Faster-Than-Light travel was a bit of a
misnomer, even if it was the term used for most means of interplanetary travel.
While it was a commonly accepted name, it was also a commonly accepted fact
that traveling faster than light was technically impossible. Accelerating any
appreciable mass to the speed of light took so much energy that even if it was technically possible it was certainly economically non-viable. Some
Core Worlds had looked into it, if only for academic reasons, and essentially
concluded that the only practical application was extreme velocity kinetic
weaponry. This was promptly banned, of course, but that didn’t
solve the real problem. The universe has a speed limit. However . . . there
were workarounds to this universal speed limit. Not exactly cheap or
easy workarounds, but workarounds
nonetheless. The primary way of dealing with vast interstellar distances was
basically “why go in person when a phone call
will do.” Quantum communications and the oddities of entanglement were very
well understood, and with a few physics tricks, you could communicate across 15
light years with all the latency of talking in the same room as someone. Well,
if the quantum bandwidth was available, but there was always enough if you were
willing to pay for it. The other workaround was far less of a physics trick,
and far more of an engineering marvel.
The warp-prow.
The way warp-prows were explained to children in school was with a blanket, and
a needle. Given that it had taken several generations of self improving AI to
design almost every aspect of technology, and that even individuals that had
dedicated their lives to the study of theoretical and subatomic physics couldn’t
effectively explain how they worked, most adults had it explained using the
blanket and needle too. The blanket represents space, and the needle represents
the fixed distance a craft can travel in a given period of time. Lay the
blanket flat out, and the needle represents an insignificant distance. Bunch
the blanket up though, and suddenly that blanket is only about three needle
lengths from corner to corner. A faster ship meant a longer needle, and a more
powerful ‘warp prow’ made the ship better at bunching things up. There was still
the problem that folding space took a tremendous amount of energy, but it was
doable. While expensive and challenging, interstellar activity was merely a
complex engineering challenge.
As with almost every engineering
challenge, it was a game of “fast, good, or cheap:
pick two.” If it needed to be done quickly and well, a massive undertaking of
pre-fabrication, supply chain establishment, and logistic expertise was
carefully orchestrated by planetary scale economies working at full tilt to get
the job done. If it need be done well and cheaply, then a simple probe was
sent, stocked with ‘Artificial Persons’ capable of executing a several hundred
year plan to build something from the ground up. Mining equipment would pull
raw resources from asteroids to build more mining equipment to build more
worker drones to begin constructing infrastructure and so on until a whole new
autonomous civilization sprung up out in the reaches of cold space. Lastly,
there was fast, and cheap. Send one, fast ship with a handful of organics
working on a shoestring budget to do a Hail-Mary job of it and then hope that
whatever it is becomes someone else’s problem before it really
costs something for a solution.
The Indomitable Explorer was fast,
and cheap. A scavenged leftover of the first attempt at civilization level
interplanetary colonization, which had nearly sent the entire society into an
economic depression so deep it could only be accurately described with the word
“apocalyptic”, the ship had been built to herald the coming
of a stellar society. Instead it had served as a warning about what happened
when blind optimism met extremely well understood limitations of physics.
Moving things through space was hard, and expensive. Moving people? Doubly so.
An attempt was made to sell it for a tenth of it’s manufacturing cost along
with hundreds of other unused interstellar craft to shore up the crumbling
Centaurian treasury, but instead it
wound up being kept in a spaceflight museum. As it turned out, absolutely no one
wanted to buy a still ludicrously expensive ship when 300 year old financial
institutions were dropping like flies and the government was teetering on the
edge of insolvency. When the economic downturn caused by busted investments in
the “space colonization bubble” hit, the museum in question was shuttered and
forgotten as deep austerity measures stripped public programs to the bone. A
rather unscrupulous night-watchman of the closed facility managed to build a
retirement fund for himself by arranging the sale of the vessel to a mining
company, which used it as a lobby decoration in their headquarters for nearly
sixty years. Eventually it was gifted as a wedding present to the son of a
board member. He donated it back to the revived Centaurian Office of Aeronautical
History as a tax write off, and they lost it to a the Centaurian Office of
Natural History in a card game. While the resulting scandal actually sent half
a dozen people to prison, the ship itself wound up under the command of
Tillantrius Zepp Warzapp the Third, and his aide from the Office of Natural
History, Zarniac.
Their mission had been to brave new worlds, explore exotic landscapes, collect
data on esoteric and alien phenomena, and to do it all in the space travel
equivalent of a dubiously legal paddle steamer that had been rigged with a
fusion powered outboard motor. Tillantrius rubbed his eyes, which had been
getting heavier from fatigue, and tapped the Navigational-Aid AI module mounted
on the control console. It was still reading data-lock. Only Chryso had come
out of their escape relatively unharmed. Well, him and the cat. Zarniac had
been fine . . . until he opened the bag with the cat in it. One fairly brutal
mauling later, Chryso had dubbed the thing Hateful Many-Talons in the
traditional style of his homeworld. Duh-rhen had managed to pull the thing off
of him, but lost his grip on the vicious predator and let it shoot into the air
ducts. They had managed to get it out, but not without additional damage to
Duh-rehn. Ironically, he seemed to have the most affection for “Hatey Kitty” or
just “Hatey” as he usually called it.
Tilly sighed, and tapped the frozen AI box one more time, knowing it was
hopeless. They were stuck on their route unless Cas suddenly developed an
affinity for astrophysics and the ability to interface with the guidance
system, and she seemed too busy hanging out with Duh-rhen and Hatey in the “sick
bay”. It was really just a bench and some padding next to the medical kit in a
supply closet. Cas had said something about her “discovering the features of
her new and seemingly persistent human form under Duh-rhen’s guidance.”
Whatever that meant. Chryso was looking after Zarn in his bunk, but all that
amounted to was administering antibiotics every 6 hours and letting him take a
hit of whatever was in his vaporizer. Zarn’s eye was in a bad way, and it didn’t
look like it was going to ever heal properly, let alone the rest of his face.
His trusted second had come back from the cockpit very quiet after they had
made their escape, and neither he nor Cas had wanted to talk about why.
There was a gut-wrenching lurch as space unfolded around them, and he prepared
to make the thruster burn to compensate for the gravity of Cygnus X-1 with
practiced and smooth precision. Except for one small problem, there was no
gravity to compensate for.
He did a double take, looking for the massive, unmissable distorting pull that
should have been drawing him into oblivion right that moment. A cacophony of
exotic radiation and gravitational distortion should have been pounding away at
his sensor array, but it was nothing but the faint afterglow of the warp-prow
radiation. He checked every scrap of data he had, and then checked it again,
trying to keep a composed and regal air even as he, at least internally, was
screaming at a steadily increasing pitch. No black hole meant no slingshot, no
slingshot meant not enough fuel to make the next leg of the trip, and not
enough fuel meant slow miserable death as either the air, ration paste, or heat
ran out on the ship.
He had half a mind to just open the cargo bay and look for a black hole, just to be
sure, but as he triple and quadruple checked his readings, he was finally
convinced there was truly nothing out
there.
The math checked out, they should be caught in Cygnus X-1’s
pull. A quick consultation of the star charts said they were in the right
place, the right celestial bodies were shining from the right angles for them
to be orbiting a black hole right now. By every metric he could find, they were
in the right place, but where was the damnable black
hole?
It’s
not like someone could have just wandered off with it, right?
——————————
Amonna hadn’t
really had an appreciation for total, and absolute dark until the third day.
Even in the blackness of space, starlight filters in and lights things up, but
not there. Not in her little cell. In her little tomb. It was a strange cycle,
the more frightened she was, the more her bio-luminescent spots lit up on her
face and forearms. As she calmed down a bit, the faint neon blue light would
fade, and she’d wind up trapped in that Stygian dark not quite certain of where
she ended and the dead space-station began.
She had been surprised by how quickly she’d gone from ‘burning up’ to ‘freezing
slowly’. In the
end, it really wasn’t that wide a range of temperatures
she could survive in. As the station grew colder and colder, it creaked and
moaned with unsettling inconsistency. She could hear banging, thumping,
screeching, and the shudder of the contracting steel superstructure through the
floor. It was like a death rattle to her, one drawn out over hours and days, a
dying thing that just wouldn’t finally let go.
Sort of like her, in a way. She felt an odd kinship with the dying station, in
that regard. It’s heart was ripped out, its body was cooling, but somehow it
still . . . struggled against it. That it struggled against fate too was
reassuring, in a twisted way.
The strange squeaks and groans had become so commonplace, that roundabout the
seventh day, she almost didn’t react to the sound of something banging against
the door to the decontamination chamber.
At first, she thought it had to be a figment of her imagination. That she had
invented someone or something to keep her company through the crushing
isolation that came with her slow death.
The knocking kept happening though. Steady. Consistent. And then her wrist
computer chimed softly. “To all
survivors, please respond on the emergency broadcast frequency. We will
continue to broadcast this on sweep until the emergency response team has
secured the entirety of the station. Help has arrived. This message will repeat
in 30 seconds.”
To say she frantically fumbled with her wrist computer would be an
understatement. “HERE! I’M HERE!” She practically screamed into the
communicator, broadcasting across every channel she could tune it to. Her voice
was hoarse and raspy from a mixture of dehydration and disuse, but what she
lacked in finesse she made up for in volume. It took a few heart-stopping
moments, but the reply came through in the same, mechanical, cool female voice
that she had heard first. “Signal lock on successful. Due to excessive
radiation levels in your area, retrieval may be delayed by up to two hours. If
you expire during this time, do you have any ethical objections to aggressive
reanimation treatment?”
Amonna blinked in surprise. The voice had been smooth and calm, almost
strangely so. Clearly artificial but even AI’s had some semblance of emotion.
This was just flat. “N-no? But I’m fine for now. Air is running low, but that
won’t be a problem for 2 hours . . . probably.” She felt a little light headed
as the words left her mouth, but she had lasted this long just fine, 2 hours
was nothing compared to the 7 days she’d already spent in here.
“Remain calm. Help is on the way. Please do not resist retrieval.”
Amonna’s blood chilled a little at that.
“Why . . . would I resist?”
The tone of the voice shifted, ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly lower.
“Remain calm. Help is on the way. Please do not resist retrieval.”
With nowhere else to go, and no way to defend herself even if she wanted . . .
she did her best to settle down, and remain calm.
——————————
Machinator watched over Verdock, monitoring his status. He had been 95% certain
the captain would be dead, but as he watched rise and fall of his chest, the
flicker of rapid eye movement behind pressed shut eyelids, he knew the Zylach
was anything but dead. His body temperature had peaked at nearly 42 degrees
Celsius, but hadn’t dropped back below 40. He had considered forcibly cooling
his body with some of the advanced medical equipment on board the stolen
Coryphaeus vessel, but as soon as he’d considered it the fever had started to
come down. The vomiting had stopped at the 24 hour mark, but the introduction
of intravenous feeding seemed to have brought on a 140 beat per minute
persistent tachycardia. He had followed the plan to the letter, the cargo was
secure, and they were on their way to the drop point, but treating Verdock had
been a challenge he was unprepared for.
Everything else had gone according to plan. Why weren’t there any preparations
made for this? Why didn’t he make arrangements for his own treatment? Why leave
them in the dark?
The other security officers had taken up the running of the ship with little
effort, most of the systems were automated in some fashion or another, and few
of them were sentient. Those that resisted were neatly disabled by overrides.
The weapon systems AI had been vocal about how they were all traitors and
cowards, but Machinator didn’t blame it. He’d think the same thing too if he
didn’t know the Captain the way he did.
He replaced the IV bag, the third one in almost an hour. The excess fluid was
literally seeping through Verdock’s skin, which had taken on a much rougher,
almost blotchy texture. Like a full body eczema, but worse. They were like
burns radiating from the inside out, weeping plasma as skin sloughed off in wet
sheets. It had some similarities to severe radiation poisoning, but a quick
scan revealed nothing of that sort. He didn’t have the proper medical equipment
to make a full diagnosis, but he guessed that there was something wrong with
his kidneys as well. He’d tried to keep as much fluid in him as possible to
counteract the open sores, but the clock was running out. He’d spent all day
going over the details, trying to match the symptoms to any known disease,
disorder, or injury in his admittedly limited field medicine database, when
Verdock suddenly sat bolt upright.
Machinator reflexively hopped back slightly, the movement was so sudden and
violent. Scraps of leathery grey flesh fell away, revealing fresh, pinkish
growth beneath glistening with moisture.
“Machinator . . .” Verdock gasped. Yanking the IV out of his arm, his weepy,
slightly distorted face pulled into a toothy, rictus grimace of pain as he
tried to peel himself out of the now bloody cot he’d been resting in.
Machinator was speechless. Verdock shouldn’t have been alive, let alone up and
talking.
“Machinator . . .” he repeated, this time deliberate and confidently. He
unsteadily staggered forward, nearly falling before catching himself on
Machinator’s shoulders.
His core process was overwhelmed with a sense of disbelief and amazement as he
beheld his own friend standing under his own power, alive and talking. He didn’t
remember him being this . . . tall, though.
“Machinator. Where’s the mess hall?” Verdock’s face split into a wide, sharp
grin, and Machinator felt a very rare sensation.
Unease.