The ripple drive activated, the space in front of the Missive shimmered, like a stone thrown into a pool on a moonlit night. Then the stretching visual began, as if the vessel was being pulled forward like it was made of putty, then the stars followed it.
The ship was holding together so far, it was shuddering a little, but that was expected with the amount of armor she had lost, the ship was no longer perfectly balanced. Alex looked down to his readings, everything seemed to be normal. “Kara, my readings are normal, how are the ripple fields looking to you?”
Kara whispered in his ear, “They are a full .68 percent out of synch. But we are accelerating out of the Birmingham system at the equivalent of 40c.”
Alex looked to his left side monitor, sure enough, 40c and climbing, wait, why was it climbing? This was considered maximum cruising speed for the Missive. He pulled back on the throttle for the fusion torches only to watch as the indicator showed 42c and rising.
“Um, Kara, any idea why cutting back on the torches isn’t stabilizing our speed?”
Kara took a moment before answering, he realized he had gone into frame-jack when he started panicking. For Kara to take a moment meant she was crunching some serious data. “It appears we have caught ourselves on the quantum wave of the space-time rip.”
Alex thought about this for a mill, “So we’re like a surfboard riding a really big wave?”
Kara’s whisper seemed right behind him, “If you consider riding space like a wave, then yes, and since space can move at unlimited speed, we may be in for quite a ride.”
Alex looked over, 67c in that short amount of time and climbing. “I’m shutting down the fusion torches, maybe we can coast out of this.” Then did just that, shutting down the engines with a click of a silver switch. He looked over again, 72c, damn.
His hand wavered above the ripple drive switch, “Kara, any idea what will happen if I turn off the ripple drive?”
A few mills pass before she answered, “I think that would be a bad idea, I believe the ripple drive is what is shielding us from the shockwave we are riding.”
Alex dropped his hand to his lap, “Well ok then, I guess we’re going to ride this out and hope for the best.” He said as he spun his chair around and stepped out into the barely forming VR of the common area. He dismissed the cockpit and the common area came into full view.
Kara appeared by the table staring at the hologram hovering above it. Alex wondered if she normally stood here invisible to him in his VR or if she had her own environment, he realized that in the last twenty eight years he had never asked her. Granted, she seemed to have… grown in the last few years.
The readouts around the hologram showed their relative speed, distance from singularity, and tons of other data that he didn’t bother with, Kara would keep track of it. “192c, we’re cruising above what an Imperial corvette can manage.”
Kara nodded as she watched the holo, “We appear to be caught on a crest of this space-time wave. The ripple field barely allowed us to latch on to the fabric of the universe before the wave hit us. So rather than the wave washing over us, we are now trapped on it.”
Alex nodded, inspecting the table for something to munch on. “Can you tell if the wave is dissipating any?”
Kara’s eyes blazed blue as she did her calculation thing, “It is dissipating, but only slightly, at this rate it will be six days until we will be clear. However, we will continue to pick up speed for another three days.”
Alex looked at the holo, fried chicken wing in hand, “Um, we’re up to 240c, we’ll be reaching humanities record soon at this rate.”
Kara’s eyes returned to her normal sparkling blue, “The speed will increase exponentially over that time, we will be traveling at 196,000,000c in twenty four hours. In 66 hours we will pass the finite curve of the universe.”
Alex stopped mid bite, “Wait, we’ll pass this curve and still keep going?”
Kara looked over to Alex, “Unknown, we may simply stop when we hit the finite curve, or we may be shot past our known universe.”
Alex shrugged and finished biting into his wing, chewing and swallowing while watching the speed increase on the holo, “Well, at the very least we bought ourselves sixty six more hours.”
Kara cocked her head again at Alex, a trait he assumed was exasperation, yeah, not sentient my ass. “If we survive this, we will be billions of light years from human space with no way back.”
Alex nodded, “I know Kara, but it was this or die, or cease to be, or whatever happens when space-time consumes you. Sometimes you have to roll the dice and hope for the best. But I see where you’re going with this, we’ll be stranded and even at our top cruising speed it will take hundreds of millions if not billions of years to get back.”
Kara simply nodded and looked at the holo. Alex grabbed a beer and headed to his couch, maybe he could beat that boss before he died smashing against some cosmic wall or some shit.
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Kara popped into existence beside him on the couch. Ok, this was different, she never interacted with anything in his VR. Alex raised an eyebrow, “This is new, joining me on the couch for once?”
Kara seemed a little sheepish, “I’ve been able to interact with your environment for a few years now, but it seemed wrong somehow. You were the human captain, I was just the AI, a tool to aid you.”
Alex put his controller down, game already forgotten. “So what has changed?”
Kara shrugged, “I don’t know, I guess my base programming no longer applies, we are no longer in human space, and we may be dead soon. I guess I didn’t want to meet my end alone.”
Alex reached over and put his hand over hers, surprisingly he felt her hand, not a hologram that his hand passed through like when they first became acquainted. “There’s nothing we can do about it now, it either happens or it doesn’t. What do you want to do?”
Kara sat back on the couch, “Can we watch something funny? I’ve seen you laugh until you spilled your beverage watching your shows, I’d like to see what that is like.”
Alex nodded, “Sure, we can do that.” The screen changed to a comedy sitcom now decades old that was your typical slice of life show.
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The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Days later Alex was getting yet another beer from the table when Kara disappeared from the couch and reappeared at the table in front of the hologram. This caused him to stop in place, “What is it Kara?”
Kara nodded to the holo, “We are approaching the curve according to the sensors estimations. We are traveling so fast everything is having to be extrapolated.”
Alex put down his beer bottle, “How long do you think?”
Kara shrugged, “A few minutes at most.” The hologram showed their ship as a blue triangle coming up on a large wall.
Alex pointed, “Um, that doesn’t look like a curve, that looks like a solid wall.”
Kara simply spoke, “It’s extrapolation, the sensors don’t know how to show nothing, so it simply shows it as a line we are rapidly approaching.”
Suddenly the ship shuddered, like a vehicle hitting the brakes on a gravel and rock road. Alex couldn’t really ‘feel’ it in VR, it was sensor data from the hull coming to him as input.
He looked at the holo, there was nothing but a blue triangle in the tank. He looked over to Kara, “Well that was uneventful. Um, are we slowing down?”
Kara nodded, “Yes, it is gradual, but it appears our ripple drive has shut down and we are being braked by whatever stands in for the fabric of reality here.”
Alex took a sip from his beer, “Ok, how long until we come to a stop?”
Kara’s eyes blazed blue for a moment, “At least three weeks if the medium is consistent.”
Alex rubbed the back of his neck, “Well alright then, let’s see what we can do to get this tub put back together.”
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Three weeks later Alex was standing on the catwalk watching the screens as the spider bots finished calibrating the ripple drive. Kara stood beside him watching the final few percentage points go by before it finally spit out the message ‘Calibration Success!’ Alex nodded, “Alright, we’ve got all the hull ruptures fixed, ripple drive online, how are we on sensors?”
Kara followed him as they walked back to the common area from engineering. “Whatever we hit going through the curve fried all our external sensors, now that we’re at a respectable speed I plan to send out repair bots to see about getting them as well as our cameras repaired or replaced.”
Alex nodded, “Will any of the ones you send out have cameras of their own we can piggy back off of?”
Kara nodded, “Yes, the larger models will. Are you wanting to see what space looks like here?”
Alex shrugged, “Yeah, I’m hoping it’s not just empty blackness in every direction for lightyears on end.”
They sat down on the couch in the common area and watched the screen as a dozen different sized repair bots were exiting air-lock 2. The cameras onboard showed pinpricks of light, whether they were stars or galaxies or universes, Alex did not know. But they were a welcome sight, he didn’t know what he would do if he was subjected to eternal darkness.
Kara pointed to the right portion of the screen, “It’s like something scraped the entirety of the ship with a giant scouring pad.”
Sure enough, the outside of the ship was shiny metal. Not a dollop of paint to be found, well, it wasn’t paint, it was imbedded nano fibers. But it was still a feat since the rebellion made sure every millimeter of the ship was space black. “Yeah, every antenna and protuberance, like cameras and point defense are gone too. How many sensors did we have anyways?”
Kara paused for a moment, “Since the military refit, about four hundred different sensors and cameras, granted we lost over half those in the fight, the rest on the curve. We’ll have to send our drones out a few at a time to replace them, it’ll be a few days I think.”
Alex materialized a coffee table and put his feet up, “Wanna watch some murder mysteries?”
Kara nodded, “I like those, even if I figure them out halfway through.”
Alex took a sip, “Just don’t tell me, I like the surprise.”
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Alex and Kara stood in front of the hologram again, Alex with popcorn, “Are you sure?”
Kara nodded, “Yes, sensors show a system nineteen light years away with a planet in the habitable zone.”
Alex popped a piece of popcorn into his mouth, “Well alright then, lets see what we find there, not like we have anything else to do.”
Kara looked over to him, then down to his popcorn, then back to his face, “We still have a lot of armor to replace, and we’re running low on raw materials. There is also a diffuse asteroid field in the system.”
He offered the popcorn to Kara, who just shook her head. She never accepted food, he had no idea why, food was awesome, “Alrighty then, setting a course, we should be there in 10 days, then a few more to slow down after shutting down the ripple drive.”
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Alex sat in the cockpit watching the countdown on his navigation panel, as the milliseconds counted down he held his finger over the silver switch for the ripple drive, at zero he clicked it down in the OFF position.
The Missive dropped back into real space, powered only by her fusion torch engines. He started the rotational braking maneuver to bring them to a stop near where the sensors showed the highest concentration of asteroids. Once set he sighed and spun his chair around before dropping out of frame-jack to see the common room.
Kara stood at attention in front of the hologram, Alex eyed the table but didn’t see anything that caught his eye, no worries, it would change in five minutes anyways. “Ok, thirty one hours of reverse burn and we’ll be stopped. Got a better idea of what we’ll find here?”
Kara nodded, “Yes, these asteroids are filled with the heavy metals and small carbon deposits we need to replace the missing armor plates. We may be able to refill the cargo holds with the raw materials we need as well.”
Alex looked at the holo and watched as the blue triangle looked like it was backing into a polka dot field. “Any sign of life on the second planet?”
Kara answered, “No signs of technology, no Bussard trails to or from the planet, no string messages, not even more primitive forms of communication such as radio. There is however a breathable atmosphere, pressure is within norms for humans, as is temperature. It is possible for life to be there, we’re simply too far out to know.”
Alex smiled to himself, a month ago he would have had to ask several questions to get her to give him that much information. She seemed to be coming out of her shell, “Well ok then, let’s get started. We’re close enough to launch the mining drones and resource carriers, not sure about our probes, they were military originally, will they be of use?”
Kara pondered this for a mil, “Yes, they aren’t survey drones, more like long range spy drones, but they’ll be good enough to pick up campfires or towns from orbit.”
Alex picked up a brownie, “Ok, we have a dozen still in inventory, I figure we can send six out to orbit the planet and look for anything interesting.”
The hologram filled with drones, carriers and probes leaving the Missive and heading to either asteroids or the planet. A few hours later the first mining drones were reporting in, excellent deposits of metal, a good sign.
Several more hours after that they received the first reports from the probes. Alex’s jaw nearly dropped to his waist, “Are those… cities?”
Kara looked at the screen from the couch and paused the orbital video, then composited visual, infrared, and ultraviolet into a single picture that punched through the atmosphere and cloud cover to show… total devastation. The cities were in ruins, the once majestic buildings were slag, melted by intense heat.
Alex looked over to Kara, “Do we have any way to see if there are inhabitants? We never found aliens in our part part of the galaxy. I mean, we only covered about three quarters of it, but still.”
Kara looked away from the image on the screen, “We have prints for the auto factories to make several different terrestrial drones, we’ll have to cloak them, and use a mining transport to get them all the way there, but yes, we could use them to view the local inhabitants.”
Two days later the first three drones left their auto factories, Kara was shepherding them to a mining transport that was also fresh from the auto factory and getting ready to launch them from the ship. Kara had been busy these last two days, the forges were working nonstop to turn asteroid chunks into usable ingots and internal hauler bots were storing them away in the mostly empty cargo holds.
On top of this, the remaining auto factories were turning ingots into armor plate sections and the repair bots were welding them in place. Before long the Missive might actually start looking like a starship again instead of a floating junk yard. Well, a shiny floating junk yard. Until they found a good source of carbon, she was going to stay shiny.
Eight hours later the transport released the three dozen cloaked drones into the upper atmosphere before firing its thrusters and leaving the planet to join its brethren in the asteroid belt. The drones were invisible to the naked eye, the cloaking field ensured the football sized drones wouldn’t cause a stir to the local population.
They had found three good sites, the world seemed to only have a single super continent. As such, one was sent to the mountains in the north, another further south with the huge industrial complex that looked more like moon scape, and one to the far south.
Alex sat on the couch beside Kara, bowl of cereal in his lap, watching as the drones slowly descended and began recording. The first to make it down entered one of the small settlements outside the bombed out area . As the drone hovered above the street it focused its camera at the crowd and zoomed in.
Alex nearly spilt his cereal in his lap, “Are those…. Elves?”