"This is great Anson. 'Becca has got to have one of these!" she said.
"She does. Jim and I worked this out together. He is showing her theirs about now also."
Tabitha smiled and replied, "Good. Would you like for me to show you mine?" She laughed as she undid her maternity top. Praise the Lord for the honeymoon trimester and low gravity bedrooms!
The effort to maintain military superiority Earthside was continuing as planned. No further skirmishes had popped up anyway. The Earth was battered and tired. World War III had done a lot of damage. It takes a while to mourn millions of deaths. It takes even longer to clean up. We kept an eye on the news and our favorite television broadcasts and the Internet. Nothing dangerous was going on. We continued at a steady and careful pace. No need to take undue risk during peacetime.
The status of the individual warp system or Supersuit wasn't great. A closed bubble that small with a hundred Watt heater (a person) inside it will need a good deal of air conditioning.
Also, the warp core and the ECCs required would take up a certain amount of volume. That couldn't be helped; things take up space. I pushed the group of engineers and scientists working the Supersuit to lead toward an armored suit, sort of like that suggested in Starship Troopers. The warp core and ECCs could be distributed throughout the suit. This would be the simplest and most likely first doable Supersuit design. We continued to work on it. And I began to create some new friendships in that group. Of course, we had handpicked everybody on the base and they were all our friends. However, none of them were really in our immediate family. Time changes that. We were becoming a lunar community.
Over the next three months we continued popping out to the solar focus and cataloged many other star systems. We looked closely at a red planet very similar to Mars around Wolf 359. Luyten 726-8 A and B supported a myriad of planets and asteroids, a few gas giants and one planet about twice the size of Earth that had liquid water and green vegetation.
Lalande 21185 had a set of twin medium sized gas giants similar to Uranus and Neptune. Sirius A and B had two different planets that could support life. One was more of a desert planet with very small oceans, while the other was in an ice age. Most of it was covered with ice except for the equatorial regions. There was liquid water there.
We continued looking and found planets around nearly every star we tried. Ross 154, 248, and 128. 61 Cygni and Luyten 789-6. Epsilon Eridani had a world that looked just like Earth but with two moons. I couldn't wait to get out there and look at these places. I was hoping that we would've found a civilization by this time though. We had looked at about twenty planets closely. I decided that we should take a couple of days per star system. Wouldn't want to miss anything. Out of all the planets we studied thus far, no intelligent life. The odds were at least worse than one in twenty for intelligent life. Although, it had been about one in three for plant life. The universe is a damn big place. We just had to keep looking.
A month or so later, Jim and I had plenty to do other than warp technology. I was constantly getting up in the middle of the night to change little Ariel Eridani Clemons. And I'm sure Jim was having a time with the twins, Mindy Sue and Michael Ash Daniels. Of course, we had no shortage of people volunteering to baby sit. Oh, who was the first baby born on the Moon you want to know? It was Mindy Sue, then Michael Ash was born a few minutes later. Ariel was born a week later. Fortunately, Ariel looks just like her mom and her older sister.
Tabitha and Annie had little Ariel in the bedroom in zero gee before she was two months old. She never seemed to get sick from the microgravity. Tabitha must have some super inner-ear gene that Ariel and Anne Marie inherited.
In our spare time, Jim and I dug out a small fifteen-meter diameter dome and put a gravity modification switch in it. We designed the gravity meter to enable gravity from zero to fifteen gee. We then padded the floor and walls and ceiling and started using that room to exercise in. I could do all sorts of flips and multiple spin kicks at a quarter gee. I could even stand and balance on one hand. We all spent time in the "gravity room" as it came to be known. After balance work, we would then do strength training. I was hoping to slowly work up to withstanding fifteen gee, but that is damned heavy. I was at least hoping to build my strength until I could do multiple flips and very high aerial kicks in standard one gee. I also spent time with Ariel and Tabitha in the room at low gee trying to get Ariel to walk early.
Life on the moon was swell. A few times we visited my and Tabitha's parents and let them play with the baby. How many kids do you know that got to fly back and forth between the Earth and the Moon on a regular basis? Our little Ariel was an astronaut at one month if you don't count being born on the Moon. Over the period of Ariel's first year she grew about twenty percent taller than the average, according to the Internet. Tabitha and I wondered if it was due to the low gee we often had her in. We soon decided that anytime we exposed her to low gee, we would then slowly expose her to higher gee. Say two and a half gee for a few minutes. However, more than ninety-five percent of her time was in normal gee.
Ariel, Mindy, and Mike became a handful. They were crawling all over the place and in the low gee rooms were walking. They were also beginning to jabber something fierce.
Finally, on Mindy and Mike's second birthday the starship was complete and parked on the surface of the Moon just outside Moon Base 1. We boarded Einstein and flew up to the surface and out of the warp barrier of the Moon base. Anne Marie docked us to the main section of the starship and we were ready for liftoff. The crew consisted of Tabitha, Margie, Anne Marie, Rebecca, Jim, Al, Sara, and myself. Our mission was to fly to the second planet from Barnard's Star, look around for a couple of days, and safely return to the Moon. We planned to bring the ECCs of both the Einstein, which was docked in front, and the Starbuck, which was docked, in the rear. The two ECCs would enable us to use much more energy and perhaps push our warp velocity even further than the fifty times that of light we had maxed out at previously. Jim and I calculated that we should be able to reach seventy times the speed of light. That meant a month out and a month back.
We had shaken hands with most of the lunar community in a prelaunch ceremony we had the previous day. We had said our goodbyes and left the base in the charge of a new colonel Tabitha was grooming, Lieutenant Colonel James Duvall. He was a good man as far as I could tell. Besides, he had the aid of the head NCO on base, Sergeant Major Calvin Perry. He would be fine.
We had also dropped all of the kids off with my parents. The Clemons and the Ames grandparents had adopted Mindy and Mike as their own grandchildren. So, we left all three of them. They would stay with my parents for the first month and then my folks were going to take them down to Gulf Shores where Tabitha's parents had moved to after the Secret War. We would pick them up on our way back. We all cried when we left them. The kids didn't seem to care that much. My dad said they started crying that night when they realized we weren't coming back for a while. Why didn't we take them? I just couldn't see taking toddlers into such a dangerous situation. What if something went wrong? Our kids should still get to grow up and have full lives. Besides, we didn't need toddlers bumping into spacecraft controls and warping us into a black hole or something. That sounds like stuff out of a bad science fiction novel.