As the probe neared the target coordinates, the Space Exploration Authority at Houston Space Center checked the probe's data feed one last time. “I know there's a pretty good delay, but shouldn't we be getting something?” asked a portly Senator who had managed to get into mission control due to the fact that he was on the board that decided on the government's funding of the SEAs missions.
“Yes sir,” said the director. “I don't understand. A week ago, we were reading ten times the standard background radiation coming from this area, but now it's barely double.” He looked at one of the technicians. “Check the probe's systems one more time. This has to be a sensor glitch.”
“Negative for errors,” responded the technician when the tests were complete.
The director rubbed his chin, trying to think of anything he may have missed, when the Senator walked over to him. “I gave you over a billion dollars to build your probe, with its “bussard ramjet” engine so that you could look at a phenomenon you said could change the course of science. Was I wrong to fund this?”
“No sir,” said the Director, knowing that his funding would likely be drastically cut if this mission didn't reveal something important. “I don't understand why we haven't..”
“Sirs” interrupted a technician, “we just got a spike, almost directly behind the probe. It's at fifteen times background levels and rising.”
“We must have flown by it, what ever it is. Show me the probe's sensors.”
The main screen in the facility switched to a number of scientific readouts from the probe, and a visual record from where the probe detected the spike. In the video was an area that looked like a mirage. It was wavy, distorting the view of the stars behind it, and it emitted green light from random places, like the sun reflecting from an ocean.
“Director, what am I looking at?” asked the Senator.
“I have no idea,” replied the director, “but you can be sure I'll find out.”
–-------------------
Over sixty years later Harold Sampson, Captain and pilot of the colony ship Atlas, checked his gauges once again. “Phil, can you check the thrusters? Make sure their operating at peak efficiency.”
“Hold on.” replied Phil, as he pushed a few places on the touch-screen to his left. When it finished a few seconds later he nodded. “They're at or beyond new design specs. We're just too heavy.”
“Yeah,” said Harold. “I knew we were borderline when we launched.” He checked his gauges again. He was at max velocity, but it wasn't quite fast enough to get out of the atmosphere. “Ok, I guess I'll have to bump up the drives a bit.” He reached over and bumped up the power 5% to each engine. “Engines at 105%. Keep an eye on the gauges. I need to know if it that causes us problems.” The velocity gauge started creeping up, and a minute later the orbital calculator Harold had running on one of the middle screens verified that they had picked up enough velocity to leave the atmosphere. He lifted the nose a little and they moved into a trajectory that would carry them into low Earth orbit. The drives shut down on their own when the air became too fine to use for propulsion.
“The thrusters got about 80 degrees hotter than they were supposed to. I had to max out the coolant system to keep them from overheating.” said Phil.
“Good, that worked,” said Harold, shutting down the ship's nuclear thermal thrusters, drives that were only useful in an atmosphere, and activating the magnetospheric drive. When their coasting had got them out of the atmosphere completely, he adjusted the magnetic field around the ship to bounce space radiation off in a way that circularized their orbit. After about 40 seconds the computer told him he had achieved a stable orbit and he cut power to the drive. “I'm going to go talk to the doc, get her to run radiation tests on everyone just to be safe, then I'll sweep the ship with rad meters. I need you to run a top-level diagnostic of every system on the ship. I want to make sure everything's working right before we leave orbit. We've got 72 minutes until we need to break orbit.”
“Yes, sir.” said Phil, beginning the ship's built-in diagnostic subroutines, and Harold walked off to talk to the Doctor.
Seventy two minutes later, Harold rolled the ship so that the thrust would be directly down, and reached over to the engine control screen. After adjusting the drive field to push them directly upwards, he set the field's strength to accelerate them at one tenth of a gee and activated the power. They left orbit and began a journey that would take months.
Nine months later, on the day that they would reach the wormhole, the computer awoke them from their stasis pods and they got dressed in the space suits that would help protect them from the radiation within the spacial anomaly. They ate, showered, and tested all of the ship's systems, and, when the computer told them that they would arrive in ten minutes, all four of the crew made their way to the bridge and took a seat.
“Ok, Phil, bring the particle cannon online.” said Harold, referring to the one piece of military hardware they had, a device which was necessary if they were to open the wormhole wide enough to pass through. At a demand of almost 400 kilowatts of particle radiation needing to be injected into the anomaly for every square meter of area the mouth of the wormhole was to have, they would have to fire at the tiny opening at a minimum rate of 1.392 gigawatts for at least 63 seconds. This length of time would be needed to give the wormhole time to open.
Harold made a final course correction to line them up perfectly with the anomaly on their sensors, and radioed the Demeter behind him. The Demeter carried one hundred and fifty colonists in stasis, plus the crew and all of the supplies they would need to set up a hydroponics facility to feed all of the people heading through the wormhole. The crew would stay in stasis until they were needed, ensuring that they don't drain the colony's resources until they could make up for it. The two cargo landers, the Demeter and the Atlas, were about a week ahead of the rest of the ships, to guarantee that the colony's infrastructure and agriculture were up and running before the other ships arrived. “This is the Atlas, calling Demeter. Are you back there?”
“Yes,” said Demeter's pilot. “we are about five minutes behind you. We'll making our final course correction for the Sol system any minute now.”
“Good. Didn't want to go through without you.”
“Not to worry. We'll be there and...” the Pilot stop talking, and a few seconds later, they swore. “We have Pirates on our scanners, and they're coming in fast. They must have a base in the Kuiper belt or something.”
“Can you turn around and target them with your particle cannon?”
“Negative,” came the reply a few seconds later. “They hit it with some sort of EMP cannon. It's offline, as are most of the sensors located in that area.”
“Then we'll have to help you.” replied Harold. He killed the drives and spun the ship around so that the Demeter was in the narrow targeting area of the cannon.
“Sir,” said Phil, “we only have three minutes before we reach the wormhole. With as long as we have to fire it at the mouth...”
“I know.” said Harold, then he targeted the pirate ship that was nearing the Demeter. When he had locked on, he turned the power up to the full one and a half gigawatt output the weapon was capable of and fired. At this range, though, the weapon wasn't that accurate, and it merely grazed the top of the pirate frigate, damaging their armor and maybe a few sensor clusters, but that was all.
“Eighty seconds to wormhole,” said Phil, just as the Captain was about to retarget and fire again. “Sorry, Demeter, that's all I can do.” he broadcast.
Knowing that he would impact the closed mouth of the wormhole if he didn't expand it, he spun the ship back around and targeted the anomaly. He fired, and the spacial disturbance absorbed the energy, the area of its visual disturbance and light emmitions growing larger with every second.
“Mouth diameter 30, 40, 50 meters.” Phil counted, reading the sensors. The three crew other than the Captain braced for impact, knowing what an impact with the edges of the month would do to the ship.
A few tense seconds later, the ship slipped into the opening, and the Captain checked the sensor records. Seven centimeters to spare on one side, five on the other. He smiled at the crew, the excitement of being the first human being to enter a wormhole, and the exhilaration of the near-impact temporarily overriding the knowledge that the Demeter was likely fighting for its life. The crew relaxed, and the Captain adjusted the drive field to output one and a half gigawatts of energy, just enough to keep both ends open so that they could leave when the ship reached the other end, a distance of 128 thousand kilometers in this compressed space. When the Atlas reached the other end, her Captain adjusted their course for the center of the exit, and they reentered normal space, this time with plenty of clearance on all sides.
“Welcome to the Hope system.” he said. “And congratulations on being the first known humans to make the journey to another star system.” With that, he adjusted their course for a breaking maneuver around the system's outermost world, Jotunhiemr. This put him on an eight-month deceleration course to the system's only inhabitable world, called New Earth by the astronomers who briefed them about this system, but Harold Sampson was sure they could come up with a better name.
“Yes sir,” said the director. “I don't understand. A week ago, we were reading ten times the standard background radiation coming from this area, but now it's barely double.” He looked at one of the technicians. “Check the probe's systems one more time. This has to be a sensor glitch.”
“Negative for errors,” responded the technician when the tests were complete.
The director rubbed his chin, trying to think of anything he may have missed, when the Senator walked over to him. “I gave you over a billion dollars to build your probe, with its “bussard ramjet” engine so that you could look at a phenomenon you said could change the course of science. Was I wrong to fund this?”
“No sir,” said the Director, knowing that his funding would likely be drastically cut if this mission didn't reveal something important. “I don't understand why we haven't..”
“Sirs” interrupted a technician, “we just got a spike, almost directly behind the probe. It's at fifteen times background levels and rising.”
“We must have flown by it, what ever it is. Show me the probe's sensors.”
The main screen in the facility switched to a number of scientific readouts from the probe, and a visual record from where the probe detected the spike. In the video was an area that looked like a mirage. It was wavy, distorting the view of the stars behind it, and it emitted green light from random places, like the sun reflecting from an ocean.
“Director, what am I looking at?” asked the Senator.
“I have no idea,” replied the director, “but you can be sure I'll find out.”
–-------------------
Over sixty years later Harold Sampson, Captain and pilot of the colony ship Atlas, checked his gauges once again. “Phil, can you check the thrusters? Make sure their operating at peak efficiency.”
“Hold on.” replied Phil, as he pushed a few places on the touch-screen to his left. When it finished a few seconds later he nodded. “They're at or beyond new design specs. We're just too heavy.”
“Yeah,” said Harold. “I knew we were borderline when we launched.” He checked his gauges again. He was at max velocity, but it wasn't quite fast enough to get out of the atmosphere. “Ok, I guess I'll have to bump up the drives a bit.” He reached over and bumped up the power 5% to each engine. “Engines at 105%. Keep an eye on the gauges. I need to know if it that causes us problems.” The velocity gauge started creeping up, and a minute later the orbital calculator Harold had running on one of the middle screens verified that they had picked up enough velocity to leave the atmosphere. He lifted the nose a little and they moved into a trajectory that would carry them into low Earth orbit. The drives shut down on their own when the air became too fine to use for propulsion.
“The thrusters got about 80 degrees hotter than they were supposed to. I had to max out the coolant system to keep them from overheating.” said Phil.
“Good, that worked,” said Harold, shutting down the ship's nuclear thermal thrusters, drives that were only useful in an atmosphere, and activating the magnetospheric drive. When their coasting had got them out of the atmosphere completely, he adjusted the magnetic field around the ship to bounce space radiation off in a way that circularized their orbit. After about 40 seconds the computer told him he had achieved a stable orbit and he cut power to the drive. “I'm going to go talk to the doc, get her to run radiation tests on everyone just to be safe, then I'll sweep the ship with rad meters. I need you to run a top-level diagnostic of every system on the ship. I want to make sure everything's working right before we leave orbit. We've got 72 minutes until we need to break orbit.”
“Yes, sir.” said Phil, beginning the ship's built-in diagnostic subroutines, and Harold walked off to talk to the Doctor.
Seventy two minutes later, Harold rolled the ship so that the thrust would be directly down, and reached over to the engine control screen. After adjusting the drive field to push them directly upwards, he set the field's strength to accelerate them at one tenth of a gee and activated the power. They left orbit and began a journey that would take months.
Nine months later, on the day that they would reach the wormhole, the computer awoke them from their stasis pods and they got dressed in the space suits that would help protect them from the radiation within the spacial anomaly. They ate, showered, and tested all of the ship's systems, and, when the computer told them that they would arrive in ten minutes, all four of the crew made their way to the bridge and took a seat.
“Ok, Phil, bring the particle cannon online.” said Harold, referring to the one piece of military hardware they had, a device which was necessary if they were to open the wormhole wide enough to pass through. At a demand of almost 400 kilowatts of particle radiation needing to be injected into the anomaly for every square meter of area the mouth of the wormhole was to have, they would have to fire at the tiny opening at a minimum rate of 1.392 gigawatts for at least 63 seconds. This length of time would be needed to give the wormhole time to open.
Harold made a final course correction to line them up perfectly with the anomaly on their sensors, and radioed the Demeter behind him. The Demeter carried one hundred and fifty colonists in stasis, plus the crew and all of the supplies they would need to set up a hydroponics facility to feed all of the people heading through the wormhole. The crew would stay in stasis until they were needed, ensuring that they don't drain the colony's resources until they could make up for it. The two cargo landers, the Demeter and the Atlas, were about a week ahead of the rest of the ships, to guarantee that the colony's infrastructure and agriculture were up and running before the other ships arrived. “This is the Atlas, calling Demeter. Are you back there?”
“Yes,” said Demeter's pilot. “we are about five minutes behind you. We'll making our final course correction for the Sol system any minute now.”
“Good. Didn't want to go through without you.”
“Not to worry. We'll be there and...” the Pilot stop talking, and a few seconds later, they swore. “We have Pirates on our scanners, and they're coming in fast. They must have a base in the Kuiper belt or something.”
“Can you turn around and target them with your particle cannon?”
“Negative,” came the reply a few seconds later. “They hit it with some sort of EMP cannon. It's offline, as are most of the sensors located in that area.”
“Then we'll have to help you.” replied Harold. He killed the drives and spun the ship around so that the Demeter was in the narrow targeting area of the cannon.
“Sir,” said Phil, “we only have three minutes before we reach the wormhole. With as long as we have to fire it at the mouth...”
“I know.” said Harold, then he targeted the pirate ship that was nearing the Demeter. When he had locked on, he turned the power up to the full one and a half gigawatt output the weapon was capable of and fired. At this range, though, the weapon wasn't that accurate, and it merely grazed the top of the pirate frigate, damaging their armor and maybe a few sensor clusters, but that was all.
“Eighty seconds to wormhole,” said Phil, just as the Captain was about to retarget and fire again. “Sorry, Demeter, that's all I can do.” he broadcast.
Knowing that he would impact the closed mouth of the wormhole if he didn't expand it, he spun the ship back around and targeted the anomaly. He fired, and the spacial disturbance absorbed the energy, the area of its visual disturbance and light emmitions growing larger with every second.
“Mouth diameter 30, 40, 50 meters.” Phil counted, reading the sensors. The three crew other than the Captain braced for impact, knowing what an impact with the edges of the month would do to the ship.
A few tense seconds later, the ship slipped into the opening, and the Captain checked the sensor records. Seven centimeters to spare on one side, five on the other. He smiled at the crew, the excitement of being the first human being to enter a wormhole, and the exhilaration of the near-impact temporarily overriding the knowledge that the Demeter was likely fighting for its life. The crew relaxed, and the Captain adjusted the drive field to output one and a half gigawatts of energy, just enough to keep both ends open so that they could leave when the ship reached the other end, a distance of 128 thousand kilometers in this compressed space. When the Atlas reached the other end, her Captain adjusted their course for the center of the exit, and they reentered normal space, this time with plenty of clearance on all sides.
“Welcome to the Hope system.” he said. “And congratulations on being the first known humans to make the journey to another star system.” With that, he adjusted their course for a breaking maneuver around the system's outermost world, Jotunhiemr. This put him on an eight-month deceleration course to the system's only inhabitable world, called New Earth by the astronomers who briefed them about this system, but Harold Sampson was sure they could come up with a better name.