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The view inside a time-jammer bubble is pretty.
Not that the Imperials built ships with windows. It almost defeated the purpose of having a hull, to leave a hole in it where radiation could get in or some random piece of debris could punch a hole and let your air out. If anything, time-jammers were more vulnerable to that than most Imperial vessels. Unlike Vector Drive, time-jammers actually had to travel the entire distance, and so time-jammers weren’t used for anything over a few hundred light-years. But they didn’t require operant mindlords to pilot them, something Earth was in short supply of at the moment. Nor could most transparent materials accept hull charge, which meant they were, comparatively speaking, fragile as ancient glass.
If you wanted to look out of an Imperial vessel, you did it electronically. The sensors weren’t cameras, technically speaking, but that’s what everyone called them. In a time-jammer under drive, you couldn’t really see anything but the lights of the capture buffer, accretion disk, or whatever you wanted to call it. Photons got caught in the buffer, and took anywhere from about forty seconds on up to work their way clear. The capture buffer provided heavy lensing as well as drastically slowing the photons within. The upshot was the entire leading hemisphere of the bubble glowed soft, shifting pastel colors like the auroras of Earth. Travelling faster than light, the entire front hemisphere captured photons that struck the field surface. The ones that were eventually emitted inwards were spread out over the entire inner surface of the field. Photons that weren’t absorbed by sensors or the dark gray hull of Golden Hind went through the whole process again.
Piloting a time-jammer was a lot like an old song from one of the rock stars my parents liked – Driving With Your Eyes Closed. I remember it being a fun little song, but the reality not so much. The piloting sensors used direct detection of mass akin to the operant discipline of farza,which allowed the computers to extrapolate mass from natural bodies from their effects on the metric of space – in other words, gravity. Imperial gear was crazy good. Anything shields or hull charge couldn’t handle would get detected in time for a good pilot who was on the ball to avoid it, even at a couple hundred thousand times the speed of light. The problem was the potential for other ships. Gravity only propagated at light speed. It’s all very well and good for natural bodies which are on the course God last set for them billions of years ago. Their gravity propagation was a thing of long standing. Not so much other ships travelling faster than light. As far as any such ships were concerned, we were driving with our eyes closed.
We didn’t think there were any such ships around, but we didn’t know. Difficult as it was to believe, we were actually going where no humans we knew of had ever been before. When the Imperial military had come to Earth, they’d done a fast survey looking for signs of advanced civilization, but signs of anything advanced enough to worry the Empire could be seen at interstellar distances. Nobody had actually visited Barnard’s Star, our first destination, or any of the other nearby star systems we were planning to visit.
Back in the Empire, TiaGracesays time-jammers are essentially a hobby, and an uncommon hobby at that. Most interstellar ships use Vector Drive, or the brand-new Interstitial Vector. From point A to point B with effectively no in-between. But Vector Drive requires a pilot with auros and para, two of the disciplines of operant mindlords. Computers can simulate para just fine; even on Earth it’s been done in hardware for decades. But computers can’t quite get the fine ability auros gives a trained operant to anticipate with acceptable precision. The Empire had given up on computer-piloted Vectors thousands of years ago – the errors were too large and the accidents were too many. Except for my aunt, all of Earth’s operants were currently somewhere back in the Empire undergoing initial training. So without operants, Earth had a stark choice for faster-than-light: time-jammers, or nothing.
Given how poor Earth was, and what people elsewhere in the Empire would pay for, finding usable real estate was one of the few things likely to show a profit. Tia Grace had led the way in finding a market for dogs and cats, and I’d worked for her for close to a year now. Imperials were crazy over dogs – even an unremarkable mutt could go for five years of entry-level wages. Some food items were also developing a following, but with siphons and converters the economics of that was different than on Earth. Even on Earth, things were changing in a major way as we found the means to buy siphons and converters. Starvation was a fraction of the global concern it had been a few months ago, mines were shutting down, and refineries were mostly going out of business. Automobile racing was also attracting a tiny following back in the Empire – but ‘tiny’ in the context of the Empire meant billions or even trillions of people, hundreds of times more customers than Earth had people. You could feel an Earth-style automobile, in ways that Imperial designs had left behind tens of thousands of years ago. Nobody sane would argue that Earth-style vehicles were better, but they appealed to a certain type of person in the feel of power. Automobiles were strictly recreation in the Empire, not transport.
Imperial vehicles were more like this ship: quiet, and almost too powerful. Thirty meters from nose to tail, roughly twenty six from wingtip to wingtip, with the central cylinder being roughly eight meters in diameter, GoldenHind was reminiscent of one of NASA’s old space shuttles. It had the same type of outer hull, minus the rocket nozzles – it was powered by a main siphon that could provide about ten percent of the power of the sun, essentially forever. A converter was attached that could use that power to produce matter in most configurations from machine tools to food. Impellers were capable of about 1200 gravities of acceleration in normal space – from grounded to 99% of light speed in less than seven hours. The Vistula Space Corporation, or VSC, had ordered a standard transport cutter, with a time-jammer addition. The faster-than-light time-jammer was designed and rated for over two hundred thousand times the speed of light. That meant Earth to Barnard’s Star in about fifteen minutes at top speed – which would be like travelling to the corner store at Mach speeds. It even had a Vector Drive in case an operant pilot became available. One person could operate Golden Hind, but we had a crew of five.
The titular commander was John Dulles. I wasn’t privy to why VSC had named a corporate vice-president to command the ship. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but nobody asked me. Earth MBAs didn’t have the background I thought likely to make good decisions in that sort of situation. I thought that if he had any brains he’d pretend to think it over and do what Major John Kyle (newly mustered out from U.S.A.F.) – our pilot – suggested. A graduate of the Air Force Academy and former fighter pilot, Major Kyle at least had the kinds of training to understand what was important if we got into trouble. Jayden Smith – a graduate of Johns Hopkins with a decade of solid work in molecular biology with medical application – was our biologist, and William Miyazaki was our astronomer. Will had had a doctorate from CalTech before his twenty-first birthday, and had spent the ten years since expanding Earth’s infant science of detecting habitable planets at interstellar distances – technology that had become irrelevant overnight when the Empire arrived to save us from ourselves.
What was I doing here? Well, the family had more than enough people to work the dog business, even the shipborne part involving Tia Grace’s two huge spherical transport ships, Earthand Indra. Her husband’s family had given them to her to help grow the dog business, and she’d needed cargo handlers, for which she wanted family – me and all the rest of her nephews and nieces. She’d given us datalinks so we could interface with Imperial computers just by thinking, plus they gave us a lot of other capabilities. Think of a datalink essentially like having a tiny super smartphone right there in your brain. Then she’d left us alone on her ships for a week at a time, with nothing to do except work and study. Of course the first things we all learned were the rest of the skills of Imperial space crew. Everything from in-system pilot to power engineer. Which made us pretty unique on Earth after the unification. When a couple Earth consortia got the funds for small spacecraft, the first thing they did was offer an unbelievable amount recruiting us, as the only Earth people with working knowledge of Imperial spacecraft. I had a better understanding of the Imperial technology we were using than almost anyone else. I was engineer, repairman, janitor, and back-up for everyone else. If something broke, I was pretty much the only hope of fixing it. Finally, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, the Empire essentially required that the command pilot be someone who had passed the Imperial adulthood tests, not just a temporary adult-by-courtesy. That meant I had final authority as far as the ship itself was concerned – I could over-ride anyone and everyone else if I had to. However, I’d get a bonus if I didn’t reveal it – VSC’s financial backers were Earth business people, steeped in the business traditions of Earth. They didn’t want to tell successful professionals with a decade or more experience that the ultimate boss was a twenty-two year old kid who had been working his way through community college a little over year ago. Our family had had over a year to deal with those tests; it had only been about eight weeks since the Imperial arrival notified everyone else.
Copyright 2016 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved.
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