“I was there the night she walked in out of the middle of ground zero at UCF with that thing on her shoulder,” Bill said. “Her whole world destroyed, her home destroyed, her mother dead, and calm as you please. Shortly thereafter I think I went to the place Tuffy comes from. And I’d say that it’s the strangest place in the universe, were it even in the universe.”
“XO has the con,” the CO said.
“XO has the con,” the XO repeated.
“Join me in my office, Commander,” the CO said.
“Sir.”
They climbed up a ladder on the port side of the conn and down the narrow corridor to the CO’s office. The CO crossed it and flopped down behind his desk, waving at a chair.
“Bill, explain to me this thing with gravi… What she said.”
“Gravitational standing waves,” Bill replied. “You’ve been through a cut in the intercoastal in a small boat, sir?”
“Yes,” the CO said, frowning.
“Well, when the tide’s running…” Bill said.
“Oh, you get standing waves,” the CO said, nodding. “I’ve seen ’em run ten feet sometimes. So the boat’s going to go up and down?”
“These are going to be going more like… back and forth,” Bill said, frowning and looking at the overhead. “I think. I’ve seen the theory but until Mimi pointed it out I wasn’t concerned about it. The gravity out here is so diffuse that big standing waves were, I thought, unlikely. But I think I can see where she’s deriving her theory from. If the conditions in the interstellar medium are significantly different than around a star…”
The CO waited for about thirty seconds, then cleared his throat.
“Sorry, sir,” Bill said, looking at his commander and grinning. “I’d need to sit down and do some serious calculations to figure out if Mimi’s off or not. But off the top I can see where she’s coming from. If they are high, it’s going to make the bow shock an interesting place. They’re going to be more or less stationary, so there may be odd material caught in them. The stellar equivalent of flotsam and jetsam.”
“You get in an area that has possibly damaging material, you slow down,” the CO said. “We get out there and engage the normal space drive. Take it slow.”
“Hmm…” Bill said, wincing. “Top velocity in normal space is three and a half kilometers per second, sir. Three point five kkps.”
“That’s always bugged me,” the CO said. “If we continually accelerate, we can go faster, right?”
“Materials, sir,” Bill replied, frowning. “Do you want us to sustain a relativistic impact?”
“Relativistic…” the CO said. “Apparently, I’m going to ask a dumb question. What is a… ?”
“If we keep accelerating things get… bad, sir,” Bill replied. “We can continue accelerating, stopping for chill-downs from time to time, as long as our fuel holds out. And with our acceleration we’ll get… very fast very quickly. However, long before we consume much of our quarkium, we’ll get up into largish fractions of light speed. Just our top end of three thousand five hundred kps is enough of a fraction to make me wince. It’s about fifty times the fastest spacecraft Earth’s ever launched and about point zero one two light speed. But the problem is that space isn’t totally empty. There are small bits all over, micrometeorites, that we’re running into even now: the bow of the boat has armoring and micrometeorite blankets on it; that absorbs most of the impacts. However, if we get up to serious fractions of light speed, a real ‘intermediate speed’ when we’re talking about the distance from the sun to Jupiter, those impacts stop being survivable. Newton starts to make way for Einstein and energy release stops being purely kinetic and starts getting… relativistic. Think nukes instead of rocks. Up close to the speed of light, if we hit something the size of a pea we’ll be a smear of photons spread over an area the size of the solar system. Not to mention when we get back home our clocks will be so off we’ll never be able to figure out what time Jeopardy is on. But that’s another discussion…”
“Time dilation I’ve got,” the CO said. “As we get up to fractions of light speed, our time slows down compared to the rest of the universe. Einstein said it was so and I heard there were some experiments that have proved it. Oh, hell. And mass increases. So that pea, since it’s going at a relative fraction of light speed, would be like—”
“Running into a planet,” Bill said, nodding. “As velocity increases, gets into relativistic range, time slows, mass increases. It also means the faster we go, the harder it is to go faster, since our own mass increases. Thirty-five isn’t a speed limit, it’s more of a guideline. But it’s a pretty good guideline, sir.
“The point is, sir, I’m not sure what you mean by… ‘out there,’ but if you mean we stop at approximately two astronomical units from the perceived trouble area, which itself is going to be something on the order of ten AUs wide, at 3.5 kkps it will take us fifty-one hundred thousand seconds to do the approach, which is—”
“A lot of minutes,” the CO said, frowning. “Hours.”
“Thirty six hundred seconds in an hour,” Bill said. “Two hours to do the approach. That’s not bad. But it will take fourteen to do the full crossing. We can cross light years in that time. And if we’re damaged coming back… Fourteen hours might be more hours than we have.”
“So we hit it at Warp One and hope for the best,” the CO said.
“I’m not sure what else we can do, sir,” Bill replied. “I do suspect, however, that the major issue will be in the area of the bow shock. So once we do this sampling… Probably when we enter a system it should be away from the bow shock.”
“Effects,” the captain said.
“The waves are going to create shearing stress. I’m not sure what the drive is going to do in those conditions, frankly, but we should probably warn the crew of the possibility of unusual maneuvers…”
“Grapp, I’m getting whacked,” Hattelstad said, looking at the clock on the bulkhead. “Four more hours.”
“We’re on twelve on, twelve off schedules,” Jaenisch said as they made their way to the armory. “Two platoons up at a time, one down. We’re the last platoon to go down. Sorry about that. I know you had a bad night.”
“Not a problem,” Berg said. “I can hang.”
“Hey, Josh,” Jaen said as they entered the armory.
The armorer was a corporal, very tall, about six-six if Berg was right, and skinny. He also looked… odd. It was something about the way he stood. His name tag read “Lyle.”
“Hey, Jaen,” the armorer said in what was barely a whisper. “This Two-Gun?”
“Yeah,” Jaen said, grinning. “But he promises he’s not going to go all mojo on us in combat.”
“I laid in a spare set of M-96s just in case,” the armorer said, smiling lopsidedly. It seemed as if one side of his face didn’t work quite properly. “You’ll be wanting your guns.”
“That we would,” Jaen said. “Want help?”
“Got it,” the armorer said, limping away from the window. When he came back he was hefting an eight-barrel Gatling gun in either hand. He set the massive weapons on the counter as if they weighed no more than a .22. Then he went back and came out with a heavy automatic cannon.
“You’ve got the other Gatling,” Sergeant Jaenisch said, checking the serial numbers and setting one of the guns on his shoulder. “See ya, Josh.”
“Go get ’em,” the armorer said, grinning. “And I’m serious. I’ve got two official .455s for old Two-Gun here when he wants them.”
“Thanks,” Berg said, picking up the other Gatling. “If I need them, you’ll be the second person to find out.”