Chapter Eight:

After all of the data he’d collected, writing a game based on steering Maglen through an asteroid belt wasn’t as challenging as he’d thought it would be.

Keeping it to himself was a different matter.

At first, he’d opened it up to members of the crew with some flight experience, and then to a few of those persons of name. Word of it traveled quickly, however, and it wasn’t long before every crew member with access to a terminal wanted to play it.

In a ship starved for things to do, and after most of the conversations had begun to repeat themselves, a video game that was a test of skills was a welcome change.

This required joining existing terminals to Regnal’s private system, and this required it to run more. In turn, this increased its heat output, and that started to give Regnal and those members of the crew who supported the onboard computer systems pause.

“It’s actually becoming an energy consumption concern,” Ghegee informed the rest of the people who’d been called to the captain’s cabin.

The cabin, only slightly larger than Regnal’s, housed their captain, Roo Amrain, of an older family which, like the Zanes, came from a military history. Where Efrain was a muscular man which thick but close-cropped hair and piercing eyes, Roo was paunchy, bald, and his brown eyes seemed to squint with every decision. He’d invited Ghegee, Livven Esteve and, of all people Kharen, who’d parked herself on the floor with her back against the cabin’s one door. The rest of them stood with the exception of the captain, who sat on his cot.

“We have passengers who’ve played through their meal hours and sleep intervals,” Kharen informed them, “and crew who’ve come late to watch because of it.”

Livven smiled her signature smile, “One wonders what they did with themselves before this was available to them.”

Roo shook his head. “Whatever it was,” he said, “they did it in an orderly fashion. Do we really need this game?”

All heads turned to Regnal. “I admit,” he said, looking down at his feet and, coincidentally, at Kharen, “this wasn’t what I intended or ever wanted. However, the data I’m collecting is invaluable.”

“Really?” Ghegee asked him.

He looked up. “They’re finding ways to navigate the ship through the asteroid belt that I never would have considered,” he admitted. “Ways to balance the use of deflectors with RF propulsion that aren’t nearly as stressful on the hull. A few members of the crew have actually navigated the expected breadth of the belt with the ship intact.”

“It wasn’t that hard,” Kharen informed him. “I think part of it is a loophole or a glitch in your program that you can exploit.”

“What?” Regnal had thought he’d been pretty thorough in regard to that.

“I’ll show you,” she promised him, looking up at him from the floor.

“Regardless,” Ghegee inserted herself back into the conversation, “the servers that the support this are being heated to the limit of what their cooling system can handle.”

“We’ve exceeded the cooling power of space?” Livven challenged her. “That seems unlikely.”

Ghegee shook her head. “We aren’t actually using ‘space,’” she corrected Livven, “we’re using copper conduits to sink the heat from those servers tasked to Regnal, to the hull of the ship, and then draw off heat and expel it to space.

“Those conduits can only move so much heat so fast, and they’re reaching their limit. Where we originally had problems with them working too well and causing condensation, now their actually dispersing heat to other parts of the ship and the area between the primary and secondary hull. Right now it isn’t a problem, but if it continues it’s going to engage the ship’s cooling system, and that’s going to draw power from the engines.”

“But we won’t slow down,” Roo said, a concerned look on his face. “We’re at 1.4 times the speed of light right now, which is our projected speed.”

“True,” Ghegee said, “but in another year, our time, we’ll have passed the particle stream and be running on solar power and our batteries. We’re charging those batteries now. The increased draw from your servers was expected to slow that, but if we have an increased heat load, we’re going to risk actually drawing on them.”

“We could creep into the new solar system at a fraction of light speed,” Roo said, “or be forced to come screaming in and trying to use planetary gravities to slow ourselves.”

“We’re prepared for that mathematically,” Ghegee said, “but no one has ever tried it, and I’d hate to be the first.”

“We’ve got to limit access to this ‘game,’” Livven said, and once again looked to Regnal.

Regnal knew the first consequence of that action – he would have a stampede of his fellow passengers knocking at his cabin door. When they didn’t get their access, it would be a lonely time for him at meal time and other recreational activities.

“Well,” Kharen asked, “we don’t have to tell them all, ‘No,’ do we?

“We really only need the data from the best players,” she continued. “We can build in a scoring system, and then the better the score, the longer the play time.”

“Those who are just playing from boredom, then, would be excluded,” Livven said. “We could even limit the times of those who are moderately successful.”

“And incentivize the rest,” Regnal said. “I can do that.”

They’d cut most of the play time off, and still get the benefits of the data.

Kharen smiled to herself. Roo would make the announcement to the crew with an explanation of what was going on. In so small a community, just explaining that they were jeopardizing their resources would suffice for most of them.

The rest – well, you can’t make everyone happy.

“Here,” Kharen was pointing out to Regnal. “Right here.”

He stared intently at the screen. In it, from the perspective of the inside of a ‘control module’ that he’d created out of his own mind, were proximity meters and warning readings, where ship’s radar and sonar reported incoming and proximal bodies of varying size, just as would be seen from a real pilot’s seat in ship’s navigation. Maglen wasn’t a fliver with a forward window. It traveled blind through the galaxy with nothing but EM waves to guide her.

“I don’t see it,” Regnal admitted. Kharen sighed and, sitting at his terminal, replayed the game.

Her idea to add scoring had proven to be a huge success. What hadn’t been anticipated was that, once passengers and crew could get a score, there was immediate competition to get the best score, and then in turn certain players became the favorites of others. A large majority of the crew and passengers, then, were content to follow and root for these, and there were daily competitions which occupied the crew better than the original game had.

People, it seemed, found a way, given the opportunity. This was certainly better than telling people, “You can’t play anymore,” or cutting them off in the middle of play because they’d used their allotted time.

“You see, we’re coming in on the belt,” she said, using what was becoming an entire slang associated with the game. “You cut your power, and you ease in here, because there is less asteroid density.”

She’d been playing the game long enough where she knew different parts of the asteroid belt. That wasn’t good, Regnal decided. He’d have to randomize the positions of the asteroids more.

“Ok,” is all he said.

“We duck under here, and we actually line up behind this big one, and we push it,” she continued.

This was another aspect that the ‘players’ had come up with, which had never occurred to him. One way to win, to get through the ‘belt,’ was to find a big asteroid and use the ship’s deflectors to change its trajectory to where you wanted to go, and then follow it. When that asteroid was beaten down – the game would actually allow damage to the asteroids so that they could break apart on collision, which he expected would actually happen – you switched to another one.

By doing this the player now only had to worry about a circle of asteroids that would come in from above, below or the side, a much easier task to monitor.

“Now I cut my power, because its gravity is pulling us, and that gives us more power to the deflectors,” she said.

That got Regnal thinking. Something about the basic principles of faster-than-light-speed travel.

Oh, no!

“Kharen,” he asked, “what speed are we moving at?”

She looked at her indicator in the lower corner of the screen. He’d put it there because it didn’t matter as much.

“One half light speed,” she informed him. “That’s pretty fast, but actually it means that the asteroids that might hit me –“

“No,” Regnal said, “that’s a problem.”

Kharen looked up at him from the terminal and paused the game.

“At that speed,” Regnal said, “inertial mass would still be four times what Maglen’s actual mass is. That mass is going to act on every object around it.”

Kharen frowned. “Mass doesn’t change…” she said.

“Rest mass doesn’t,” Regnal said. “Inertial mass increases as speed increases. Before my mother, people thought that meant you couldn’t go faster than light.”

“Your mother?” Kharen asked. “Your father is the famous one.”

Regnal shook his head. “He overcame gravity,” he said. “But my mother overcame speed.

“What’s important, though, is that inertial mass works to eventually stop an object in motion, no matter how much energy it puts into its acceleration. We overcome that by adding energy from an outside source. This is why time is different inside and outside of Maglen. We’re essentially in a negative gravity well, and experience less time change.”

“But with enormous relative mass,” Kharen added. “Why aren’t we a magnet for every large body on our flight path?”

“We are,” Regnal said, “but we’re moving so fast that we just barely affect them, and they’re all in motion anyway. We may have slowed a few bodies and sped up some others, but it’s a negligible effect.

“It won’t be in the asteroid belt,” Regal said. “With objects that close in –“

“We’ll draw them in like gnats,” Kharen said.

It really was a shame that she didn’t go to the Academy, Regnal thought. She had a quick mind. She’d have done well in any field.

“I have to change the parameters of the game,” Regnal told her. “We have to allow for the effects of gravity change, or we’ll have to slow Maglen down to the point where it doesn’t matter, meaning we’ll have to start braking earlier.”

Regnal shoo’d her out of the chair and opened the program interface to the game he’d written. Kharen watching him for a while, then moved on and left him. She doubted that he’d notice she was gone.

She’d been bringing him his meals when it was clear that he wasn’t going to make meal intervals, and she’d been reminding him to wash when he missed those times as well. She’d kept his cabin, which was supposed to be his responsibility, and she played his game, which she considered her reward.

He noticed hardly any of it, and she wondered at why she wasted her time. He was her age, he had money – but he couldn’t spend it on this new world, and likely he’d be going back to Syriahs at the first opportunity. She intended to stay there, to find a new life where a person with no name could still be wealthy, or famous, or important.

Still, she did it. When she came back hours later, he’d barely moved save to mercilessly beat the keyboard in front of him. She laid down his plate and he grunted to her. She watched him for a while again, and she left.

Yes, she thought. Things would need to be different on this new world.

Adding a new facet to the game he’d designed only excited those who played it.

Regnal found that the best players were now using a combination of pushed objects and pulled ones to create what they described as a ‘grinder’ in the belt, where large objects were bashed against each other, and then the ship’s deflectors used to repel these.

To compensate for the energy needed, they looked for even larger objects in the belt, and used the pull of these to drag the ship along. The game became one, then, where the pilot would hunt for, use and then destroy the objects in their path, and in this way scramble through the belt’s obstacle course.

“And we think this will work?” Roo asked him.

Regnal, Kharen, Hames and Livven were collected once again in the captain’s cabin, this time with a young, red-haired man named Belgar, a member of the crew who was consistently a top scorer in the game. He came from an engineering background and hand trained at the Academy under the Professors who Regnal was familiar with.

Kharen was perhaps his equal, but without the training, she was an unlikely source. She knew of this and Regnal had a sense that it bothered her.

“If the simulation is good, I can get us through the belt,” Belgar informed them. He was from the southern continent, but his accent had been drilled out of him. He spoke in a tenor that wasn’t unpleasant.

“The simulation,” Regnal informed them, “comes from what data we collected from the belt before we left. Keep in mind that this information took almost ten years to travel to Syriahs, and we last saw it around four years ago, real time.

Eighteen months had passed on Maglen. If they couldn’t navigate the belt, then they had to start braking now. This would mean a much longer journey, and there were other considerations.

Soon, they would out-run the particle stream they’d been riding to the new solar system. At home, it had already been shut off, and its tail-end was now a phenomenon in space. A year after they arrived, it would pass near the planet and through its solar system.

If it penetrated the belt, that is. Many conjectured that it would be so disrupted by that, it would be useless. Regardless of what happened, life on the other side of this belt of asteroids would be different.

“So this could be for naught,” Hames Acuff added. “For all we know, there is no asteroid belt.”

“I think that unlikely,” Livven said, her doe eyes sweeping the rest of them. “So large a phenomenon doesn’t just fall into the sun or get left behind as the solar system moves through the galaxy. I would love to find that the bulk of it was on the other side of the solar system as we approached it, however even that is unlikely.”

“It seemed to be evenly disbursed around the sun, occupying a space between the fourth planet and the gas giant,” Regnal said. “This is why we think it is the remnants of a rogue moon.”

“It would be nice to stop, take another look, and then proceed on,” Kharen added from her place on the floor.

Livven snorted. “Stopping would take months,” she informed them. “Then we would have to pick up speed again, which would take more time.”

“But we could do it,” Regnal said, and looked at Roo.

“That is not our mission,” Roo informed them. “We have no way to have such a change approved.”

“Approved by a group of people who will continue on in their lives perfectly well if we’re smashed to bits in an asteroid belt that we didn’t take the time to study,” Kharen argued.

That drew dark looks all around.

“You know,” Belgar said, looking away from the rest of them, “that really isn’t such a bad idea.”

“It would add no less than ½ a year to our journey,” Livven argued.

“We’re already going to arrive late,” Hames said. “We could transmit as we began braking, send status and what we’ve learned. If the mission did fail, that would be invaluable.”

Mission fail meant they all died, Regnal thought. It was a subject that they studiously avoided. There were more things that could have ended it all for them than they could imagine, from objects in their past to other space-faring cultures who might decide that they were a threat. Better not to waste time thinking about what they couldn’t change.

This, Regnal thought, they could change.

“I would like to consult more than this group before we went off-mission,” Roo insisted.

He’d like to cover his career future, Regnal thought. He’d ask every person of name on the ship and make sure they all agreed, so that there would be more targets when fingers pointed back on Syriahs.

“Do it,” Livven said.

“I’ll need to get a few members of the crew assigned to adjusting forward radar,” Hames informed them, as if the decision were made. “It isn’t even on now. We’ll want to scan the area around us and decide where we are, if we’re on track, where we’re going – everything.”

The meeting broke up. Reglan walked back to his cabin, not realizing Kharen was behind him.

“Thanks for your support,” she said from behind him.

He turned and realized she was there. Her back was stiff – she wasn’t happy.

“I didn’t offer-“ he began.

“I know,” she said. “Would have been nice if you had.”

He was dumbfounded.

“You’re so used to the world serving you,” she said, “that you don’t even realize when someone is helping you succeed. You honestly believe that it’s all your due.”

“If I fail – “ he started. She interrupted him again. He’d grown used to it.

“It doesn’t keep you from appreciating the support you receive,” she said. She went a step farther now and pushed past him in the corridor.

Regnal’s shock went beyond what experience had taught him. She’d actually pushed him.

“I don’t know why I bother,” she said, and then was gone.

The actual command module for Maglen was nearly in the center of the craft. It made the most sense – most of the ship would have to be destroyed before this space was lost. The ship flew entirely on instruments and then had no windows to the exterior.

In the module, there was a central chair for the captain, and then consoles surrounded the walls with personnel monitoring sonar, radar, communications, and other facets of the ship’s environment. There was a rudimentary damage control center to monitor the ship’s personnel and living spaces, and a direct interface to engineering systems, the ship’s batteries, cooling and propulsion.

As the ship slowed, absorption of power from the particle beam they traveled along would become more efficient. Charging the batteries would move faster and would be crucial to their returning to greater than light speed.

“We’re at sub-light speed, sir,” a crewman at one of the consoles reported.

“Bring up radar,” one reported.

“Pinging,” said another, who ran the sonar console.

Radar would give them a spectrum of targets, sonar would help to paint the close-in targets in three-dimensions. In short order, a hologram of the exterior of the ship appeared between the captain and the consoles before him appeared in the air. A representation of Maglen rested at the center of it. The hologram showed space moving around their ship, the whole thing expanding as data from farther and farther out was added to the image.

“Getting a fix on our position,” the crewman at the navigation station reported. He consulted dual databases, one from the recordings of decades from Syriahs and the probes that had been sent out, another from passive measuring, based on gravitational changes recorded at the hull, of great bodies that they’d passed or were in proximity of. From this, an orange track emerged from the back of the representation of Maglen in the hologram, showing where they were going.

“Oh, my!” the navigator, a woman in the red uniform of the crew, her long black hair done up in a bun at the back of her head, exclaimed, as more and more of their path was revealed.

Because the galaxy and every part of it was in motion, and including Syriahs, and because it didn’t all move at the same speed, their path was a curve through space. The particle beam’s path from Syriahs was constantly corrected for those changes, and therefore their path. In addition, there were corrections to be made for large bodies which were expected to cross their path – as the ship had moved through space, it had from time to time left and regained the path stream to avoid the objects that were expected to cross it. Data from the past showed some very near misses, as well as some objects they’d nearly struck.

To their surprise, it also showed a traffic-jam of space debris, in size from dust particles to asteroids large enough to destroy their ship, traveling in their wake.

“What is that?” Roo demanded.

“That’s the effect of inertial mass, isn’t it?” Kharen asked, looking at Regnal directly.

All eyes turned to him.

“It is,” he said. “As we moved faster than light, our mass effectively increased, and then our gravitational effect on everything we passed increased. None of it could keep up with us, but it seems like we put all of it in motion behind us, and with nothing to stop it, it’s just going to keep going.”

“So eventually, we’re going to need to get out of its way,” Livven said. She peered into the trail of debris that was following them, going back and growing as far as the hologram reported.

Already the hologram had stopped growing and now was filling in more blanks in its image.

“It’s not that simple,” Hames informed them. He’d been a key part of plotting their course and then it was necessary for him to see all of this. “Our path is directly for the planet we intend to land on. That was made to be as close to a direct hit as we could make it, even when we knew about the belt.”

“So while that debris isn’t a threat to us, it’s going to rain down on our destination,” Roo said.

Hames nodded. “We’ve doomed the place where we plan to go.”