* * * * *
It was amazing how quickly a spaceship could be built if its construction crew had been properly motivated, Sargon often thought.
And so it was that Enlil was born in just one year.
Sargon’s engineers had been hard at work on the new vessel he had designed since just after the last attack had been carried out on Wysteirchan. By that point, they had already finished refining the rare metals and alloys into smooth plates for the first hull, hull “skin” and rotary hull, plates so bright that he could see his reflection in them.
After the attack on Wysteirchan, the technicians began working on creating the dense rotating “quasi-singularity”–a ludicrous name, but Dr. Linskin’s idea–that would provide a negative pressure field around the ship. This negative pressure field would allow the ship to pass through centipede gates. Thanks to Erlenkov, Sargon now knew Alessia’s people had pioneered such centipede gates across the galaxies. Without this negative pressure, Enlil could not pass through the cosmic holes, and he would be stuck here forever.
Sargon helped to create the dense, “quasi-singularity” by using his telekinetic power to compress energy within the electromagnetic field. Then he and Linskin worked to shave off exotic particles, creating a massive substance contained in the field. This exotic matter was going to be the engine’s main power source, and the entire engine apparatus was soon transported to the heart of the vessel.
Then Sargon moved on to his second, more risky project: the creation of two adjoining engines to the singularity engine drive. He began to set about isolating the string components of one hydrogen electron, string being the smallest known component of atomic particles. The containment fields and heavy, dense walls of the containment facility contained the destructive energy release as the electron was sundered into its individual, vibrating component strings.
At the same time, they began to generate tachiyons, the tachiyon engine energy source. The tachiyon engine was in many ways dangerous, but the least limiting method of space travel, hypothetically speaking. The tachiyon engines allowed a ship to jump across space, with the cosmic holes or without.
The separate tachiyon absorption and containment fields began to register tachiyon activity appearance, several seconds before the positron stream hit the gamma radiation to create it. That should have been impossible. It was like having a ball bounce back before you had even thrown it. But this happened with tachiyons because they were in fact positrons traveling backward in time, that accelerated into the past as they lost energy.
You could drive yourself crazy wondering what might happen if you changed your mind about generating the energy after it had appeared, Sargon often thought. It was like one of those hypothetical time-travel questions. What would happen if you returned to the past and accidentally killed your own mother before you were born? Sargon felt sure the universe would not permit mere mortals to thwart it, that it would tie up these loose ends somehow. Anyway, he was not going to do anything so foolish as to try and test the laws of the universe.
He was busy enough already. He watched as the tachiyon particles created from the electron stream disappeared to reappear as positrons in future time when left exposed to the gamma energy as they were in the testing facility. Then only the disrupted string energy could be channeled into near light-speed motion out the ship’s thrusters, launching the ship forward.
But he knew that with a single orchestrated charge between the gamma energy of the forward motion string engine and a containment field in the tachiyon engine that kept out the gamma radiation, the appearance of millions of tachiyons in the ship-hugging containment field would carry anything in their field of influence with them, including the energy-feeding current of positrons and the gamma radiation source.
This was, in technical terms, how the space “jump” operated. Caught in this exotic energy field, Enlil could essentially jump across space.
But, as the particles “jumped” over the light-speed barrier, carrying their energy source and the matter of the ship enclosed within the fields, the strings in the particles of the matter contained within the fields would begin to vibrate and add their collective energies, and the entire field of influence would begin to move backward in time despite the string engine’s forward motion.
This was a problem. Ships could not travel backward in time without consequences. It was another example of testing the universe. The universe didn’t allow time to flow backward, except in the case of the wayward tachiyon.
Yet, gradually feeding on the infinite energy of the string reactor as the tachiyons turned back into positrons, each tachiyon would slow down, approaching the light-speed barrier once again, then jump over it, and begin to move rapidly forward in time. The time lapse of such a journey would be infinite as well as seeming that no time at all had passed, the ship caught within the field appearing to instantly pass from one space to another. This meant that a ship’s passengers would feel as though they had jumped instantaneously across space, even though they hadn’t exactly done that.
The problem was that the matter of any living creatures within the ship would be affected during this kind of journey, maybe even destroyed. But long ago Alessia had said that Hinev’s fighter-explorers could use their telekinetic powers to help any passengers or objects reform atomically as identical matter that had no memory of the jump or the transformation.
And, despite the dangers, the space jump was ideal. Between such induced charges, the ship could travel unhindered by friction throughout space at relativistic rates approaching light-speed without losing any energy beyond the initial burst required to set the ship’s speed and reserves for course re-direction losses. The only unfortunate circumstance was that during the space “jump”, they could not accurately control the energy levels and thus the distance traveled and time traveled backwards.
Another problem was that the ship could not exist as matter in two places at the same time, as it would if it traveled backward in time. So, until the ship caught up to the moment it had jumped, it would remain moving energy or else tear into another universe, time, or dimension like a visiting ghost caught between two worlds. There was also a remote possibility that passengers would be caught in a time loop on board the original ship that ran between the time traveled backward and the moment of departure.
In either case, it was likely those aboard might materialize partially in the alternate state, in backward time, as an anti-person, an identical but negatively charged being, created from the near-infinite energy of the sundered string engine and energy burst of the accelerating tachiyons. The “anti-beings” would have no memory whatsoever and once caught up to their initial departure time, would likely remember nothing of their alternate but brief “anti-person” existence. Hopefully, they would still have at least some remaining memories once the journey was over.
Sargon knew that if Alessia’s explorers had once survived the matter-altering space jump, then his own identifying energy would most likely also live through it. But he wondered if he would be able to risk the lives of the other Orians on board. The matter-alteration might cause the lives, memories, or even bodies of ordinary beings to cease to exist. Well, he might not ever need the tachiyon space-tearing engine, though at least it was his if he ever did need it. It would be far better to stick to using the “quasi-singularity” powered engines, he decided.
In her interview with Eiron, Alessia had explained that there had been some negative effects of the first jump on some of the matter on board, and that even Hinev’s explorers rarely used the device. Because of the serum, the lapse of time meant very little to them, and they hadn’t really needed the tachiyon space-tearing engine.
Alessia’s people had discovered another way to travel to far corners of the universe by tearing and enlarging existing microscopic “centipedes” in the space fabric and emerging at another point in the universe; cosmic holes were holes in space-time itself, pathways to far distant corners of the universe and other univers
es, long held to be untraversable. But the artificial “quasi-singularity” that would allow Sargon’s ship to pass through these existing cosmic holes could not create new ones.
He lacked one thing to create his own: the cosmic string.
It seemed that long ago, the creators of Selesta had contained a tiny strand of cosmic string, a remnant of the original energy of the universe upon which galaxies formed. Cosmic strings were closed loops in space-time, leftover when the universe formed into uneven domains separated by incredibly small areas of negative pressure, or tubes of cosmic string.
Unlike a tangible, elastic string whose tension would drive the material to come together once it had been stretched, cosmic string exerted pressure to keep stretching. This “negative pressure” it exerted would be enough to force open and widen particle holes in the fabric of space-time without the resulting cosmic holes closing. In other words, a people capable of using cosmic strings could perhaps tear holes in space-time anywhere, rather than having to locate natural, traversable cosmic holes.
Since cosmic holes theoretically closed with the approach of gravitational fields produced by accelerating objects, for example a speeding space vessel, ordinarily encountering such bridges in space-time would prove useless if a ship was unable to exert the negative pressure necessary to keep them open like a channel. The “quasi-singularity” could do that as exotic matter, but unlike cosmic strings, he did not think the “quasi-singularity” could create new cosmic holes in the fabric of space-time.
But how had Alessia’s people contained the cosmic string? It was impossible, Sargon’s mind told him. Though infinitesimally thin, cosmic string was dense stuff, enough to distort the properties of the matter around it! So dense, in fact, that it could not even be drawn into the clutches of any black hole whose original stellar material had less mass.
If used properly, then, it could theoretically open rotating black hole gates, channels that terminated in past singularity white holes, leading to other universes, other galaxies, even other times! Orian science considered it impossible for a ship to actually travel backward to times where it, or the people inside, had not existed. But by using the cosmic string to pass through the natural time machine mechanisms inside a rotating black hole, anyone could, however, travel forwards in time, even millions or billions of years.
Sargon didn’t know how Alessia’s people had learned to master centipede gate travel, or what star charts they had made or where the cosmic holes they had made or mapped led; that was yet another reason why he had to find Alessia. It was going to drive him mad not knowing where to go with Enlil, even if he could ever leave the Rigell system behind.
Alone and adrift in the universe, he knew that if he passed through any cosmic hole, called a centipede, without knowing where it went, he might emerge into some unknown territory of space, and if he couldn’t pass back through the centipede for some unknown, unpredictable reason, he would be stuck somewhere in the vast unknown, and would never be able to find his way home to Rigell.
He tried hard not to think about this; he would persuade Alessia to surrender soon enough, he thought, once he turned Enlil loose on Tiasenne.
Now, with the Enlil’s engines completed, there was still another matter to be taken care of; supervising the work that would make his final assault on Tiasenne possible. Sargon had already designed the artillery of weapons to be integrated onto Enlil’s hull, but work in that area had been going on for several months and would likely continue for some time.
Of course, Enlil was only a temporary substitute until he could have the real thing: he wanted Selesta almost as much as he wanted to find Alessia. He would use his spaceship against Tiasenne to force Alessia to come back and relinquish her ship to him. Then perhaps Enlil could join his fleet, but he and Alessia would lead the Orians to another world in Selesta; if Alessia returned, he wouldn’t need to stay here and force Tiasenne to surrender also, would he?
Or did he really want to see that planet suffer? That planet that had rejected his people for so long. Did he really think he could just leave without punishing the Tiasennians for what they had–or rather, hadn’t done for his people?
The Last Immortal : Book One of Seeds of a Fallen Empire Page 74