USS Kepler Dawn

by Gerald Lane Summers

  According to the schedule mapped out for us, after completing the engine room rotation, Miki and I were to be assigned to a more complex course of study on how the engines were built. It was the difference between theory and practical engineering.

  Ultimately, I knew, Miki and I would be separated in our courses of study. She would focus on the mathematics of cosmology, colonial development and interspecies diplomacy. Although I envied her and would have changed my study path to stay beside her all day, the captain wanted me back at the bridge scanning stations to follow up on my discovery of Kepler 186f’s moon. I could not turn him down.

  So, Miki and I arrived at our last class together determined to make the best of it. We were complete novices when it came to the construction of propulsion engines and we were both a bit nervous about it. We only knew there was a thing called gravity and its opposite, anti-gravity. And, of course, we were wrong. Anti-gravity was not a thing, rather a process by which gravity itself was counteracted and its direction changed. This caused us both to seek the truth in the history of modern gravity science.

  Gravity waves had originally been predicted by Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in the early twentieth century. Of the four major forces in the universe — electromagnetism, the strong and weak atomic forces that held atoms and molecules together, and gravity; gravity was the weakest. Since it was the one of the two forces individuals could feel and observe in action, few really thought it could be true. It was.

  None of this took into account dark energy, which was still the holy grail of cosmological research. It was believed to be the real opposite of gravity in a super-symmetric universe. If that had any meaning for us on this side of the alleged symmetry it would likely take as long to figure out as it did the discovery of gravity waves in the first instance. I did not intend to try until I had a much better understanding of what we knew of gravity itself. Miki, on the other hand, seemed excited at the prospect of studying all of it, every aspect of cosmology.

  Scientists all over the world had searched for over a hundred years to detect gravity waves, all without success. And then, in 2016 and 17, a network of stations around the Earth finally confirmed their existence. They were thought to have come from the Big Bang itself, because it was believed only an explosion of that magnitude could do it. Not long after the initial detection, however, the collision of two black holes in galaxies so far away that they could barely be seen on radio telescopes, demonstrated that creation of the waves was not limited to the Big Bang. A cascade of discovery quickly followed as brilliant scientists realized such waves were being created by supernovas as well as pulsars. The most powerful were detected after the collisions of two neutron stars, the remnants of supernovae that were extremely dense.

  In fact, to most scientists’ absolute amazement, it was shown that gravity waves were not random and rarely observed events. They were ubiquitous throughout space/time, coming from every point in the universe, saturating everything independent of the gravity wells of stars and planets.

  The waves were traveling away from each of those massive explosions, thus crisscrossing the entire universe in a constant and unending flow. No matter where or when an object was in space, it was constantly encountering gravitational waves.

  Boris Horowitz, a brilliant scientist from New Israel thought about this and decided to see if he could control the wave flow, to focus and use them to counteract the normal forces in a planetary gravity well. He dedicated his life to the project and ultimately succeeded. With the waves gathered and focused down on a single spot with superconducting magnets of immense strength, he could use them to counteract the mass-based gravity of the planet, or any other astronomical body. Soon, he’d built a modest antigravity engine that was used strictly for assisting rockets to lift off from the Earth with a minimal use of fuel. It was just the beginning.

  When it became clear that climate change on the Earth was going to get much worse before it got better, possibly kill a great many people within a few hundred years and might well be irreversible, the population of the entire planet became involved in the building of massive anti-gravity engines that could be used both to create space-time bubbles and to propel spacecraft across the galaxy at relativistic speeds.

  Every physics student knows that no object can travel faster than light. The reason is simple. The faster the object moves through space/time, the more mass it gains. At light speed, it would theoretically be larger than the universe. After a time, the search for a method of traveling at superluminal speeds became a search for ways to separate it from the space-time through which it was passing.

  An analogy to this effect is the super-speed submarine torpedoes developed during the early 2000s that generated a bubble of air at the front and allowed the torpedo to travel without the resistance of the water it was passing through. Speeds up to two hundred miles per hour had been recorded for these murderous weapons.

  In our studies on the history of superluminal speeds, we learned of a man named Miguel Alcubierre, a brilliant Spanish physicist who first proposed a method of stretching the space-time fabric of the universe into a wave that would allow the fabric ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand. Under his scheme, the ship was effectively allowed to surf that wave.

  It worked out differently in the end. Anti-gravity engines were developed and installed in the bow of a ship as well as the rear. That bow engine pushed the space time fabric out of the way and allowed a ship to enter the empty void. The push from the rear both by the space/time fabric rushing back in while the rear engines pushed the bubble forward, allowed the ship to stay within the empty area. Theoretically, there was no limit to how fast this bubble could move. Since the ship was not moving within the bubble, rather carried along as the region itself moved, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation did not apply.

  Once in the bubble, the ship could exceed the speed of light just as the Big Bang had originally done as it had inflated into areas where there was no space/time. Without that fabric, there would be nothing to stop or slow a ship down. Some smaller ships had been tested to achieve speeds beyond five times the speed of light. USS Kepler Dawn had been tested out at seven times the speed of light. There was no reason why it could not go even faster, but a great fear seemed to take hold of the engineers who insisted there had to be some limit. They just did not know what it was or how to go about calculating the number. There was no known math capable of providing an answer.

  My initial assignment to the propulsion system was not in an anti-gravity engine room. It was in the master control room where the space-time bubble was monitored. Its shape was critical to our forward motion and its focus had to be maintained.

  Incoming gravity waves were captured by sensor traps all over the outer skin of the ship, redirected by small anti-gravity engines strategically placed among them and then focused and expanded to fit around the entire ship. This gave the ship’s outer skin the look of fish scales, each of which could move as needed. Once the bubble was established, it would be maintained naturally as new waves arrived.

  The incoming gravity waves were not always perfectly stable, since some of them had traveled millions to billions of light years before reaching the ship. They might even have been gravitationally lensed by dark matter galaxies and distorted. All of this necessitated constant monitoring.

  The standard anti-gravity bubble started at the forward generator which produced a lightly visible halo around the ship extending precisely five miles out in all forward directions. It then formed around the nose and extended back the full length of the ship where it passed by the giant propulsion engines focused in the opposite direction.

  The wave monitoring system, where I was assigned, was broken down into ten sections each covering a specific length of the outer skin of the ship. One person was responsible for the sensors and miniature anti-gravity engines in his or her sector. If the slightest disturbance was detected in any sensor in the monito
r’s section, the ship’s main computer would alert the individual immediately by setting off a beep in his headphones. It was then the duty of the monitor to fine tune it back to proper specifications.

  It was no big problem if one or two of the sensors beeped at the same time. If more than four did it an alarm would sound and the chief engineer would be notified. He had a separate office where all sensors were monitored on a board not unlike that of a large music synthesizer. If he detected an assigned monitor not handling the matter properly, he could take over. If things started to cascade out of control, the computer would shut the system down in the most efficient and least damaging way. No one wanted that to happen, and so far during the voyage, it had not.

  I worked in the monitoring compartment for two months before being sent back for more study on how the engines were constructed.

  Chapter 11

  Ihad not spoken to Buryl Boggs since the boxing match, now several months past. Rumor had it he had opted to join the colonists rather than be further humiliated by his suspension from the academy. I thought it a serious waste of his talent.

  As it turned out the rumor expanded. He had justified it to himself and others by pretending he would never be able to advance to higher rank as a military officer and had a better chance to be a leader with the colonists. His decision had been the focus of gossip for several weeks and like all such piffle, most of us figured it would slowly fade away. No one could believe he would leave the service for a colonial position. They’d believe it when he did it.

  His decision may have been justified in some sense. Still, my guess was that he needed to feel like a man in command rather than join with the scientific nature of the colonial establishment. Their job was to organize, build and run cities, set up manufacturing plants to build out new anti-gravity engines to further the longer term goals of mankind. They would need bright people to lead them and leading scientific minds in large numbers was known to be an errand difficult at best and impossible at times. Trying to herd cats was one metaphor I had thought applicable to the process. I certainly did not want to do it.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  Miki Sakura and I stayed together most of the time, taking similar classes, having lunch and dinners together and working toward the same goals. We had in-fact become inseparable. I had not recognized it for what it was as we’d been growing up. I considered her my best friend and as a woman she had everything I had ever admired about the opposite sex. She was brilliant, tough and took no crap from anyone. I suspect her black belt in karate provided her with a level of confidence few others in her circle of friends had attained.

  As for why Miki was attracted to me, I do not know. She simply decided one day that I was for her and was not going to let me get away. Of course, it could have been our mutual interest in higher mathematics and if that was so it would have been a letdown for my ego. When she called me “Stick,” it was always with that coy Asian smile and a subtle invitation to find a private closet somewhere close by where we could physically bond. It was no longer about talking and playing.

  For some strange reason, Buryl had receded to the back of my mind. It felt good not to be concerned with him and his bluster, and wouldn’t you know it, like all good things it came back with a bang. I had been meditating in the gym after a hard workout, when I began to wonder what he was up to. I had no reason to care for him or what he might be doing and then out of the blue it seemed important for me to find out. Things like this just happened and I had no real understanding of why. Perhaps it was the intuition the captain referred to.

  At any rate, Buryl and I ran into each other by chance that same afternoon, right at the entrance to the forward transport tube. Several higher ranking officers were waiting in line, so neither of us could leave until they had been accommodated. The next thing I knew, we were alone and staring at each other. For want of something to break the awkward silence, I asked him where he was going.

  “What’s it to you?” he snapped.

  Sigh. I took a relaxed pose with my hands in my pockets, trying to suggest to him that I did not want conflict.

  “Nothing. I haven’t seen you for a while and since we are here together for the first time since the boxing match, I thought we might try to patch up whatever ill feelings that might still exist between us. There is little point to it all, don’t you agree?”

  He stared back at me, his jaw muscles flexing. “You’ve got to be joking. After what you’ve done to me it is unlikely I will ever forgive you. You’ve taken everything from me.”

  He stepped back, inadvertently crossed the door opening beam and almost fell into the tube well. “Shit,” he said as he moved to the side. “You’re bad luck for everyone close to you and someday you will screw up, Kelso. When that day comes, I will put you down for good.”

  I extended my hands toward him, palms up so he would not think I was being aggressive.

  “Whoa, Buryl, what have I taken from you?”

  “You took my spot as head of the class, that’s what. You and your father cheated me out of my career. Then, you cheated me out of my girl, Miki, and managed to get me suspended from the academy. Now, I’ve got to become a colonist in order to have any chance for advancement anywhere.”

  “Good grief, Buryl. I did none of those things and you were never the ‘head of the class.’ That was just your ego getting in the way of reality. The captain and the wardroom officers picked the valedictorian and neither your father nor my own took part in the deliberations. I’ve been told by the captain that they chose me because of my leadership skills, not my grades. Ask your father, if you don’t believe me. As for Miki, she chose me over you mostly because you had been bullying her as well as many of her friends and she did not like it. Neither did I.

  I’ve known Miki since we were babies and we always had something of an understanding. Nevertheless, when it comes right down to it, I have no way to know why she chose me and have not asked her. It was her prerogative and it just happened to sit well with me. As for the fight, you brought that on yourself. Bullying her was one thing, because with her black belt I knew she could defend herself even against you. Still I could not allow the slander you were putting out about her to continue. She has always been sweet and empathic to those around her and everyone knew what you were saying about her could not be true.

  On top of it all, you broke the rules during the fight while the entire ship’s complement was watching. That was probably your worst act. It showed the officers that you could not be trusted to maintain discipline. Even so, I think you would make a great officer if you gave it your all and abandoned your course of revenge.

  Now, I encourage you to get back into the academy when your punishment period terminates. Give up this idea of becoming a colonist. There’s no future for you there, unless your goal is to become a farmer or factory worker.”

  “What do you know about it?” Buryl growled. “The commander of the colonists has already accepted me into their group. I will be leading a two hundred man security team charged with protecting the entire colony. And I’ll be doing it without your wonderful guidance.”

  “Well, that’s great,” I said. “I’m sure you won’t need my help or anyone else’s. You never have and that is too bad, because they could have saved you from the downward path you are on. It is always a good idea to make friends with those who might be of help to you in the future. So, I hope everything works out for you. And remember, the ship won’t be leaving the Kepler 186 system for some time after the colonists are dropped off. We have to make sure everything is okay before we head to the next planet. You’ll have plenty of time to change your mind and I will not stand in your way.”

  When the transport tube re-opened with the arrival of a new set of vehicles, Buryl hustled in and took the nearest car. I stayed where I was. My next class was a half hour away, so I opted to jog the three miles to it. When I arrived, I stopped for a few moments to catch my breath. Miki came walking up and stopped at the class door. My eyes
were immediately attracted to her incredible shape, especially her hips which were remarkably similar to those of Lieutenant Herman. For a moment, I considered ignoring the class and finding a cubby hole somewhere.

  “Hey, handsome,” she said as she wiggled her bum at me. “What’s with the sweat? Have you been running in the hall again?”

  “Yep, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Yeah? Well, tell that to your neighbors. I’ll be across the room.”

  “Sure you will. You love my sweat and you know it.”

  “Argh.”

  I stepped toward her with my arms out. “Come on beautiful, give us a little kiss.”

  She backed up, laughing. “No thanks. I’ll wait until you dry off.”

  She was true to her word. I sat closest to the door and she sat on the far side of the room where she could look out the telescreen. She occasionally glanced at me, the corners of her mouth turned up suggesting the likelihood of a smile coming soon.

  Chapter 12

  It was a class in gravitational propulsion engineering, something I took very seriously. I knew how to operate the engines, though not the details of how they had been built. That being so, I suppressed my thoughts of wild abandon with Miki or anyone else who might float by spreading their pheromones or otherwise unduly disturbing my loins.

  Our instructor, Socrates Cheng, had been related to one of the famed men who had originally developed the big engines and deserved the respect of our full attention.

  There was something about him, a modest soft spoken man of Chinese/Greek origins who taught in a manner I’d never before experienced. I could swear there was a force of some kind that exuded from his head and spread out over everyone like a bowl of caramel. I did not grasp the process at first and pondered it for some time. Then it came to me. The force was just a subtle form of organization, a way of approaching problems that allowed for no mistakes. I thought it brilliant and almost unfathomable. It was as if he had invented an entirely new way to think.