12 Feb, 2014
Neutrinos
blasted past the ship’s sensors twenty minutes ago.
The
star was ripping itself apart in a cataclysmic explosion, a nova.
Since
then, we had been piling on as much velocity as the computers would allow
trying to escape. Two habitat ring support
arms were already bending under the stress.
There
are things
that can go wrong with a new starship when it’s the first, the only one, of her
kind. Of course, ours couldn’t be
anything small, like elevator doors that only opened half way or panels that
popped off the walls.
We
had the first gravity drive that bent space-time around the ship. It didn’t allow for true faster than light
travel. It was a cheat, a trick of math
and physics, of energy and matter allowing us to barely out run photons. But it felt that way to us inside. Weeks or months of effective time for us,
while one light year of travel was only one year of time passing outside. We could, if we wanted, go home in our own
lifetimes.
In our case the whole ship was wrong.
Twenty minutes was enough time for the crew and ship’s
computers to figure out why our target star had gone nova. It shouldn’t have for another 6 or 7 billion
years. We had planned to settle on the only
habitable planet. But our arrival had
cut that time down.
The field from our drive was much larger than expected,
and the ship was pointed directly at the star when we decelerated into the
system. The only habitable planet was
just on the other side, a handful of light minutes away. We were never going to see it.
The gravity drive was what had started the reaction which
caused the nova. Even as our speed
increased, the telescopes where searching for Sol.
You see, we could go home, if we wanted.
But, as we slowed down here, we had accelerated out of
the solar system. We realized, with our
drive pointed almost directly at the Sun.
If there was anything left to go home to.
The telescopes should be picking up the light from Sol
soon enough.
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