“I understand, sir.” Angus was well worn into his secondary role as the Governor’s dumping ground for all his stress and pressure. This catharsis would clear Bart’s mind such that he could enter Parliament and perform as the shrewdest politician the Colony had ever seen.
As they walked, the screens around them all changed in unison, showing a red bar at the top and bottom. Against the white bar in the center, was a bold red word: NO-2-WARP.
“Who are these kooks that keep doing this, Angus?” Bart asked, in annoyance.
“Well, sir, they’re activists. They keep hacking into the screens.”
“Find out who they are, and stop them, okay?”
“We’ve been trying. They’re sneaky,” Angus said.
“Remind me what it is they’re complaining about again?” Bart said impatiently. He was huffing and puffing with the effort of the brisk walk.
“It’s the Albucierre warp drive, sir. The Clarke Academy thinks it’s found a way to make it work, and they’re about to launch a test ship from Phobos Station.”
“What’s the big deal with it?”
They were within fifty meters of their destination, so Angus had to summarize his explanation. “It bends the fabric of spacetime. We all know faster-than-light travel isn’t possible. The theory goes that if we can bend space around a ship, it never needs to accelerate at all within its local frame of reference, so we can still travel immense distances without breaking the laws of physics.”
Bart nodded and turned to Angus. “And this is a problem because…?”
“There’s a small, though not irrelevant, chance that we could end up creating a black hole in the process.”
Six-year-old Sophia Federici settled down in bed, her favorite teddy bear under her arm. Her mother Marcia tucked her in and kissed her forehead. “Goodnight, baby.”
The little girl’s brow was furrowed. “Mom, when will Dad be home?”
“I don’t know, honey. He’s so busy now.” Pain flickered across Marcia’s face.
“I just wish he didn’t have to be so important. Then he could just be my dad.”
Marcia sighed and nodded.
Sophia’s look of consternation then changed to curiosity. “Who are the Sleepers?” she asked.
Marcia, relieved that the subject had changed, said: “They’re a dad and daughter who flew off into space, two hundred and seventy years ago.”
“Oh. Tracey at school says they’re dead.”
Marcia shrugged slightly. “Well, no one knows for sure, baby. They were supposed to wake up after a hundred years, but they didn’t.”
“Oh.” Sophia thought for a minute. “Kind of like Snow White?”
Marcia smiled and nodded. “Yes, very much like her. Sleep tight.” She switched off the light.
Nethanial Stiles and Mark Greenwood tracked the ship’s telemetry from one and a half billion kilometers distance. Nethanial repeated a phrase that Mark had become sick of hearing in the last few months. (His Asperger’s disorder gave him a special gift as a brilliant physicist, but at the cost of social ineptitude.)
“We’ll know if it worked in one of two ways: either the radio signals cut out for a while or we stop existing.”
“Like I said, a black hole wouldn’t affect us immediately,” Mark said, with a trace of irritation in his voice. He had mostly learned now to cope with Nethanial’s quirks. Mostly. “It would take millennia to destroy the Solar System.”
“Ah, but what about a tear in spacetime?” Nethanial took an almost childish delight in finding the same workaround to Mark’s logic, time after time. “That would do it.”
“Well, yes, I guess it would,” Mark said, in exasperation. “Anyway, let’s keep watching. There’s only a minute to go.”
Their display streamed data on the unmanned ship’s health, and a picture of a metronome on board that had operated continuously since launch. The seconds ticked down to zero. The data and picture remained just as they had been.
“Spacetime appears to be intact,” Mark said. “We’ll soon know if it did anything at all.”
Two hours later, as the feed that had been generated when the drive kicked in reached them, the picture went blank.
“Now the nail-biting really starts,” Nethanial said.
Twenty-six seconds later, the signal was reacquired, from a slightly different direction. The two men looked at each other in astonishment. Mark was the first to open his mouth: “It hopped eight million kilometers, almost instantly.”
Chapter 33
“Rebels without a clue!” Bart Federici said in jubilation, wagging his finger in Angus’s face as they walked down the corridor to the stage entrance. “And they said it would destroy us! Heavens above!”
“Well, sir, nobody knew for sure…” Angus said, somewhat defensively.
Bart was unfazed. “Nonsense! I had complete faith. This, my good man, is going to save my governorship. It’ll distract people from bickering for long enough for me to get reelected. And Mars gets to present it to the rest of humanity as our crowning technological achievement!”
They entered the doors and walked to their places on the stage of the Clarke Academy’s giant auditorium. The president of the Academy and the mayor of the Martian city of Marineris, where the Academy was located, joined them. Beside them was the secretary-general of the United Nations.
Bart walked up to the podium and cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen everywhere, today marks a new beginning for humankind. History will be forever divided into what came before, and what came after.
“The brilliant scientists and engineers at the Clarke Academy of Space Technology, here on Mars, have produced the first working prototype warp drive.”
He paused for a full thirty seconds as a buzz of excited chatter passed through the crowd. It rippled out at the speed of light throughout all human settlements as the news was learned.
Bart continued: “The proposed Earth-Mars transportation loop is an excellent start. However, this technology enables us to do much, much more. It is my great pleasure to present you humanity’s first mission to the stars,” Bart said.
The auditorium darkened, and the screen at the front showed what appeared to be giant, thick, silver oval. It was convex on the top, but concave underneath. Its skin was featureless.
“The ship you see now is the IIX. This stands for Interplanetary Interstellar Explorer. Six years from now, using the Albucierre warp drive technology, she will take a crew to the binary star system of Alpha Centauri.”
All humanity stared breathlessly at their screens, in the most charged moment of space exploration history since the Moon landing of 1969.
Captain Elias Sims and his crew floated aboard the bridge of the IIX. It was circular, windowless, and located in the center of the ship. The walls were screens, and the center contained a model of the ship’s position in the Solar System, projected in mid-air in 3D. Using conventional drives, the ship was now half a billion kilometers from the nearest planet—this was considered a comfortably safe distance, if something went badly wrong.
“Gravitometer status?” Elias asked.
“All good,” said Wilson, the ship’s engineer.
“Zero-point source?” Elias asked.
“Also good,” Wilson said. “I’ve seen pictures of warp travel, from the test ship, and it looks like… nothing, from onboard.” Elias nodded.
“One minute,” Allen, the pilot, announced.
“I wouldn’t be human if I said this didn’t scare me a little bit,” Elias said with a sigh.
“I hear you.”
“I’m more curious to find out what happened to the Eternity than what Alpha Centauri looks like up close,” Wilson said. “I’m glad they worked that into the trip.”
“Ten seconds,” Allen said.
“Hold onto your hats, ladies and gentlemen,” Elias said. They watched the display of the Solar System, and their position within it, with utter fascination. Imperceptibly at first, it began to mov
e. Gradually the change became visible as they picked up speed.
“In conventional terms, we’re already doing tens of thousands of kilometers a second,” Allen said, his eyes wide.
“Unbelievable,” Elias said. “Gives me goosebumps.”
“Just keep adding zeros to the number,” Allen said.
They reached the boundary of the Solar System, still picking up speed. The display now expanded to show their destination also.
“We’re still accelerating as the spacetime ripples grow further apart,” Wilson said. “There’s less computation required. We’re already twenty billion kilometers out.”
“Hard to believe the Eternity and Dawn flew one point seven trillion kilometers from civilization,” Elias said, in awe. “That’s an appreciable fraction of a light year. A humbling reminder, I guess, that our generation didn’t invent interstellar travel.”
The others nodded.
“ETA?” Elias said.
“Thirty-one minutes.”
Chapter 34
The combination of Eternity and Dawn was completely dark. A quick scan had already revealed the ships’ inner structures and showed that the Eternity’s reactors were still generating a trickle of electricity.
“They’re supposed to be in the center of there,” Elias said, pointing to the utility sphere. “Radiation levels seem normal from the outside.”
Wilson nodded. “Let’s go in.”
The 160-meter IIX, using her conventional engines, moved to within ten meters of the Eternity.
“Connect us,” Elias said. Its skin morphed, and a tube formed. Its end flared out like a trumpet as it bonded to the hull of the Eternity.
Elias and the ship’s second engineer, Christina, suited up and floated down the tube. Elias knocked on the hull. A dull thud was heard. “They sure built them solid back then,” he said. “Probe inside the hull, Wilson.”
“Aye.” A probe formed from the silver material surrounding them and pierced the hull. “Air pressure normal. No toxins found,” Wilson said.
“Okay. Go ahead and open it,” Elias said.
The circle of metal in front of them dissolved. Their helmet lights revealed a tiny passageway extending into the sphere.
“Only one of us will fit at a time. I’ll go first,” Elias said.
He moved forward. “It sure is dirty in here. These must be flakes of either dead plant matter or food. CO2 levels are high. I’m kinda thankful I’m not breathing the air in here—it probably smells bad.”
He passed a tiny galley, side corridors, and dirty, dark display screens. “It’s almost as cold as deep space. Moving further in…” His face lit up. “Here it is!”
Elias floated in a larger area, where two people could fit, and Christina joined him.
“Wow…” she said, marveling at the sight in front of her. The glass-fronted chamber revealed two figures, lying side by side. One clutched the other’s hand. “True time-travelers. This is unbelievable.”
“There are two lights on this panel,” Elias said, “The scanner reveals both electrical activity and very slight biological activity in there. Plus, the chamber’s a lot warmer than its surroundings. There’s a good chance they’re still alive.”
“So how come they didn’t wake up when they were supposed to?” Christina asked.
“I really don’t know,” Elias said. “I’m guessing the chamber just malfunctioned and didn’t reanimate them when it was supposed to. We need to get them on board the IIX. We’ll have to bring the entire chamber aboard—while maintaining its electrical supply. Problem is, it’s about three meters long and one-and-a-half meters across. There’s no way it’ll fit down this passage.”
“We can send in particles to open up an access shaft,” Wilson said from the bridge, “once we’ve run an electrical cable in there.”
“One hundred and ten volts A/C?” Elias said a while later, examining the end of the cable. “Nobody’s used that in a hundred years. Oh well, here goes.” He swapped the chamber’s plug from its home in the wall to the extension cord as quickly as he could. The lights stayed on.
“Good. That worked,” Elias said. “Oh, and before we do this, there are some artifacts we’ve got to grab.” They removed all the storage media from the Museum of Humanity and passed it back through the tunnel. Christina removed the two larger DNA storage plaques from their mounts on the inside of its door and examined Kato’s and Susan’s pictures closely.
A cloud of luminous particles, each a few millimeters across, flew through the tube from the IIX. They began to eat away at the interior of the corridor, in order to widen it enough to remove the bulky hibernation chamber. Locker doors, the lockers’ contents, walls, display screens and wires began to dissolve. Two hours later, a large enough passage had been cleared. Four crew members maneuvered the chamber out of the Eternity, across the ships’ interconnection, and into IIX’s medical bay.
“Let’s detach from Eternity,” Elias said. “Patch the hull first, though. I’m sure more expeditions will head this way, and this place is like a time capsule. I don’t want depressurization to destroy the ship.”
Half an hour later, this was completed.
“Okay,” Elias said. “Systems check?”
“All nominal,” Wilson said. “We’re good to go.”
“To the stars!” Allen said. “ETA: eleven hours.”
As they traveled, two doctors worked on reviving their new passengers. It was less than straightforward, as the chamber technology was flawed. However, it was eventually accomplished.
“What… who…?” Zara said as she came around in a bed in the sick bay. “Where am I?” She looked around at white walls and human beings who were much taller than she was used to seeing. “Where’s my dad?”
“I’m right here,” he said from the other side of the bay. He turned to Karla, the Chief Surgeon. “Where are we?”
“You’re on board the Interplanetary Interstellar Explorer,” the pretty, dark-skinned woman said, smiling.
Kato’s head spun. “You’re not aliens that have assumed human form?” he asked.
Karla chuckled. “No.”
Elias floated in. “I’m honored to meet you, Kato,” he said, shaking the bewildered man’s hand.
“Are we… in the future?” Zara asked.
“Yes,” Elias said. “Two hundred and seventy-six years have passed since you left Earth.”
“Wow…” Zara tried to, but couldn’t, wrap her mind around this fact.
“Are we back in our solar system?” Kato asked.
“No,” Elias said. “I’ll let the view speak for itself.”
The walls went clear, and their vision was filled with the entrancing binary stars of nearby Alpha Centauri.
In a large, square stone room near the top of a Mayan-style pyramid, a Chinese man named Jun Chu addressed twelve others. They sat at a long stone table, with six at either side and Jun Chu at the head. He was around forty and wore a charcoal gray business suit.
“So, councilors, this is the time we have waited for,” Chu said. “Indeed, that the whole Dynasty has waited for. The interstellar mission has been gone for two weeks. There is a chance they could pick up the infidels.”
There were slow nods and a reverent awe around the table.
“What Master Seung Yi foretold has come to pass,” one of the others said. The words hung in the air for half a minute. Those present absorbed the implications. This was by far the most important event in their lives—indeed, for two centuries.
“At 6:01 PM, it is due back,” he said. He looked at two men sitting on his left. “Doctors Guo and Xun, you were charged with the Master’s care while in hibernation. As soon as it is confirmed that the Sleepers are back, you are to commence his revival. He will swiftly take his revenge.”
Author’s Note
I hope you enjoyed this book. All I really want from writing is to craft tales that people enjoy reading. Please sign up for my mailing list to stay up to date on my new release
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Zara's Flight: Book One of the Kato's War series Page 13