CHAPTER THREE
Sir Angus had, from the first, wanted Rogers’ arrival on New America to be inconspicuous. What had happened at Hobart’s had caused him to upgrade “inconspicuous” to “clandestine.”
This suited Rogers for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that he would use civilian transportation instead of a fast but austere Navy courier craft. Of course, the Regal Lines’ sleekly up-to-date passenger liner Queen Elizabeth IV wasn’t precisely slow; she would cover the twelve light-years to Tau Ceti, her first port of call, in less than two and a half standard days. Some additional time was taken up by orbital transfers at each end; not even grav repulsion made it practical for a ship of Queen Elizabeth IV’s size to land on planets. Thus it was that Rogers rode a shuttle from Salisbury Plain Spaceport up to the great oblate spheroid that was Albion Space Station, where he went through the relatively painless red tape of routine clearance before being allowed to proceed through an access tube to the ship, where it was moored against one of the station’s great docking flanges.
After depositing his minimal luggage in his stateroom, Rogers decided he had time for a before-dinner drink. The ship’s lounge was a large hemispherical chamber, which was one great television receiver, so that it was like sitting on the outside of the hull surrounded on all sides but astern by the star-blazing firmament and the cloud-marbled curve of Earth slightly more than a thousand miles below, with the sun peeking over its edge. He had barely finished his scotch and soda and ordered another when the intercom announced imminent departure. Some of the inexperienced travelers who had been gawking at the panorama looked a trifle apprehensive at that, although they had been assured that there was no cause for alarm. Nor was there. All that happened was that the sternward blind zone was suddenly ringed with the fringes of the vast-spreading cone of light produced by the photon rockets, and Earth began to slide away and recede. The inertial compensators prevented anyone from feeling any sensation of acceleration, and they coordinated with the artificial gravity so smoothly that no one’s drink was spilled. (There was a barely audible tinkling of glassware, and a few ripples on the surface of the scotch and soda. Rogers suspected that the captain would mention it to the chief engineer.)
Rogers hadn’t quite finished dinner when another announcement filled the air of the lounge. Steady acceleration had brought Elizabeth IV to the Primary Limit: the distance from a large body (twelve and a half thousand miles from planetary center, in the case of Earth) where the force of gravity was less than 0.1 g. Here, the Bernheim Drive could be safely activated.
All at once, the glow of the photon torch was no longer seen and there was a very slight fluctuation of weight. With Earth now invisibly astern, there was no nearby reference point to give a visual sensation of rapidly increasing speed. But space was being folded in front of the ship, the folding process altering the properties of space to reduce normal gravity in that direction, and Elizabeth IV was now lunging outward at an acceleration of two hundred gees. A pseudo-acceleration, actually; the inertial compensators were no longer needed, for the ship’s occupants would have been in a state of free fall had it not been for the artificial gravity generators.
Under that terrific but insensible impulse, it didn’t take long to reach the “Secondary Limit,” just short of the asteroid belt. Here, at a distance of somewhat more than two astronomical units, the Sun’s gravity field was a negligible 0.0001 g. Now the Bernheim Drive could safely wrap negative energy—the so-called “warp field”—around the ship to change the shape of space and create a kind of bubble in space-time (referred to as “subspace”) that could move faster than other parts of space-time, just as theory insisted the fabric of space had expanded far faster than c in the few microseconds when the universe was inflating after the Big Bang. Inside the bubble, space was not distorted and the ship was still traveling at sublight speeds, so no physical laws were violated. But the bubble itself was moving through space-time faster than light, so when the field was formed it instantly imparted what was in effect superluminal velocity. Just how fast that was depended on the number of massive drive coils and the amount of energy pumped into the drive. In the case of Elizabeth IV, it was slightly more than nineteen hundred times as fast as light. That wasn’t nearly as fast as the upper limit—currently around 3,000 c—that could be obtained by drive coils accounting for a quarter of the ship’s loaded mass. But the closer one approached that threshold, cumulative deformations in the drive field degraded its efficiency and lowered the marginal returns from more massive drive coils; and beyond it a point of diminishing returns was reached. So only vessels optimized for speed pushed the limit. A liner like Elizabeth IV, in no tearing hurry and intended to carry as many passengers as possible in the state of luxury they expected, followed the usual standard regarded as economically optimal for civilian ships: her drive coils accounted for ten percent of her total mass (about half of what was typical for naval combatants) with the other Bernheim Drive components (exclusive of powerplant) adding another four percent or so.
There was still no sense of movement when the ship’s accumulators, charged by the inferno of energy that was its antimatter reactor, put out the tremendous surge of energy necessary to initially form the warp field. But this time there was a visual effect. It wasn’t a necessary one. But the captain knew it was a thrill for the first-time passengers when he left the outside view unaltered at this moment. And as always, there was a chorus of gasps, and a scattering of squeals from the women, when the stars suddenly flowed swiftly sternward, flashing through the light-show of Doppler effects, before giving way to absolute void. But then the screens returned to reassuring steadiness, showing a virtual representation of the universe outside the field, as it would have looked in the (impossible) event that it could be seen normally from subspace. And even at the unthinkable pseudovelocity to which the ship had been instantly translated, the stars were too distant to show any visible motion.
* * *
Early in the second “day” of the voyage, Rogers activated his stateroom’s computer and brought up the Imperial Star Directory, 34th edition, and consulted the entry for his destination.
Rogers scrolled rapidly down. He didn’t need all this stuff…Ah!
Rogers smiled at the names. The discoverers—by means of radial velocity planetary searches—had by then been running out of pantheons, and had used the deities of the Iroquois people of North America. Initially, when planet V had been regarded as a possible super-terrestrial abode of life, it had been given the name of Eithinoha, the Iroquois goddess of Earth. Later, when it had been found to be in fact a double planet, the secondary planet had been named “Onatha” after Eithinoha’s daughter. Still later, the colonists had been allowed to rechristen it “New America,” although some purists among the astronomers (especially at Oxford) still insisted on calling it “Onatha.” As for the other planets, the New Americans had been perfectly happy to leave them with names of unimpeachable North American pedigree, unlike the Norse and Babylonian and Egyptian and other outlandish god-names that had been plastered over other extrasolar planetary systems.
The Directory went on to describe the “debris disk” at a radius of 10 to 55 AU, containing so much dust that Tau Ceti could almost be said to have a “ring.” It also contained ten times as much asteroidal rubble as that which orbited Sol, with all that implied for asteroid impacts on the planets. One of the asteroids, 13.5 AU from Tau Ceti and above the plane of the ecliptic, housed the Royal Space Navy’s base in this system. It had been thought that such an unobtrusive location would be more tactful than one closer to New America. Of course, the base’s name—Washington Station—was a shade less tactful, however appropriate it had undoubtedly seemed at the time.
Rogers clicked on the more interesting of the planets for details. Gunnodoyak orbited near the inner edge of the liquid-water zone, the Eithinoha/New America doublet just inside its outer edge. But Gunnodoyak’s dense atmosphere had doomed it to a runaway greenhouse effect, leaving it a hell-like “super-Venus.” Eithinoha was a “gas dwarf,” or a “nebulous superterrestrial” planet as it was sometimes called: a superterrestrial with a thick, helium-rich atmosphere and a small, low-density core. But New America was a rocky “super-Earth” at the very lowest mass-figure for that classification, presumably captured by Eithinoha as a result of what was called a “binary-exchange reaction” in the remote past, much as Sol’s Neptune had once captured Triton; a gas-planet moon so massive relative to its parent could not form in the normal course of things from a shared accretion disk. Had New America fallen on the same mass-over-density curve as the terrestrial planets of the Solar system, it would have had a surface gravity nearly half again that of Earth. But Tau Ceti was older than Sol, and had formed out of an interstellar medium less enriched by supernovas. Hence it, and therefore its planets, had a lesser allotment of heavy elements, and New America’s density yielded a gravity of 1.19 g. That was still enough to hold a relatively dense atmosphere, and what had been a curse for Gunnodoyak had been a blessing for New America, which was reasonably comfortable in an orbital position where Earth would have been frigid except possibly for the tropics. It also helped that Eithinoha’s tidal forces caused a certain flexing of New America’s crust, resulting in friction that warmed the planet from within.
Tau Ceti, like all main sequence stars, was gradually growing brighter, and as a consequence its liquid-water zone had only recently (as astronomers, not to be confused with people, defined “recently”) expanded outward to encompass the double planets’ orbit. But New America had spent enough time in the extended life zone conferred by its atmosphere for life to have arisen and spread. That life took only primitive forms; in a system whose planets suffered asteroid strikes of “dinosaur killer” magnitude ten times as often as those of Sol, there had never been time for the kind of riotous speciation and long-term evolution that characterized Earth’s biosphere. From the standpoint of colonization, this was a good thing all around: the atmosphere had a breathable percentage of oxygen, and imported Terran species expanded rapidly, pushing the native stuff out of the way. And, of course, there were no dangerous animals.
There were other plus factors as well. Even before interstellar flight, it had been theorized that “super-Earths” of tolerable gravity were the best bet for life-bearing—and therefore readily colonizable—worlds. A thicker atmosphere than Earth’s implied more erosive weather, hence flatter topography, with shallow seas and island archipelagos, the ideal environment for life to arise and spread to the land. More importantly, such a planet would retain more internal heat, leading to a longer-lasting spinning molten core, generating a stronger protective magnetic field as well as longer-lasting volcanism and plate tectonics to regulate carbon cycling. New America had provided confirmation of all this. There was even a school of thought that held that a higher gravity than Earth’s (within reason) was healthier for humans due to the increased exercise it enforced.
Rogers skimmed through the rest of the planet’s physical parameters, and also the information on its history, population, government, et cetera. Most of this he already knew, at least in general terms, and he wanted to have as open a mind as possible when exposed to the viewpoint of the liaison officer he was going to be assigned—a certain Grey Goldson. The name was about all he knew, given the limitations of interstellar communication. Instantaneous communication via quantum entanglement was a theoretical possibility, but so far that was all it was, due to the staggering size and expense of the apparatus it would require. Messages between the stars had to be carried by ship, like messages between continents on Earth before the first undersea telegraph cables. And the courier services had a chronic backlog of message traffic, even though they were restricted to official Crown business and private users who were able and willing to pay whacking great fees.
A certain adaptability on his part, he decided, would bear cultivating.
* * *
Given Tau Ceti’s lesser mass, its Secondary Limit was somewhat closer in than Sol’s. At a cautious distance outside it, Elizabeth IV’s captain disengaged the drive field, lest the drive abruptly shut down and suffer a possibly very severe degree of physical damage as the warp field collapsed with a completeness exceeded only by that of his own career.
On the other hand, Eithinoha’s Primary Limit, extending well beyond New America’s, was considerably farther out than Earth’s. So the Bernheim Drive drove the ship in sublight mode for a relatively short time, as the passengers crowded the lounge and watched the double-planet system approach. That approach grew more and more gradual as the ship decelerated, for its pseudovelocity must be brought down to zero before the drive was turned off altogether—as it had to be turned off before crossing that Primary Limit. Failure to do either would result in the same highly unfortunate consequences to ship and captain. Afterwards, the ship’s intrinsic velocity was resumed. (It was, Rogers had often reflected, a very fortuitous characteristic of the drive, preventing fanatics from using it to make planet-killers of asteroids by accelerating them up to relativistic velocities. He wouldn’t have put it past the Caliphate.)
Thus the passengers had plenty of time to watch Eithinoha—banded like larger gas-giant planets, but gray-green rather than the angry orange of its more massive, Jupiter-like kin—grow, with New America off to the side, showing the beautiful cloud-swirling blueness of a predominantly oceanic world. As the approach continued, New America appeared to swing around and partially occlude its larger companion.
Then, with the last of the pseudovelocity shedded just outside the Primary Limit, the Bernheim Drive stopped playing tricks with space. The ship shifted seamlessly to photon thrusters and proceeded toward the space terminal in low New America orbit.