“It is … different, Mister Carew.”
“Not a place man’s supposed to be,” Hadd muttered and the other spacers nodded agreement.
“You’ll be all right, Mister Carew,” Burley assured her. “A minute at the hatch with it dark, an’ then the lights’ll be up. Not near so bad w’ the lights up.”
“Less’n a minute,” another spacer added. “Jus’ seems longer.”
“And likely time to discover it for yourself, Mister Carew,” Caruthers said, moving to the locker’s front hatch and motioning for her to follow. “We’re at the Lagrange point and ready to transition to darkspace, I see. Do remember that the radios will not work once the hatch is opened to the Dark.”
Alexis swallowed heavily and followed him, her heart beating faster. She fastened her helmet back onto her suit as the others were doing, then placed her hand flat against the hatch in front of her.
Without warning, the lights in the sail locker went out and she realized that they had transitioned to darkspace or were about to. The hatch began to slide under her fingertips and she knew that they must have, though she’d felt nothing to indicate it and felt no different herself. She waited in anticipation as the hatch slid away into the hull, and looked out into … nothing.
She could see nothing but blackness, broken only by the dim glow of the tritium coated needle of her suit’s oxygen gauge. She stretched her arm out ahead of her, thinking perhaps that she had been mistaken and had simply lost contact with its surface but felt nothing ahead of her. She could see nothing, feel nothing except her vacsuit and the deck under her feet,
She stood still for a moment, wondering if this were another of the spacers’ jokes, but nothing at all happened.
And then, as her eyes adjusted to the utter lack of light, she saw … something. Almost a swirl of darker black in the distance and then, as though her brain had suddenly discovered how to interpret what she was seeing, more of them. Far in the distance, great masses of darkness, swirling and rolling across the void. How she was seeing them when there were no sources of light that she could see, she didn’t know, but she could. Or almost could, for it seemed that there was detail just out of her grasp.
Alexis gasped as one of the masses, shaped like a dark thundercloud against a jet black sky, slowly rolled across the void and touched another, smaller one. The two shapes roiled into each other, flashing with ebony lighting until the larger cloud split in half where it touched the smaller, the two halves gradually flowing up and over the other shape before folding back upon the whole, and Alexis lost sight of the two shapes as they drifted past the edge of the hatchway and were blocked by the ship’s hull.
Fascinated, Alexis dropped to her knees and groped blindly outside the hatchway for one of the guidewires. Finding one, she snapped on her safety line and stepped out onto the bowsprit, remembering to step slowly and keep her feet firmly anchored to the hull. As quickly as she dared, she moved out onto the bowsprit, away from the hull, and looked around her.
There were far more of the objects out there than she’d been able to see through the narrow hatch. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of masses, far off in the distance. All slowly moving, majestically colliding and absorbing each other. And behind those shapes, thousands of points of blackness, like dark stars. Can a star shine blackness? she wondered in awe.
Merlin’s outer lights came on, shining from the hull and masts but not all at once. Even the light behaved differently here, seeming to pool and flow across the surface of the hull, creeping toward her along the bowsprit and as it reached her, she found it more difficult to make out the far off shapes. Reluctantly, Alexis turned her attention back to the ship and Caruthers quickly approaching her along the bowsprit.
He reached her and touched his suit’s helmet to hers so that she could hear him. “Are you quite all right, Mister Carew?” he asked, his voice echoing and, perhaps, a bit breathless.
Alexis looked off into the distance again, barely able to make out the distant images while standing within Merlin’s lights.
“It’s beautiful.”
Nine
“And what do you suppose will happen then, Mister Carew?”
Alexis considered for a moment. This odd way of speaking outside the hull in darkspace, heads bent so that their helmets touched, unable to see the other person’s face, and his voice echoing dully in her own helmet. “Given your question, I rather suspect it will do something quite different than I would suppose, sir.”
Caruthers laughed. “Indeed, Mister Carew. Watch carefully, now. This is called throwing the log, and it will tell us our speed and any deviation from our course.”
He bent to the hull and attached the device to a bracket on the hull. He motioned her to step back and then sharply jerked a lever on its side. There was a puff of gas and a small, weighted bag flew out of the tube, trailing a thin wire. She watched it soar straight until it was ten meters from hull, and then it suddenly slowed. Still moving away, but clearly slowing and now quickly dropping back along the ship’s hull.
Alexis furrowed her brow, confused. What she was seeing made no sense — admittedly, she’d never been in space before, but she’d studied basic physics. We’re in vacuum … there’s no gravity … it … it shouldn’t do that!
She stared at the bag and its trailing wire, eyes wide in fascination. It had stopped moving further away from the ship at, perhaps, twenty meters but was still falling behind as though it had stopped moving entirely and the ship was simply pulling away from it.
Caruthers tapped her leg to get her attention, and she crouched to look at the device where he was pointing. There was a mechanical timer counting down to zero and another counting the amount of wire being pulled out. When the timer reached zero, Caruthers stopped the counter and began turning a crank that reeled in the wire.
Once he’d recovered the log, he gestured for her to follow and they made their way back to the bow and into the sail locker. Alexis pondered what she’d seen while they waited for the locker to pressurize. Nothing she knew about physics allowed for what she’d just seen. An object moving through space should not just slow and stop as the log had done. And if the ship were to travel between star systems, surely it had move further in a minute than the hundred meters or so of line that had run out.
“Seven knots speed, Mister Carew,” Caruthers said when they removed their helmets. “Not spectacular, but neither is it horribly slow.”
“Lieutenant Caruthers, how is that at all possible?” Alexis asked.
“By knowing how much line was pulled out in a particular time,” he explained, “we can determine our speed.”
“I meant the way the … the log behaves, sir. How does it just stop? It shouldn’t do that.”
“Answer that, Mister Carew, and you’ll have done more than anyone since we discovered darkspace. We know how it behaves, can measure it to a certain extent, but the why of it?” He shook his head. “No, we only know that once outside the field effects of the gallenium in Merlin’s hull, things just … stop. Their momentum stills until they come to rest, and that’s the end of it.”
He slid open the hatch to the quarterdeck and led her to the navigation plot.
“How much do you know about darkspace, Carew?”
“Not a great deal, sir,” Alexis admitted. “A bit from schooling, but … well, I’d never expected to leave Dalthus at all. Simply understanding the transit times for our shipments seemed to be enough.”
“I see.” Caruthers ran his fingers over the plot to bring up an image of star and orbiting planet. “Then we’ll start at the beginning. Most midshipmen come aboard with a thorough grounding, you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Caruthers gave her a grin. “Don’t feel too badly about it. They also come aboard being absolutely wrong about any number of things. You might be able to avoid that.” He gestured to the image on the plot. “So, we’ll start with Lagrangian points, then.”
“For any two orbiting bodies �
� say your planet, Dalthus IV, and its sun – there are five places in space called Lagrangian points, or Lagrange points, there’s some disagreement on what’s proper. These are points where the gravitational effects of the two bodies will, more or less, keep something in the same place.
“Now, when I say ‘point’ and ‘same place’, please don’t misunderstand. We’re still talking about quite vast areas of space. What’s really going on here is that something place at, let us say, L1 will have something of an orbit around the L1 point. Do you understand?”
Alexis frowned. She really hadn’t paid much attention to the details of space and space travel in her studies, being far more interested in the economics she thought would best assist with running the holdings.
“Is it that the two larger bodies, their gravitation, is constantly pulling on it? So that it sort of loops about that point in space, pulled by first one and then the other?”
“More or less,” Caruthers said. “Now, points L4 and L5 are those most used for transition to and from darkspace. They have the largest transition area, which means a body there has the largest orbit. And these sets of points exist for every orbiting pair in the system. Five for each planet and the star, then five for each moon around each planet. Do you see?”
“Yes, but, transition area?”
“Here.” Caruthers adjusted the image on the plot and more lines appeared, including two oblong areas near where L4 and L5 were marked in the image.
“So these would be the expected orbits of something at these points,” Caruthers went on. “As you can see, L4 and L5 are quite large, and it’s within these areas that a ship may safely transition to and from darkspace. Attempt to transition to darkspace from anywhere else in normal-space and simply nothing will happen, but attempt to transition back from darkspace from any other point, and the ship will cease to be.”
“What happens to it?” Alexis asked.
Caruthers shrugged. “We have no idea. There’s nothing left of it. Which is why merchantmen and other civilian ships generally stick to transitioning at L4 or L5, as they offer the largest transition area and are safest. L4 to return to normal-space, as it’s ahead of the body in its orbit and the planet’s own movement assists them in reaching it more quickly. L5 to enter darkspace, for the opposite reason, it being behind the body in orbit, do you see?”
Alexis nodded.
“Naval ships generally do the same, unless there’s cause not to. In a particular hurry we might transition at L1 – or if the captain wishes to give the crew some practice at transitioning in the smaller space. L2 and L3 aren’t used very often, as they’re so much further away. A planetary-lunar L2 point is useful if you wish to remain unobserved, as the moon will block the planet’s view of you until you come around it. Assuming there’re no ships or satellites to observe you, that is.
“Now, once in darkspace,” he continued, “we must deal with the two fundamental forces of that realm.
“The first is dark energy, what we refer to as winds because of the way it behaves and tends to travel – blow, as we say – toward star systems. It supplies the energy that’s causing the universe’s expansion to continue increasing and we are able to harness those winds with the ship’s sails. The metal mesh of the sails, properly charged by the ship’s particle projector, catches that dark energy and allows it to push the ship forward. The force of those winds, that dark energy, is quite great – nearly seventy percent of the energy in the entire universe exists there.”
“This is some sort of solar wind, then?” Alexis asked.
Caruthers shook his head. “Not a bit. Solar winds are charged particles released from a star and move outward from a system in normal-space. The winds we use in darkspace are dark energy. The source is unknown.”
“So this energy propels the ship via the sails.” Alexis frowned. “Why not just use the conventional drive?”
“Ah, well, that brings us to the other fundamental force of darkspace, the dark matter that permeates everything. Along with the discovery of dark energy and its contribution to expanding the universe, it was discovered that there was quite a bit more gravity out there than could be accounted for by visible mass in normal-space. Over eighty percent of the universe’s matter is in darkspace, we believe. And it is everywhere in darkspace, though we generally can’t see it with just our eyes. Unless …”
Caruthers brought up an image from outside the ship.
“No electronics will work outside the hull unless they’re encased in gallenium,” he said, “but our optics can bring images inboard. If you look here, just …” He ran a finger over the image. “There. Do you see?”
Alexis shook her head. It looked like nothing more than an image of blackness with barely the hint of swirling dark clouds in the background. “No, sir.”
“Here. Rather like a black flag waving in the night?”
Alexis looked closer. There could be a bit of rippling in the darkness there. “Perhaps?”
“Merlin’s computers are far better at recognizing the pattern than our eyes – and thankfully so, or we’d still be planetbound on Earth. So long as the optics can bring images inboard, it will be able to point out shoals and transition points to you within a system, even if there’s no pilot boat to guide you.”
He tapped the image again.
“That, Mister Carew, is a darkspace shoal. The Dalthus IV shoal, to be specific. It’s an accumulation of dark matter that occurs in darkspace and correlates with a normal-space mass – this accumulation correlates with your home planet. Strike that with a ship and your hull will crumple before you know it. The dark matter’s everywhere in darkspace, but when it becomes visible, such as a shoal or a severe storm, then your ship’s in danger.”
“Storms?”
“Those roiling masses in the distance? Those are darkspace storms. The winds kick up and pull more and more dark matter together – that’s what makes them visible. The combination of that striking your ship – the dark energy of the winds and the dark matter picked up by them – and it can make for an interesting ride.”
Alexis shuddered. She thought Caruthers might be understating things and wondered what she might have gotten herself into with this Navy business.
“As to moving the ship,” Caruthers said. “All of that dark matter has mass and it’s distributed throughout darkspace. The gallenium in the ship’s hull offsets some of that, just as it insulates us from the winds’ radiations, but it’s a sad fact that the conventional drive simply won’t propel the ship through it. Try as we might, it won’t. Nothing unprotected by gallenium can move through that morass, and that includes the drive’s thrust. It simply slows and stops. You noticed the oddness of the light Outside?”
Alexis nodded.
“Even light is slowed and eventually stops once outside the protection of the hull’s field. People, especially, are extraordinarily effected by it.”
“How so, sir?”
“Spacers caught outside the hull’s field say their limbs become leaden, they’re unable to move at all, and their very thoughts begin to slow.”
Alexis swallowed hard.
“It’s not a common occurrence to have someone go overboard, but it happens. You’re generally safe for about ten meters away from the ship’s hull, perhaps three or four meters from a yard or mast if you’re far above the hull. Less in a storm, as the winds and dark matter are stronger. I’ve seen particularly strong storms where even the hull couldn’t keep the effects out and our lights and consoles would flicker. That is why the engineering spaces and the fusion plant have more gallenium about them.”
“So the gallenium protects us from both the dark matter and dark energy, and the charged sails harness the dark energy, winds, to pull us along?”
“Exactly.” Caruthers took a deep breath. “And so on too navigation.”
Alexis eyed him warily. If, after all that, it was navigation that made him hesitate in his explanations, she wasn’t at all certain she wanted to hear about it.
“We’ve just thrown the log and that tells us our current speed by how much line was pulled from it. And the angle, if it was pulled to one side of the ship or the other, up or down, will tell us if we’re drifting at all from our course. Knowing that and time, we can calculate our position.”
“I truly don’t understand, sir.” Alexis stared at the navigation plot for a moment, frowning. Caruthers entered the information from the log and the plot now showed the latest leg of Merlin’s travels. “This shows us well away from Dalthus, but the last position was still within the system, and it’s been but an hour.”
“Two bells,” Caruthers corrected her. “And we are making good time.”
Bugger the bloody bells, Alexis thought, staring at the plot with her brow furrowed. “But that was our speed before as well,” she said, comparing the two segments on the plot, “and we’ve traveled near twice as far in the same time. And the log only pulled out a hundred meters of line or so. We’re barely moving at all!”
“Space and distance are quite different in darkspace. The further we get from a system, from any large mass in normal-space, then the greater the distance we cover in darkspace.”
“So a meter in darkspace is different than in normal-space?”
“We don’t rightly know if there’s a correlation as simple as that. Simply that it may take hours or days to sail between Lagrangian points within a system — Dalthus IV to Dalthus VIII, that big gas-giant beyond your asteroid belt, for instance — while it takes us only a fortnight to sail from Dalthus to Eidera, light-years away. Once away from the system, either the ship moves faster or the distance is somehow shortened. It’s possible that darkspace itself expands and contracts in relation to normal-space mass — but we don’t know exactly, because the only places we can drop back into normal-space to truly determine our position are within systems.”
Caruthers looked at her and raised his eyebrows.
Alexis Carew: Books 1, 2, and 3 Page 11
