Entropy Risen (The Syker Key Book 3) by Aaron Martin Fransen Page A

people were watching his flight.
    “Roger Endeavor. Pad reports your mass is null.”
    That meant the outside drive was working as well. Perfect. Time to pick a direction and throttle up.
    “Control, I’m cranking it up.” He couldn’t resist the familiar language, steadfastly refusing to use the military-grade speak that the space program demanded. Another stab in the back of the insane powers that had held the planet in it’s grip for so long.
    Pan slowly lifted the craft, pointing the nose towards the sky. “Pressing the big red button in three, two, one.”
    He keyed the sequence to accelerate, and the craft quickly started climbing, as if falling into the sky. Inside, Pan felt nothing, no acceleration, no indication of movement.
    He knew he could pull sudden right angle turns and it wouldn’t, shouldn’t , have any impact on the vehicle or the occupants, but this test wasn’t about doing anything too radical.
    The ship’s engine was at one gravity, meaning it was truly moving forward as if falling towards Earth. Instead, it continued to accelerate into the sky. In less than a minute it was in space, and Pan entered the key sequence to increase the acceleration to five G. The ship started falling into a hole five times more powerful than Earth’s gravity.
    In less than two minutes he was forced to turn the ship around and use that same gravity well to slow the ship down; halfway to Luna already.
    For someone used to using teleportation, travel was always slow, but as travel went, this was pretty good. It wasn’t long before he was at Luna. He didn’t need to orbit since the Moon’s gravity had no impact on the ship, but he flew around it anyways. He wanted to see the property he’d bought, though it was ridiculous because without the computer to tell him where it was he had no idea exactly what to look for. He knew where it was near though.
    “Control, I am now looking down at the Sea of Tranquility.”
    “Roger Endeavor, reaching the moon in under six minutes is a confirmed new record, by three days.” Pan could hear the laughing and cheering in the background. He smiled.
    The ship worked.
    And the new space age had begun. For the first time in centuries, Pan felt like humanity might have a chance.
     

Requiem for a Gambit
    John was amazed at the progress they had made. In five years the human race had no fewer than two hundred and fifty thousand people living off-planet. Many were on Luna, some in the asteroids, and the rest on Mars. A new massive space station was even under construction, and it was going to orbit Hermes, not Earth. It would spin to produce gravity, since artificial gravity was a bit of an energy sink, and would look much like any of the round space stations from science fiction.
    John realized he was living in the age of that very science fiction become reality. Space tourism sprouted up within months of the mining operation, and there were now three companies catering to the growing industry.
    Boeing, who had helped with the construction of the Virgin space tugs, was now retooling their entire operation for the new drive technology, since it was going to apparently make flying safer everywhere, not just in space. Their own fleet of 700 series aircraft were obsolete overnight, and they were trying hard not to be left behind.
    Likewise Airbus started to design and build passenger craft with the same technology, and in typical Airbus fashion, theirs were both larger and more luxurious. For a price.
    Fuel was probably the biggest driver, however. A 747 burned a gallon of precious jet fuel every single second. It was very expensive. In contrast, the thorium salt reactor at the heart of the new power trains was economical; thorium salts were easily extracted from the ground, and were hardly exclusive to any region. So instead of paying for fuel for the trip, you were paying for the service.
    Manufacturing and processing weren’t cheap, which was the only thing saving the old flying