Near Future 1: Awakening (19 page)

However, being paranoid like he always was, he noticed something suspicious. He spotted a man that he knew worked in Space Tech security go by his office. Another man he didn't recognize came by a few minutes later, and then he got a VR message asking if he had seen Doctor Randolph in the last hour. Somehow they must have caught on to him, but he had his escape plan. He sent,
"Abort! Abort!"
on the VR forum.

Slipping around the corner from his office, he pulled the fire alarm on the wall and dashed into the nearby stairwell. He then ran down three floors and pulling out a key, he opened a maintenance door. The room was full of equipment but he ran across the room in the gap between the sections of equipment and into a locker area. There he opened a locker, pulled out a set of coveralls with the local fire department logo and put on a fireman's mask. He also pulled out a bag of cash, the last of his emergency supply. He was easily able to hide his things in the large fireman coat, and the mask hid him from anyone who might recognize him. Turning on a radio on the firemen's frequency, he waited until he knew they were on his floor, so that he could easily slip out of the room to join the group of firemen. Staying with the group, he eventually made his escape by following them out of the building.

Space Tech security had been monitoring the VR traffic into and out of Doctor Randolph's VR system as part of their latest upgrade to their security. When a message came in with an invalid tag, it had set off a warning in their equipment. When the doctor did not respond to a silent message, they increased the security level to an alert and sent a security team to check out the doctor's office, since they had not been able to locate him. But about that time, someone pulled the fire alarm and everything was total chaos for a little while.

By the time Space Tech Security had been able to regain control of the area, no one was to be found in the lab. Neither the doctor nor his lab assistant appeared to be anywhere within the Space Tech facilities. The head of security immediately contacted Ted Randolph to alert him to the situation. When they played the fake VR message to him, he instantly knew that it was a fake and that something was seriously wrong.

Space Tech Security immediately declared an emergency and sent notice to all the security offices throughout the Space Tech infrastructure. Neither Sam Randolph nor the assistant could be found anywhere.

At first they thought both men were the victims of a kidnapping, but when Space Tech checked into the lab assistant's background, they found some questionable issues. Therefore, they contacted the police, asking them to send out a bulletin to watch for the lab assistant and asking them to monitor all of his credit accounts.

#

Instead of staying to work in the lab that day, Doctor Sam Randolph slipped out to catch the shuttle up to orbit. From there he caught a shuttle out to the secret test facility of Space Tech. Their facility was actually a large spacecraft out in an area of the second Lagrange point (L4) that was currently not being used for mining. Just like the other Lagrange point (L5), that was called R5 by everyone, this one was called R4.

He and his brother had decided to name the ship
The Annette
after Doctor Randolph's late wife. He still missed her terribly and if this test worked, he would be one more step closer to finding a way to chase down and wipe out the Organization and those responsible for her death.

He had used one of his disguises to get there, so that he would not be tracked by the Organization, something he started doing as a matter of habit whenever he traveled. This time he had used his elderly professor disguise, which was the one he really liked wearing for some reason, probably because he also used it to visit the Space Academy. So everyone else on the flight believed that he was one of the technical staff, or some kind of consultant. Strangely, no one had challenged him when he boarded either shuttle.
Need to tighten down the security on all our flights
!
 

When they arrived at their destination, as he exited the shuttle he realized that he had been so deep into his disguise, he had forgotten to send a message to his brother telling him where he was going. He would need to send him a message as soon as they were out from under the communication blackout imposed during the test. They always imposed the blackouts in case the Organization was listening and could triangulate their position.

Glancing around to make sure no one was watching, he tapped the access control to his private quarters. Removing the wig that was the main part of his disguise, he placed it in his carry case. Glad that normally they used spin on the research vessel to simulate gravity, he went to the small toiletry area and washed off the makeup that he used to modify his natural coloring and add to the appearance of age. The water would be recycled as everything had to be self-sufficient on the research ship. Checking his appearance in the small mirror in his quarters, he decided that he passed inspection, so he headed out to the control room of the research ship.

He had come to watch their latest test of a new propulsion system. Some strange behaviors had been seen in testing different containment configurations for a new design of their fusion plant. Although they had not provided any actual benefit as a modification to the containment units, an unforeseen possibility had been presented. They believed that the effects from the fields could be used as a method of propulsion, in which a distortion of space generated by the field would allow the ship to move by compressing space in front of it and decompressing the space behind it. To the ship it would appear to be moving toward a gravity source, but that source would always seem to be just in front of the ship.

The closest to the proposed propulsion system was the theoretical drive system known as the Alcubierre drive, and until now that was entirely theory. The possibility that they might have the technology to do something similar now was astounding, if it actually worked. All their early tests had been promising. Such a drive could potentially achieve significant speeds, and theoretically achieve faster than light travel.

They had temporarily mounted field projectors for the test propulsion system in the bow and stern of the ship, which had involved running heavy duty power cables most of the length of the ship to the newest version of the Space Tech fusion plant. They had already completed a number of tests of the drive and so far it looked good. This time they were going to do a live test. Hopefully, they would be able to use the new propulsion system to move the ship instead of using the rocket motors.

As Sam moved to his station in the main control room, a warning tone went out through the ship and the ship's spin was stopped for the test. Everyone donned spacesuits and strapped in to their stations. When the lead tech, John Jenkins, looked toward him, he nodded his agreement, and the drive was brought online. Everything came up green, so it was time to fish or cut bait as his grandfather used to say.

They had decided on the plan to engage it at one percent power, check their results and then try two percent if it looked good. Finally, if it again passed muster, they would go all the way to ten percent. John was essentially the pilot, and he had a large button on his console to hit if they needed to abort. They also set a course up from the solar plane to make sure no one would be in their way.

"One percent is a go," John said. Sam nodded his approval and John pressed the start on the console, ready to hit the abort if necessary.
 

It was working! The ship started to move on the set course and the acceleration matched the expected profile within an acceptable range. In fact, their acceleration was actually a little better than expected. They remained at that level for a couple of minutes until the doctor said, "Ok, this is really looking good. Take us to two percent."

John pressed the preset two percent choice. The ship immediately increased its acceleration. Once again everything looked good, although again it performed better than the expected specs. Someone would need to study their detail readings after the fact to determine why that was occurring. After a few minutes John looked to the doctor, who simply nodded. The final test for the day was a go.

John once more hit the engage button, again they felt a surge in acceleration, and again the ship started to move noticeably faster. Momentarily the new readings passed within the expected range, but strangely, the acceleration continued to increase. At first, John thought, it was because the system was again performing better than expected, but the acceleration increase continued unabated. Realizing that something was wrong, John tried to abort the test, but just as he was reaching to hit the cancel button, the acceleration began increasing by a huge amount. He was unable to reach the console to hit the button, because he was pinned down due to the g force from the acceleration. The situation was dire and the acceleration would have probably become fatal for the passengers, but luckily for them, all power to the ship was lost as the power levels exceeded that which many of the systems could handle, causing them to trip out.

#

Doctor Randolph gradually became aware again of his surroundings. He had briefly passed out when he suspected the acceleration had exceeded ten g. Everyone was wearing a spacesuit with the faceplate raised. He could tell the power was out because it was very dark. He began to see the lights on the various spacesuits coming on and he turned his on also. "What happened?" he croaked.

John replied, his voice rather stressed, "I don't know..." He was looking for his own answers, too.

He finally managed to get control of himself. "Somehow the acceleration curve was higher than we expected." That was just stating the obvious. He struggled to explain what he did know.

"I think maybe it should've been a logarithmic scale, which would've been bad enough. But I also think that at the last it was more than that. We seemed to be experiencing some kind of feedback loop that dramatically increased the power level. If everything had not tripped out when it did, I think we would all be dead now."
 

John was still rather shaken up about it. He looked at Doctor Randolph. "I'm sorry, sir. It happened so fast, I couldn't react fast enough and then the g force was so bad, I couldn't reach the console to hit the abort."

Sam shook his head. "It's not your fault. No one could have reacted quickly enough."

John nodded. He still felt bad about it, even though he knew that was true. He went on, needing to get it all out, "In hindsight, we were way too optimistic, and we should have increased one percent at a time. That way we would have detected the issues in time to abort the test."

Sam nodded. "That's my fault
--
I pushed too hard
--
too aggressively." He sighed. He knew he was obsessed with getting his revenge. They should have taken it slower. But it was too late to go back. "So what do we do now? How long until we can get the power restored? And how soon can we contact Space Tech Station to get assistance?"

John replied, "Let me check with Engineering."

John switched on his suit radio. "Control to Engineering. Please respond. I need an immediate status update." His eyes glazed over for a moment as he listened to their reply. "Control acknowledges," he finally said.
 

"Sorry, sir. As per protocol, I was able to communicate with Engineering by means of my suit radio. They are telling me we should have emergency power in a few minutes, but at least an hour until they have partial power from the main reactor, which they believe is undamaged.

"Regarding your second question, we're moving too fast for anyone to reach us anyway," John told him, glancing at the few displays he had active, none of which displayed their current speed. "At least for a long time, and they will have to decide if it is feasible to attempt a rescue."

At least the communication system still seemed active, but it was giving an error which John immediately knew what it meant. That was bad! "That doesn't appear to be the worst problem. Right now, I don't even know if we'll be able to communicate with Space Tech. We carried spare parts for our propulsion systems, and even our communications equipment. However, I'm pretty sure our outside antenna was stripped away during the acceleration. We will have to fabricate something, and do an EVA to make the repair. We can transmit, but not at the long range we would need to reach anyone."

At that moment, the emergency power came on. John switched his console to use the emergency power. "Oh no
--
" he said. If anything, he was even more shaken up now than before. Every time he looked at something, the news grew worse. He struggled to get his composure.

"I am now able to read the information on my console, including our projected speed. If this is correct, our current speed is much greater than we thought. Not good at all..." He stared at his console in almost disbelief, but every time he looked, it still came up the same.

"We will have to figure out exactly what happened later. I can guess that somehow in the last few moments, we were outside of the Newtonian universe briefly. I will try to calculate our exact position and speed to verify this, but I can tell you that it's bad. We may be beyond rescue, if we can't get the drive to work again. I'm not sure that Space Tech can build a fast enough rocket to reach us, unless we figure this new drive out with their help. Maybe they could at least get us more supplies."

"How long will our supplies last? Especially the essentials such as food, water, and oxygen?"

"Enough food probably to last at least a year. We initially planned to have that long of a contingency if for any reason we could not be resupplied. We may be able to stretch that time period a little bit if we began rationing immediately. Theoretically, our water and oxygen supply should last us indefinitely, but I'm sure we have some leaks in the system. We may be able to mitigate that to some extent by shutting off areas of the ship."

"That gives us that long to figure this out. Hopefully either Space Tech will be able to mount a rescue or together we can figure out how we can return. If we can even figure out how to contact them."