In the Black, стр. 7
At the push of the virtual icon at the helmsperson station, banks of capacitors inside the engineering hull released a torrent of energy through three structural pylons into the stream of negative-matter plasma channels and radial gravity-well accelerators inside the rings themselves. Outside the rings in a rough sphere reaching out to five hundred kilometers and change, spacetime had a little fit as it tried to sort out exactly how it was supposed to be shaped. This was, in centuries-old naval parlance, the “gooey zone,” so named because the effect this warping of spacetime had on anything or anyone unfortunate enough to be trapped within it were not conducive to continued mechanical or biological functioning as they tended to end up the consistency of chunky peanut butter.
However, inside the gooey zone, the Ansari pinched off a perfect little bubble of universe of its own. Several things happened then that maybe six living people actually understood. The Ansari stood perfectly, absolutely still inside its little bubble universe, while powerful gravitational eddies stretched spacetime at the bow, and compressed it at the stern. Twisting the very fabric of the universe in such a violent and unnatural way came at a price. Nearly an entire recon platform’s worth of antimatter fuel had to be annihilated just to charge the rings to create the bubble in the first place.
Pulled from ahead and pushed from behind, the bubble universe took off like a scalded cat. At its center, the Ansari sat, perfectly serene and immobile. It was impossible for anything to travel through space faster than light, and would remain so until the death of the universe. But space didn’t actually care what it did inside itself. A simple-enough idea that had regardless taken centuries to take from bar napkin, to blueprints, to hardware.
Trapped inside its bubble, the Ansari was completely cut off from the outside. The inside surface of the bubble reflected any light or other active energy emissions. If the ship had portals, a crewmember could wave and see a funhouse mirror image of themselves waving back. Anything inside the bubble was nigh-invulnerable to anything in the universe outside, except against sufficiently intense gravitational shearing, such as the forces found inside a star or black hole, which could collapse the bubble prematurely, then collapse everything inside it permanently.
The downside was, as long as they remained inside it, the Ansari and her crew were completely blind. They couldn’t see out to know if they were on course or to see approaching dangers. They couldn’t make any midcourse corrections. They just had to trust in their astrogation and hope for the best until it was time to pop the bubble and see where they ended up.
In the case of this jump, they didn’t have long to wait. The Ansari covered the twenty-six light-minutes of the journey in less than four seconds. The precision necessary to drop them exactly where they wanted to go was beyond human reflexes. A preset countdown that ran out to eleven decimal places reached zero, and the same sequence that created and sustained the bubble ran in reverse, collapsing it in an instant almost too short to measure. The ship reappeared in the “real” universe at a dead stop.
A small bow shock of gamma rays burst out and continued on in the Ansari’s direction of travel at the speed of light, the remains of the handful of dust grains and stray high-energy particles that had gotten trapped on the outer surface of the bubble during the jump. Over such a “short” distance, the effect was minimal. But it compounded the longer one traveled in Alcubierre. After a few light-years, the burst of gamma rays was powerful enough to destroy ships or punch holes in atmospheres. You really had to be careful where you pointed an Alcubierre bubble when it popped.
“Jump complete,” Broadchurch reported.
Susan worked her suddenly sore jaw. Something about Alcubierre transitions always made it clench involuntarily. A succession of ship’s doctors had told her that was impossible and it was psychosomatic, but it stubbornly kept happening anyway. “Stand down alpha and gamma rings,” she said while working her mandible.
“Stand down alpha and gamma rings,” Miguel echoed.
“Standing down alpha and gamma rings.”
“What’s our position?” Susan asked.
“Coming in now, Captain. We are … nine hundred forty-seven kilometers sunward of grid marker six-two-seven-dash-three-eight at zero-point-one-nine-meters-per-second closing rate.”
“Not bad, Charts,” Susan said with satisfaction. “You’re a few dozen klicks past the line. Do you think you can beat that on the next jump?”
“I will certainly try, mum.”
“Weapons, where are we?”
“CiWS is hot and streaming data from the active array,” Warner answered crisply. “Decoys and countermeasures on standby. Missiles on standby. Ready to bring up the laser and railgun systems.”
“I think a ship-killer missile half again as big as a combat drone might be a little overkill, Guns.”
“Overkill is my job, mum.”
Susan shook her head. Some things were universal among weapons officers. “Scopes, bang away with the active sensors. Damn our EM signature. If there’s something hiding out here, flush it out.”
“Yes’m.”
“Also, launch four armed drone platforms and establish a perimeter of a half million klicks at bearings zero, ninety, one-eighty, and two-seventy relative to the eclectic. Don’t bother stealthing them, go full active sensors.”
“Bait, mum?” Mattu asked.
“Something like that.”
“Yes’m. Armed drones at compass points flat to the eclectic. Should be ready to launch in t-minus ninety seconds.”
“Good. XO, alert Flight Ops to get a shuttle and an EVA team ready. I want them in vacuum in