Michael McCollum - Antares 01 - Antares Dawn(1).pdf - Michael McCollum - margozap

ANTARES DAWN

A Novel By

Michael McCollum

Sci Fi - Arizona, Inc.

Third Millennium Publishing

A Cooperative of Online Writers and Resources

CHAPTER 1

The landing boat fell in a nose-high/belly-down attitude toward the blue-white orb of the

planet below. Outside the hull, the first whisper breaths of the hypersonic wind tugged at the

boat’s wings and control surfaces, causing them to be bathed in a nearly invisible envelope

of plasma glow. Inside the hull, the keening of the wind was more sensed than heard, and

the first gentle tugs of deceleration were but a foretaste of the pressure soon to come.

Captain-Lieutenant Richard Drake, commanding officer of the Altan Space Navy Cruiser Discovery , the

landing boat’s sole passenger, lay strapped into an acceleration couch and gazed out the viewport next to

him. Drake was of medium height, with a slender build, black hair, and the faded tan of an outdoorsman

who has spent the last eight months in space. He was thirty-five, but looked younger. His hair, which he

wore in the close cropped style of a military spacer, showed a touch of gray around the edges. His eyes

were green, and widely spaced above a broad nose and high cheekbones. A whitish scar ran diagonally

across one of his eyebrows - the result of a collision during a secondary school athletic contest.

Drake’s expression was pensive as he gazed at the plasma flow building up on the leading edge of the

landing boat’s wing. In his pocket was a message flimsy that ordered him to report to the Admiralty

Building in the Altan capital of Homeport immediately. The message was stamped MostSecret and signed

by First Admiral Dardan himself.

“What have we done to deserve this high honor?” Commander Bela Marston, Drake’s

second-in-command, had asked when Drake showed him the order aboard Discovery .

“You don’t suppose he’s found out about those extra field coils we requisitioned the last time we were

undergoing maintenance at Felicity Base, do you?” Drake asked, only half in jest.

Marston shook his head. “No reason to worry there, Skipper. Those old coils should have been junked

ten years ago.”

“That won’t save us if Dardan thinks he’s going to have to go back to Parliament for a supplemental

appropriation this year.”

“Good point,” Marston said. “Shall I have your yeoman lay out your armor-plated underwear?”

Drake had nodded, laughing. “Not a bad idea. I might need them.”

The landing boat touched down at Homeport forty minutes after it encountered the first tenuous wisps of

Alta’s atmosphere. As soon as the craft had parked at the passenger terminal, Drake unstrapped and

made his way to the starboard airlock where a nervous crew chief watched intently as a cantilevered

loading bridge maneuvered slowly over the boat’s still-glowing wing surfaces.

“What’s the matter, Chief?” Drake asked. “Don’t you trust the port handlers?”

“Trust them fumble fingered goons with Molly here, Cap’n? No, sir. Not as far as I can spit under triple

gravs.”

The landing boat had touched down well past local sunset, but the million-candlepower beams of the

spaceport’s polyarcs had no trouble turning night into day. Drake watched as the loading bridge sealed

itself against the hull. When the Chief signaled that all was secure, he stepped onto the spidery trusswork

and crossed to the terminal beyond.

Inside, he found Commodore Douglas Wilson waiting for him. Over the years, Drake had served three

tours of duty under the older man’s command. He had long since learned to sense Wilson’s every mood.

Drake could tell that the Commodore was excited and trying mightily to hide the fact.

“Good to see you again, Richard,” Wilson said. “How was your trip?”

“Rough enough, sir. I have not had to suffer through a maximum performance reentry since my days at

the Academy. What’s up?”

“The Admiral will brief you,” Wilson said noncommittally. “Come on, I’ve a car waiting.”

Drake followed as Wilson led the way to an Admiralty limousine. An enlisted driver helped him with his

hand luggage, and then slid behind the control panel while the two officers arrayed themselves in the back

seat for the ten-kilometer drive to the Admiralty.

“How is that young lady of yours?” Wilson asked as the driver maneuvered the car into the heavy traffic

headed for Homeport.

“Cynthia? She’s fine, sir.” Drake gestured at the overnight bag. “I was hoping for a chance to see her this

trip.”

Some unidentifiable emotion flashed across Wilson’s features. “Sorry, Captain, but you won’t be on the

ground that long.”

“Oh?” Drake accompanied his question with raised eyebrows, but the commodore refused to rise to the

bait. Instead, he leaned back in his seat and gazed out the window at the shadowy trees zipping past at

two hundred kilometers per hour.

They rode in silence for several minutes until the driver gestured toward the eastern sky.

“Antares is coming up, sirs!”

Drake turned to follow the driver’s pointing finger. Sixty kilometers to the east was the Colgate mountain

range. By day, their snow-capped summits and forested slopes provided a view that was a favorite

among the purveyors of scenic holocubes. By night, they were a jagged black wall looming against the

horizon. As Drake watched, a single star of eye searing, blue-white brilliance rose from behind the central

peak of the mountain range. In that moment, the scenery around them changed dramatically. The

scattered clouds, which had reflected the dull orange glow of the Homeport streetlights, suddenly blazed

forth with a blue-white fire of their own. The once dark forest on both sides of the highway was suffused

with an internal silver sheen, sending long, jet-black shadows leaping westward across the highway.

“Is it always like this?” Drake asked, gesturing to the view beyond the limousine window.

Wilson nodded. “It has been ever since the nova began rising after dark. Before that it wasn’t very

impressive at all - just a star bright enough to be visible in daylight.”

“It still looks that way from orbit,” Drake said. He gazed at the passing scene in silence for several

seconds. “Who could have predicted that a disaster of such magnitude would be so beautiful?”

The first person to postulate a rational theory of gravitation was Sir Isaac Newton in 1687. His

PhilosophiaeNaturalisPrincipiaMathematica established the theory that gravity is a force, one by

which every atom in the universe attracts every other atom. Newton’s views on the subject remained

essentially unchallenged for nearly two and a half centuries. The reign of Newtonian physics ended in

1916. That was the year Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. Einstein suggested

that gravity is not a force at all, but rather a curvature in the very fabric of the space-time continuum

caused by the presence of mass. No one seriously challenged Einstein’s view of the universe until

Bashir-ben-Sulieman published his definitive treatise on macro-gravitational effects in 2078.

Sulieman was an astronomer working out of Farside Observatory, Luna. He had spent his life measuring

the precise positions and proper motions of several thousand of the nearer stars. After two decades of

work, he reluctantly concluded that Einstein’s simple models of gravitational curvature could not

adequately explain the placement of the stars in the firmament. The discrepancies were small and

exceedingly difficult to measure; but nonetheless, they were there. Try as he would, Sulieman could not

explain them away as “data scatter” or “turbulence,” as had earlier astronomers working from deep

within the terrestrial atmosphere. The longer Sulieman pondered his data, the more convinced he became

that, besides being curved locally in the presence of stellar and planetary masses, space is also folded

back upon itself in long lines that stretch across thousands of light-years.

The idea that the space-time continuum is multidimensional is an old one. Classical space-time has four

dimensions, three spatial and one temporal: up/down, forward/back, right/left, past/future. However, if

four-dimensional space-time is curved (as Einstein postulated), then there has to be at least one additional

dimension for it to be curved into . For General Relativity to be correct, space-time must possess at least

five dimensions. Bashir-ben-Sulieman’s contribution was to add yet another (or sixth ) dimension. He

reasoned that if Einstein’s curvedspace was indeed curvature in the fifth dimension, then his own

foldedspace must be curvature in the sixth. To keep the two separate, he established the convention of

“vertically” polarized curved space - indeed, humanity’s very concept of vertical depends on gravity,

which is the prime manifestation of curved space - and “horizontally” polarized folded space.

He theorized that the origin of the long, intricately woven foldlines was the massive black hole that

occupies the center of the galaxy. He went further. Noting that the foldlines stream outward along the

spiral arms, he wondered aloud whether the lines of folded space might not be sweeping up interstellar

matter as they rotated; in effect, acting as the catalyst for star formation. The problem of the relative

overabundance of stellar births in the spiral arms was one that had long plagued astronomers and

cosmologists.

Sulieman spent the remainder of his life improving on his theories. At the age of 92, he proved that the

sixth-dimensional foldlines are distorted by the fifth-dimensional curvature that is gravity in much the same

way that a lens distorts a ray of light. Sulieman demonstrated mathematically that whenever a foldline

encounters a star-size mass, it is “focused” into a restricted volume of space. Usually, the effect is so

small as to be undetectable. Sometimes, however, the “focus” is sufficiently sharp that a weakness

appears in the fabric of the space-time continuum, and a foldpoint is formed.

Twenty years after Sulieman’s death, scientists discovered a practical use for foldpoints. They positioned

a spaceship within one of the two foldpoints known to exist within the solar system and released copious

quantities of energy in a precisely controlled pattern intended to warp space even further. The energy

release caused the ship to drop into foldspace, thereby instantaneously transporting it to the next weak

point along the foldline. One moment the research ship was floating high above the sun; the next, it was in

orbit about Luyten’s Star, some 12.5 light-years distant.

There was no holding the human race back after that. The Great Migration began almost immediately.

Over the next several centuries, the leakage of population into space became a flood. The pattern of the

migration was determined entirely by the shape of foldspace. While some stars were found to possess

only a single foldpoint, others possessed two, three, or more. The biggest, most massive stars were

discovered to be especially fertile ground for foldpoint production. The red super-giant star Antares was

the champion throughout human space. Antares had six foldpoints, a fact that made it the linchpin of a

network of star systems on the eastern edge of human expansion.

Since the foldlines were aligned with the spiral arm that contains Sol, humanity found it easiest to expand

along the axis of the arm. Distances between colonies were figured, not by the spatial distance between

their respective stars; but rather, by the number of foldpoints between them. In order to reach the star

next door, it was sometimes necessary to first jump to one five hundred light-years distant, then double

back.

Early in the great migration, survey ships searching the systems of the Antares Cluster (those stars

associated with the foldline hub in the Antares system) found an Earth-like planet circling an unnamed G3

spectral class star some 490 light-years from Sol. They named the star Napier (after the ship’s captain)

and its single habitable planet NewProvidence . Charter companies were formed and vast quantities of

resources were poured into the system. New Providence prospered and attained self-sufficiency in less

than a hundred years. As the colony matured, it too began to look around for stellar systems in which to

invest its excess capital and manpower.

The Napier system was close enough to the giant Antares to be affected by the larger star’s warpage of

foldspace. Because of this interaction, New Providence was blessed with more than its fair share of

foldpoints. In addition to the foldpoint leading to Antares, there were two additional gateways in the

system. Beyond both foldpoints were systems containing prime real estate in the form of Earth-class

worlds.

With the New Providence colony firmly established, these additional systems became the targets for two

competing colonization drives. The better funded of these concentrated on the metal-rich

Hellsgatesystem . The smaller colonization effort was left with the job of establishing a colony in the

system of an F8 dwarf identified only by its catalog number. The New Providence colonists in this latter

system gave their new home world the name of Alta . They named their star Valeria , and quickly

devolved to calling it “Val.”

The Altan colony grew apace, although more slowly than Sandarson’s World in the Hellsgate system. By

Alta’s bicentennial year (2506 AD), it was beginning to look with longing toward the surrounding stars.

However, the Valeria system was one of those unlucky enough to possess only a single foldpoint. Altan

starships were thus forced to traverse the Napier system to reach either the Antares hub or its sister

colony in the Hellsgate system. In 2510, negotiations were begun with the New Providential government

to allow Altan ships unimpeded access to the Napier system. Two years later, with both governments

largely in agreement as to terms, the question of access became suddenly moot.

For, at 17:32 hours, 3 August 2512 (Universal Calendar), the Altan spaceliner VagabondTraveler

reported that its instruments could no longer detect the Val/Napier foldpoint at its charted position.

Survey ships were immediately dispatched. In a matter of weeks, they had confirmed the extent of the

catastrophe. For reasons that no one could explain with certainty, the sole foldpoint in the Valeria system

had ceased to exist. Alta was cut off from the rest of human space.

The Admiralty building was a large, unsightly pile of steel and glass left over from the first years after the

founding of the Altan colony. Drake and Wilson exited the limousine in front of the Admiralty’s main

entrance, acknowledged the salutes of the guards on duty, and stepped briskly through armor-glass

doors into the spacious lobby beyond. The building had originally been constructed by the central

government of Earth for use as an embassy and ambassador’s residence. The familiar continental outlines

of the Mother of Men were still visible in the marble tile work of the floor.

The guard at the interior desk was less ceremonial than those at the entrance. He sat within an

armor-glass cubicle and required both of them to insert their identity disks into a slot in the cubicle wall.

A computer in a sub-basement consulted its files, concluded that they were who they said, and flashed a

green light on the guard’s control panel. The guard saluted them as they retrieved their identification.

Wilson led Drake to an old elevator-style lift and ordered the car to the topmost floor. They soon found

themselves marching down a quiet hall between portraits of previous first admirals. Wilson stopped in

front of a heavy door carved from a single slab of onyxwood , knocked, and was rewarded with a

muffled order to enter.

Beyond the door was First Admiral Dardan’s private office. The First Admiral was seated at his oversize

desk. His attention was focused on a small, white haired man who stood before a lighted holoscreen. At

the sight of Commodore Wilson entering through the door, the first admiral rose from his desk and

moved to greet the newcomers. His sudden movement caused the white haired lecturer’s voice to trail off

into exasperated silence.

“Ah, Richard, good of you to come so quickly. May I present Professor Mikhail Planovich, Chairman of

the Astronomy Department at Homeport University.” Dardan guided Drake by the arm to where the

lecturer stood. “The professor was just starting to review what is known of the Antares Supernova for

us.”

“Pleased to meet you, Professor Planovich,” Drake said, shaking hands.

“Likewise, Captain.”

Dardan pulled Drake toward a man who was slouched on the couch opposite the Admiral’s desk. He

held a drink in his hand and appeared totally relaxed. “I believe you know Stan Barrett, the Prime

Minister’s troubleshooter.”

“Yes, sir. I met Mr. Barrett when I served as Navy liaison to Parliament two years ago. I’m not sure he

remembers me, though.”

“Of course I remember you, Drake,” Barrett said, shaking hands without rising from the couch. “Your

last job, I believe, was the five year forecast for the cost of fleet operations. We really nailed the lid on

old Gentleman Jon’s coffin that time, didn’t we?”

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