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Our actual departure from Earth had been pretty prosaic. We’d used the old runway the shuttles used to land on in Cape Canaveral, for no good reason. Imperial ships could take off vertically and safely from anywhere, with noise about equal to an electric car until you hit Mach. Major Kyle took us up and out of the atmosphere, then out of the plane of the ecliptic preparatory to transitioning to light speed. It wasn’t far as in-system distances went, and it really only took about half an hour to get well clear of most of the junk in the solar system. We watched Earth drop away, becoming a blue-white marble behind us before diminishing to a point. We hadn’t used maximum acceleration, so we were only about ten million kilometers from Earth – twenty times further than any previous ship manned by Earth humans – when we engaged the time-jammer and went superluminal.
The aforementioned capture buffer built quickly. It didn’t matter if we caught a photon that had left Sol before us, or one travelling towards us from one of the stars in the “forward” half of the sky. Photons impacting the bubble entered the capture buffer, and only slowly worked their way loose, resulting in the pretty soft pastels I talked about earlier.
We started off slow and built speed up over the course of an hour or so. It had been planned that we’d peak at about fifty thousand times the speed of light, but Major Kyle ended up ramping more slowly to a lower top speed, about thirty thousand times the speed of light, which we stayed at for about an hour and a half before it was time to start slowing down again. During that time he jogged us three times to miss objects large enough to worry about. A couple of times, Dulles tried to talk to him but Major Kyle said, “If you want to talk, we need to stop first.” It wasn’t exactly difficult piloting, but you couldn’t let your attention wander at all. In one second at thirty thousand times the speed of light, we were travelling about nine billionkilometers, or roughly the entire diameter of Neptune’s orbit. There were a lot of reasons why Vector Drive was better, if you had the pilot to handle it. For one thing, when you went directly from point A to point B, there was a lot less to hit.
Will, bless his soul, distracted Dulles from bothering the pilot by talking about what he was doing and cursing the bubble that made it essentially impossible for him to take electromagnetic readings. I think he was trying to take a mass survey via gravitic sensors to see if he could help shed more light on the question of how much dark matter there was between stars, but you’d have to ask him to be certain. That lasted maybe fifteen minutes, then Dulles started asking me questions as if there was something real going on. But Major Kyle had the only hard job right now. The siphon, time-jammer, and all the other ships systems were smooth as silk. As I’ve said, one person could fly the ship. Tia Grace flew ships a lot bigger than this one by herself.
Once he brought us subluminal in the vicinity of Barnard’s Star, Major Kyle let out a big sigh. “Damn that was draining. I need a break. Joe, can you take over and slow us down?” I indicated my assent, and started moving to the second pilot’s chair.
“I don’t believe I gave you permission to take a break,” Dulles knew he was theoretically in charge, and just couldn’t let it go. That and he was sitting in the other pilot’s chair, where corporate protocol said I needed to be in order to take over. Never mind that with my datalink, I could have flown the ship from my bunk.
“Mr. Dulles, I have been a pilot for nearly fifteen years, and that was the most difficult thing I have ever done,” Major Kyle replied, “It was like combat alertness without the combat adrenaline for two hours, which is about a hundred times what combat usually lasts. As I understand it, we don’t expect to be here that long. If you want me piloting the next leg any time in the next day or so, you’ll let Joe relieve me now, or I’m likely to plow us into a rock. Not intentionally, mind you, but I need to get my head out of this seat.”
“We’ll speak about this at your fitness review, Major.” Actually, I was archiving the exchange for Mr. Goddard, the program chief back on Earth. His first decision, and Dulles was already proving he didn’t belong in the commander’s seat. Basic safety everyone knows. When the driver says he’s tired, you change drivers or stop. But at least the cabron moved to let me take over. I looked over the scanner like I hadn’t already done it, checked the controls, and told Major Kyle, “I’ve got it.”
The scanner didn’t have much. Nothing more than moderate asteroid size close to our current path, and no need to change our current flight path to miss anything. Space is pretty much empty. Choose any random point in our solar system, and by far the most likely scenario is that the only thing you’ll be able to see from that spot is the sun. Major Kyle got up and went back to the living quarters; I left the ship on the deceleration protocol he’d programmed – eight hundred gravities until at rest with respect to the star itself. Dulles plopped himself down in the chair Kyle had occupied, and Jayden came forward. There were only four seats in the control deck, and there’s not a whole lot of point to having a biologist there while you’re superluminal. Truth be told, I wasn’t certain what he could do before Will found a planet, if Will found a planet, but he got to work. From his demeanor and the way he was using scanner data, I’m sure he was doing something constructive.
Meanwhile, Dulles had moved on to pestering Will, who being Will, didn’t have any trouble talking while doing his job. But while he talked like the standard Fool straight out of literary canon, Will really knew his shit. He was dating Alexandra Rourke, his opposite number on Victoria. Nerd love was a marvel to behold. They’d both been stereotypical nerds – no social skills whatsoever until they started seeing each other. Will was no player even now, but he looked and acted like a normal guy, and Alexandra had both manifested a wicked sense of humor and started dressing up enough to show that she was really pretty now that she was out of her shell. Neither one had eyes for anyone else, and the wedding was set for next June. May God grant me that kind of luck someday.
“We’re pretty certain there isn’t anything big enough to be useful here,” Will began, “It was included on our survey as a confirmation. Luminosity is only point oh oh three five sol, so we’d be looking around nine million kilometers from the star for a world getting the same energy as Earth, definitely no further than twenty million out for anything that can be made habitable. At nine million kilometers, the planetary year would only be about fourteen days and it would almost certainly be tidally locked. The Empire would probably have to spin it for habitability, but supposedly they have no problems doing that. Barnard’s Star is much older than the solar system so we’re expecting anything we do find to be metal poor. I have one blip about eight million kilometers out, looks like mass is a little more than Mercury’s, roughly six percent of Earth’s. Jayden, you got it?”
Jayden took a few seconds. “It’s dead, no real potential. Tidally locked. Surface temperature on the night side is about 100 Kelvin or so. Dayside looks to be about 420 Kelvin. No significant atmosphere.”
Mr. Dulles asked, “Okay, not prime a candidate for habitability. Any minerals?”
Will again, “Nothing I’m picking up. Imperial gear don’t care about mining. There’s probably a solid metal core, but small, and lighter metals. Density is low. Not like mines are worth anything to the Empire.”
“Why not?” the idiot demanded.
I answered for Will, “Because the Empire doesn’t care about finding minerals when they can go to any siphon with a converter and pull out as much as they’re likely to need. You want a hundred kilos of gold? Titanium? Praseodymium? Wait until Major Kyle comes back on duty and I’ll go run it off for you.” Some people are just slow on the uptake. Some complex materials needed to be grown in special conditions or built up an atom at a time or a couple other issues, but any reasonably homogeneous material could be created straight out of a standard converter. The only limitation on “how much” was how much energy you fed it. TiaGrace gave my parents a siphon/converter for their home, and there was one at the farm, too. We used to create perfect diamonds of pretty much any size – the siphons Tia Grace gave us would handle 918 grams per Earth second, half again the size of the largest natural diamond ever discovered on Earth. If we wanted to sell them (before the Empire actually came to Earth) we had to be careful to keep them small and only sell a few. Mom had a necklace with a diamond the size of a golf ball that everyone outside the family just assumed was fake. The main siphon on Golden Hind could throw out enough energy for about a hundred million kilograms per second on full power, although the converter would get fried trying to handle that much energy. The big energy users on a starship were supposed to be weapons, shields, and other essential starship functions.
“There’s nothing else significant within fifty million kilometers of the star,” Will announced, “Jupiter gets more energy than anything that far out. Maybe someday someone will build something here, but there’s nothing we can sell. As far as habitable or potentially habitable goes, I’m done and ready to leave.”
Jayden agreed, “If there was ever anything here we’d be interested in, it’s gone now. I’m ready to move on to Ross.” Ross 154 was our next stop, a little under five and a half light-years from Barnard’s Star.
“Go tell our pilot we’re ready to move,” Dulles told him.
Major Kyle came back forward, then had to wait for Dulles to move his ass out of the first pilot’s chair. We hadn’t even slowed all the way yet. Since there wasn’t anything in our path and the track to Ross 154 was well off the plane of this system, he just restarted the time-jammer and off we went.
Copyright 2016 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved.
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