by Aer-ki Jyr
The jumpline was also nowhere near Venus at present, located a good quarter orbit away, which meant that the Farscape was going to have to travel across the inner zone to get in position to make the jump.
“Get us moving into position, Nav,” Roger ordered, finally sitting down.
“Aye, sir,” the navigation officer said, plotting a course and feeding it to the helmsman, the first leg of which took them further out into Venus orbit to stabilize the mini jump they were about to make. They had to wait nearly two hours to circle around Venus to the point where their trajectories lined up, at which point the Farscape kicked in its gravity drive at low power and pushed off from the planet’s gravity well over the course of several minutes, then began a long coast in towards the Sun.
Eventually the ship used its gravity drive to brake against the star’s gravity well, then kicked in its enormous plasma engines to put it into a low orbit that would bring the ship around to the jump point. It was a convoluted course, but until Star Force developed the technology to isolate one gravity well from another it was what they had to work with…but still far more efficient than using plasma engines alone.
Several days later they finally arrived on the jumpline at the jumppoint they’d chosen, having killed all excess orbital momentum via the plasma engines. Technically they were now falling into the Sun, but at such a great distance that that point was merely semantics. For all intents they were now floating in place, micro-adjusting their position to get exactly on the jumpline, or as close as technologically possible.
The trick with choosing jumppoints was that the further you got away from the gravity well the better the angle became for accuracy. Moving one meter to the left close into the star made for more of an angular shift than one meter did out by, say, Pluto did. The downside was that the farther you got away from a star the less gravity there was, meaning less propulsion, so the navigator had the arduous task of picking a point with sufficient accuracy and repulsive thrust, given the ship’s capabilities.
That point for the Farscape was midway between Venus and Mercury’s orbit. Having taken into consideration the presence of all the planets and their gravity wells during the jump that would bounce the ship to and fro as its gravity drives repelled from them as well as any and all gravity pulls within the system. Confident that they were properly aligned, the navigator gave the go ahead to the helmsman, who looked to Roger for final confirmation.
“Is the jumpline clear?” he asked.
“No detectable obstructions,” the sensor officer reported.
“Make the jump,” Roger said, steadying himself. If they didn’t get this right they’d be lost in space, unable to stop for lack of a target gravity well to brake against.
The helmsman powered up the multiple gravity drives in the aft of the ship, making sure their alignment was accurate to balance out the forward mass, otherwise they’d send the ship into a spin as one engine pushed harder than another.
“Jumping in five, four, three, two, one…now,” the man said calmly as nothing happened.
Nothing detectable anyway, given the inertial dampening fields that were a key component of the gravity drives, else the massive acceleration would have driven the engines straight up through the interior and into the nose cone, ripping the ship apart. Everything save the engine cores were encased in one gigantic field with multiple redundancies. That field spread the acceleration out evenly to every molecule within its confines, meaning that Roger’s body couldn’t feel so much as a twitch as the speed indicator on the helmsman’s and navigator’s consoles began counting up rapidly.
His chair had its own counter which was set to approximate figures, unlike the meter per second measurements required of precise navigation. Those figures on their screens blurred out, and the lightspeed counter on Roger’s armrest ticked up to .1 within the first second, then counted up slower and slower as the jumpship got further away from Sol’s gravity well and the pushing power of its engines became less and less.
The exterior monitors, fore and aft, became useless within seconds. The aft monitor red-shifted briefly then the view of Sol completely disappeared as the screen went black when the light coming from the star could no longer catch up in visual form, being stretched out into infrared, then radio waves, then elongated so much it no longer appeared as any form of EM. A moment later the jumpship was moving faster than the photons so that nothing was visible on the aft cameras other than pure blackness.
The forward cameras grew brighter as the ship’s speed condensed the incoming photons into greater concentrations, then out of the visible spectrum entirely…with infrared and radio waves then being elevated to the visible spectrum for a split second before all the incoming EM started to blue-shift so far that the cameras had to shut down behind protective plates to keep from being burnt out by the now gamma rays and those insanely compressed forms of photons that didn’t even have a name in the Human lexicon.
“How are we looking?” Roger asked as the ship’s location on the hologram passed Saturn, with the map automatically beginning to scale down to keep perspective.
“Significant drift,” the navigator reported as the ship’s speed continued to increase, “but within limits.”
Roger let out a sigh of relief, even though the jump wasn’t yet completed. His biggest worry had been an immediate course misalignment that would have sent them speeding off in approximately the direction of Proxima but not close enough to hit the target’s gravity well. What the navigator meant by ‘within limits’ was the Farscape’s ability to correct its trajectory using plasma engines once the jump was completed, retargeting its destination slightly to make sure they hit the star’s gravity well spot on for deceleration.
The jump lasted many minutes, with the engines running hard to provide additional thrust with the weaker gravity further out in the star system before their designated travel velocity was achieved at 102 lightspeed.
“Engines are off,” the helmsman reported as the computer shut them down. “Speed is spot on. Permission for course adjustment?”
“We still good?” Roger asked the navigator.
The man confirmed his numbers then turned around and nodded. “Successful jump.”
Just then a small ping from one of the consoles got all the officers’ attention, as well as making Roger’s breath catch in his throat. When nothing further happened he slowly let it out, waiting.
“Shield impact,” the sensor officer reported. “Successful deflection. It didn’t make it through to the armor.”
“One less rock in the galaxy,” the helmsman muttered.
“Get us aligned,” Roger said, granting permission. He knew the sooner they made the adjustment the more fuel they’d save.
The hologram suddenly jerked out, diminishing Sol to a small dot and shoving it off to one side of the bridge while another spot appeared on the opposite side, followed close by with two others nearly on top of one another. The first dot was their target destination, the Proxima System at 4.24 lightyears distance, or 1.3 parsecs. Star Force used lightyears to measure interstellar distance and eschewed the 3.26 lightyear ‘parsecs’ for being pointless. It also made speed/distance calculations easier if the two were using applicable units.
The two dots nearby were the binary Alpha Centauri System, 4.37 lightyears away from home and only .2 lightyears away from Proxima, making the pair of star systems the closest neighbors to the Solar System, with the next closest being the Barnard System, 5.94 lightyears distant and being a good third of a rotation away on the far side of the Solar System in quadrant 1. Proxima lay squarely in quadrant 2, while 3 and 4 made up the rimward half of the local area.
The trip out to Proxima would take the Farscape about 2 weeks, but that was a jog next door as far as the galaxy was concerned. The V’kit’no’sat empire stretched out across a vast domain, but even it was limited compared to the full size of the galaxy which stretched 100,000 light years across. As grand and significant an expedition that this
was for Star Force, far surpassing anything they’d done to date, the sheer size of the galaxy that they were now reaching out into impressed on Roger one chilling fact.
They were still the newbs in the galaxy, and that wasn’t going to change for a very, very long time.
Canderous
1
March 8, 2258
Epsilon Eridani System
Corneria
Harrison-167 jumped over a low log, skimming the bottom of his right foot on the rain-slickened bark as he sailed over a bit too low, as usual, but it didn’t trip him up. He landed in the slightly blue-tinted forest soil, his foot sinking in a good inch as he ran on, adding his newest footprints to the path that he and the other 14 Archons assigned to Clan Saber’s little corner of the planet had been pounding out of the hills surrounding their colony, which was situated at the base of a deep ravine between two ridgelines that offered significant elevation challenges for the Archons’ exterior runs.
The reason for the extra difficulty, and the occasional boot-skimming, was that Corneria’s gravity was 108% that of Earth’s, making everything feel just a bit heavier, but not enough to cause any serious problems. Harrison had the bad habit of reverting back to his Earth-based movements from time to time, causing a bit of a neuromuscular hiccup despite the fact that he’d been on station for the past 5 years. He’d expected to have fully adjusted by now, but he guessed the occasional trips to orbit and normal gravity were enough to keep his body confused, hence the occasional coordination flap.
Turning right sharply around the trunk of a very thick tree, Harrison climbed up three strategically placed roots and around onto a switchback that sent him further up the ravine in the opposite direction as the path zigzagged up towards the peak, on top of which sat a tiny outpost with a timing pedestal. Given the ever changing weather conditions and, more often than not, rain-soaked landscape, the footing was never the same twice, meaning the course was outside the bounds of the reliability necessary for any challenges, but the Archons still liked racing to the top and comparing times on their auxiliary workouts.
The Clan Saber colony was small, but it did contain a full sanctum, meaning they had a proper track indoors for their normal running workouts. The trails were a bonus, as well as providing a more established route up to the top of the ravine than huffing it through the unpredictable rocky outcroppings that could stall one’s ascent and force you to backtrack if you didn’t keep an eye out for where you were going. Most of the rocky nubs had long since been covered over with soil, but enough remained poking out to be a problem if you were in a hurry…or trying to run downhill.
Harrison was running up and over into the next valley as an extra workout today, already having logged 15k indoors at 5:40 mile pace along with the rest of his core workouts in the morning. After lunch he’d focused on his skills work, mainly swimming today with a little target practice thrown in, then his workout quota was complete and he had the rest of the day off…as was usual. Garrison duty on Corneria was exceedingly dull, which also made it a great environment to train in.
Sucking down a few ambrosia-laced cookies, Harrison had taken to the trails for the past 2 hours, reaching the farthest point on the out and back course they’d established over in the next valley. As was typical, he’d worn a backpack with a number of heavy supplies which he deposited at the terminus along with the others that had been accumulating there over past weeks. Each time one of them came out this far they brought more with them, and once the prerequisite number of materials had been reached they’d begin building another outpost by hand…then extend the trails on further out.
The easier way would have been to load up a Mantis and fly the supplies over, but they didn’t want to do it the easy way. Carrying it all out by trail felt better, as well as enhancing the difficulty of their runs, and allowed them a bit more personal exploration than they’d been used to back in the Solar System. Corneria was a world of pristine, untouched forests that circled the globe from pole to pole, ranging from snowy evergreens at the extremes to hot jungles along the equator. With no axial tilt to speak of and a 22-hour day, the climate remained relatively constant, though the local weather patterns were quite the opposite.
Precipitation was frequent in the area that Clan Saber had been allotted to colonize, yet there were no oceans on the planet, only a number of small lakes scattered across the surface. Whereas Earth was a water world, Corneria was all forest…but a rain-soaked forest at that. There were dry spells, but more often than not there was moisture in the air, which gave rise to the mass of bluish ground cover that sprouted up everywhere the trees blocked the intense sunlight, blanketing the forest floor underneath the canopy and giving the soil its trademark tint through decomposition.
Where the sunlight did break through were thin grasses, not unlike on Earth, but all the vegetation had a slightly alien theme to it, like someone had gone and tried to copy their homeworld but messed up little bits here and there. For example, the evergreen trees in the north were a dead ringer for pines…except that their needles were forked, growing in a V-shape rather than the single lines typical on Earth.
Other similarities were abound, but the biggest difference was the lack of wildlife. To date they’d categorized exactly six species on the planet. Four were insects and the other two were types of ground burrowing grubs. There were no birds, no wildlife, no fish, no nothing on the entire planet…or at least as far as they had searched. It made the entire world feel empty and new to Harrison…quite the contrast to overpopulated Earth.
When he finally reached the top of the ridge Harrison tagged the finish pedestal and stopped for a breather. His backpack now rolled up into a tiny pouch at the small of his back, the Archon stood on the concrete slab jutting out from the tiny building wedged in between the trees to his left as he looked out over the small clearing they’d created, giving him a good view of the valley below. Directly ahead of him was the path going on down, zigzagging to the right initially before being swallowed up by the forest again, but the main draw was the huge valley spreading out before him, at the bottom of which were the sparkling buildings of the colony as they reflected the sunlight back up into his eyes.
He squinted away the glare and sucked in a deep breath of the fresh air. The oxygen content was higher here, rising to over 40% in the deepest parts of the forest, but the carbon dioxide was also higher, running on average at 1.2% compared with the .03% on Earth. That seemed odd to Harrison at first, given that there was no indigenous animal population to produce the carbon dioxide. Given how rapidly the plant life on Earth sucked the stuff out of the air he’d expected there to be almost none at all on Corneria.
He was right, there shouldn’t have been any. Nor should the plant life have been able to survive without it, but what the planet did have instead was a number of geological hotspots spread around the planet spewing gasses into the atmosphere on a regular basis, including a large amount of carbon dioxide...more than the forests could soak up, meaning that the plant life here had it very, very good and grew to applicable size.
The trees around where Harrison now stood were smaller, due to being at the top of the ridge, but further down the slope they grew to insane size thanks to the abundance of the carbon dioxide, which in turn generated the high amounts of oxygen as the forests scrubbed the carbon atoms off the gas and used them to grow tall and thick. Along with the abundance of moisture Corneria was a plant haven, and certain tracks of the wilderness even made Endor’s trees look small in comparison.
Star Force had wisely chosen not to tackle colonizing those thicker sections right off and took to more of the shorter growths to start carving out a foothold in. Clan Saber was brought in 13 years after the initial colonization and given their choice of locations. Paul had chosen this valley as their starting point, which the planet’s Duke had quickly granted him.
That wasn’t surprising, since Paul’s Marquis had been chosen by Davis to oversee the Epsilon Eridani System, taking a simil
ar role to the Director’s in the Solar System. Clan Saber had been assigned another of Davis’s ‘to be groomed’ apprentices while Hightower got promoted up to Duke and now had his hands full with the much larger colonization effort.
Paul and most of Clan Saber weren’t on Corneria, with Harrison being the highest ranking Archon assigned. He had recently achieved Adept level 78, which put him a good 22 levels ahead of the next highest ranking member of his garrison unit, giving him defacto command of the small colony wedged into the base of the ravine along with Baron McGuiness, who oversaw the Sabers’ economic activities within the system.
Half visible from Harrison’s position and stretching off to the east was the Sabers’ ever-growing colony ‘building,’ in that it was all one continuous structure continually being added upon. Over time Paul had adopted a light blue as the Sabers’ primary color and the normal grays of Star Force design esthetic had been replaced with the faint blue, smooth exterior that clashed with the overbearing greens of the forest, but complimented the hue of the soil perfectly.
The colony looked like an accumulation of blue marshmallows that had fallen down to the base of the ravine and smooshed together, in so much as they filled the center without reaching up to the ridgelines. At the base the building ended abruptly, allowing a small tunnel through which the ravine’s waterway flowed…too big to be a creek, yet too small to be a river during normal weather conditions but capable of significant rise during storms. The architecture had been built to accommodate such floods and was anchored into the ravine’s walls, allowing a small arch over the middle through which one of the Archons’ trails ran.
The top of the ‘marshmallows’ was appropriately lumpy, with several base elements of spires beginning to be built upon while both ends of the colony continued to extend down through the ravine. Currently the colony’s population was a steady 22,000, mostly comprised of construction crews and other workers with very little in the way of a civilian population present. At the moment the Sabers needed to get a solid foothold on the planet before they started building habitats, meaning that they had to replicate all of their infrastructure from home inside this one colony, which was not an easy thing to do.