Tiger: Dark Space (Tiger Tales Book 2)

by David Smith

  “It’s possible that may be one and the same solution, Commander. The two theories could simply be the same solution arrived at from different perspectives. It’s not uncommon for scientists who don’t violently disagree to actually violently agree with each other” said the computer apologetically. “Unfortunately, without more data, there isn’t really much to be gained from further speculation.”

  “Ok, thanks Susan, we’ll keep you posted on developments.” Turning to the engineers he said, “It looks like those Tana coils may have had unexpected benefits. If any of you do have any thoughts on possible explanations, please raise them as a matter of urgency. In the meantime, I guess we’re still waiting to find the silver lining on the edge of our cloud.”

  --------------------

  It took another ten days to reach the edge of the dust cloud.

  Dave was asleep in his quarters when Lieutenant Janice Lyle called him at three in the morning, ships time.

  “Whu?” said Dave.

  “We’re out!! We’re back in open space, Sir!!” squealed Lyle in delight, and then squealed again as an unexpected climax sneaked up on her.

  Two minutes later Dave was on the Bridge with about thirty other people, most of whom had been woken by the watch crew. They’d realised everybody on board was desperate to escape the dust cloud and since Tiger had burst free from the cloud they’d been calling people non-stop. Everyone they’d called had called someone else and the news had spread like wildfire.

  Dave had stopped to throw on a uniform, but most of the crew had come in pyjamas and night-dresses. Ensign David had arrived completely naked, but nobody seemed to have noticed.

  All eyes were fixed on the main view screen, as tiny wonderful stars drifted past in an unending, mesmerizing procession.

  For people used to staring out at the stars every day, being without them for over two months had been a peculiar and unpleasant experience. Now they were back, it was hard to tear their eyes away from the glittering pin-points of light as they streamed gently past.

  O’Mara, still fragile, but unwilling to miss the spectacle, hobbled over to her usual seat at the Science Station. Tapping a variety of icons she drew up the stellar cartography displays and began checking for astronomical land-marks that would allow her to fix their location.

  Almost to herself, she said “Well, that’s odd!”

  Dave, more focused on recent issues said “O’Mara, can you confirm our velocity?”

  Shaken out of her own query she checked bearings to the nearest star and replied “Aye sir. We’re moving at an equivalent real-space speed of ….. four thousand and ninety times the speed of light, but there’s …… ”

  “That’s incredible! We may have just made every ship in known space obsolete!” interrupted Dave.

  “Yes sir, but I don’t think it’s quite that simple …. “

  “This could be an event that makes Tiger one of the great ships of history! She’ll be up there with the Mayflower, the Beagle ….. ” said Dave with mounting excitement.

  “But something’s wrong sir ….. “

  “As soon as we get back to Federation space we need to get the technical specs and details of everything we’ve done over to the Drive Development Facility at Eridani ….. “

  O’Mara lost patience “WOULD YOU SHUT UP FOR A SECOND??!!!”

  Dave stopped and turned, staring at her open-mouthed “Uh …. Are you ok Aisling?”

  Lowering her voice, she said “No, I’m bloody not. Something is wrong. We normally fix our position by taking bearings to three or more micro-second pulsars which are unique beacons that are visible from huge distances. We’re not picking up anything that the navigation computer recognises.”

  “Are we still lost?” asked Dave trying to hide a note of rising panic in his voice.

  “No …. Not exactly. This is really weird. The star charts we’ve got include this area of space and everything is more or less where I would expect it to be. I can pick out all of the known stars in this area, and can confirm our location is …. here.” She pulled up a small two-dimensional map on the screen above her console.

  Dave left the Captains chair and headed over to the Science Station. He examined the map. It showed a large area of the galactic spiral arm with two main blue dots representing Hole and Arcturus. Tiger was a smaller red dot that was more or less in line with the two blue dots but further away towards one edge of the screen. “Well that’s not so bad, we’re not in any dangerous areas and the space we have to travel through is largely Federal treaty exploration territory. It’s just typical of our luck that we set a heading for Hole in Sector 244 and the worm-hole looks to have dropped us in the exact opposite direction. But at the velocity we’re moving at, we’ll be able to cover the distance back to Federation space in a matter of days.”

  O’Mara said nothing and Dave added “Won’t we?”

  “I think so, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it. Something is very wrong here, sir” said the Science Officer from under a deeply furrowed brow.

  On a hunch, Dave turned to Shearer, who was still staring vacantly at the view screen.

  “Lieutenant Shearer, please try to identify any Federation communication traffic.”

  She snapped out of her day-dream and turned to her console. Her delicate hands danced across the controls, and after a brief pause, she said “Naw traffic at awl sir! Mine yew, we’re a long way oot an’ all. There’ll be naw relay stations this for oot, so what we do pick up will be long oot o’ dayt.”

  He paused and thought about it. “Dolplop. Take the bearings from the Science Station display and plot a course for Hole. What’s our ETA?”

  The Vosgeean’s tendrils drifted across the navigation console, making the necessary calculations. “Course plotted. At our current velocity, the journey will take approximately twenty-eight days.”

  “Twenty eight days. Ok O’Mara, we have a pressing situation in Sector 244 that we can’t miss. We’re going to head towards Sector 244 on the understanding that we have no real reason not to. That means you have, say, twenty one days in which to work out what the hell is going on.”

  --------------------

  It took a while. After fourteen days of head scratching and cursing O’Mara, eventually called Dave on the Bridge.

  “Good Morning Lieutenant-Commander O’Mara. Have we got any idea why we can’t fix our position via standard pulsars?”

  “Yep. Cracked it.”

  Dave had been speaking to the ships Science Officer every day on the matter, and had observed her become increasingly frustrated as she failed to find a solution to the conundrum. He was taken completely by surprise at the abrupt turnaround: “Really?!? Can we fix the problem??”

  “Er ….. not exactly. Actually ….. ummm ….. I don’t know” she dithered.

  Dave sighed. In his excitement he’d let his institutionalized cynicism slip and assumed there was a simple answer. He’d been on USS Tiger for nine months now: There was never, ever a simple solution. Taking a deep breath he reminded himself to take small steps ….

  “So what’s actually causing the navigation and communication anomalies?”

  “Ah, now that I can tell you! There are no anomalies, everything is working just fine. We were yapping about it in the lab earlier and we had a flash of inspiration: we can’t get the navigation data and comms signals we’re expecting to because we’re travelling backwards through time” she said matter-of-factly.

  “WHAT?!?” yelped Dave in alarm, shortly followed by “HOW?!?” which came out sounding more of panic than disbelief.

  “Steady now …… “ said O’Mara soothingly. “You’ll recall you spoke to Susan and the engineers a while back about why we were going so much faster than seemed possible?”

  Dave nodded dumbly before remembering that O’Mara couldn’t see him. “Yeah, I remember that. Susan was as concise and helpful as always. She mumbled something along the lines of it most likely being a side effect of the interaction of the
field coils from the Tana vessel with our own Fleet-standard coils.”

  “Well, that’s the answer in a nutshell. The Tana coils are creating a co-axial warp-field that’s warping the space that’s already been warped by the standard coils. But it’s not warping it in the same dimensions at the original coils. The original coils are compressing space-time, but the Tana coils are warping space, time and possibly an extra dimension that we don’t understand as well” said the Science Officer as if this was all completely obvious.

  “Are you certain?” asked Dave nervously.

  “Absolutely, one hundred and one percent, stake-your-grannies-pension-on-it certain” replied the Science Officer and then explained “Not only do the calculations stack-up perfectly, our observations fall in line with the calcs with absolute accuracy. In fact it all fits together so perfectly it’s a bit embarrassing that we didn’t spot it sooner” she added sheepishly.

  “For example, we passed close to a binary star system yesterday, and when we checked back on the navigational data, the smaller star was revolving in the wrong direction, so it’s obviously a time displacement issue. Also, we can’t locate any of the usual pulsars, because they’re not emitting pulses, they’re absorbing them. We can spot the radiation travelling back to the pulsar, but because our time frame is out of step with the rest of the universe, the frequencies of pulses we can observe aren’t what we’d expect from those particular pulsars.”

  The silence from Dave’s end of the comm-link told her he was losing the thread of the conversation and she simplified it as best she could “The pulsars and stars are all fine, and doing exactly what they’ve done for millions of years. We just can’t see that because the warp-field we’re generating is affecting time and space differently from normal drive systems.”

  “So we can’t see the universe properly because our warp-field is distorting our view?” asked Dave hopefully.

  “Yes!! That’s it exactly” O’Mara squealed excitedly “And the same goes for communications. Our system was looking for a signal at particular standard frequencies. All frequencies are time based, and we can’t see them because we’re moving backwards in time, making them all weird negative values from our perspective. We got Lieutenant Shearer to record a sample of white noise and when we reversed and applied a correcting factor, we found all sorts of banal hum-drum communications all over the place!”

  Dave thought about the implications of this. “Well that has to be good news. If we’re picking up Federation comms traffic we can’t have gone back disastrously far in time. Do we need to drop out of warp to assess the situation?”

  “You can if you want, but I’m not sure it will help. We’ve already calculated the time-displacement factor and confirmed it by running the comms signals through it. Our observations confirm that at this velocity, for every hour we spend travelling in ship’s time, we’re actually travelling backwards about two hours and twenty minutes in real space-time.”

  Dave scratched his head and crunched the numbers in his head. “So we’re travelling at four thousand and ninety times the speed of light, but each day we travel at that speed moves us nearly two and a half days backwards in time?”

  “Spot on, sir!” giggled O’Mara in delight. “I thought you might struggle to get your head around it, but you got it first time! As Officers from the Operations Department go, you’re actually quite switched on.” There was a brief pause after the back-handed compliment before she continued. “Now we get to the not-such-good-news bit,”

  Dave instantly got a sinking feeling in his stomach.

  Sensing this, the Science Officer tried to clarify the situation and failed miserably “Actually, there’s quite a bit of not-such-good-news, but on the positive side, not much of it qualifies as really-bad-news and none of it at all is really-really-bad-we’re-in-deep-shit-news.”

  There was an extended silence while Dave tried to translate her meanderings into English, but O’Mara pressed on regardless.

  “Firstly, the drive isn’t going to revolutionise anything at all. It’s an interesting effect, but the truth of it all is that the speed of the drive is tied to its effect on space-time. There’s no way to get the speeds we’re seeing without the side effect of going backwards in time.”

  “Hidden in with that is a teeny-weeny bit of actually really positive news in that we found out we can generate a large enough warp-field to move Tiger even though we’re three coils down on each engine. The Tana coils operate in a different dimensional plane to our coils so it’s our coils that are moving Tiger at warp eight, and the Tana coils are warping that warp-field in two or possibly three other dimensions to make it appear we’re moving super-fast but also backwards in time.”

  “We’ve come to the conclusion that our old coils can operate more effectively then before because the new Tana power relays we’ve fitted are significantly more efficient than Federation designs. They can feed a bigger, more stable plasma supply to the coils, allowing the coils to produce the larger, more stable field we need to overcome the loss of six coils in total.”

  “Now we come to the second bit of not-such-good-news, although as a physicist I would consider this as really-quite-bad-news or possibly end-of-the-universe-as-we-know-it-type-news. In short, using this drive risks cause and effect paradoxes because any ship using it will reach its destination before it actually left: that’s in breach of the Fleet’s planned temporal directives, so regardless of how clever it all is, the drive design will be banned, sure as eggs are eggs.”

  “Which brings us to the third bit of not-such-good-news: by my reckoning, if we maintain course and speed we should get to Hole at about the time when we’re actually arriving at Arcturus ….. if you catch my drift” she said, wrinkling her brow.

  “So do we have to drop out of warp now or are we risking paradoxes?” asked Dave.

  “Well we could, but I’d say in for a penny, in for a pound. We’ve been travelling for over two weeks now which means we’ve gone back in time nearly five weeks. I can’t see that another couple of weeks is going make much difference either way, especially as we won’t be interacting with anyone in transit back to Hole.

  She ran her fingers through her tangled hair again. “It’s quite hard thinking about it as we’re all used to time flowing nice and linear and forward. As far as I can work out, all we need to do is be really careful when our current course takes us back through Arcturus. If our predictions are accurate we’ll passing back through Arcturus while we’re still there undertaking the tactical tests”

  Dave was about to suggest a minor deviation in course when the penny dropped.

  “Of course! How could I not have seen that?? Thanks O’Mara you may be just about to …. er …. to have saved our bacon?”

  He cut the comm-link and called the Torpedo Bay. ”Pappy, we need to prep two torpedoes, and make sure they’re both absolutely perfect. We’ll need to make an attack at high-warp in a couple of days. I’ll get Lieutenant-Commander O’Mara to provide the details and timings. We’ll only get one shot at the target. Make sure one of the torpedoes is the one with the dodgy serial number from the Arcturus Ranges.”

  Chapter 19

  Three days later, Tiger approached Arcturus Delta, still travelling at over four thousand times the speed of light.

  Dave had ordered everything to be wound down, so Tiger emitted as little radiation as possible. Her communications system was isolated as were her friend/foe identification system, all running lights and all active sensors.

  Still covered in the caramelized LOAVES she was blacker than black, and ghosted silently through the system, completely unnoticed by the shipping-control and navigation systems of Arcturus Station. She passed Range ships and tugs, relay stations and shuttles without any of them registering her presence.

  The crew could only watch transfixed as the ships and satellites all zoomed across the screen in apparent reverse, moving much faster than they should do.

  As they approached the end of th
e target range, Crash reduced speed. They only had one shot and couldn’t afford to turn on the targeting sensors for fear of giving away their position.

  O’Mara had worked hard on the mathematics with ASBeau. As they fired the torpedo and it moved away from the ship, it would leave the Tiger’s warp-field and return to normal space and more importantly, normal time. They’d have to fire at a point in space, and from that point the torpedo would have use its on-board systems for terminal guidance towards the target.

  As zero-hour approached, they passed into the area of space the range had used as a shooting gallery, a sparsely populated area on the fringes of the largest asteroid belt. Dolplop picked up the area’s various navigation beacons and Crash adjusted course for their final approach.

  Using passive scanners only, O’Mara managed to find the “older” Tiger, which according to her own chrono-dynamics had completed the test but was now heading back towards the last of the targets to begin un-destroying them.

  She put up a forward camera angle on the main view-screen. There were several gasps and many held their breath as they caught sight of Tiger running down the range in reverse. She then appeared to spin on her axis, facing forward as she slipped towards the last target.

  It was difficult to understand what was happening as they watched the drama unfold in reverse, and Dave barked orders to keep everyone focused on the one task they had to have a hand in. Calling the Torpedo Bay, he said “Pappy, please confirm we’re locked and loaded. And that torpedo serial number 8/A/366/42 is in tube two.”

  “Yeah Sir. Checked everything, all systems are nominal, all indicators are green. Tho’ I must say I don’ have a damn clue what we’re doing here! We’re good to go.”

  “Thanks Pappy.” Dave cut the comm-link and turned to the Ship’s Tactical Officer. “You ready for this, ASBeau?”

  He shrugged, but never took his eyes off his tactical display or even blinked. “Sure. I’m going to launch a torpedo at a target I can’t see because it’s already been destroyed. We’ll be launching at incredibly high velocity and without the use of our active targeting sensors. When I do launch, I’ll lose track of the torpedo because it’ll start going forward in time while we’re still going backwards. When we do hit the cloud of debris that will be visible at the co-ordinates we logged over three months ago, it’ll magically coalesce into a target beacon. Of course I’m ready! What could possibly go wrong??”