Law's End (23 page)
Authors: Glenn Douglass
Tags: #adventure, #travel, #dog, #future, #space, #rescue, #supercluster
True to her word Greene couldn't sleep but
instead kept thinking about the possibility of being unable to
bring their velocity under control. The idea of speeding out of
control across the length of Laniakea, endlessly searching for
somewhere to come to port, jolted her out of every effort to doze.
Eventually with a stifled yawn Greene determined to begin the
process of bringing the reactionless drive online alone.
On her way to Sabha's cockpit Greene moved
quietly, careful not to bump anything with her legs as she pulled
along the handholds, but as she grew closer she heard activity in
the ship's tiny gym. Peaking in she saw Canis wearing a tension
harness that held him to the room's treadmill apparently without
any lingering effects from the earlier drama. The dog trotted
happily along through the open meadow projected on the wall in
front of him. His mouth hung open and occasionally he paused to
sniff at the faux-scents of plant and animal generated by the
system to complete the illusion.
Suddenly Canis froze in mid stride with his
tail straight back, ears up, and eyes locked straight ahead. For a
moment Greene thought that the guard dog had spotted her, and she
wondered what exactly the consequences of having her plan
discovered by the animal might be. Something small and brown
flashed across the projection and in an explosion of energy Canis
raced virtually after the creature over hills, through brush, and
across small streams.
Backing away from the gym entrance Greene
pulled through the ladder-well and into the cockpit. A quick guilty
look down the short and narrow 'up-stairs' corridor leading to the
captain's stateroom and life support spaces confirmed she was
alone. Kassad's door was closed and all was silent even the console
systems were displaying only minimal standby information.
Reactionless drive systems were a technology
whose origins were lost to time. Rediscovery of the manufacturing
techniques had required that unique logic defying asymmetrical
thinking that the terrestrial species was infamous for. After that
the utility and reliability of reactionless drive systems had made
them almost instantly ubiquitous.
Reliability of reactionless drive systems meant
that they often went decades or more without being shut off. Many
of the legacy systems from the Lost Era had been run continuously
for thousands of years without incident. By the same token those
few legacy systems that had been taken offline for inspection and
analysis seldom regained their original functionality.
Keeping a reactionless drive active was a
simple matter. So long as power was available it was easy to
maintain an inertial bias strong enough to keep the forces with the
device balanced. When the system wasn't needed the inertial bias
could be reduced to a low enough level to make it negligible. If
the reactionless drive even went offline the process of
reactivating it was much more involved.
Ordinarily it would be the task of a shipyard
facility to do the work of reactivating a deactivated reactionless
drive system. It was possible to reinitialize the functional state
of the drive's core without elaborate shipyard instruments, but it
was a complicated and risky process. There were more things that
could go wrong with the process than could go right and any
failures or lapses could ruin the drive or, more catastrophically,
cause it to explosively fracture.
At the heart of any reactionless drive, beneath
a shroud of regulating apparatus, was a core of precisely
atomically aligned matter. Most commonly a core of pure iron was
used for its combination of density, stability, and ease of
alignment. When properly initialized the core could be endowed with
artificially induced momentum that it would in turn impart to
whatever structure it was mounted on. If improperly initialized an
imbalanced reactionless drive core would either fail to function or
tear itself apart with enough force to send fragments hurtling at
tremendous velocity through anything in their path.
Taking the pilot's seat Greene called up the
maintenance subroutines as she stifled a yawn. None of the
sub-systems showed any signs of malfunction. A small test pulse of
energy through the iron core revealed its internal structure to be
perfectly coherent.
Having expected extensive work just to prepare
the drive core for charging Greene was pleasantly surprised. What
she was looking at appeared to be as functional as if it had just
rolled off the production line that had assembled it. Since there
was nothing indicating the drive core or its support systems
wouldn't work Greene optimistically considered beginning the
process of charging the core.
After all while Greene knew that the process
required some manual oversight she had every reason to suspect that
it, like everything else in the modern universe, was heavily
automated. Investigation into what would be required confirmed this
assumption and emboldened her. Looking over the data it seemed to
Greene that the drive could be up and running in less than an hour
if everything went well, and she had every reason to believe that
it would.
It took a lot of energy to move a thousand tons
of ship, and it took a lot of finesse to balance that energy within
the reactionless drive core. Thousands of kilowatts were poured
into each layer of iron crystal while alternate layers were
countercharged to keep the whole in balance. Most of that energy
would end up in being converted into other dimensional aspects of
the matter in a process that was only understood in abstract
theory.
Bringing the reactionless drive online was made
hazardous due to the sensitivity of the core to interference from
nearby electromagnetic sources and irregularities in the flow rate
of electrical input. It was these variables that made constant
monitoring necessary. When imbalances occurred they had to be
drained away quickly, before they caused a cascade collapse, so
that the process could be restarted at the last balanced
layer.
A real shipyard system would have had
sophisticated computer monitoring software and hardware to help the
process. Full shipyard systems would also have had heavy
electromagnetic shielding to minimize interference, and that too
was only minimally replicated within Sabha. In spite of these
hurdles it was entirely, and temptingly, possible to manage the
process manually.
As a youth Greene had heard space crew talk
about manually restarting cold reactionless cores in tall tales of
daring-do. As a function of the controls in front of her the
process looked very straightforward. In fact those tall tales
looked increasingly to have been the product of exaggeration rather
than reality as she started up the process herself.
Everything went smoothly at first. Each layer
charged cleanly and smoothly until an involuntary twitch from
Greene inadvertently aborted a charge layer that was outwardly
normal. After that the recharge of the iron crystal layer following
the aborted layer seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second
prompting Greene to abort the charging of that layer as well. Soon
she was questioning all of her observations and making very little
progress. Only after an hour into recharging the reactionless core
did it occur to Greene that she was too exhausted to complete the
process safely.
Increasingly Greene's decisions made the
situation worse and the threat of a cascade failure loomed
ominously until a little more urgently than she would have liked to
sound Greene called out, "Kassad!"
Clam and very close Kassad's voice came back,
"Yes?"
"What?" Greene turned quickly to see Kassad
drifting languidly in the air behind her with a disinterested
expression on his face then she turned back to her task demanding,
"How long have you been back there?"
With a sleepy yawn Kassad admitted, "Sabha
alerted me to tampering an hour ago, but I went back to sleep. I
certainly didn't think you’d try to recharge the reactionless drive
all by yourself." Another yawn and a bit of stretching followed
before Kassad continued, "I woke up hungry a few minutes ago and
saw you in here on my way to the galley. All those crystal layers
are kind of pretty though… almost hypnotic."
Annoyed by Kassad's flippant attitude Greene
replied, "Well now I'm in a little over my head and I need you to
take over for a while."
In what he intended as a reassuring tone Kassad
said, "No you don't. I brought along a portable recharger system I
borrowed off of a salvage ship; the captain and I go way back."
Pointing at the work Greene had already done Kassad scoffed at the
absurdity of the situation saying, "I'm certainly not going to try
to recharge the thing by hand if I don't have to. People get killed
doing that."
Momentarily relieved Greene looked over the
controls for a general abort key. "So I should just dump all the
work I've already done?" Kassad reached past Greene to toggle a
control that made the entire display go black and Greene's eyes
went wide in terror, "There's a gigajoule already in there!" She
yelled fearing a fracture of the core.
A core fracture would prevent a full charge. It
would also riddle the core with microfractures that would place
their own limitations on performance. Worse than this was the
reality that any microfracture could rupture into a full blown
fracture with little provocation. If this happened it would add its
own microfractures to the core in a cascade that could destroy more
than the drive itself.
"No, there isn't." Kassad explained calmly.
"That's the mirror system. I put that on there so people who try to
mess with Sabha's systems think they're actually doing something.
It's much more effective than just a command key, and kids love it.
They can come up here and pretend they're a space captain," as if
fondly remembering a specific instance Kassad added, "scares years
off their parents."
With a howl of outrage Greene turned to glare
at a shocked Kassad which prompted Canis to bound into the space
barking wildly. Another wordless shout from Greene brought a swift
end to the barking as Canis duplicated Kassad's shocked expression.
As much as could be managed in zero gravity Greene stormed out of
the room leaving the two to share confused looks.
Chapter 18: "Welcome to Mareville"
"Item 2: The establishment of Mareville as a
settlement shall first and foremost have as its focus the
maintenance of a good business environment. Only through the
generation and accumulation of wealth can other goals (such as the
maintenance of good living conditions) be pursued with any hope of
success."
-Mareville Charter of Settlement
really bring the reactionless drive online again it was an
experience both less smooth and far less dramatic. A third of the
systems total thrust output was ultimately lost to a microfracture
that prevented a full charge of the system. What was left would be
enough to bring them to a neutral velocity with respect to the
Horsehead Nebula within a week. This matched up almost perfectly
with the indirect elliptical course that the jump drive
navigational plot demanded.
Attempts to bring the warp drive online had
failed. After replacing a series of blown fuses from their first
attempt Kassad spent a day and a half just getting the
self-diagnostic routine running. In reward of this effort an
endless string of fault codes warned against any serious attempts
to fix the problem without full port facilities.
At least with the reactionless drive
functioning they were once again under two-thirds gravity
acceleration. The presence of up and down did much to clear their
heads and offset the sense of wrongness from their still distorted
senses. It also made sleep much easier for Greene, and all of them
were feeling much better when they reached the Horsehead
Nebula.
At a distance a cloud of gas can look solid,
and this is especially true of the immense distances in space and
the clouds known as nebula. By way of example the slow moving
clouds of water vapor in Terra's skies have always evoked a sense
of mass in excess of their weight so that early peoples . Yet a
cloud is insubstantial enough to be carried through the air and
solid enough to block the light of a local star. Yet walk into any
cloud along a mountain top and the ethereal nothingness of a cloud
can strain belief in its existence.
Interstellar clouds of gas known as nebula are
far thinner than terrestrial clouds and almost invisible from
within. Spread out over light years of space they are composed
mainly of a hundred or so molecules of per cubic centimeter. It is
their tenuous nature that allows them to exist. If they were any
denser they would rapidly collapse under their own gravitational
pull to form stars or gas giants.
instead kept thinking about the possibility of being unable to
bring their velocity under control. The idea of speeding out of
control across the length of Laniakea, endlessly searching for
somewhere to come to port, jolted her out of every effort to doze.
Eventually with a stifled yawn Greene determined to begin the
process of bringing the reactionless drive online alone.
On her way to Sabha's cockpit Greene moved
quietly, careful not to bump anything with her legs as she pulled
along the handholds, but as she grew closer she heard activity in
the ship's tiny gym. Peaking in she saw Canis wearing a tension
harness that held him to the room's treadmill apparently without
any lingering effects from the earlier drama. The dog trotted
happily along through the open meadow projected on the wall in
front of him. His mouth hung open and occasionally he paused to
sniff at the faux-scents of plant and animal generated by the
system to complete the illusion.
Suddenly Canis froze in mid stride with his
tail straight back, ears up, and eyes locked straight ahead. For a
moment Greene thought that the guard dog had spotted her, and she
wondered what exactly the consequences of having her plan
discovered by the animal might be. Something small and brown
flashed across the projection and in an explosion of energy Canis
raced virtually after the creature over hills, through brush, and
across small streams.
Backing away from the gym entrance Greene
pulled through the ladder-well and into the cockpit. A quick guilty
look down the short and narrow 'up-stairs' corridor leading to the
captain's stateroom and life support spaces confirmed she was
alone. Kassad's door was closed and all was silent even the console
systems were displaying only minimal standby information.
Reactionless drive systems were a technology
whose origins were lost to time. Rediscovery of the manufacturing
techniques had required that unique logic defying asymmetrical
thinking that the terrestrial species was infamous for. After that
the utility and reliability of reactionless drive systems had made
them almost instantly ubiquitous.
Reliability of reactionless drive systems meant
that they often went decades or more without being shut off. Many
of the legacy systems from the Lost Era had been run continuously
for thousands of years without incident. By the same token those
few legacy systems that had been taken offline for inspection and
analysis seldom regained their original functionality.
Keeping a reactionless drive active was a
simple matter. So long as power was available it was easy to
maintain an inertial bias strong enough to keep the forces with the
device balanced. When the system wasn't needed the inertial bias
could be reduced to a low enough level to make it negligible. If
the reactionless drive even went offline the process of
reactivating it was much more involved.
Ordinarily it would be the task of a shipyard
facility to do the work of reactivating a deactivated reactionless
drive system. It was possible to reinitialize the functional state
of the drive's core without elaborate shipyard instruments, but it
was a complicated and risky process. There were more things that
could go wrong with the process than could go right and any
failures or lapses could ruin the drive or, more catastrophically,
cause it to explosively fracture.
At the heart of any reactionless drive, beneath
a shroud of regulating apparatus, was a core of precisely
atomically aligned matter. Most commonly a core of pure iron was
used for its combination of density, stability, and ease of
alignment. When properly initialized the core could be endowed with
artificially induced momentum that it would in turn impart to
whatever structure it was mounted on. If improperly initialized an
imbalanced reactionless drive core would either fail to function or
tear itself apart with enough force to send fragments hurtling at
tremendous velocity through anything in their path.
Taking the pilot's seat Greene called up the
maintenance subroutines as she stifled a yawn. None of the
sub-systems showed any signs of malfunction. A small test pulse of
energy through the iron core revealed its internal structure to be
perfectly coherent.
Having expected extensive work just to prepare
the drive core for charging Greene was pleasantly surprised. What
she was looking at appeared to be as functional as if it had just
rolled off the production line that had assembled it. Since there
was nothing indicating the drive core or its support systems
wouldn't work Greene optimistically considered beginning the
process of charging the core.
After all while Greene knew that the process
required some manual oversight she had every reason to suspect that
it, like everything else in the modern universe, was heavily
automated. Investigation into what would be required confirmed this
assumption and emboldened her. Looking over the data it seemed to
Greene that the drive could be up and running in less than an hour
if everything went well, and she had every reason to believe that
it would.
It took a lot of energy to move a thousand tons
of ship, and it took a lot of finesse to balance that energy within
the reactionless drive core. Thousands of kilowatts were poured
into each layer of iron crystal while alternate layers were
countercharged to keep the whole in balance. Most of that energy
would end up in being converted into other dimensional aspects of
the matter in a process that was only understood in abstract
theory.
Bringing the reactionless drive online was made
hazardous due to the sensitivity of the core to interference from
nearby electromagnetic sources and irregularities in the flow rate
of electrical input. It was these variables that made constant
monitoring necessary. When imbalances occurred they had to be
drained away quickly, before they caused a cascade collapse, so
that the process could be restarted at the last balanced
layer.
A real shipyard system would have had
sophisticated computer monitoring software and hardware to help the
process. Full shipyard systems would also have had heavy
electromagnetic shielding to minimize interference, and that too
was only minimally replicated within Sabha. In spite of these
hurdles it was entirely, and temptingly, possible to manage the
process manually.
As a youth Greene had heard space crew talk
about manually restarting cold reactionless cores in tall tales of
daring-do. As a function of the controls in front of her the
process looked very straightforward. In fact those tall tales
looked increasingly to have been the product of exaggeration rather
than reality as she started up the process herself.
Everything went smoothly at first. Each layer
charged cleanly and smoothly until an involuntary twitch from
Greene inadvertently aborted a charge layer that was outwardly
normal. After that the recharge of the iron crystal layer following
the aborted layer seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second
prompting Greene to abort the charging of that layer as well. Soon
she was questioning all of her observations and making very little
progress. Only after an hour into recharging the reactionless core
did it occur to Greene that she was too exhausted to complete the
process safely.
Increasingly Greene's decisions made the
situation worse and the threat of a cascade failure loomed
ominously until a little more urgently than she would have liked to
sound Greene called out, "Kassad!"
Clam and very close Kassad's voice came back,
"Yes?"
"What?" Greene turned quickly to see Kassad
drifting languidly in the air behind her with a disinterested
expression on his face then she turned back to her task demanding,
"How long have you been back there?"
With a sleepy yawn Kassad admitted, "Sabha
alerted me to tampering an hour ago, but I went back to sleep. I
certainly didn't think you’d try to recharge the reactionless drive
all by yourself." Another yawn and a bit of stretching followed
before Kassad continued, "I woke up hungry a few minutes ago and
saw you in here on my way to the galley. All those crystal layers
are kind of pretty though… almost hypnotic."
Annoyed by Kassad's flippant attitude Greene
replied, "Well now I'm in a little over my head and I need you to
take over for a while."
In what he intended as a reassuring tone Kassad
said, "No you don't. I brought along a portable recharger system I
borrowed off of a salvage ship; the captain and I go way back."
Pointing at the work Greene had already done Kassad scoffed at the
absurdity of the situation saying, "I'm certainly not going to try
to recharge the thing by hand if I don't have to. People get killed
doing that."
Momentarily relieved Greene looked over the
controls for a general abort key. "So I should just dump all the
work I've already done?" Kassad reached past Greene to toggle a
control that made the entire display go black and Greene's eyes
went wide in terror, "There's a gigajoule already in there!" She
yelled fearing a fracture of the core.
A core fracture would prevent a full charge. It
would also riddle the core with microfractures that would place
their own limitations on performance. Worse than this was the
reality that any microfracture could rupture into a full blown
fracture with little provocation. If this happened it would add its
own microfractures to the core in a cascade that could destroy more
than the drive itself.
"No, there isn't." Kassad explained calmly.
"That's the mirror system. I put that on there so people who try to
mess with Sabha's systems think they're actually doing something.
It's much more effective than just a command key, and kids love it.
They can come up here and pretend they're a space captain," as if
fondly remembering a specific instance Kassad added, "scares years
off their parents."
With a howl of outrage Greene turned to glare
at a shocked Kassad which prompted Canis to bound into the space
barking wildly. Another wordless shout from Greene brought a swift
end to the barking as Canis duplicated Kassad's shocked expression.
As much as could be managed in zero gravity Greene stormed out of
the room leaving the two to share confused looks.
Chapter 18: "Welcome to Mareville"
"Item 2: The establishment of Mareville as a
settlement shall first and foremost have as its focus the
maintenance of a good business environment. Only through the
generation and accumulation of wealth can other goals (such as the
maintenance of good living conditions) be pursued with any hope of
success."
-Mareville Charter of Settlement
really bring the reactionless drive online again it was an
experience both less smooth and far less dramatic. A third of the
systems total thrust output was ultimately lost to a microfracture
that prevented a full charge of the system. What was left would be
enough to bring them to a neutral velocity with respect to the
Horsehead Nebula within a week. This matched up almost perfectly
with the indirect elliptical course that the jump drive
navigational plot demanded.
Attempts to bring the warp drive online had
failed. After replacing a series of blown fuses from their first
attempt Kassad spent a day and a half just getting the
self-diagnostic routine running. In reward of this effort an
endless string of fault codes warned against any serious attempts
to fix the problem without full port facilities.
At least with the reactionless drive
functioning they were once again under two-thirds gravity
acceleration. The presence of up and down did much to clear their
heads and offset the sense of wrongness from their still distorted
senses. It also made sleep much easier for Greene, and all of them
were feeling much better when they reached the Horsehead
Nebula.
At a distance a cloud of gas can look solid,
and this is especially true of the immense distances in space and
the clouds known as nebula. By way of example the slow moving
clouds of water vapor in Terra's skies have always evoked a sense
of mass in excess of their weight so that early peoples . Yet a
cloud is insubstantial enough to be carried through the air and
solid enough to block the light of a local star. Yet walk into any
cloud along a mountain top and the ethereal nothingness of a cloud
can strain belief in its existence.
Interstellar clouds of gas known as nebula are
far thinner than terrestrial clouds and almost invisible from
within. Spread out over light years of space they are composed
mainly of a hundred or so molecules of per cubic centimeter. It is
their tenuous nature that allows them to exist. If they were any
denser they would rapidly collapse under their own gravitational
pull to form stars or gas giants.
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