Just to keep you in suspenders if you’ve read Tuesday’s post, I’m going to turn to my first novel, 11,000 Years. It’s very different from Becoming Terran. There are parts that may remind you, if you’ve read them, of Arthur C. Clarke, and Olaf Stapledon, and they should. But this is all mine. I’ll note that my old friend, Dr. Seti, tells me he found no scientific errors in it…
11,000 Years
Chapter 1: Arrival
Captain Phelan Morgan sat in his quietly-lit office contemplating the dark blue of the words he had just written, floating before him against a cream-colored background in the virtual display of the mesh when Ghadi Saeed, his first mate, called to him in the mesh. “Phelan, we’re about to start final braking.”
“Be right there,” Phelan replied. He leaned back and shook his head. The middle of the twenty-second century, and further from Terra than humans have ever gone, more than twenty-eight hundred light years, and I’m writing reports, rather than the AI doing it. He stared for a moment, then had Stephen, the ship’s mesh AI, add the boilerplate and save the report. Hoisting himself out of his chair, he walked out the door into the conference room, then through the other door and turned right into the bridge of the Terran Confederation research starship Hawking to sit in the captain’s chair. Around him in the round room were the bridge crew at their stations, with Guoli and his senior staff of researchers on guest chairs by the rail around him. Everyone was in blue shipsuits, with helmets on shelves by the door. Phelan’s headband was on, but he had only been in light mesh, so with a thought he irised it up to cover the top of his head with a metal net that gave him deep immersion in the mesh. Sinking in, he knew as the rest of the bridge crew, already in deep mesh, fell into alignment with him, providing the context and coordination that made them all as much a part of the Hawking as Stephen, or the clustered servers that ran the mesh, and the ship itself. Stephen suggested an increase in braking, and second mate Annette Nguyen at the helm directed it, while Vlad Strudowsky, the chief engineer, monitored the engines. In mesh, each of them knew what the other was doing, and together they managed the ship over the next hour until it dropped to sublight.
At last, after sixteen months, they were at their destination, and the view on the bridge monitor and in the VD left everyone stunned. Ahead was the black hole they’d come to study, the red-and-gold ring surrounding nothing, like an eye staring at them. Relatively above it was the white dwarf companion star, blazing flares rising high above its surface, all of this lying against a backdrop of uncountable stars.
For a time, the bridge mesh had an intensity that life out of deep mesh never reached. But they were still human, and after another two hours of braking, Steven, monitoring the bridge crew’s vital signs, warned them that they needed to come up. With everything looking nominal, Phelan came up into light mesh, and fell back to the physical world.
Which was when the ship shuddered, and the collision alarms went off. He dropped back into deep mesh, to see that a small rock, accelerated by the event horizon to a large fraction of the speed of light had come straight at them. Hitting their electromagnetic force field had slowed it and changed its course, but not enough. The close defense lasers had blown it apart, but some of the rubble had hit the ship.
Guoli Wang, Principle Investigator on the mission, and his senior staff were on the bridge to observe the arrival on the large monitor. They watched as view inverted, from the disturbing view of superlight, where the stars grew larger and faded as they fell behind, to a normal view, and the feel of the ship braking down from lightspeed. Then the five of them were jerked in their chairs as the ship shuddered. They swiveled their heads fearfully, looking at the Phelan and at Ghadi, and knew, through the mesh, that they were dealing with it.
In the bridge mesh, Phelan viewed with Ghadi the two sections of the ship that had been damaged. Small floater robots were already on the way to check on the compartments.
In a forward compartment, crew members Yusef and Davida had been in their seats for the drop to sublight, the blue of their shipsuits the only color in the gray and white compartment with the ceiling black. They were in light mesh when there was a tremendous crash, and a brief stream of incandescent dust shot through from the hull side to the wall opposite, gouging a hole though the wall. The stream stopped, and air began to scream out of the hole. Both were in shipsuits, but their helmets were by the door. Automatically, they fell deeper into mesh as they yanked the releases on their safety harnesses and leapt from their seats, Yusef let Ghadi know what had happened, then, as if rehearsed, the AI released a large cover plate that Yusef grabbed and guided to place against the hole, while Davida yanked open the tool kit that was almost always with her and pulled out her laser spotwelder. He moved aside as she started firing bursts with the mesh guiding her aim, first the corners, then the middle of each side, then at lower power sealing the seams. As she did, the air stream slowed to a stop, and then there was only the hum of the ventilators.