GALACTIC SURVEY (COLONY Book 3)

by Richard F. Weyand

  “Your great grandparents were transported thousands of light years in an instant. Right now you’re sitting in a spaceship on the first manned hyperspace flight. You live in an age of wonders – and you’re reading science fiction?”

  “Well, yeah. I like it. In an age of wonders, why would you read something mundane?”

  Moore had no good answer for that.

  “What’s it about?” he asked instead.

  “Some guys invent a supercomputer. It becomes self-aware, then it takes over and tries to kill all the humans because they’re imperfect.”

  “The computer kills everybody?”

  “It tries to,” McKay said. “But it can’t, because humans don’t react logically. It can’t anticipate their moves.”

  “Huh.”

  Moore read the blurb on the book, then turned to McKay.

  “Got any more? It’s gonna be two days, after all.”

  The computer take-off and trip into space had gone well. The rocket burn to give them velocity away from the planet had been typically uncomfortable, with several gravities of acceleration for seventy-five minutes.

  Now, as the time for the hyperspace transit drew closer, they were getting a little anxious about it.

  “What’s this gonna be like?” McKay asked.

  “No telling,” Moore said. “All the animals came back OK, but they couldn’t tell anybody what it was like. The instruments didn’t show anything at all.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they said. And those instruments ought to be more sensitive than us, right?”

  “I would think.”

  “So we don’t feel anything,” McKay said.

  “We’ll see.”

  “Three... Two... One... Transition,” the computer voice said.

  “Oh, geez. Look at that,” McKay said.

  “That’s a little unsettling,” Moore said.

  They had not felt anything at all on transition to hyperspace. What they saw was something else again.

  First of all, it was very bright. The computer had stopped the transparency of the cockpit windows way down, and it was still bright. But there was something more to it. It was like when something caught the corner of your eye – a glint of some kind – and you turned to look at it, and there was nothing there. But it was like that anywhere they looked. Featureless, but not quite, and no putting a finger on it.

  “Transition complete. Initiating ripple drive.”

  “Urp,” McKay said.

  “Yeah, that makes it even worse somehow, doesn’t it?”

  The ripple drive imposed a set of slightly darker bands on the view. Or perhaps it was slightly lighter. In any case, the bands started rolling over the ship, from front to back. The sense of something there, something you couldn’t quite focus on, increased.

  “Enough,” Moore said. “Computer. Blacken windows while in hyperspace.”

  “Windows blackened.”

  “That’s a lot better,” McKay said.

  “Yeah. We might be the first to actually see hyperspace, but I couldn’t recommend it to anybody.”

  “I’m with you there. We got what now? An hour?”

  “Yeah,” Moore said. “Less.”

  When the ripple drive initiated, they were initially pushed back in their seats a bit, but not much. It was nowhere near one gravity. Perhaps a tenth. That faded back to zero-gravity once the ship encountered enough drag to slow acceleration to nothing even while the drive was pushing.

  When the hour was almost over, the drive reversed as the computer aimed for its desired exit velocity. They were pushed forward in their seats a bit. Again, perhaps a tenth of a gravity.

  “Three... Two... One... Transition,” the computer voice said.

  “Wow,” McKay said.

  “Nice,” Moore said.

  The computer had made the windows transparent on transition out of hyperspace. In front of them, Beacon-1 looked bigger than Arcadia from the safe transition distance. Beyond it was the star Beacon. They could see clearly that it was not Arcadia’s sun. The color was off, a bit more toward the red.

  “So now what?” McKay asked.

  “We go back.”

  “That’s it? We came, now we go back?”

  “Yeah,” Moore said. “They already got pictures and stuff from before.”

  “It’s like riding a bus to the end of the line and starting over.”

  Moore chuckled.

  “Yeah, but that was the goal. Come here and then go home.”

  As if on cue, the computer fired a nose thruster to get the ship pointed back toward Arcadia. They could have gone the whole way in reverse on the ripple drive, but they would have to turn around at some point to fly back down to the planet’s surface anyway.

  As the ship came around, the countdown started.

  “Three... Two... One... Transition,” the computer voice said.

  The windows went black, and they were back in hyperspace.

  It was almost an hour later when the ripple drive kicked into reverse in preparation for their exit from hyperspace.

  “Three... Two... One... Transition,” the computer voice said.

  The windows went back to clear, and there in front of them was the planet Arcadia and its yellower sun.

  “And there we are,” Moore said.

  “If that ain’t the damnedest thing,” McKay said. “One hour each way, and now we’re back, but with a day to go to get to the planet.”

  “Yup. Get another couple books in before we get to watch the computer land us.”

  “That will be more nerve-wracking than the take-off. It’s dicier.”

  ”Yeah, but the computer’s done it before,” Moore said. “We’re just along for the ride.”

  “I know, I know. I won’t touch anything. Still.”

  They had already reported in that they were fine, but when they got closer to the planet, Huenemann contacted them.

  “How you guys doing? You all rested up and fed and everything?”

  “Yes, sir,” Moore said. “Pretty much. Not very stressful, after all. We kept our hands off the controls, so we just watched.”

  “All right. Well, you’re going to be coming down about noon Arcadia City time. And they’re setting up a parade and all.”

  “A parade?”

  “Yeah,” Huenemann said. “For the returning heroes. You know.”

  “But we didn’t do anything.”

  “You know that, and I know that, but they want to get everybody all excited. We’re going to be spending a lot more money going forward, and the prime minister doesn’t want any pushback on funding.”

  “Ah. Politics. Got it,” Moore said. “So we wave and smile and all that shit.”

  “Yeah. You got it. Shake a buncha hands, too. Maybe even get a medal.”

  The motorcade came in from Arcadia City Spaceport along Quant Boulevard. It met up with the bands and all about six blocks from Charter Square. The parade route was down Quant Boulevard to Hospital Street, right on Hospital to A Street, left on A Street to University Street, and left on University to Arcadia Boulevard. That is, it ringed Charter Square on the big roundabout.

  The leading elements of the parade made the right onto Arcadia Boulevard, but everything stopped when the car carrying the first humans into hyperspace reached the intersection. The reviewing stand was there, and Prime Minister Milbank, Chen MinChao, Jessica Chen-Jasic, and other notables were there.

  The reviewing stand was open on all four sides, and Charter Square was full of cheering people as Moore and McKay mounted the stairs. They shook hands with all the notables. Milbank gave them both a medal, the mayor gave them the keys to Arcadia City, and Miss Arcadia City gave them both a kiss on the cheek.

  “You know what this means, Rob,” Jessica said to the prime minister as they watched the proceedings.

  “Yes, Jessica. Your funding payments go up.”

  “And we’re ready to place RDF satellites. We’ll find Amber and Earthsea before the end of the y
ear.”

  “Ouch,” Milbank said. “There goes my next year’s budget.”

  Jessica laughed.

  The Search Begins

  While all the excitement centered around the first manned hyperspace mission, JieMin’s work was concentrated on the second hyperspace ship. He had watched interviews of the manned hyperspace crew of the first hyperspace ship, and was unsurprised at their reaction to the appearance of hyperspace. Hyperspace did not follow space-time’s rules.

  When the second hyperspace ship was operational, the torque testing of the screw drive was performed under computer control. The results of those tests were given to JieMin’s hyperspace mathematics team. They would work out the implications.

  JieMin was working on bigger-picture items. One big question was, How would they find the other colonies? He knew they were a minimum of roughly three thousand light-years apart. How could he visualize this so the solution would be more apparent to him?

  It was an important issue because, once Amber and Earthsea were found, they had to know where to redeploy the RDF satellites to find other colonies. And if they weren’t deployed within a hundred and twenty light-years of a colony, they wouldn’t see it. Its radiation signature wouldn’t have traveled that far yet.

  JieMin was washing his hands in the bathroom down the hall from his office when it came to him. Bubbles! He ran back to his office, his hands still soapy.

  After an hour’s work – and a cursory wipe of his hands on his trousers – JieMin surveyed the results. In the three-dimensional display, he showed this part of the Milky Way galaxy. Specifically the Orion and Sagittarius arms. Around each of Earth, Arcadia, and the likely positions of Amber and Earthsea, he had drawn a nearly transparent globe, like a bubble.

  The bubbles were fifteen hundred light-years in radius, or three-thousand light-years in diameter. If two bubbles touched each other, the distance from the human-inhabited planet in the center of one bubble to the one in the center of the other bubble would be three thousand light-years, through the contact point.

  More to the point, other colonies could only be located where other bubbles would fit, and only at the center of the bubble. If the bubble had some slop to wiggle back and forth, the location of the colony planet for that bubble could also wiggle back and forth, because the center of the bubble had moved.

  Now the question was, Did that set of locations – the locations where the center of a bubble could go – contain a G2 type star or not? The stars – location and type – were all mapped pretty well in this part of the galaxy.

  JieMin spent the rest of the day playing with the bubbles, moving them around, consulting star charts, and selecting likely locations. By the time the RDF satellites had located Amber and Earthsea, he would be ready with deployment locations.

  As a matter of fact, JieMin thought he already knew which stars Amber and Earthsea orbited.

  JieMin and ChaoLi sat at the dining room table after dinner that night. The kids had cleared the table and then gone off to their rooms to study.

  “I had a major breakthrough today,” JieMin said.

  “In how to find the other colonies?”

  “Yes.”

  JieMin told ChaoLi of the bubble idea, and how he was using it.

  “So all human space...” she began.

  “... looks like twenty-five three-thousand light-year soap bubbles,” he finished for her. “That’s right.’

  “That’s a great way to visualize it.”

  “Yes. And if I can visualize it, I can reduce it to an algorithm.”

  “And cross-reference it to the star charts,” ChaoLi said.

  “Yes. Exactly. We should get a pretty small list of locations to look at, at least for the colonies that are close to us.”

  “Outstanding. You know, the RDF satellites have been signed off on. We deployed two of them to Beacon, and they both found Arcadia. It’s only three light-years away, but still, they worked.”

  “When is Karl deploying them?” JieMin asked. “I have some refinement on the best locations from the bubble map.”

  “He was going to send the first set off next week. The ship can carry three of them, so he was going to deploy the Amber ones with the first hyperspace ship, and the Earthsea ones with the second.”

  “So both hyperspace ships will be gone almost three months, just to deploy the satellites?”

  “That’s the plan. No way around it, given the distances.”

  JieMin nodded.

  “Maybe we should just have the ships wait for results,” he said. “It shouldn’t take long. Then bring the satellites back with them.”

  “That’s a good idea, too, given the three-month round-trip time. I’ll mention it to Karl. You need to send him your refined locations.”

  JieMin nodded.

  They were finally getting somewhere.

  Karl Huenemann liked the idea. Three months with the ships gone was what he expected, but then it was another three months to go and pick up the satellites and get results. Waiting a month for results made the initial trip four months long, but then they would have the results right off.

  Huenemann knew they could pick up the satellites. They had practiced rendezvousing with them – under computer control – in Arcadia orbit before deploying two of them to Beacon. So there was no problem there.

  The change in the programming of the mission profile wasn’t that much. Just leave out the part where they came back to Arcadia and went back out in between. Place all the satellites, wait, then do the pickup mission. Easy.

  JieMin and ChaoLi were at the beach watching the boys play in the water. LeiTao, newly engaged to Chen DaGang, was off with her fiancé buying housewares to update his bachelor’s supplies. Short engagements being the norm on Arcadia, the wedding celebration was next weekend. They were already living together in his apartment, and JieJun had moved into the now empty bedroom that had been the girls’ room.

  For everything else going on, JieMin’s mental back channel never moved far from the project.

  “ChaoLi.”

  “Yes?”

  “How is the project doing financially?”

  “Why do you ask?” ChaoLi asked.

  “If we made a satellite delivery vehicle – no cabin, ripple drive only, computer control – it would be quite a bit cheaper than the current hyperspace ships. A half dozen of those, with maybe another dozen RDF satellites, would be a lot faster at finding other colonies than just the two hyperspace ships. As it is – deploying the RDF satellites to multiple likely locations with six-week transit intervals, going out to get results, redeploying – it’s going to take years to locate the other colonies.”

  “And that would also free up the hyperspace ships for other tasks. I like it. I’ll have to look at the finances, but we might be able to swing it, especially because I think we are going to find Amber and Earthsea pretty quickly.”

  “You could probably make those delivery vehicles space-only. No need to have them come down to the planet. Simpler still.”

  ChaoLi nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “We already know how to do that. Actually, if they stayed outside of the safe transition limit, we wouldn’t even need rockets on them. All nuclear power for the hyperspace drive, and no refueling issues. They just come back here, deliver results, and get redeployed. I like it.”

  She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Good one, JieMin.”

  LeiTao and DaGang’s wedding was a smaller affair than ChaoPing and JuMing’s huge event two years before. They were not on the track of the engineering and accounting disciplines that were the choices for the family’s potential power couples. Still, there were a hundred people crammed into the smaller private dining room of the family’s restaurant on Market Street.

  Chen MinChao and Jessica Chen-Jasic attended, though, as did Prime Minister Rob Milbank and his wife Julia Whitcomb. JieMin and ChaoLi were movers and shakers, and, more to the point, Rob had become a personal frie
nd through their interactions on the project.

  The bride was beautiful, the groom awkward.

  All was as it should be.

  It wasn’t until the week after the wedding that ChaoLi was able to bring the question of specialized satellite deployment vehicles to MinChao and Jessica. She explained the benefits and costs to the family’s ultimate power couple and got the go-ahead for development and construction.

  The project kicked into high gear.

  “OK, so one problem we have with space-only deployment vehicles is getting them out to the safe transition distance the first time, right?” Mikhail Borovsky asked.

  “Yeah,” Karl Huenemann said. “We can only get them going so fast with the cargo shuttle, and we just have to wait until they get there.”

  “Maybe not. One of the guys was looking for one-time-use rocket systems, and he came across something called a JATO bottle. Ever heard of them?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “Jet Assist Take-Off bottle,” Borovsky said. “One-time-use rocket. They used to use them to get heavy airplanes off the ground. You just light ‘em and hang on.”

  “Sounds great. Do we have build plans for them?”

  “Not factory plans, but they’re stupid simple. Not a big problem to write the build program for them. We put a couple on the deployment vehicle, and light ‘em off once the shuttle drops it off. We can even do two plus a second two. They don’t have a long burn, but as light as the deployment vehicle will be, they can get it up to a speed where it will only be three days to safe transition distance.”

  “Nice,” Huenemann said. “Let’s plan on that then.”

  “You got it.”

  Both hyperspace ships sat on the shuttlepads adjacent to the hyperspace facility at Arcadia City Spaceport. Both were unmanned for this mission, their cockpits empty, running under computer control.

  Slung beneath each were three of the RDF satellites. Each was the size of a cargo container, and they were using the offset latches that centered three containers under the shuttles, which could carry up to four containers each.