Hegemony (2 page)

Some of those limits made intuitive sense to Hans Rilk; others were utterly counter-intuitive, even paradoxical.

Range was a limit. An FTL transit could not reach across more than a few dozen light years of space. That made intuitive sense, to Rilk.

Gravity was another limit; trying to initiate a wormhole too close to a gravity well, even a very weak gravity well, added enormous, dangerous levels of uncertainty to the process. It was far safer and more reliable to accelerate out into interplanetary space, where only the distant whisper of gravity from a system's star held sway, before starting an FTL transit. On the other hand, it was also dangerous to try to emerge too far from a gravity well; opening a wormhole in deep interstellar space was both difficult and risky, hence the utility of systems like Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II.

Emergence precision was another limit. An ideal emergence point was undefined, anywhere within an empty volume of space tens of millions of kilometers across. Trying to control the point of emergence too closely increased the odds of trouble. That led to a counter-intuitive corollary; very short range FTL transits, within the volume of a single star system, were more complex, and more likely to go wrong, than larger, less precise transits across interstellar space. It was, Rilk mused, as if the process that generated a wormhole somehow
resented
any attempt to rein in its intrinsic uncertainly.

And most counter-intuitive of all, trying to coordinate FTL transits between multiple ships increased the risk of a problem for each of the ships involved. FTL navigators talked about "non-local interactions" and "chaotic quantum resonance," but the terms were elusive to Rilk. The fact remained that trying to get ships to stay together, to enter and exit their FTL wormholes at the same time and place, pushed the limits of the process.

Of course one could, and did, push the process. Ships pushed for greater range, for greater precision, and for coordinated transits. But "pushing" the process and attempting a "high-stress" FTL transit meant accepting a certain probability of trouble.

There was a risk of a chaotic FTL emergence, with ships winding up somewhere other than where they aimed for. Other times, there might simply be a failure to initiate the FTL transit in the first place. The real problem was that when an FTL transit went wrong that way, it caused (or was caused by, or at least somehow correlated with) a severe destabilization of the femto-singularity at the core of a ship's singularity reactor, which was both the source of a ship's power and the key to being able to make FTL transits in the first place.

The man-made femto-singularities that were at the heart of a singularity reactor were never fully stable to begin with; each had a limited lifespan before instability built up past all attempts to re-stabilize, and the sub-atomic singularity collapsed into nothingness. Even a routine use of a singularity reactor for FTL transit induced destabilization, requiring the singularity reactor to be re-stabilized before it could be used for FTL again. An FTL emergence or initiation fault risked severe, possibly irretrievable, destabilization of the singularity.

It was never really safe, mused Rilk, to push around a black hole... not even a very, very small one.

There were some planet-bound religious sects that claimed that each singularity was a captive demon, or a gateway to hell; their followers refused to travel off-world, lest their souls be ripped away. There were times, when a new singularity was forced into being at the heart of the reactor, or just before an FTL transit, when Hans Rilk was not perfectly certain they were wrong.

This time, the FTL transit had scattered the four ships by hundreds of millions of kilometers, and worse for their schedule, had severely destabilized the singularity reactors on all four ships.

It could, Rilk knew, have been much worse. None of the ships' femto-singularities had collapsed. A singularity collapse would leave a ship with no power except her backup fission reactor. A singularity reactor was the only sort of fusion reactor that was viable for a ship; conventional containment-fusion reactors delivered only a fraction of the power of a singularity reactor of the same size, and they couldn't be made compact enough to serve as backup reactors. Instead, most ships used ultra-compact, high efficiency fission reactors for emergency power. A ship's backup fission reactor would provide enough power to maintain life support and call for help, but not nearly enough to power a ship's plasma drives. And of course, without the singularity, there could be no FTL transit.

For that matter, in a real worst-case, a singularity could even destabilize violently, generating a vast, uncontrolled burst of energy before it collapsed. That rarely happened unless the reactor was badly damaged, but if it did happen, it left nothing of the ship but vapor and radiation.

The emergence error could have been worse as well; there were wild stories, officially discounted with perhaps a bit
too
much fervor, of ships that emerged in the wrong star system, or more confusingly, in the wrong temporal framework; there were tales of ships attempting to cross light-years in an instant instead being thrown years into the future, displaced in time instead of space.

Nothing like that had happened. But there would be a substantial delay for the convoy as it maneuvered back into formation. These waypoint systems on the periphery of the Hegemony of Suns were not perfectly safe. There were independent,
anomic
, colonies out there, existing outside of the
nomos
of Hegemonic Law. Many of them harbored or spawned pirates. There were also the nomadic void-runners, the so-called "Brotherhoods," who eschewed any home world and lived in their ships, stopping only to raid or trade, as seemed best to them.

Four freight-liners together, with coordinated defenses, would give most raiders pause, while one ship alone would be a very tempting target.

So there was space to cross under conventional plasma drive; carbon reaction mass fed in towards the singularity, close but not too close; close enough for carbon to be crushed together to the point of gravitic fusion, but not quite close enough to fall into and upset the delicate balance of the femto-singularity at the heart of the ship's reactor. The resulting stream of ultra-energetic neon and helium plasma was fed into the ship's plasma drives. There it mixed with more reaction mass, converting thousands of times more carbon into ultra-high energy plasma thrust.

The ships' drives lit up with nuclear fire, illuminating the empty darkness of the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system with hundred kilometer long spikes of plasma as the four huge ships maneuvered to regain their lost formation.

Setting aside the huge power of the plasma drive, it was still fundamentally a rocket. But to Rilk, an enthusiastic student of the history of early space flight, it was hard to place a singularity reactor-powered plasma drive in the same mental picture as a historical chemical rocket of the sort that mankind had first ridden into space. The plasma drive's power output was greater than the combined power output of the entire Earth had been in the era of the first rocket flights. Had one of those old-Earth chemical rocket pioneers somehow been able to see the sight, the plasma drive's exhaust, a torrent of radiation streaming out at almost ten percent the speed of light, would have seemed more like a stellar phenomenon than rocket exhaust.

And still, for all that power, the thrust could only accelerate the multi-megaton ships at a quarter of a standard gravity. It would take more than a hundred hours for the four freight-liners to cross the volume of space they had been scattered through. For the crews of the freight-liners, the slow hours of waiting had begun.

For the crews of the other two ships, drifting silently through the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system, the time of waiting was over.

Hans Rilk sat in his command pod on the bridge of the
Ulia's Flower
and rubbed the bridge of his nose. For all the excitement of the chaotic FTL emergence, the slow business of regaining the convoy's formation was tedious. There was nothing for the captain to do except monitor the ship's systems and watch as the
Ulia's Flower
exactly traced her plotted vector. At times like this, even on watch, the mind tended to wander.

Rilk could envision his ship perfectly. The
Ulia's Flower
was a huge teardrop shape, with a rounded bow, lightly armored to deal with the occasional micro-impact, and a narrow stern that held the main plasma drive. Forward of the drive and behind the bow were the huge cargo holds that gave the ship her purpose, and forward of those, nestled into the ship's bow, was the relatively small volume of the crew's accommodations and the command-and-control spaces from which the ship was operated. Swept-back radiator spines and sensor masts, mounted along the ship's ventral and dorsal aspects, gave the an appearance rather like some sort of deep-sea creature.

The two megaton freight-liner
Ulia's Flower
was an old ship, older than Rilk, who was on the wrong side of five hundred thousand hours himself; sixty, in Old-Earth years, though Old-Earth years were a fading measurement. Old-Earth history was a hobby of his... though if pressed, Rilk would admit that Old-Earth had very little to do with humanity now.

His thoughts were all over the place today. Momentarily, he shut off the data feeds and opened his eyes, taking in the faded metal bulkheads and worn crew pods of the bridge. There was nothing to see here, save the forms of his command crew. His first mate, who was also his wife, looked younger than her hours, at ease in her pod, eyes closed and mind open to multiple data feeds sent directly into her brain from the ship's systems. It was disorienting to try to see with both biological eyes and direct interface feeds at the same time. A glance caught his own reflection in one of the glossy backup video screens of his own command pod. The reflection showed a broad-shouldered man, balding, with a fringe of graying hair above a wide, deeply lined face, with a large nose and deep set brown eyes. His full beard was still mostly dark, though shot through with gray. He had once looked quite dashing, he knew, with a wild mane of dark hair and a thick dark beard; a bit wild. It was a good look for a space captain. He could still manage to look stern and commanding for new crewmembers, at need. But the face that looked back at him was no longer even close to young.

It was still going to be a pretty good run, Rilk mused, even with the delay. The increased destabilization from the bad emergence meant that it would take much longer than normal to stabilize the drive's singularity before it was safe to make another FTL transit. Worse, the need to use the singularity reactor to power the plasma drive meant that it wouldn't begin re-stabilizing until the long main engine burn was done, in a hundred and thirty more hours. Then it would take at least two hundred hours, maybe more, to stabilize the singularity enough to safely initiate another FTL transit. Compared to an ideal emergence, this navigational mess would probably cost the ships at least an extra two hundred and fifty hours; added to the hundred hours or so it
should
have taken, with a properly executed FTL transit, it was going to be three hundred and fifty hours all told... over fourteen days, by Old-Earth measure. Rilk had spoken sternly with the ship's navigator, but there was no indication of any actual mistake. Just probability; just bad luck.

This delay would cut into profits for the ships' owners, and that meant cancellation of both the crews' and captains' schedule-bonuses. But on this run even
that
wouldn't be a disaster. The margin on this cargo was
very
robust and despite the delay, the run was still going to be profitable. Even the crews were going to do well on this one; for a rare change, the crews' secured profit shares were much larger than the now-forfeited schedule-bonuses.

It was an unusual cargo, really. The four-ship convoy carried almost four megatons of alloy-bearing ore; not the sort of thing that usually paid the costs of interstellar transit. Almost any sort of ore was much cheaper to mine in the same system that was going to use it. Gold, for instance, didn't even come close to paying the costs of interstellar shipping. It was almost never economically feasible to ship mineral wealth between the stars. Almost. The only exceptions were the richest ores of fuel-grade uranium, or of the platinum-group metals: platinum, palladium, iridium, osmium, rhodium and ruthenium.

The
Ulia's Flower
and her sister ships were laden with the latter sort of ore; mixed platinum group metals, primarily rhodium, in astounding concentration, but with all the other platinum group metals present in high concentrations as well. Prior to stating this contract, Rilk had never heard of anyone finding ore of this quality... ore valuable enough to be worth interstellar shipping costs.

As far as Rilk knew, the Sigma-Charybdis system, where the ore was mined, was a unique anomaly as well. To the crews that worked in the system's hellish, high radiation environment, huddling inside heavily shielded mining platforms, it was just "Charybdis," a monster that would devour them with killing radiation for the slightest mistake.

Sigma-Charybdis had once been a widely spaced binary star system: a fast burning type O supergiant star, distantly orbited by a white dwarf star. It had been blasted apart by a type II supernova, probably less than a hundred million hours ago; barely more than ten thousand old-Earth years; very recent by stellar measure. The gravity of the small second star, almost a tenth of a light year distant from its exploding partner, had captured a fair sample of the products of its stellar sibling's supernova. The high value elements and exotic alloys that could be mined in the ravaged remnants of the system, by the megaton, would have cost a hundred times more to obtain by normal means.