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Originally Posted by TacticalLoco

OK friends, this is my first post for critique and I'm pretty freaked out.

I just started working on this yesterday and this is what I have so far.
It's supposed to be a hard SF story. Let me know what you folks think.
************************************************** ****

Persephone Phillips settled herself into the pilots

pilot's

chair of the Lucifer. It was her first ever shift at the ship's helm, but that did not bother her too much because it was also only the fifth FLT piloting shift in human history.

The Lucifer was forty seven days outbound from Earth and precisely 32 hours of that time had been spent traveling at greater than light speed. She, on the other hand had spent the past 2 years of her life studying, practicing and waiting for his moment. She had

Comma

however, met the eyes of the fourth shift pilot Saul Meyers as he was leaving the bridge. He

had

looked tired.

"Keeping all four forces balanced is the key.

Comma rather than period

" the taut man standing beside her intoned almost religiously.

She restrained the urge to remind her CO that she was qualified,

Period rather than comma.

"Aye aye, Captain."

Besides

comma

he was absolutely right. Keeping the ship moving at speeds defying both Newton and Einstein was literally a juggling act. F=ma and E=mc^2 both played a simultaneous role

"played simultaneous rôles", perhaps?

in interconnecting and cheating space-time.

"Just keep in mind

Comma

Lieutenant, there are no worm holes or fictional warp drives here. We are moving though real space on a superliminal

Um, don't know if this was intended, but wouldn't it be "superluminal"?

vector."

"Yes sir. I understand.

Comma instead of period, and the following "s" lower case.

" She said, and responded more directly by making a slight adjustment to the local ship mass, compensating for the steady shift of gravitational forces surrounding them.

Benjamin Sidhain nodded his agreement and allowed himself to return to his own console.

Before this mission's training, she could not have even imagined gravity fields as variables. But

Comma

she recalled, that was before the aliens gave us the Magi field and all it promised.

The use of first person (even if plural) "us" here would only be justified if these were her thoughts, rather than a recounting of them. You return to "their" in the next paragraph.

According to their exotic and largely unknown benefactors this technology allowed direct manipulation of mass. Not to mention the side effects of controlled momentum and inertia. By maintaining a delicate equilibrium between variables is was possible to change the ships

ship's

movements quickly and radically or to keep it moving though space faster than matter should.

For the next six hours seventeen minutes of her shift that's what pilot Phillips did. The Captain sat at the sensor console, monitoring her, the ship, the surroundings, plus

Comma

she suspected, catching short cat naps. She didn't blame him or even think of reporting him for it. He had not left the bridge since hyper 'c' velocity had been passed. He couldn't have slept much, if at all

Comma

those two days.

A small mass was entering the field,

Comma splice; perhaps a semicolon. I assume that gravity propagates faster than light in this story, so they can detect things by interaction of the gravity field? Otherwise the impact would arrive before the information.

she altered the force matrix in that direction to bypass it. Looking at the visual monitors she couldn't see anything, but that was hardly surprising. The massive Doppler effect was another reminder that they firmly remained in normal space.

If you were in fact superluminal you wouldn't get a Doppler effect; a supersonic aeroplane can't hear its bang. The Doppler only works up to near light speeds, and it's obvious that from behind no light can catch up with them. I suppose some space might be dragged along with them containig a few photons, but essentially they would be flying blind, depending on information from before they broke the light barrier, needing to slow down every so often to let light match speeds so they could get to see where they actually were, rather than where they calculated they should be. Which means the next paragraph is inaccurate.

Ahead of the Lucifer, the stars all crowded into the center of the screen, blue shifted into a dull glowing blur. The rear screen showed the same scene in a red shift motif. Using a combination of star charts and computer enhancement she could zoom in for much greater detail, but it was not really relevant to her job now. The irony of it all made her grin,

Comma splice; semicolon?

here she was one of the very first people to fly a ship FTL, and she was already bored with the view.

Something odd! That small mass was still closing on their position. She adjusted the forces again to move away from it. Beyond belief the object continued to advance. That was definitely not right,

comma splice

no debris could do that. In fact, no object of normal mass could do that.

"Oh my god!" Her gasp was as involuntary as the twitching of her insides. "We got company!"

Persephone wondered if she should nudge the Captain awake before hitting the all hands alarm.