Lunar River (Episode 7)

(In case you have missed out previous episodes, please go to 'Collected Memories of the Deep' and click on '2010 (75)', from there, choose 'November' and you will see the previous episodes)

Sylvina had passed through the Booster. It was a magnificent alien structure looked like a ring. But, her sensors told her that there were some things around the Booster and the ship recognised it as non-hostile and probably of Rimdi's allies.

She couldn't be so sure. But her astrogation system was still mapping out where she was. Right now she was lost. That was it. The Booster was still active and it had cast her into deeper space where she might not know. She was like a stone shot out from a rubber band. She knew she had zoomed across space-time, but she didn't know where she was.

She waited.

She held her excitement when she made the transition. It was a fine privilege to have someone passed through the Booster which luckily the structure was active. The experience for her was sufficient to flood all other wonderful memories in her entire lifetime. The feeling was exotic when her thoughts suddenly became plural the moment she stepped through the structure. It was said that anyone passed through it a connection with all your counterparts in the visible universe and external could be established. You might be able to see yourself in the past, present and future in all different universes.

Then, there came a beep. She looked down on her screen. Presently, she was at the region of the galaxy known as Menidas Sector, a region where most stars were still at their younger stage, giving off bright radiation of yellow and blue. She calculated the distance she had skipped and she was amazed. She had skipped about twenty light years ahead. That would make her, she calculated, twenty-four years earlier to arrive.

Another beep made her jumped. She saw her message inbox was filling up by factors of hundreds. Hundreds of news was reaching her in a second. She remembered what Rimdi had told her about some slight causality problem caused during the transition.

Causality is a term that describe a cause always precedes the event. A slower-than-light bullet fired from a gun will cause a robot to spoil, but if causality was violated, the robot malfunctioned before the faster-than-light bullet appeared. Usually objects travelled faster than the speed of light would violate causality.

So, when travelling through a Booster, sometimes superluminal travel occured. The Booster prevented this problem of causality by encasing the entire transport in a impermeable membrane while excited its contents (here would be Sylvina's Nova) into a quantum superposition so that it could react with its counterparts all around the universe to gather information.

Then, the membrane collapsed just as the quantum state collapsed. Now, external information was rushing into Nova to update its system and news so that Nova could know the cause of the event before the result took place.

Complicated, it seemed. But she didn't care. She had leapt twenty light years ahead. It's too late to turn back by now as the Booster had deactivated. She quickly keyed in the coordinates of the Absence, or Vapidus cloud and let the ship handled the course for another twenty light years ahead. Maybe she should take a cold sleep, in stasis and wake up if anything happens.

So, she spun around.

But a beep came again. She walked to the bridge and looked at the display. She frowned. She commanded the ship to throw on a holographic display like before. The ship obliged and instantly she was blanketed by millions of stars. It was a realtime map and radar. She was the blue icon blinking regularly towards an empty void where the Vapidus was located twenty light years ahead. Behind her, a red icon shifted in and out of existence.

'Ship, take on the ID,' she ordered.

A few minutes later: 'Identification failed. Unstable object or anomalous information registered.'

Sylvina knew that the object behind her was tapping Nova's sensors. It knew exactly the point where the sensor swept and it would go quiet and dark. 'Drop probes,' she said out loud.

'Supplies are running low. Additional usage of mass is not encouraged,' the ship replied. 'Do you wish to abort or continue with the deployment of probes?'

'Continue,' Sylvina said.

'Thank you. Probes are now firing up and ready to be deployed in counts of five. Any loud and abrupt noise, interjection or abnormal vocal transmission could be recognised as a denial and rejection. If that case occurs, the deployment will be halted.' The ship said, 'Five, four...'

Sylvina weighed her chances in her mind.

'Two...'

'Stop!' Sylvina cried.

'Deployment aborted,' the ship replied.

'Listen here, Ship,' Sylvina said. 'In a few moments, I am going under a cold sleep. I want you to have a clearance of 2 light seconds volume. Anyone or anything that comes too close, you must destroy them even they are our allies. Address our standing point before they enter the exclusion zone. Do you understand?'

'Yes.'

'If the trail or course of foreign elements are strongly suspicious, do not hesitate to let out a warning fire and wake me up. Clear on that?'

'Yes.'

Sylvina spun and went towards the cold sleep chamber.

Lunar River (Episode 1)

It had been two years in the small spacecraft no larger than eight hundred metres called Umbraic Nova, or also known as the Shadow Burst. Yet, their final destination had not reached. The ship had no interstellar travel capability, but Rimdi, their great friend had modified the engine drive.

In space, small is good. You can ramp up the acceleration to impossible speeds. Inertia plays a little role in small things. Large ships however would need to take months to reach interstellar speed. When it comes to interstellar speed, it simply means speed about ninety-nine point nine percent of the speed of light.

But small things have a slight drawback: they could not mount enough power to gallivant around the universe. That's the paradox. You can have a brontosaurus, but it moves in inches, or you can have an ant, but it can only travel short distances.

Sylvina Aluna Celumbus had made a difficult choice. She chose to head towards a spatial void where no stars, planets or nebulae existed because there ahead laid a strange ring structure called the Booster. As its name suggested, the Booster would boost any incoming object very, very close to the speed of light by injecting high energy to space-time.

However, getting through the Booster was a bet. You would never know where the Booster would bring you, unless you had been through before. Even that had a possibility of throwing you too far as the energy density changed. Another risk was the Booster could be used only once in a specific period. Sometimes once in a few millenia. So if you planned to head for the Booster, you wouldn't know whether it was still active till you actually passed through it.

Both risks were Sylvina's concern. She had never been through this Booster before.

She held Vohne's hand when they walked through the hallway. Nervousness was creeping her spine. Besides, the news of a fast approaching ship had worried her as well. It was not the first time they encountered a ship, but usually those ships were of bandits. So far, suicide bombing and hijacking had topped the list.

Most came for a same reason: to obtain the Solar Catapult. A magnificent and yet remained a myth among most pilots weapon. It was said to be capable of tearing stars apart and catapult them away. Those bandits knew Rimdi's allies. They would hunt them down till they found the weapon, althought killing was sometimes necessary.

The communication window opened. A woman having a stern-looking face forced out a warm smile to them. She was wearing a profession short-collared black blazer. She spoke, 'Captains of the starship Umbraic Nova, I am Captain Adema of the starship Lunar River. We are announcing our presence to you at the last hour and now we find no time to speak of our urgency.' She paused, as if she allowed Sylvina to speak. Then she continued, 'We are in dire need of supply. We need a trade. We want more power. Our ship has run its full capacity since its departure on Noxus system. But the Vapidus are still on our tail. We cannot fend them off. We sincerely hope that the captains of Umbraic Nova would consider this seriously.'

Sylvina stood straight and thought for a while for what to say. 'I am sorry, Adema,' she said, at last. 'We don't have much fuel for us as well. We are having a small ship here. We need more power than you do. I am sure you understand the flight dynamics pretty well. We pitied your condition but it is the same for us too.'

'Are you heading to the Nexus?' Adema asked.

'Yes,' Sylvina said. 'Why?' she sensed a trap somewhere.

'Aren't we all? But the difference is there is a pack of Vapidus behind us. Tailing us for months. Your ship is small. They can hardly notice it. But my ship is big...'

'Vapidus is ahead of us, not behind, Adema. Stop lying,' Sylvina said.

'Well, I am not,' Adema said.

'Listen here, Adema, we are on our way to the Nexus and we are applying full thrust. Now you want to communicate with us and our acceleration has dropped by two orders of magnitude. That costs us more fuel than expected. Unless you have something better to let us treasure,' Vohne interrupted. 'We are in no position to negotiate here. Show us what you got and then leave our immediate space volume.'

'I am sensing an "or" behind your sentence, captain,' Adema said.

'Or we will shoot you out of the sky,' Vohne said firmly.



[What will Sylvina do to such offer? Will she trade? Is Adema a bandit like others? Or is she telling the truth? The Vapidus Nexus is where they are heading but how come some elements of the Vapidus are found behind Adema?

What will become of their fate?]