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CHAPTER 24

August 31, 2089

“May I have your attention. This is the captain. As you are aware, today is the day we’re supposed to engage the Samara Drive at full power and begin accelerating toward Proxima Centauri b. According to the chief engineer, our tech crews, and the ship’s AI, the Samaritan is in perfect shape with all systems functioning as they should. As we planned, we’ll start putting the crew in the cryobeds two weeks into the trip and awaken everyone when we’re about two weeks from disengaging the drive at Proxima. This is it, folks. Once we enable the Samara Drive at full power, the acoustic resonator will stimulate the metamaterial matrix into the exotic-matter phase, which will in turn blue-shift the radio frequency electromagnetic radiation from the fusion plasma source to the ultraviolet in a super-radiant cavity of amplified stimulated emission. This process has a decay time of, as the CHENG and Dr. Vulpetti both tell me, over eight hundred days. Once we fire this thing up, there’s no turning back. I’m starting a countdown clock now of thirty minutes. This is your absolute last chance to jump ship. In thirty minutes, barring any safety issues, we will press the go button and say goodbye to the Sol System forever. Also, as a final note, there’s been a last-minute fifteen-minute hold placed on our departure by the UN—fallout from the recent destruction of the Matador by the Interstellarerforscher’s UV exhaust. We’ve been asked to use our shipboard collision avoidance radar to make sure there aren’t any unregistered ships in the straight-line exhaust-cone angle from our Samara Drive. We are also awaiting word from the US Space Force that they have cleared the engagement zone. We don’t want a repeat of what happened as we engage our drive. I will keep you posted.”

“That’s not unexpected,” said Enrico.

“Unexpected? Which one?” Rain asked.

“Um, the thirty-minute hold is on the schedule,” Yoko added. “What would happen if one of us actually said, ‘Wait let me off!’?”

“Like that’s going to happen.” Enrico laughed. “I mean the radar check hold. Too many folks probably got chewed out, maybe worse, for the Matador incident.”

Enrico, Rain, and Yoko had become fast friends since lunar space dock departure and were in the rec room chatting when the captain’s announcement was broadcast throughout the ship. As they waited on the approval to engage the Samara Drive, the ship’s onboard fusion reactor was powering the Samara Drive propulsion system at a moderate rate and was continuing to accelerate them outward at an acceleration of two tenths of a gravity—the same as they would experience during the long-term cruise phase once the Samara Drive took over. It made shipboard life much easier to have just a little simulated gravity instead of no gravity. No one liked being nauseous, using zero-gee toilets, or encountering various body fluids floating around after a sneeze that went uncontained. Zero gravity was still a messy condition, despite all the technological advances. For the first two and a half years, Earth relative, the Samara Drive would accelerate at about eighty-five percent of Earth gravity. Then, the ship would drop back to twenty percent that of Earth for about five years. The reason had to do with the metamaterials inside the Weak Energy Condition Acoustic Violator—called the WECAV or “wee-cav”—that couldn’t hold up to the stress of nearly a full-gee acceleration for much longer than that without serious degradation. The drive would be throttled back and repaired and then they would reverse thrust direction and throttle up again to start slowing down. The WECAV was never brought fully down because the phenomenon acted like a ringing bell and took months to ring down all the way to where it was safe to actually turn it off without damaging it. At least that was how Rain understood it. She was a radio astronomer not a breakthrough physics propulsion expert.

Rain was beginning to suspect that Enrico and Yoko were becoming very close friends. At first this caused her to feel . . . jealous . . . and then, as she thought again about the age difference between her and the aerospace engineer from Georgia, she realized that what she really felt was her denial of growing older. She was old enough to be his mother and, of course, he saw her that way. He wasn’t blind. Yoko, on the other hand, was a knockout beauty with brains—how could he not be attracted to her? She thought of her good friend, Hannah, who once relayed a story about when she realized that the hot young guys on the U-Bahn were no longer checking her out. It was just before her thirty-sixth birthday and she was so upset. Rain had been sympathetic and, at the time, sure she would not have the same reaction. Yet, here she was, twenty years older than Hannah, feeling exactly the same way. Shit—growing older is not fun. And I’ve been alone too long . . . 

In true form, the whole feeling-sorry-for-herself train of thought lasted no more than a few seconds and she was quickly able to tune back in to the conversation around her. Enrico, having been part of the Samaritan’s mission since before there was either a ship or a mission and had had time to think about the capabilities of the Samara Drive and its implications, was speaking.

“Think about it. The Samara Drive efficiently converts gigawatts of power generated by the fusion reaction into a stream of ultraviolet light containing nearly all that energy. It’s the ultimate death ray,” he said.

“That’s why we don’t engage it until we’re at the one and a half AU mark, near Mars orbit,” Rain added, eager to cover her momentary “tune out” by jumping right into the conversation.

“Correct. But we’re following the rules. In a war or terrorist attack, the bad guys don’t follow the rules,” Enrico replied. “As, I guess, was made clear by whoever our saboteur was.”

“Or if they are smugglers running silent,” Yoko agreed, referring to the Matador and her crew.

“The good thing is that the range is limited. The UV exhaust isn’t like a laser. It’s not collimated. The beam will spread out, diverge, with distance until the energy is so diffuse that it isn’t a threat. But up close, it’s deadly. It may not always be that way.”

“Do we know if anyone is actually weaponizing it?” asked Yoko. “How likely is that? I’m a biologist, remember. Not sure I even understand how the Samara Drive works.”

“You can bet they are,” Rain said quickly. She was cynical when it came to governments, technology, and secrets. Governments you couldn’t trust, technology always advanced and someone would always find a way to turn it into a weapon, and she had always believed that secrets lasted only about as long as it took to classify them—at least when speaking about government secrets. There was always some government official’s staffer who leaked information when it was politically advantageous to do so.

“I know they are,” said Enrico, staring straight at Yoko. Rain got the impression that Enrico was showing off as if he knew about such classified things. On the other hand, he was the engineer who had led the team to develop the engine’s design for interstellar travel. And, to top it off, the original development was all privately funded before the governments of the world got involved. Somebody most likely was developing a Samara Drive beam weapon—probably Enrico’s employers. The implication of Enrico’s statement remained unsaid, but certainly triggered unease in Rain.

Two hours later, the Samaritan began its journey to Proxima Centauri b.



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