by Purple Hazel
“Hell, who could blame him...shit, not me,” remarked B.J. when Kelvin, in a rare moment of candor, pointed this out in conversation with her. “When I wake up on Kapteyn B, I sure as fuck know what I’m gonna be needin’.”
A humored Kelvin, for once letting his guard down just a bit, then commented, “After breakfast and a hot shower that is, right, Beej?” B.J. crinkled up her nose and shrugged, grinning sheepishly. “Not if the good captain is already awake. If he’s up and about; I’ll never even get to go pee. That fucker’s an animal.” To this, her old friend cackled loudly, just like he used to before he’d gotten so serious about getting chosen for the mission.
Yes, this was a rare occurrence for Kelvin, usually the professional/dedicated type these days. He’d lighten up on occasion, of course—everyone had to from time to time. Go blow off some steam. Get a little action. Get really drunk out on Cocoa Beach. But Kelvin had bigger plans. He knew those eggheads and science nerds, now turned young scientists and astronauts, would excel in most every category requiring a deep understanding of mathematics, chemistry, and physics. He could keep up with them to a point, especially in aeronautical engineering, which he’d technically majored in back at MIT. However, it was vital that he surpass his colleagues—all in their twenties or early thirties due to the duration of the voyage—in every other way he possibly could, and this he sincerely believed he could do.
Subsequently the newly chosen captain of Away Team, a Brit named Thomas Berwick, took immediate notice of him. He saw the effort. Saw the mental focus he’d been told to expect from his counterpart Captain Stehter. He could easily see the championship athlete within Kelvin’s soul and was impressed. He told others about this as well.
“That’s a First Mate in the making right there,” he told his colleagues. “Too bad he’s a little slow on the uptake with all that electrical engineering they’re studying.” That was indeed Kelvin’s Achilles Heel, no matter how B.J. and her gal pals from the Return Team tried tutoring him. Captain Berwick knew full well that knowing the ins and outs of the craft and all its functions and vulnerabilities was going to be crucial.
For there was new information being revealed every day to the crew men and women preparing for the journey to Kapteyn B. It wasn’t just going to be a mission to land on an alien planet and colonize it, like they’d thought. No, it was much more than that. They were actually going to prepare the field so to speak by laying a 1.3 quadrillion-kilometer flight path for something even bigger to follow.
This path, as they’d soon learn, would be made up of non-baryonic matter conversion pods capable of fueling a future supply vessel being designed at this very moment by astronautical engineers back in Noordwijk.
It was in class one day that they found out, to their surprise and delight. The foundation was already being laid for the launching of a much larger craft capable of traveling at upwards of ten times the speed of light. When finished, they were told, mankind would then be able to fly nearly thirteen light years across space to Kapteyn B...in a little over thirteen months.
That was indeed a very exciting day for the trainees when they finally learned of it! Space Programme not surprisingly had been carefully concealing this secret project from the public all along—and there was good reason for doing so. To be fair, the very idea of traveling faster than the speed of light had ALWAYS been considered to be scientifically impossible. Frankly, most scientists had never believed it could be done.
It had been a pipe dream at best, this concept of traveling at multiples of the speed of light. ADM or Alcubierre Drive Metric was once a mere speculative theory in which a spacecraft might reach faster-than-light travel if a configurable energy-density field lower than that of a vacuum (e.g., negative mass), could be created. The Alcubierre Drive merely required exotic matter or basically some form of non-baryonic matter not made up of protons and neutrons. That was one of the big problems with it anyway.
Such matter that deviated from the norm had always been proposed to exist out in space, but almost a century earlier, Miguel Alcubierre suggested using a Casimir vacuum to fulfill the negative-energy requirement for the Alcubierre Drive to function properly. Placing ordinary matter under high pressure, he’d stated many years ago, might result in dramatic changes in their physical and chemical properties. A Casimir vacuum might accomplish such a task.
The Drive Metric would allow a warp bubble to appear suddenly in flat space time, then move away at superluminal speed. Within the interior of the bubble inhabitants would sense no acceleration. Because objects and people inside the bubble would not be moving faster than light, the mathematical formulation stood consistent with the laws of relativity. These laws established by Albert Einstein maintained that an object of any mass cannot reach or surpass the speed of light.
But with ADM, conventional relativistic effects like time dilation would now simply no longer apply. Not when compared to conventional motion at ninety percent of the speed of light.
And yet over ninety years had passed since this revolutionary concept was created, with decades of research into both this and other alternatives considered. From this, scientists finally arrived at the irrefutable conclusion that ADM technology must indeed be the best solution. What’s more, they would have about fourteen years to perfect its application! Scientists had secretly begun work on it in years prior and a blueprint for creating a craft big enough and advanced enough was probably less than ten years away.
Naturally this posed a bit of a quandary to the young scientists and engineers that day in class when they were informed.
“So then, why are we taking the slow lane to “B”, queried Kelvin, “Why don’t we just use this ADM thing and arrive there in thirteen months?” By now he’d won over most everyone in the Away Team section and frankly he had stepped up to speak for them on many an occasion—especially when it came to challenging classroom instructors. Many of his timid colleagues appreciated a brave leader like him to represent them as a unified group when they needed someone to be their voice.
The reason given for this however, was merely because, for a warp bubble to be created, it would first require someone had already begun work on warping space from Earth all the way to its destination. Eighty-seven years ago, Serguei Krasnikov had proposed that if exotic matter like tachyonic particles could not be found in space then the solution was simply for masses arranged along the path of the vessel to be placed in such a way that the required field would be created. Thus—and this was the key—an ADM vessel could only travel routes that—just like with the old transcontinental railroad—would have first been equipped with the necessary infrastructure.
At the time, sitting in on the lecture was Young-Min Jo, and when this was detailed, it seemed to suddenly make sense to him. Coolly, and with the maturity of a grown man, the bright ten-year-old stated, “and that’s where we come in, right?”
Chuckling, their instructor raised up her eyebrows and replied, “Precisely. The crew existing inside the bubble are disconnected basically, and thus cannot carry out actions outside of it,” clarified the instructor, “The engineers on board this newly proposed vessel cannot place infrastructure out ahead of the bubble while in motion, you see?” She then rose from her desk and added bluntly, “Think of it like this, students…crew members on an ADM ship cannot control, cannot steer, cannot even stop the ship until it’s completed a path already programmed into the ship’s computers. Any mistake made in constructing their route would thus send them off into unknown space; and likely they would be lost for many, many years with only their fusion reactor to propel them at sub-light speed. It will be your jobs to create this railroad and see to it everything is in place. Clear it up any?”
At that point a lone voice out in the audience of trainees mimicked a train whistle sound choo-choo, and everyone broke up laughing. “I believe we can now grasp your train of thought,” quipped another, and this elicited a few groans. Nevertheless, the young crewmen and women of the Away Team got t
he point that day. The real reason they numbered twice as many as the Return Team was quite obvious now. They were being charged with paving the way for a resupply ship with additional materials and settlers to land on Kapteyn B roughly two years after the soon to be obsolete Santa Maria had departed the new colony.
So this begged an even bigger question, and by the time the entire crew from both teams had assembled in the mess hall for evening chow, many were already voicing it. Could the resupply ship return to Earth in the same amount of time? Of course, it could, following the same route home, and everyone seemed to agree with that. Same thing with electronic transmissions. These could be sent at post-light speed using the same technology and inform Earth that the flight path had been completed.
“Well, then...does that mean they’ll intercept us on the way back? Or can they, I mean?” asked B.J. to a group of excited female colleagues. She was quite popular among the women of Return Team after all, and loved to shock them with her wild stories from college back in Colorado, as well as her amorous adventures with men she’d met in Toronto. “Absolutely!” replied one of her brainy friends. Another one added, “It would merely mean programming their destination to coincide with an acceptable rendezvous point...but I can’t see why not.
To this B.J. began calculating equations in her mind. “Okay, then, let’s see...we arrive at Kapteyn B in 14.2 Earth years...supply ship leaves Earth what, say two years later after receiving our transmission that the line is nearing completion?” She then craned her head back like she always did when calculating something in her head. “Arrives in 1.3 years, lands...offloads more settlers, supplies, ’n whatever else.” Her bright crewmates started nodding and murmuring affirmation. “Then,” she added, “supply ship departs Kapteyn B—say one year later just for the sake of argument—and intercepts Santa Maria at …ummmm.”
Suddenly one of the gorgeous Brazilian gals from her team finished her sentence. “About four light years into the return voyage, would be my guess,” she said. This caused more than a few excited whoops and whistles from the other women at their table. That’s when another young Belgian woman from the team quipped, “Non mais allo quoi! Do you see what ziss means? We could be home in like...five years.” B.J. then sighed, realizing by now she should have accepted that others among her crew were just as quick with mathematical calculations as she was.
“Fuck, yeah, bitches—five Earth years—and guess what else? We’ll still be in our early thirties,” exclaimed B.J. The women chuckled joyously and cooed exuberantly. A nearby table with some male crewmembers had overheard this by now and joined in with the excitement. An even larger crowd began to form around them as well. “Seriously?” said one. “Five years?” clarified another, “Cool! That means my Ex-girlfriend will only be...uh...forty-four.”
One of his table mates then explained that the woman had dumped him soon after he got selected by Space Programme. B.J. laughed some more, then said, “Well then, you’ll have to go look her up again when we get back, dude. Statistically speaking, given the latest data on marriages, she’ll most likely have been married and divorced by then.”
Part Three
Journey and Conquest
Chapter 10
Year Five
As the year 2091 came to a close, things on board the Santa Maria had pretty much settled into a daily routine, or roughly the equivalent. On the ship, Kelvin and the Away Team, along with Oswaldo, diligently worked six-hour shifts preparing non-baryonic matter conversion pods for deployment, activating Casimir Vacuums inside the onboard lab, or performing other important tasks vital to the mission as the ship neared each planned collection point. Matter conversion pods were continuously prepared and then launched from a special section situated next to the cargo bay.
The ship itself was quite massive! Kelvin’s high school sports stadium wasn’t even as big as the interior of the cargo bay of the Santa Maria. T.C. Williams Field could probably have fit snugly inside it, figured the budding young officer. Meanwhile, Oswaldo “Ozzie” Guerrero worked inside a lab the size of the gymnasium back at Katy Boys Farm; and shared tasks with seventeen other scientists and engineers preparing the Casimir Vacuums.
Kelvin then supervised the deployment of these devices along a path previously calculated by Space Programme to provide adequate fueling of the ADM ship to someday be following them. This was likely the most crucial aspect of the mission and his promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade came within months of launch when he’d repeatedly demonstrated a knack for managing his comrades. Following Captain Berwick’s orders to the letter and achieving optimal efficiency—preparing the field for follow-on missions to Kapteyn B—was clearly of the upmost importance, and nearly as important as the crew’s basic survival, at least in Kelvin’s view.
It also came in handy as the years passed, because as millions of kilometers of flight path were laid out, Captain Berwick could eventually launch message pods along this newly constructed string of matter conversion devices. Message pods—eggs as the crew called them—could reach Earth at ten times the speed of light and be intercepted by orbiting craft working around Space Programme’s launch control station. This was now a permanent facility located on the Moon.
Thus, mission control was learning of their progress within a few months of each transmission, and by 2091, the media could report regularly on their progress; as well as broadcast personal messages sent from the crew to loved ones back home. Naturally, this should have made for regular fodder for evening news shows—almost a perfect human interest story—but just like with anything else thrown at them in the nightly news, Earthlings slowly but surely lost interest as the years passed. Folks simply became jaded by the mundane perspective of it. By year five, news about the Santa Maria simply wasn’t that titillating anymore.
Besides, as December 2091 approached, things back on Earth had returned to some sense of normality ever since those heady days leading up to and right after the launch of the Santa Maria. Five years earlier, it was daily—often hourly—news with broadcasts reporting everything about the crew’s training, key interviews with launch control officials, and biographies on both the Away Team and Return Team ship captains. But by now, people on Earth had kind of forgotten about it.
They got back into a weekly routine with their lives again, stopped worrying about worldwide food shortages and the gloomy predictions of bespectacled agronomists in white lab coats predicting regional famines yet again in Africa. Instead they enjoyed their free time, worked at their jobs, raised families, saved for retirement, and began paying more attention to their favorite sports teams or Ultravision broadcasts of their favorite shows while planning annual vacations with their kids and spouses. Problems far from home just didn’t seem to concern them much.
Europe was putting out newer, sleeker, and even more power-efficient models of solar passenger vehicles for model year 2092. Japan and China continued to copy their designs and offer cheaper versions of these same vehicles to consumers using less expensive Asian labor. Mining mishaps on the moon occasionally made the news, of course. That was always riveting; hearing about miners being trapped in cave-ins or stranded in remote lunar outposts for days and days awaiting rescue.
Meanwhile stories from the Middle East seemed to indicate problems out there would continue like they always had for thousands of years. Blood feuds. Human rights abuses. A fatwa or two issued by some radical Mufti calling for a ban on something pleasurable. Same as always. There was always something like that going on. And over in North America, the masses turned their attentions to living out their lives as happily as possible while enjoying their favorite pastimes…
* * * *
Especially riveting that year was the High School National Megaball Tournament, when the underdog Katy, Texas squad advanced into the Supers after a smashing victory over regional rival Lake Travis. With their dominating forwards unit and speedy backers such as freshman sensation Ranger Guerrero, the Tigers swept the Texas Division that November. Th
ey would eventually fall to Don Bosco Prep from New Jersey in the Super Regionals; but this previously unknown athlete—a lanky fifteen-year old from some boys’ farm outside Houston—soon burst onto the scene and caught the attention of the national sports media for the first time. A lot of college coaches and recruiters took notice as well.
In the Divisionals, he carved up defenses like a Christmas ham with his slashing running style; even took over the center-back position during the matchup with Lake Travis in the waning minutes of the game. Up until then, he’d been just another face in the crowd, but according to news reports following the Texas divisional championship game, he assumed command of the offense with only 1:32 left in regulation; ostensibly to run out the clock with a comfortable twelve-point lead and save their opponent from Austin any further embarrassment by running up the score.
However, what happened after that...on the very next play from scrimmage...would be broadcast throughout the sporting world for days and days to come.
Of course, only a handful of people outside of that group of exhausted young men who participated in the heroics that day would ever know the true story of what happened. But reality was that senior outside backer Gerardo La Rumba from Katy High School only needed seventy-six meters to attain the all-time prep school record for receiving. Most everyone viewing the match between Lake Travis and Katy knew that, of course, and truly the Lake Travis defense was aware of it, as well. The media had been covering his progress the whole time and broadcasting it on the stadium’s jumbovision.
Despite Ranger’s orders from his coach to sit on the ball and run out the clock, he promptly heaved a fifty-meter bullet to Gerardo who streaked diagonally across the field and then down the sideline after the catch. Remarkably, in one dramatic aerial display, he picked up just under eighty meters in a single play—and now held a record which would likely stand for decades to come. Most anyone, even the defenders chasing him, would have assumed he’d sprint right into the try zone for the score.
