed him. This, of course, he already knew.
“With the sustained fire of that program, the generator won’t be
able to cool itself quickly enough. It’ll burn out.”
    “Mr. Tunsley?”
    “Yo,” came Jack Tunsley’s cheery voice over
the intercom.
    “Can the weapons generator keep up with the
rFireBeckett17 program?”
    “Sure thing, Skip? You know that.”
    “It’s true. I do.” Beckett seemed
unconcerned with the Ghost ship looming closer into the
cameras.
    “With all due respect, sirs,” Boone said
through gritted teeth. “I have studied many generators that are
similar to the ones installed on this ship…”
    “But not the ones on this particular ship,
right?” Tunsley’s disembodied voice asked him. “Know your own ship,
man!”
    “Thank you, Mr. Tunsley.” Beckett cut him
off. “That’ll be all.”
    Boone reddened from his neck to the tops of
his ears. He was no stranger to reprimand, but public humiliation
was something else entirely. Without another word, he ran the
program.
    All around them, they could feel the roll of
the ship and the thrumming of the guns. Since energy weapons were
ineffective against Ghost ships, most United Earth vessels used
simple ballistic weapons. Heavy repeating guns were the norm, with
torpedoes and nuclear missiles installed on war ships. The Valor was not a war ship, though she could hold her own in a
fight because of her sleek design and speed.
    As the two ships approached each other, the
guns probed the alien enemy for weaknesses, pinging off of its
unprotected hull. Many of the shells went awry, missing the Ghost
ship entirely. They would drift off into space, inertia carrying
them at the same speed on the same course until they collided with
something. As the guns fired, the computer was recording the
trajectory of every bullet, logging it so that other ships coming
into the area would be aware of the danger.
    A small white flare showed up on the
camera.
    “Capture,” Beckett ordered.
    Boone’s fingers flew over the keyboard as he
checked the screen and the read-outs. The seconds ticked by. The
distance between the two ships grew short.
    “The computer’s narrowed it to about two
hundred shots.”
    Damn. That wasn’t nearly a small enough
sample. Boone’s capture had been competent, but Beckett wanted more
out of his program. He’d always known he would need to automate the
capture, but had yet to figure out a way to make the computer
understand that a critical hit had been recorded without human
intervention. Well, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it now.
With a two hundred shot margin for error, he was better off
continuing the program. For all he knew, the white flare meant
nothing anyway. They may have hit a light bulb.
    Stepping over to Winkler’s station, he
ordered them into a mock orbit around the Ghost ship. This was a
tricky maneuver. Winkler could program the helm to use the enemy as
a focal point, but since its motion didn’t follow a mathematical
pattern, there was no way to maintain the program. The pilot would
have to do it manually.
    “You may need to wrap this up, Captain,”
Jack Tunsley said from over the intercom.
    “What’s the problem?”
    The Engineering Officer snorted. “We’re just
getting a little cooked, that’s all.”
    There was another white flare.
    “I got a better capture that time,” Boone
reported before Beckett could ask. “About half the shots and…” he
was looking over the screen, making some adjustments, “with a
cross-reference…” he made one final check, “I’ve got a decent
target lock.”
    “Feed it to navigation. Mr. Winkler, you
keep that position in our sights.”
    Maybe it was Beckett’s imagination, but it
looked as if the young man was