The first time I went supersonic was a little disappointing. Everyone told me the moment you go supersonic was a ‘non-event’, but I was still curious to experience it for myself. I was in a T-38, and I actually didn’t notice that I had broken the sound barrier. I hit the afterburner as I did an aileron roll and when I looked down at my instruments I was going mach 1.2. Non-event. Nothing. Just another day at the office.
This was not like breaking the sound barrier. As I pushed the throttle forward we gradually gained speed. I say gradually gained speed, but within the first five seconds of acceleration we were going faster than the Apollo astronauts on their way to the Moon. I mean we are talking thousands of miles per second, and we were still accelerating!
The speed of light is roughly 300,000,000 meters per second, or about 186,000 miles per second for us Americans, but we stick with meters in space because it just makes everything easier. As we approached the speed of light, the internal gravity field power levels increased to compensate for relativity. As the external gravity field’s power increased the ship began to vibrate. This must be the resonance that Mac talked about. There was this incredible hum that I felt more than heard. It felt like my bones were vibrating.
As we broke the light barrier the ship felt like it was going to fly apart. The ship was shaking and shimmying. The controls were fighting me. The nose kept sliding off center. I was holding onto the yoke, whiteknuckled, trying to keep us on course, but the more we accelerated, the harder it got to keep the ship steady.
The DSRV gave a sharp jolt, like I’d been kicked in the back. Multiple red lights flashed at me from the control panel. I noticed that my hands were sweaty in my gloves. My heart was racing. I’d been on some wild rides before, but this was different. On those previous rides I knew what would happen if I lost control. I knew the aerodynamics and the probabilities of survival. This time I had know idea what would happen if I lost control. Would the ship fly apart and scatter our molecules over a dozen light years? Would we suffocate? Would death be instant? Psychologically the uncertainty was gnawing at me.
Then I looked out the window. The stars were rushing past us. Not like Star Trek or Star Wars. The stars didn’t stretch into lines. They just fell past us. Rather, we were falling past them, seeing as how we were manipulating gravity so that we were basically falling through the universe. I could see the constellation Sagittarius. The individual stars moved at different speeds because some were closer than others. They moved until the constellation was no longer recognizable.
Mac must be right about the gravity fields, I thought. We shouldn’t be going this fast. Jupiter was in the same solar system as Earth. The stars shouldn't be moving. The stars were all so far away that from Jupiter all the constellations would still look the same. But as we accelerated the stars moved. If we were passing stars, we must have left the solar system. I couldn’t believe it. We were the first humans to leave to actually leave the solar system! Well, us and Zody.
“I think I’ve just about got the resonances of the gravity fields figured out,” Mac shouted. I hadn’t noticed how loud it was in the cabin until that moment. Even over the intercom she had to yell. The tag line from an old movie ran through my head: ‘in space no one can hear you scream.’ Well, that turned out to be true in this situation.
“Good!” I shouted back, “because I don’t think the ship can take much more of this!” The gravity drive had started to make a whining sound that was becoming higher pitched by the second. Zody’s flight was only supposed to be three minutes long, so that was how long we had to hold it together.
“Got it!” Mac said just as the pitch of the engine reached a crescendo. Suddenly the vibrations smoothed out, and the high pitched whining of the engines lowered to a steady, low pitched hum.
“Nice.” I said as the yoke stopped fighting me. The ship was pretty much flying itself now. According to all of my simulated Faster Than Light tests, I could just lock the yoke in place now and the artificial gravity tunnel the engines were creating would keep the ship on course. But I wasn’t about to take my hands off the yoke so soon after the ship almost tore itself apart.
We were almost there anyway. It had been almost three minutes. What if Zody’s ship had torn itself to pieces? That thought had been running through my head since the shaking had started. Zody hadn’t had Mac next to him to correct the resonance problem.
“What if the Eagle’s engines exploded?” Mac said, echoing my thoughts. Her voice was quiet now. Maybe I noticed because the engines weren’t so loud anymore, but there seemed to be resignation in her voice. A realization that maybe this was a wild goose chase after all. But we still needed to know. We couldn’t go back empty handed. Not after what we’d done to get here. We had to see this through.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” I said.
Mac looked at the flight data. “20 more seconds.” Then we would drop out of FTL.
When I throttled down the stars stopped falling towards us. As soon as the stars came to a stop, there was a large thud against the nose of the ship. “What the...”
“Debris!” Mac said, looking out her window.
“Crap!” I turned the yoke and rolled the ship to the right to avoid a large floating hunk of metal. I heard a scraping sound echo through the hull of the ship. Must have just grazed it.
“Is it from the Eagle?”
“Could be. But I don’t see anything big enough to identify as - Wait!” Mac froze as she looked out the right window. I tried to follow the direction of her gaze. It was too dark to see much out there. But the radar was picking up a lot of small objects out there. I zeroed the ship's velocity, bringing us to a stop, relative to most of the debris.
Mac pushed a few buttons and all of a sudden the debris field lit up. She must have turned on the docking lights. “Turn us to the right,” Mac said. I used the thrusters to turn us 90 degrees. Suddenly the docking lights hit a familiar chunk of metal. It was the tale section of the Eagle.
Stay Tuned
More to come
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