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“It is not what you believe to be true that will determine your or humanity's success but what works.”
― John W. Campbell
“One man's 'magic', is another man's engineering.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
“Any planet is 'Earth' to those that live on it.”
― Isaac Asimov
PREFACE
Humanity had spread into the cosmos from its home world. But even before it had investigated every world circling every star, it discovered boundary worlds beyond. These were worlds that could only be reached through the large extra-dimension called the bulk by physicists, worlds that were strange but similar to their own. Brane worlds that were enough like humanity's abode that they could also provide a home.
And so, humanity bifurcated, as it always does when presented with new vistas, over and over until it became a rare habitable brane world that was without humanity's presence. And with each new world/universe, humanity replayed the “eternal return,” that is, as the great French mathematician Henri Poincare pointed out while studying the Newtonian three-body problem, under very general conditions any fixed-volume system will return infinitely often and with arbitrarily little error to almost every previous state. This, Poincare's Theorem, implied that history would repeat itself given enough time. It was then shown by the German mathematician Ernst Zermelo, that if Poincare's Theorem were correct, there could be no truly irreversible processes, and thus the inexorable increase of entropy as defining the arrow of time was incorrect.
For humanity it meant that time wasn't an unstoppable river but an eddy, a rivulet, a wave, washing ashore and then receding, a force of nature, that in a finite volume filled with infinite brane worlds, would bend to reason.
CHAPTER 1
The Space Forces' ship, USSF Avenger, was about to use its boundary drive to enter the bulk. Captain Stilwell ordered the helmsman to power it up. The helmsman ejected the specialized target from the front of the ship and then brought up the pulsed-power laser. Lowered from the underside of the long fusion-drive vessel, the laser fired. At a peak power of one hundred petawatts, more power than seven billion people consumed in an ordinary day on Earth, but lasting only a million billionth of a second, the intense beam found the target and was focused even more by it, until deep in the micro-structure of spacetime, three of the six tiny curled up dimensions of a Calabi-Yau manifold began to expand.
The expansion wouldn't stop until the density of the injected energy was diluted and almost equaled that of the surrounding space. By that time the void, sometimes called a “bubble,” in spacetime would have engulfed the Avenger and its third of the way from the bow, three hundred feet in diameter crew wheel, and its overall thousand feet in length. And like an air bubble underwater, the phase difference between the spacetime void and ordinary spacetime would create a pressure gradient. By adjusting the shape of the bubble, this gradient would give it and its contents an impetus, that is, it would speed away from its origin, a self-propelling warp. The velocity and direction controlled by shaping the bubble with the laser.
“How long until boundary?” asked the captain.
“Four minutes, forty seconds sir,” said the navigator.
The void, with the ship inside, was now traveling at a small percentage of the speed of light and was headed for coordinates in space that would take the ship from its world brane into the bulk.
“Sixty seconds, sir,” said the navigator.
It's important to encounter the boundary between ordinary space and bulk space with just the right trajectory to prevent an effect called mirroring, which could cause the bubble to retrace its steps as if it had bounded off a wall or reversed in time.
“Thirty seconds sir,” said the navigator.
Though the Avenger had just left Moon orbit it was only seconds away from the boundary, a result of the extra-dimension in which ordinary spacetime is embedded. It wasn't so much about how far to the boundary, but how to align with the boundary. Think about the corners in a room where the three dimensions that make up a floor, wall and ceiling meet. They are dimensionally unique and only at the corners do all three walls adjoin. So, it is with the five dimensions that make up brane and bulk. They meet only at unique coordinates, and these coordinates must be targeted precisely to cross the boundary successfully.
Because of the precision required, there was always an air of anxiety in the control room of a ship approaching the boundary.
“Three, two, one, zero,” said the navigator.
Captain Stilwell noticed he was gripping the arms of the command chair, he relaxed, he looked around the room at his crew. Navigation was in front of him and to his left, and the helmsman to his right. If he looked farther to one side or the other, he could see the curvature of the big wheel as the ceiling and floor began to rise. Then, he heard the alarm.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Sir, SCR shows a gravitational anomaly straight ahead,” said the helmsman.
The SCR, Superconducting Cavity Resonator, was a form of compact gravitational wave detector that relied on superfluid helium-4's vibrational response to passing gravity waves. It was the only way a ship in the bulk could “see” outside the spacetime void.
“Can you avoid the anomaly, Mr. Cavendish?” asked the captain.
“I can try sir.”
The helmsman brought the laser online again and started firing it at the walls of the spacetime bubble.
The energy deposited started warping the bubble and distorting its shape. It started changing its course in response to the changing pressure gradient surrounding it.
The alarm continued.
“Mr. Cavendish.” said the captain.
“Sir, the anomaly is changing,” said the helmsman.
“How?” asked the captain.
But Mr. Cavendish didn't answer as the bubble ruptured on contact with the anomaly and the ship slammed against an almost solid mass.
“They didn't arrive sir and so far, we have no other information.”
“Well, Lieutenant Sayers, I suggest you get some more information before our next meeting,” said General Slateman.
Sayers, who was short and stocky with a haircut that the general found unbecoming for an officer, saluted and left the office, leaving the general to his thoughts.
First, there was that commercial ship that disappeared, but we didn't think much about it because we doubted the captain and crew's ability. But the Avenger's crew was one of the best in the Space Force. This won't be easily dismissed. I'd better inform the Secretary before he hears it from someone else.
General Slateman was a big man, with short cut hair and a voice that could thunder, and he was correct, the loss of one of the Force's own was big news. The Secretary of the Air Force had just left a grueling four-hour meeting in which he was told all that was known about the missing ship. Unfortunately, there still wasn't much known, and the secretary wasn't happy that he would have to brief the president without more answers. And when the secretary is unhappy, everyone is unhappy.
Something was happening, Leonard Post was sure of it. He had been reporting on space matters since he got out of journalism school. As a freelance reporter, sometimes it was only because he was first or because he was unrelenting, that he got the credit and the money that came with the story. And he knew from all his years of reporting, that General Slateman wasn't being completely honest.
Leonard was thirty-five now and starting to gain weight, he was also starting to notice a gray hair or two that he allowed the lady that cut his hair to shampoo out. He wasn't vain, but thought that the younger you looked, the better on a screen.
If he couldn't get anyone in the service to give him a scoop he might run with that theory from that egghead, about how dangerous it was to use the bulk as a superhighway without knowing its fundamental physics. Whatever, he would do something to break the story loose.
Dr. Mark Dreyer was in his mid-twenties and looked much like the college students he taught. He'd just got off the phone to that reporter who wanted him to go over again his theory about the boundary drive.
Mark knew the boundary drive was a remarkable development. It had led to direct proof of the large extra-dimension theories that had languished without verification for years. But while the physics of its operation in ordinary spacetime could be exactly understood, its operation in the bulk was less well understood, because a proper theory of the physics of the fifth-dimension, the bulk, weren't available yet.
That was something that he was working on.
Mark looked at the computer screen he had brought up when he was talking to the reporter, Post. It was a compilation of everything known about bulk physics and there wasn't much. For instance, he knew that for a ship to travel through the bulk it had to be shrouded in the spacetime void of the boundary drive. A ship outside a bubble when in the bulk would be subject to tremendous shear forces caused by the extra dimension. But he didn't know what the ultimate fate of the ship might be.
Without using mathematics, Mark used a two-dimensional analogy to explain it to his students. In a two-dimensional flat-world he would begin, there could be a circle. If that circle is translated into a three-dimensional world, what would it be? Of course, it could stay the same and be a two-dimensional circle, but it is much more likely that it might become spheroidal or maybe cylindrical or any number of different varieties of those two solid bodies depending on the angle the circle makes with the third dimension, and that could have an infinite number of outcomes. So, it's more likely that the circle becomes something other than a circle upon translation to three-dimensions.
But what does that mean to a solid body? Such a body could also take on different variations of itself upon translation and almost all of them would require a shearing of the body. Whether it could survive and continue to function in its new configuration was unknown.
Captain Sheryl Wilson was unusual in the Space Force, being one of the few females to captain her own ship. At five feet ten inches tall, Sher, as her friends called her, had the physical presence to demand respect. And if that wasn't enough to bring around a recalcitrant crew member, when she spoke, the mantle of command was even more apparent.
Her ship, the USSF Liberator, was an older ship, recently outfitted with the spin-two and boundary drives.
Since it never made landfall, it didn't have a Mach effect drive but some of its small shuttles did. Sher had heard about the Avenger but not through official channels, the only guidance coming from the top was a requirement for extra call-ins under the pretense of monitoring operational efficiencies.
Sher knew the top brass were worried and that's why the extra call-ins. The Liberator was preparing for a run to the world brane Alcyoneus. The civilization there was now at a crossroads and making decisions about its ties with the old world. The Liberator would be taking the ambassador from the US to try and strengthen relations.
Sher had crossed the bulk before to other brane worlds as one of the crew, but this would be the first time as captain. She wasn't expecting any problems but after the recent incidents there was some anxiety.
Everyone aboard was required to be secured during the crossing of the boundary between brane and bulk. The captain's chair automatically secured Sher. She looked around the control room, noticing communications and engineering and the helmsman as he started the countdown to the boundary.
At the end of the count there was no physical manifestation of the crossing and Sher knew they had hit their coordinates precisely. Just as she was about to release the chair's restraints a loud crash rumbled and cascaded throughout the ship, immediately followed by the sudden stoppage of all motion. If she hadn't been restrained, she would have been thrown across the room, as was Jennings, the engineer.