“We’ve detected an anomalous energy signature in sector gamma 43b.” Said [Tom].
“Anomalies how?” asked [Charles] looking up from the report he was reading.
“It looks like a massive antimatter detonation, at least a [kilogram]!” said [Tom] he glanced back at his instruments and then at the analysis the shipboard computer was running. “It might actually be more, we’ve never seen an antimatter detonation of this scale so the estimation might be off.”
[Charles] nodded and leaned back in his chair. “The distance of the sensor buoy?” he asked.
“It’s a light [day] from the system, a biological categorization team was observing the system about [300] years ago and they left it in place,” Said [Tom].
“Anything pertinent to this?” asked [Charles].
“A seeded planet was sustaining life, they were able to categorize the inhabitants as Dorvakian variant C1764. Called themselves human,” Said [Tom]. “They were at a pre-industrial stage, although predictions had them killing themselves off at the nuclear stage.”
“Well they made it too antimatter so that’s impressive for a C classified variant,” Said [Charles].
“I think it might be a record actually.” Said [Tom]. “Most C’s kill themselves when they discover chemical weapons.”
“We should do an analysis,” Said [Charles].
“Now?” groaned [Tom] as he put his hands over his face.
“Now, wake up [Sam] and tell her to come up here.”
[Tom] continued to grumble but turning back around to his workstation began to work, turning the small scout ship towards the coordinates and preparing it for the FTL jump. [Charles] meanwhile filed his standard report with Empire control informing them that they were going to investigate a subspecies variant killing itself off and make final recordings. If the planet was not too badly damaged it might make a good colony site in a few hundred [years] once the remnants of the C classified inhabitants had died off.
“Ready for FTL sir.” Said [Tom].
“Execute,” Said [Charles].
The ship’s drive which had been powering up behind them slowly eased them into subspace, not even shuddering at the transition the ship entered subspace and directing its thrusters burned propelling them towards the system of interest.
[Sam] yawning came onto the bridge and sat down at her workstation. “What’s up?” She asked.
“Anomaly in sector G43b, a C classified species was reported to be advancing in technology there,” Said [Charles].
[Sam] perked up and glanced back at her workstation and began to sort through the data on it, she was the biological specialist after all so she was no doubt curious.
“Wow, they are a deviant species.” Said [Sam] she put an image of the humans up on the screen.
“White skinned for the most part, they have that hair growth on their heads and look at that two extra fingers.”
Charles nodded in affirmation as he looked at the image, the humans certainly were a deviant from the normal Dorvakian structure especially the skin and hands. A correctly evolved seed world should have produced the normal red skin and natural eyes. Something had obviously gone wrong in the system, and they were obviously not fit to be inducted into the Empire.
“Any other changes?” asked [Charles].
[Sam] nodded. “They have the C classification,” she said.
[Charles] rolled his eyes, “besides that.”
“They are aggressive and animalistic impulses within the species were never correctly removed. They kill each other in droves and were never expected to make it past the nuclear stage. But this is an antimatter signature?” asked [Sam].
“They made it a little further but then blew themselves up, the energy signature was big enough to crack a Garden world’s crust,” said [Tom].
[Charles] frowned at this analysis. “Will the planet recover? Natural worlds for colonization are rare enough as it is.”
“In a few hundred years most of it will be habitable with minimal reconstruction effort. Although the fauna and flora will most likely have to be replaced if a class C species developed. Other deviations from the normal genetics are likely.” Said [Tom]. He glanced back at the information in front of him and nodded.
“The seed must have mutated, the catalog team was unable to identify all of the species on the surface,” he said.
“Alright, enough. How long until we drop into the system?” he asked.
“[Ten minutes]” said Tom.
[Charles] nodded and leaned back in his chair. “We’ll see what these idiotic offshoots have done then.”
“Ready?” asked the pilot turning back in his seat to look at his partner.
“Just do it Malcolm, I’m nervous enough as it is!” said Lincoln, she was starting to regret being a savant when it came to mathematical calculations. She should have been on the ground doing these calculations, not up here with some hotheaded test pilot. But the combined resources of Earth and Mars were behind this and they didn’t even have enough resources to do a test flight with a probe first. So they wanted the best on the Longboat IV to keep the FTL systems stable. Which was going to require her expertise the first time through, after that the geeks back at control could build programs to do it. The issue was that no one had mathematical models to predict the internals of subspace accurately, so she would have to do it on the fly.
Malcolm was pilot from the war, and like all of the pilots from that time he was insane. The thought of being flung through the solar system at FTL speeds was just another day on the job for him. It would hopefully be safer than being launched form the magnetic rails around Earth and Mars but still, even at best Lincoln calculated a 23.259% chance that she would be unable to keep the ships systems in sync. Tumbling out of subspace at near the speed of light would mean being annihilated by stellar dust in an instant.
“You sure you don’t want to run another calculation?” asked Malcolm turning back in his seat to look at her.
Lincoln glowered at him. “No. And for your information one of the sensor buoys was not calibrated. I had to change all of the calculations so we had the right vectors. It would take most people about a week to do that. I’m sorry we’ve been sitting in here for ten hours,” She said fuming.
Malcolm laughed. “I’m just kidding doc, I figured out a long time ago not to doubt the eggheads. I saw a guy in my squad try to do his own magnetic launch calculations once, he messed it up and for a whole day he knew he was going to slam into the moon at 200 klicks a second! He was yelling half the time and drying the other half, it was horrible.”
Lincoln winced, whatever had happened to that poor man would be nothing compared to their state if something went wrong. The console next to Lincoln beeped and she glanced over at it. “Control agrees with my modified calculations. We’re cleared to accelerate whenever you’re ready.” said Lincoln.
Malcolm smiled and without another word activated the magnetic launch. At nearly 20 kilometers long the launch system orbiting Saturn was the largest structure in the solar system, and even it could barely get them up to 0.005% the speed of light. The inertia dampening systems and mass reduction properties of the ship would lessen the effects of acceleration, but it would still be uncomfortable. It was needed though, without a significant velocity a ship could not make it into the rift which would hypothetically remain open for only a few milliseconds.
Lincoln grunted as she was shoved back into her seat, and watched as the rail which was actually more of a tube flashed past them the super magnets inside of it accelerating them down it in the vacuum of space. Within moments they were clear.
“Extending stabilization arms,” said Malcolm. The arms on the side of the ship unfolded and extended up and around the core of the ship, forming an almost complete dish. The ship now looked like a communications dish but inverted, the dish pointed behind them.
“Arming the warheads,” Malcolm flipped another switch at his station and Lincoln felt the slight movement of the ship as the payload doors opened, a strange matter warhead pointing in front of them and the largest antimatter warhead ever produced pointed behind them. She tried not think about the fact that they were sitting on the combined arms of post war Earth and Mars, nearly 1.5 kilograms of antimatter.
It was the interaction between these two energy dense elements which would rend space-time for a fraction of a second theoretically allowing Longboat IV to cross into subspace.
“You ready doc?” Asked Malcolm turning around to look at her, she was pale white but a small replica of his own smile was on her features. Despite everything she was just as excited as he was.
Lincoln took a breath and nodded. “We’re ready, as soon as we cross the barrier transfer control to me. Maintaining sync will be critical and for all tests to be performed we need to remain inside of the event for 2 seconds,” said Lincoln.
“Roger, we can go for Alpha Centauri later,” said Malcolm only half joking. He turned back to his station and double checked the warheads. At the end of the war he had vowed to never fire one of these things again, but destroying the entirety of the antimatter reserves for both Earth and Mars in one go to move at FTL speeds was something he could bend that vow for.
“Launching warheads in ten seconds,” said Malcolm.
“Ready,” said Lincoln. She was staring at the sensor data and the analysis of all the screens around her, she was ready, and despite the adrenaline flooding her system she felt calm. She would do this.
The two sat in silence as the countdown reached zero. The missiles fired one streaking forward and one behind, they would detonate both in less than a second and either send themselves hurtling into subspace or kill them in the center of the largest explosion in history.
The missiles detonated, and the dish behind the ship caught the energy of the antimatter blast and translated the energy forward and into the frame of the ship charging the shields and reflectors far past their designed energy outputs, in the same moment the strange matter was released and it coiled outwards into the darkness of space tearing at the very fabric of it.
When the particles of the two explosions met, instead of annihilating normal matter they turned to the only substance left to them, that fabric of space that both were inherently able to damage. Only together could they destroy it though, for a few moments before the Universe repaired itself.
Malcolm winced as half of the systems in the ship around him shorted out and went dark, only the more basic and redundant systems left to him. He hardly paid attention though, as in front of him he stared into a void. His brain was desperately trying to categorize what he was seeing in front of him and failing. It was darkness and light, uniform and random, chaotic and organized.
Lincoln was typing as quickly as she could into the consoles in front of her manipulating and changing the dynamic of the reflectors as well as the mass of the Longboat IV in an effort to keep everything in sync.
They flashed into the void, and Lincoln stared out into framework of the universe marveling. He could not understand it, but if it was anything it was beautiful. Like a thunderstorm it held power and purpose but it was not evil. Like a Mother it stared reproachfully at him chastising him for breaking the rules, yet somewhat wryly impressed by his feat.
Lincoln hardly had time to spare a glance at the window, the computer of the Longboat had rerouted everything around the damaged section to redundant processors and the tests to probe what subspace was were underway. They had been inside of the anomaly for just under a second.
At the two second mark the tests finished.
Lincoln killed the emitters around the ship.
“Take us out Malcolm!” She shouted over the din of the machines and the roar of the universe all around them. Looking up she was startled for a moment, outside the ship floated raw and incredibly complex equations of a fanciful math, equations that promised the very nature of existence at their conclusion. She shook her head and looked at them again, marveling. A savant she might have been, able to see math and equations in the world around her but even this was beyond her. As it should be she mused, no one should truly know the nature of reality. They might glance at it and occasionally catch a glimpse but it should never be caught.
Malcolm thumbed the controls and another much smaller missile edged out in front of them. The nuclear explosion was only of a 50 megaton yield, strong enough to hopefully knock them back into regular space.
The missile sped away and detonated, subspace hardly reacted showing none of the classic signs of a nuclear detonation but still the energy was imparted and inside of the beauty of subspace the two saw the ugliness of reality, and the blinking of familiar stars.
“Here we go!” said Malcolm as they flew through it.
The rest of the systems in the Longboat IV shorted as they crossed the horizon and they were ejected into the inner solar system.
Lincoln glanced down at her one display that was still functioning, they were nearing Venus and they were on track she breathed a sigh of relief, her calculations had been correct. The net would slow them from the bleed over velocity.
Malcolm hit the panel in front of him. “Hell Yeah!”
Lincoln smiled and shook her head, he had the chance to immortalize his words, and she considered it for a moment though they were oddly appropriate words.
“What is it?” asked [Charles] annoyed.
“Sir, I’m not sure,” Said [Tom].
“Did they not kill themselves off?” asked [Charles].
“Sir, I’m detecting a subspace rupture. A recent one, coinciding almost perfectly with the antimatter detonation.” Said [Tom].
[Charles] frowned, “what does that mean?”
[Tom] shook his head, “I have no idea sir, and neither inhabited planet is showing signs of an antimatter explosion. The detonation and tear in subspace took place near the second largest gas giant in the system,” said [Tom].
“Sir there is no evidence of tachyon manipulation,” Said [Sam].
[Charles] glanced over at her. “What?! How did a subspace rupture form?”
[Sam] glanced back at her data. “I have no idea, but it coincides with the antimatter detonation. Is it no conceivable that this species has discovered a way to enter subspace without tachyons, but instead antimatter?”
“With over [1.5 kilograms] of antimatter?! That’s insane!” said [Tom].
[Charles] shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, we need a science team to investigate it. We are a scout team. If a class C species had discovered a way to enter subspace without tachyon emissions the Empire needs to know. Especially if they are using antimatter to do so.” Said [Charles].
“Yes sir, shall I plot a course back to our route?” asked [Tom].
“No, take us to the home world.”