Twenty six days later, Alex and Kara were sitting on the couch watching horror movies, some so old they had to use translators to understand the language. Kara found the notion of watching movies to scare you fascinating. Just as the monster was killed and the sun came up over the horizon Kara paused the movie.
Alex turned to her puzzled, “What’s wrong?”
She stretched, okay, that was new, “The repairs and refit are complete!”
Alex grinned, “Well, that is some good news, are we working on switching templates over to probes and drones?”
Kara nodded and stood up, walking over to the holo-tank instead of vanishing and appearing in front of it. “In about an hour we’ll have everything swapped over, we can use the probes’ string radios to route data in from the sparrows. That way we can speed up the language and culture interpretation while we see where the Lynx are going.”
Alex launched himself off the couch and walked over to the holo. “So, how many probes and sparrows can we get made in a week?”
Kara looked at the production schedule in the holo-tank, “Looks like about six hundred sparrows and twenty four probes.”
Alex picked up a muffin, he hoped it was strawberry and not wild berry, he meant to delete that from the buffet table but kept forgetting, “Wow, that should speed things up, and we’ll have the computer bank in cargo two available during travel to crunch the numbers for us.”
Kara watched as he took a huge bite out of his muffin, then spoke, “Yes, we will have language and culture models complete before we reach our destination.”
Alex cursed as he reached for a napkin to spit out the wild berry muffin, “That is good news, how many more can we make in route?”
Kara’s eyes blazed blue for a moment while she calculated, “The Lynx appear to be traveling to a nearby system with another G-Type star, it is 4.2 light years from our current location. At 25c while in stealth it will take us sixty one days, we can make a little over five thousand sparrows and one hundred and ninety two probes.”
Alex nodded, “That is a ton of drones and probes, can the computer banks in cargo two handle the data coming in from that many?”
Kara stared into the holo-tank at the specifications for the computer banks before shaking her head, “No, not in real time. Data will continuously be backlogged to storage until we shut down the drones and probes or bring more computer banks online.”
Alex grunted as he found a cheesecake square, “Well that’s no good, we have nine holds of torpedoes, one with the new computer banks and the rest are forges, nanites, drone and hauler storage, raw materials, and auto-factories. We don’t have room for more computers, how many can our new bank handle with the load already on it from the Elves?”
Kara calculated again, eye’s brightening once more, “About twelve hundred sparrows and around forty eight more probes.”
Alex swallowed his cheesecake bite, god those were good! “Alright, let’s manufacture that many and save our raw materials.”
Kara nodded, “Very well, production schedule is programmed in, eighteen hundred sparrows and seventy two probes.”
Alex nodded picking up a beer and popcorn from the table, “Well, with that out of the way, how about we switch from horror movies to something else?”
Kara walked around the table, “I prefer comedy you know.”
Alex nodded his head solemnly, “Comedy it is, let’s start from the beginning, well, the ones that aren’t silent. I think the Marx brothers would be a good place to start.”
________________________
A week later they watched as the hauler returned from dropping off it’s supply of sparrow drones to the planet, now the new twenty four probes sat in stealth in geosynchronous orbit around the planet routing data back to the Missive. The original twelve still sat at one light month out on sentry duty.
Alex sat in the cockpit, verifying all systems were go. “Everything shows green Kara, destination selected as sector zero zero two. Confirm?”
Kara whispered in his ear, “Confirmed, stealth field is activate. We are ready to depart.”
He brought the fusion torches up slowly, watching his readouts, when they reached seventy percent he ensured the Missive was in the pipe. Once confirmed he announced, “Activating ripple drive on my mark. Mark!” He stated as he flipped the silver switch and watched as the ripple drive stretched the ship, then the stars ahead of them.
The effective speed monitor was reading a solid 25c, “Hey Kara, 25c is supposedly our maximum speed with the stealth field active, we’re going to be holding this course and speed for months, will it be a problem?”
Kara’s voice came back to him as a whisper, “In our universe it would be a problem, but in this more energetic one it is not, we could probably exceed our top speed here without worry of the stealth field collapsing.”
Alex nodded, it made sense after all, “It’s too bad the Missive is too large for a cloaking field to cover. Being invisible to even focused active sensor pings as well as all forms of light, not just visual and infrared would be nice.”
Kara hesitated before continuing to whisper in his ear, “That… isn’t completely true. Well, it’s not true anymore I should say.”
Well, that is surprising, he spun his cockpit chair around and stood up as the rest of the starship VR environment faded into existence in front of him. Kara stood at attention with her hands held behind her back by the holo-tank.
He walked over to the table peeking at the current selection. “I’m assuming you mean the wonky physics here would allow a cloaking field over a ship the size of ours?”
She waved her hand and the hologram showed a wireframe of an imperial stealth frigate. “In our universe, a cloaking field’s strength to volume ratio is very small, meaning you need a huge amount of power to cover a small ship. This limits the usefulness of said ship to scout or recon patrols, and even then, they are time constrained due to the strain on their reactors.”
She then swiped her hand and the visual spun to show a wireframe of the Missive. “However, here the field can extend in volume up to two hundred percent. Which would be just enough to cover our hull. However, it could not be used in conjunction with the ripple drive, we simply do not have the power output, even with the Kugelblitz reactor.”
Alex nodded while putting his hands on the table and looking at the model, “I am assuming you haven’t brought this to my attention until I mentioned it for a reason?”
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Kara nodded as she spun the holo again to show a large ring, he looked at it and checked his own internal databases, “We need a particle accelerator to build it?”
Kara smiled, she rarely did that, and it was new, but he really liked seeing it, “You are correct, some of the exotic isotopes needed for it’s construction cannot be printed in auto-factories or transmuted in the forges. It will require massive particle accelerators to produce enough to build a cloaking field generator. Then we have the problem of space, they are large devices, taking up most of the internal space in an imperial frigate.”
He sighed, “Internal space is a problem at the moment, we’re loaded for bear in case we need to fight our way out of a bad situation. That may change in the future, and maybe we can rearrange our cargo holds to make room.”
Kara nodded, “Agreed, but for right now, a cloaking field generator simply isn’t feasible, we will have to rely on our stealth field and hope nothing out here can see through it.”
Alex grabbed a cookie from the table, “That’s a problem for the future, I think I’m going to have a spa day.”
Kara turned to him, hesitating. “Very well, I will await your return.”
He waved back as he entered his spa room, it was only then that he thought to himself, “Maybe I should have invited her? Would that even be appropriate? Does it matter anymore? We don’t even know if our own galaxy survived what those maniacs did at Birmingham. Fuck it…”
He called out, “Kara, would you like to join me?”
Instantly Kara appeared in the spa room in a pink robe. He had never seen her out of her uniform, either the civilian one or the military one she adopted when they joined the rebellion. He held out a hand to her as they headed to the sauna together.
_____________________
Sixty one days later Alex was back in the cockpit of the Missive of Dissent watching his monitors as Lynx zero zero two loomed closer. “Three minutes until ripple drive shut down. We will be arriving inside the Oort cloud but outside the outer planets at a range of four light hours.”
Kara whispered in his ear, “That should be sufficient to keep the Lynx from detecting the spacetime ripple, if they have sensors capable of detecting them.”
Alex sighed, “I still don’t get the difference between our spacetime ripple and the gravity wave the pine cones can do.”
Kara sounded a little exasperated, “I don’t think now is the time to go over the physics again, just understand they are different.”
Alex smiled to himself, Kara had evolved considerably since they arrived here, “Yes dear, be prepared, cutting ripple drive on my Mark. Mark!”
The spacetime distortion in front of the starship stopped, as did the star streaming effect. Once done Alex flipped the ship end over end and activated the fusion torches at twenty five percent. “Kara, how is our stealth field handling the engines?”
Kara took a moment before whispering in his ear, “Stealth field is holding fine, I believe you can go up to fifty percent to aid in slowing us down.”
He nodded, slowly pushing the throttle forward, “Fifty percent aye, according to navigation we will be slowing down for eight hours.” He then spun the cockpit chair around and waited for the VR environment to load as he came out of frame jack.
Walking to the table he studied it for a snack, but not seeing anything that caught his eye, that was not the case with Kara, who was nibbling on a cupcake. He smiled both inwardly and outwardly, “I never would have thought I’d see the day that you would be eating from the buffet table.”
She smiled at him and wiped her mouth with a napkin. “I just wish you would have talked me into trying food a long time ago, I had no idea what I was missing!”
He reached up to the holo-tank and looked at the passive scans, “Alright, G-Type star, we knew that already, six planets, including one ridiculously big gas giant at planet five, and one rocky planet in the habitable zone.”
Kara finished her cupcake, wiping off her hands before vanishing the napkin, “Yes, everything we are receiving now is five hours old, we will need to launch probes to both the planet and the system to use their string radios for faster than light updates.”
Alex picked up a small pizza bite, the little bugger was hot! He blew on it before speaking, “I agree, launch all but twelve probes, I want to keep some aboard just in case there are surprises, like they detect and or destroy some.”
Kara nodded, and the view on the holo showed where the probes had been designated to take up station keeping, with twelve of them heading to the planet in the habitable zone. “All drones will arrive at their destination in twenty two hours.”
Alex struggled a bit as the pizza bite’s center was somewhere around the core temperature of a star as he tried to chew it without turning his tongue into raw meat. After the ordeal he had his body reform without the burned tongue, “Twenty two hours you say? I think there are ten comedy movies of the duo Melvin and Cobbs from a few decades ago. Wanna binge them?”
Kara grabbed a bowl of popcorn and a soda, “You had me at comedy!”
______________________
A little over twenty two hours later they both stood at the table staring at the holo-tank, any inkling of grabbing any food from the table lost on both of them. Alex was the first to speak, “I have never seen a planet that battered before, under nearly a kilometer of ice you say there are over a thousand craters?”
Kara looked to the sides of the tank checking the data streams, “Yes, but some of them were kinetic impactors, they cracked the planet’s crust, shifted entire plates. Someone was very angry with the inhabitants of that planet.”
Alex then swiped at the holo and the display changed to seven of the pine cone shaped craft surrounding what looked like a large debris field. “We need to move some probes closer to this area, I want to know what the fur balls are doing here.”
Kara raised an eyebrow, “Fur balls? That’s a new one, I will start shifting the four nearest probes to surround the area at ten light seconds. It will take a few hours.”
Alex finally stood up straight and stared at the table, “We have time, do you think we should bother sending sparrows to the planet?”
Kara stood up as well, crossing her arms behind her back, “No, the probes in orbit will continue to scan the planet, but we have detected no life on that barren ball of ice.”
Picking up a bowl of potato chips he pointed to the holo-tank with a yellow ruffled chip, “I really want to know what those ships are doing though.”
Kara zoomed in to the maximum range of the inbound probes, “They are encircling a large mass in the center of the debris field, the field is rich in metals, perhaps they are salvaging materials from this site?”
Alex held another chip up to the holo-tank, “Maybe, but it seems a bit odd for them to be using seven of those huge pine cones around a debris field around the same size as one of their ships.” He popped a chip in his mouth and chewed while he thought, “Hey, uh Kara, could you run some calculations on estimated mass of the debris field?”
She nodded and poked at the four probes in route and gave them the task, a few minutes later she stood back, “Estimated mass of nine hundred thousand metric tons, plus or minus eight tons, but that large mass in the center corresponds to a Jacobs class Imperial Freighter.”
Alex put his bowl of potato chips on the table and leaned in to the holo, “Jacobs class? They quit making those over a hundred years ago, and they were in production for what, a hundred years before that? I think the rebellion still had one kicking around, rock solid ships. What the hell is one doing here?”
Kara pointed out the obvious, “Well, it’s a debris field now, but I would assume it got here the same way we did, out of alignment ripple coils.”
Alex stood back, “What’s the chances of two ships being pushed past the wall and ending up only 5 light years apart. Seems like astronomical odds to me.”
Kara pulled up her current model of physics, both here and back in their original universe into the holo tank. Two spheres showed in the tank, one on top of the other, with tendrils linking the two. “I don’t think direction works the same when traveling between universes, there is no spacetime in between them, so direction as a concept does not exist. No matter where you exit your universe you will arrive at the same place in this universe.”
Alex looked at the holo then back to Kara, “Yup, mind blown. Wait, so any ship leaving our universe will end up roughly in this area of their universe?”
Kara pulled up some really sophisticated math with weird greek symbols, “From what I can deduce, yes. Well, within a fifty light year bubble anyway.”
They both went quiet as the holo-tank swapped from the two universes to a wireframe of the seven ships, a wave was emanating from the center mass. Kara spoke first, “Active sensor ping, it hit all four incoming probes. They confirm it originated from the center mass.”
Alex watched the pine cones, “Doesn’t look like the other seven ships noticed it or cared. So whatever that center mass is it detected our probes and knows something new is in the neighborhood.”
Kara nodded as she manipulated data coming in from the sides of the holo, “Correct, however the pulse was very weak. It was a low power sensor sweep, either the center mass did not want to expend the energy or it worried the pine cones would detect something stronger.”
Suddenly the nearest probe started pulsing, Kara poked it with a finger and looked to the data stream on the side of the holo, “SOS signal, imperial standard, requesting aid, under attack.”