at the moment—was that a ship needed a fairly flat gravitational metric when the drive was engaged. Shipbuilders had been working on that problem for centuries, with no discernable results. So a ship still couldn’t go into faster-than-light drive until it was eight to ten AUs out from a star of Sol’s mass—the distance, roughly, of Saturn at its farthest from Earth.
No, the real problem was that none of this necessarily applied to Charlie One. It was an alien ship, of unknown potential and technologies. For all any human knew, it might pop into Alcubierre Drive in the next few seconds, or within a couple of million kilometers of the sun. Connor decided, however, that that was extremely unlikely. If they could have done it inside of one astronomical unit, they would have done it by now. The fact that they hadn’t led Connor to speculate that they were aiming for a particular patch of sky, that they would continue accelerating past Sol and out into the outer system before engaging their FTL drive.
So the million-dollar question is, just what part of the sky might that be?
It was simple enough to superimpose a star chart over her fighter’s navigational data.
And the answer to her question was . . . surprising.
Chapter Four
29 June, 2425
Emergency Presidential Command Post
Toronto
United States of North America
0044 hours, EST
“The fighters are in pursuit, sir,” Admiral Armitage told Koenig. “They won’t catch the damned thing, though. Not unless either Charlie starts decelerating or they can shave another tenth of a percent off their velocity.”
“How good are the new designs at that sort of thing?”
“Mostly depends on the pilot,” Armitage said. “Things are happening awfully fast at those velocities, remember.”
Koenig nodded. He’d been a fighter pilot once, a very long time ago. “I do.”
As a fighter moved faster and faster, relativistic phenomena not only increased the vehicle’s mass, pushing it toward an impossible-to-reach infinity, but it also shortened the rate at which time—as measured by an outside observer—passed for the pilot, an effect called time dilation. The pilot experienced everything—the increase in mass, the compression of time—as perfectly normal; it was outside observers that saw basic constants of the universe shift and flow like water.
For fighters traveling at 99.7 percent of the speed of light, one minute objective—a minute as perceived by slowpoke left-behinds—was only 4.64 seconds. To observers back on board the carrier, the pilot would seem to be moving and speaking and living with extreme slowness.
The difference could be significant—and a real problem, especially in combat. Where a relatively stationary target had a minute to react to oncoming fighters, those fighters had only a few seconds. The best cybernetically augmented reaction times in the world couldn’t handle differences at such scales.
In fact, getting anything done when you were up against an unaccelerated opponent was dangerous when a decision or an action taking a handful of seconds was in fact a whole minute long outside of the pilot’s frame of reference. At least, Koenig thought, in this case both the fighters and their quarry were pushing c , and the time difference between their relative frames of reference was trivial.
That was one reason that fighters sent at relativistic speeds toward an enemy target generally decelerated before reaching their objective. Speed was life, as the old fighter-pilot aphorism had it. But in modern space-fighter combat, too much speed could put you at a serious disadvantage.
With all that in his mind, Koenig pulled down an in-head schematic from the America showing the relative positions and speeds of the alien vessel and the pursuing fighters. He began pumping through some simulations. If the fighters could increase their velocity by an additional tenth of a percent of c , their speed, relative to their quarry, would be 30,000
No, the real problem was that none of this necessarily applied to Charlie One. It was an alien ship, of unknown potential and technologies. For all any human knew, it might pop into Alcubierre Drive in the next few seconds, or within a couple of million kilometers of the sun. Connor decided, however, that that was extremely unlikely. If they could have done it inside of one astronomical unit, they would have done it by now. The fact that they hadn’t led Connor to speculate that they were aiming for a particular patch of sky, that they would continue accelerating past Sol and out into the outer system before engaging their FTL drive.
So the million-dollar question is, just what part of the sky might that be?
It was simple enough to superimpose a star chart over her fighter’s navigational data.
And the answer to her question was . . . surprising.
Chapter Four
29 June, 2425
Emergency Presidential Command Post
Toronto
United States of North America
0044 hours, EST
“The fighters are in pursuit, sir,” Admiral Armitage told Koenig. “They won’t catch the damned thing, though. Not unless either Charlie starts decelerating or they can shave another tenth of a percent off their velocity.”
“How good are the new designs at that sort of thing?”
“Mostly depends on the pilot,” Armitage said. “Things are happening awfully fast at those velocities, remember.”
Koenig nodded. He’d been a fighter pilot once, a very long time ago. “I do.”
As a fighter moved faster and faster, relativistic phenomena not only increased the vehicle’s mass, pushing it toward an impossible-to-reach infinity, but it also shortened the rate at which time—as measured by an outside observer—passed for the pilot, an effect called time dilation. The pilot experienced everything—the increase in mass, the compression of time—as perfectly normal; it was outside observers that saw basic constants of the universe shift and flow like water.
For fighters traveling at 99.7 percent of the speed of light, one minute objective—a minute as perceived by slowpoke left-behinds—was only 4.64 seconds. To observers back on board the carrier, the pilot would seem to be moving and speaking and living with extreme slowness.
The difference could be significant—and a real problem, especially in combat. Where a relatively stationary target had a minute to react to oncoming fighters, those fighters had only a few seconds. The best cybernetically augmented reaction times in the world couldn’t handle differences at such scales.
In fact, getting anything done when you were up against an unaccelerated opponent was dangerous when a decision or an action taking a handful of seconds was in fact a whole minute long outside of the pilot’s frame of reference. At least, Koenig thought, in this case both the fighters and their quarry were pushing c , and the time difference between their relative frames of reference was trivial.
That was one reason that fighters sent at relativistic speeds toward an enemy target generally decelerated before reaching their objective. Speed was life, as the old fighter-pilot aphorism had it. But in modern space-fighter combat, too much speed could put you at a serious disadvantage.
With all that in his mind, Koenig pulled down an in-head schematic from the America showing the relative positions and speeds of the alien vessel and the pursuing fighters. He began pumping through some simulations. If the fighters could increase their velocity by an additional tenth of a percent of c , their speed, relative to their quarry, would be 30,000
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