The Chemical Mage: A Hard Science Fiction Adventure With a Chilling Twist by Felix R. Savage

Author:Felix R. Savage [Savage, Felix R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SciFi, Military, Space Opera
Amazon: B0762TTYGD
Publisher: Knights Hill Publishing
Published: 2017-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 29

“SO,” COLM SAID, SIXTEEN months later, “we’re going to make a pit stop.”

Meg and Tan greeted this with silence, chewing their lunch. 200 grams of algae each, reconstituted into a dripping, greyish-pink mass. This stuff was un-ruinable, terminally unpalatable: the ship’s biscuit of the space age. The Shady Lady had been provisioned with 50 freezedried kilograms of it, for emergency situations like the one they were in now. It grew in processed wastewater—a.k.a. sewage—and provided a spectrum of nutrients along with calories. Two cheers for Fleet nutritionists. In the Navy, they had called this stuff Pink Shit, for what it tasted like as well as where it came from.

Colm shovelled another spoonful into his mouth. “Opinions? Feedback? Jokes? Insults? Ruthless criticism of my abilities and character?”

Tan shrugged. “Sounds like a plan.”

Meg said, “We’re not going to make it otherwise. So, OK. Pit stop it is.”

Her tone held no trace of blame. But Colm knew their plight was all his fault. He glumly reviewed his mistakes as he chewed his algae. They were sitting at the table in the main cabin, its glass surface etched with a chess board and a Snakes & Ladders board—each scratch the work of several days, like graffiti carved by hand in the wall of a prison cell. The air was hot and stale. A single working LED at the apex of the ceiling dulled the unappetizing color of the Pink Shit.

The big 3D screen at the front of the cabin displayed empty space, 600 lightyears from Earth.

On one side of the screen glowed the red-tinted fireball of Betelgeuse, still 60 AUs away, but far brighter than Sol at the same distance.

Juradis?

Nowhere to be seen.

The problem was that Colm had given in on the artificial gravity, when he should have known better. And the showers.

The problem was that his delta-V calculations had left zero margin for error in the first place.

The problem was that Betelgeuse was a red giant. Its surviving planetoids orbited up to 60 AUs out, and Colm was fucked if he knew why sentient beings chose to live here ... but even that wasn’t the real problem.

A wall of gas and dust—a shock front from Betelgeuse’s initial expansion—lay between the red giant and Earth. There was nothing like that in Sol’s neighborhood. A milligram of dust per cubic centimeter, all of it moving in the same direction ... away from Betelgeuse.

When Colm calculated their flight plan, he’d used the default value of one nanogram of dust per cubic centimeter, which was what you got in Sol’s neighborhood. The zero-gravity field converted mass into energy: 1ng/cm3 = 10KW added to the energy of the field. So far, so good. More dust: less power gobbled by the field generator.

But then there was inertia.

In Sol’s neighborhood, cosmic dust wandered around on a random distribution curve—some coming in your direction, some moving away. It all cancelled out to a net impact of nothing on your FTL speed. The Betelgeuse shock front was a different story. The momentum of all that dust had rung the ship like a bell.

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