by Aer-ki Jyr
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.