Star Girl (16 page)

“Well why didn’t you just borrow a bird then?”

“I just didn’t feel like it.”

He knows I’m lying, I can tell by the look on his face.

          When we get home and he gets my bags from the trunk, he stops in his tracks, looking at the luggage check in tag from the airport that says ‘Las Vegas / Omaha’ on it. He looks up at me with a curious look.

“You didn’t?”

I nod with a giggle.

“We need to talk baby.” He gets a big smile.

Even though dad sure doesn’t have a need to know. I’ll tell him, alone, because he is my daddy and I can’t wait to see his face.

          Mom is all over me with hugs and kisses, and we go in to sit and talk while she finishes cooking a big meal for us.

“So how is that country club for old fighter jocks, as your father calls it?”

“I love it there mom. I have room service and concierge service. Spa, pools, tennis courts, and any wonderful old jet I want to fly.”

“I thought you test flew new airplanes?” She asks.

“I do mom, but just once in a while. The other flying is for hours, so I stay fresh.”

“For fun is more like it.” Dad quips. “So what’s the neatest old bird you get to fly?”

“The Blackbird is my favorite dad.” I grin proudly.

“No kidding? Our little girl’s been to the edge of space baby. What do you think about that?”

“I don’t like it George, it sounds dangerous.”

If they only knew.

          Later after dad and I do dishes, he takes me into his home office, or den, and closes the door.

“So, you are having some real fun I bet.”

I laugh. “Okay, shoot dad. I’ll answer what I know.”

“Aliens?”

I nod.

“Damn…” he shakes his head. “Are they scary?”

I shake my head.

“Good. Flying saucers?”

I nod.

“Of course. They had to get here somehow. Have you talked with them?”

I shake my head.

“What do they want?”

I shrug.

“Not good. What are you really flying?”

“The ARC one twelve. Mach twenty six in a gravity well, a hundred and twenty thousand miles an hour outside one. Stops on a dime, and turns on one as well at hyper speed. Some magic hull material, we don’t hardly feel any G force, and there’s no air resistance either. The dang thing doesn’t make a sonic boom in an atmosphere. It’s a fully interplanetary transport.”

His eyes bug way out and his jaw drops open, yes that’s the look I was waiting for.

“What are you doing with them?”

“Building a gigantic space station behind the moon.”

He whistles. “We are way further along than I thought.”

“Me too.”

“What are they going to use the station for?”

I shrug.

“Can you take me for a ride?”

“That is tricky, unless you can get out to Area 51.”

He shakes his head. “You have to be invited out there.”

“Maybe I can get you invited.”

“No, no. Don’t even mention that. I was just dreaming baby.”

“It is like a dream dad. I like being weightless in space.”

“My baby is an astronaut.”

“Call me Star Girl daddy.” I giggle.

“Star Girl, I like that.”

          Mom is told nothing of my real career that I have embarked on. She wouldn’t sleep well if she knew. The next day I call Deb, and we chat for a while. She is pregnant with her second child now, and she sounds like she adjusting to motherhood well. Better her than me. I know we’ll never be lovers again, but I sure had fun with her. Next I call Carly, and she asks for another jet ride, so I ask my dad. He tells me to get the flight hours in while I can, as he is retiring next year. So we go for another fun spin in the Eagle trainer. Again I let her take the controls at altitude, and she loves it like always. On the way home we stop for a burger.

“So, what do they have you doing now Steph?”

“I am a test pilot.”

“Oh, good. You are done with all that other stuff, I’m glad.”

“Me too.”

“Hey, you aren’t mad at Obama for pulling out of Iraq are you?”

“Hell no. That’s why I voted for him.”

That earns me a friendly hug.

“How about your love life girl, what’s going on there?” She chews an onion ring waiting for my reply.

“Nothing at all. I think I have given up on that happening for me.”

“What? Why?”

“Oh, it’s just that everyone I become intimate with, dumps me.”

“You have to keep trying Steph, sooner or later it will happen.”

“I’ve got too many things going on anyway.”

“There’s always time for love.”

“I already am in love Carly, with my career.”

“Yeah, well your career can’t make you climax can it?”

“Actually, yeah.”

She shrugs, and then nods. “Flying that Eagle is pretty close I must admit, but you can have both!”

“I don’t think so.”

“You can try.

“I tell you what, if I meet someone who makes me so wet that I can’t resist, I’ll go for it, of course I will.”

“That’s the spirit!”

          When I ask about my Grandma Kilmer, my dad tells me she is in a nursing home in Indianapolis now. So I give her a call hoping to be able to talk with her. I get lucky and have a few minutes with her. She tells me how proud she is of me, and most especially how proud Grandpa Joe was of me. Telling me that when I graduated the Academy, he was so excited you could have sworn it was him who had succeeded. I tell her how I always loved them both with all my heart, and it gets a bit teary towards the end of the call. I know I probably won’t get a chance to talk to her again. I could tell by how weak and weary her voice was.

          I see Carly again several more times on my furlough, and each time we go for a ride. I need the hours, and she loves it, so it is a win, win. Too soon though I am on my way back to Las Vegas.

          When I get back to NET nine, which stands for Non Existent Terminal number nine, the progress that has been made since I’ve been gone is astounding. The hull is nearly three quarters complete, and I am told they will start to spin the station soon. I only spend three more weeks delivering supplies when they do spin it, and now my home has gravity, making everything much easier.

          This is when my flight leader tells us all that we are to begin a ground school here on NET nine for the next generation craft. Our normal duties are almost totally eliminated, save for a food and water supply run for the station every three days. Many of the construction crews are now gone, and the huge wheel in the night over the moon seems really rather empty because it is so vast. Everyone in the squadron is very curious to see what they have for us next, including our flight leader.

          On our first day of the new ground school the CO of the station, Admiral Lathrop, begins with an indoctrination lesson.

“Double N’s listen up! You have been selected for a new program. This is not just a new craft to pilot, it is so much more than that. Your training will require about thirty weeks to complete.”

Our groans drown him out for a moment.

“Like I said, this is a whole new program. If any of you wish to opt out, now is the time to do so, but you really might want to consider sticking around.” He pauses and waits for any disinters to leave.

“Nobody? Good. Now what we will be training you in is a wide variety of topics, but mainly centered around understanding the principle of operation of this new craft we are designing. This is not for the meek; that is why we chose you. The following information is highly classified and will only be discussed here on NET nine. Understood?”

We all affirm it in chorus.

“The code name of this project is ‘September,’ or SEP for the acronym. This stands for Species Expansion Project. Anyone care to guess why we have named it so?”

Colonel Ham raises his hand. “Because we are going to expand the human race?”

“Exactly, but how we are going to do this is the real trick. The new craft we are designing will be a starship.”

He lets our gasps of astonishment fade before he continues, “Of course for you to learn how to properly operate this craft, will require intensive training, hence the estimated thirty weeks. This will be much more like a very compressed degree program from a university. You will each have all the required knowledge of how your craft works before you ever even see one.” He pauses and looks us all over carefully. “One of you will become the most famous person who ever lived, when it comes out publically that is. That will be the lucky one who is selected to travel to the first star system outside of our own. Study hard, and pay attention, it might just be you that we choose. Any questions?”

I raise my hand. “Is there anything we can do to improve our chances for that honor sir?”

“Study hard, be diligent, and want it enough to endure.”

There are no further questions, and we are sent to our first class in Fluid Quantum Theory.

Chapter 9

         
Our instructor introduces himself as Mister W. Saying that his name is classified. He asks us if any of us have any background in cosmology.

I raise my hand. “I like reading about the universe as we know it sir.”

“Good, it will help. However we have a whole brand new view of how the universe behaves. This is what I have been contracted to teach you. To begin with we now have a new perspective of the base constituents of the universe. There are three base components of all things. Matter; considered in its most basic form, the singlet. The base component of all matter is this super tiny little sphere. They are all the exact same size and have the exact same properties. Their density is infinite, meaning they displace time-space completely. There is no time-space in them at all. They also never reflect light, they are too small, nor do they diffuse it in any way as light simply brushes them aside.”

          “Next we have light. Now, matter has a base tendency to come together, thus compressing time-space in between, and creating a gravity well eventually. Light does the opposite from this. Its base tendency is to spread in all directions, and instead of compressing time-space, light expands this ethereal material. Imagine if you will a photon screaming through time-space, so fast that the actual fabric of time-space is expanded right at the head of the photon, like a wake that a ship would make in the sea. Now this expanding little wake at the tip of the photon will actually exert a kinetic pressure on any matter it encounters. The photon of light energy itself does not exert any energy on matter that it strikes, but the expanding wake of time-space at the head sure does. This is what is known as the particle like effect of light.”

          “Lastly we have the third component of the universe, time-space. As Einstein correctly predicted and then proved, time-space is a substance, or as he called it a fabric. It can be warped or bent if you like, and as such it is not nothingness. Here on the screen is the very familiar graphic of a gravity well as expressed by Mister Einstein. We have the ball representing a gravity source like a planet, or a star. The grid lines that it sits on and warps into a well like thing, represents time-space. Can anyone tell me what is lacking in this representation?”

No one volunteers.

“In this representation, time-space is portrayed as being two dimensional, but we all know that space is three dimensional. Try to imagine what a three dimensional representation of time-space would look like.”

None of us nod, just many head shakes.

“Imagine a vortex then. This implies that time-space is moving into the gravity source, and so we see that is what gravity actually is. The movement of time-space into a gravity well, as it moves over, and through the matter on the planet like a fluid; exerts a kinetic force downwards. Now the more mass a gravity well has, the stronger the gravity is. If we use some simple fluid dynamics that you all know, we can understand why this is. More mass compressing means more time-space fluid moving, and this has slower movement due to the amount rushing together. The faster a fluid moves, the less pressure it exerts. So the slower moving time-space fluid will have a greater kinetic pressure on matter as it is moving slowly. On a lighter gravity body like the moon, the opposite is true. Less gravity and you have less time-space fluid moving into the gravity well, but at a faster rate, meaning less kinetic pressure from the movement of time-space fluid, and less gravity.”
          He lets us ask a few questions before he goes on, “The most interesting thing about this is that the faster time-space moves over and through you; the faster time actually transpires for you, compared with a system which has the fluid moving over them more slowly. This means that the time rate you experience on the moon, and even here in orbit around the moon is a faster rate than you experience on Earth; and this explains the time dilation effect that you have all experienced when returning to Earth. More time has transpired for us here than down there.”

It’s actually starting to make sense to me. There is a delicate dance going on between the three prime constituents of the universe, and the rate at which time-space flows is at the heart of this dance.

          The rest of the lecture was an even more detailed examination of this dance. I go to eat evening chow with my head swimming in space, time-space. I guess it has always been that way, but now I can realize it. My bunk calls me to it early, as tomorrow my mind will be expanded more. I must sleep on this.

          The morning cycle starts me anew, and the squadron is in another class today. This one is concerning quantum shifting drive technology. The whole day is spent lecturing us on a new material called obstructed matter, and its function as a time-space inhibitor. It seems connected to the previous days lecture in principle, but I can’t see what it has to do with star drive. Then towards the very end of the day, the instructor tells us that this material is what the hulls of our fantastic shuttles are made of, and now I see the possible connection.

          So the next many days start to blend together as my mind is desperately trying to grasp all the very advanced concepts that they are throwing at us so rapidly. On week six we are told that quantum shifting probe craft are being experimented with near NET nine. They said that the results so far are very optimistic. I still can’t quite fathom that I will be a starship pilot. Daddy will absolutely freak out when I slip him this tidbit.

          Then in the next several weeks we start to learn that there are some grave dangers associated with this endeavor. Though we don’t have all the details yet, we are told that the experience of trans-dimensional flight will be very painful. Our current instructor tells us that they are doing everything they can to minimalize this suffering. My excitement, nor my determination waver a bit. I am going to do this even if it kills me. Star travel, are you kidding me?

          The beginning of week eighteen and we finally start to learn exactly how the craft will perform this quantum shift they have been telling us about.

“The element 115 fuel pellets are stimulated by bombardment with protons, and with the free flow of electrons across its surface. This produce ant-protons on the very surface of the pellet, this annihilates the anti-proton as it comes near protons. This disintegration of matter releases an enormous amount of light energy, but more importantly also an enormous amount of compressed time-space fluid. This expanding fluid is channeled out the forward bow of the craft, causing a low pressure area of time-space in front of the craft. The time-space fluid behind the ship rushes forward to fill this low pressure area, pushing the ship forward. The key though is in the obstructed matter hull of the craft. You can easily see that the fluid dynamic shape of the saucer shape causes the time-space fluid to move much faster along the exterior of the ship than the interior, as not all of the fluid can penetrate the hull material. That rushing around to catch up with the fluid moving through the ship is really having to move very fast. This is what causes the exterior of the ship to quantum shift into the fourth temporal dimension, while the interior is still in the third temporal realm.”

I raise my hand. “So the flat bottom of the saucer is the bow, or the direction of travel then. Right?”

“Yes. Just as the diagram illustrates.”

          It still takes us a couple more weeks before we all are understanding the theory in a practical, useable sense. Then they explain why the event causes so much pain.

“The gravitonic pressure inside the hull is so much greater than that outside during the transit; that it must be equalized slowly by opening thin panels of the TSI hull material slowly at strategic locations on the ship the occupants will experience rapid heating of every molecule in their body. This will be countered by extremely cold air being pumped all over you and into your lungs, and there is a reverse, near freezing effect when the panels are first slowly closed for the transit. Then hot air will be blown into you, and over also.

          This is by and far the most complicated craft I have ever learned how to fly, and I guess it only makes sense. We are talking about a craft that appears to travel faster than light from our point of view. I wonder about this, and the ramifications of nearly instant star travel. What will become of us all, humanity? Talk about the beginning of a golden age, this could very well be it.

          The huge wheel like space station is almost fully completed, and there is so much empty space not being filled, though it is quite obvious that a large amount of people will be coming here. That is what it was built for. There are so many staterooms and barracks like berthing areas, along with a huge cafeteria facility that can seat, and feed thousands. Though there are only a few chefs preparing our meals at the present. We are treated like rock stars with the luxury accommodations and food, and no one is complaining at all, with a few exceptions concerning the difficulty of the courses, but never the perks.

          The next day we are told that they have been sending some monkeys on short quantum leaps, but that there have been some problems. We are assured the very best and brightest minds are tackling the issues. I do worry; what if I am chosen to be first, and they don’t have all the kinks worked out yet…But then I know that I would still become famous in history for my sacrifice. It’s worth it for that damn it!

          Then as week thirty approaches, one of us is called upon to make the first short flight. Not to another star system, but just a test jump one light year distant. They choose Colonel Ham to be the very first human to make a quantum leap. The whole squadron all give him our best high spirits beforehand, and tell him that he makes us all very proud to serve with him.

          We watch the standby probe’s view of his departure. His saucer zips off at high speed, but we don’t see his eventual shift through event horizons. Then exactly one hour later, as planned, his ship comes zipping back into view, to slow rapidly. He signals that he is alive, and the shuttles race to meet his ship. Colonel Ham tells that the trip was extremely painful, and he even needs a couple days in the infirmary to revive. This worries me a bit. I’m not fond of excruciating pain.

          The whole squadron visits him regularly for the couple days he’s in the infirmary, and when he gets out we learn that the next test flight is ready to go. They want a volunteer, and I shoot my hand up first. I ain’t scared.

          My flight is today, and I am nervous for sure. It’s just one light year away, then I turn around and come right back after I take stellar observations to accurately allow the scientists to verify my location. One light year is only about six trillion miles… I sure hope nothing goes wrong, because there is no damn chance of rescue.

“X one this is project control, you are now on automatic launch sequence… departure is imminent in thirty seconds.”

“Rodger control, I am go for flight.”

The count down from ten begins, and all the systems are green.

“Five…drive is active. Four… first panel closing. Three…”

I feel heavier suddenly by a sight, and I am suddenly freezing. The air hoses attached all over to my pressure suit blow hot air on me and my mask feeds hot air into my suddenly very cold lungs.

“One…drive is engaged. You are on course to egress the system’s gravity well Major. Safe journey.”

I don’t feel any acceleration, but the video monitors show that NET nine is quickly fading from sight. Then I start to feel real light, and at the same time my body feels like it is catching on fire all over! Cold air is blasted on me and into me. God damn it hurts!

“Panel two closing in five, four, three…” The computer informs me. Then as it closes I feel instantly much heavier, and my body shifts to being very cold from that previous burning shit. Then my temperature slowly stabilizes until it starts to become very damn hot again as cold air rushes in.

“Panel three closing in five, four…”

The processes is repeated again, and again until all the panels have closed.

“Trans-dimensional penetration in five, four, three…

When it hits, I am on damn fire it feels like and icy air pricks at all my nerves.

“Ahhh!” I cry out. “Shiiiit!”

I am in such pain, the icy air only begins to take the edge off, and only with sharp crystal bites. I breathe faster, deeper.

Then in just moments the computer tells me that the drive is shutting down, and the panel opening countdown begins. It is the same pain in reverse order as before, until finally all the equalization panels are open, and I can begin to unstrap to take my astronomical readings. I feel that I pissed myself, as the pain subsides.

          The realization that I have to endure the exact same torture again in just under an hour, my time; brings no pleasure to me, just that I have to get home again, or I die out here. So I take all my readings as per mission specifications and I strap back in for the automatic ride home. I am really not a pilot by any measure in this thing. Just a passenger going for a very torturous ride.

          I make it back on pins and needles and they instantly come get me to take me to the NET nine infirmary, which is rapidly gearing up to be a full-fledged hospital. I am not as beaten down as Colonel Ham was though, and they release me in several hours.