Hegemony Resurgent Exodus: Chapter 3

Jackson came back to reality to the sound of howling alarms and a medic rolling him over on his side.

“What the fu—“ he shook his head, “What happened.”

“Half the population is having TDS to varying degrees.” The medic looked at him. “Sir, if you’re—“

“Go.”

Jackson levered himself up and looked around. Some of the men and women were out of it, while others looked okay, if woozy.

“Ship status?”

“Reactor’s scrammed, but it looks like it was a precautionary scram. No damage, but engineering wants to check them first.”

Jackson nodded as someone passed him a bottle and barf vacuum to clean his mouth and front. It wasn’t like they didn’t have redundancy in all the life support systems.

“Right. So we’re alive.” He kept balancing on a console, looking around.  “Where are we?”

“No idea, sir.” The captain shrugged. “Even if we landed dead on, we’ll have to wait until astrographics can check out the pulsars.”

Which means they have to find them.

“KF drive?”

“Everything’s red.”

“Expected. But nothing exploded. Civilians?”

“Lots of TDS calls. A few heart attacks…”

*****

Christa was hanging on to the Runt. The flash had hit, and the Runt had started screaming about Mom and Dad. Marjorie was dealing with her own problems, and evidently they’d stopped boosting because now gobs of vomit were floating in the air.

“Okay, listen to me…” The medic said. “This is just TDS. It makes you see things that aren’t there, do you understand?”  She slipped an injector into the Runt’s arms and the Runt went limp. “Okay, some sleepybye juice. Wish I had time to stick with him, but we got other issues.” She looked at Christa. “If it seems that he’s having trouble breathing or vomiting, hit the emergency call. But he should just sleep it off.”

“Wh…what did he see?” Christa asked.

“TDS—we jumped a long way away, and it’s hitting a lot of people.” The medic shook her head. “Sometimes it makes you see stuff—and that works on your memories. You lost your parents, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Know how?”

Christa bit her lip and shook her head.

“Okay, yeah, not good. He probably saw everything he was afraid of. So when he wakes up, a lot of those memories will be gone. TDS tends to fade fast, but be certain to tell him that none of it was real.”

“Right.”

“Okay, gotta go. Got a full load of first graders someone thought should have a full meal before the jump.”

With that, Christa stared over at Marjorie… and sighed. There was nothing to do but help her pick up the rest of the barf-gobs.

Disgusting.

*****

“A total of forty five dead, forty from heart attacks, probably due to TDS,  five for reasons… unknown.” The medical officer shrugged. “Not many injuries beyond that.”

“Good,” Jackson said. “Drives?”

“Sublight is fine, fusion power plants are fine, but…”

“We didn’t come out where we intended to. We’re no where near the target.”

“So we’re marooned?” One of the passengers Jackson had brought in to observe asked.

“No.” Captain Silva shook his head. “This ship has supplies for over 100 years of cruising—the life support is more or less self contained and we can coast.  There’s a solar system, relatively close—call it six months travel time. It’s just that I think were bounced off axis by the premature jump. We’ll have to wait until astrographics finds a few recorded pulsars to get a fix on.”

Jackson nodded. Most everyone knew about that. Pulsars could be used to get a fix since every pulsar had a unique frequency…

“Why can’t we just jump?”

“Well that’s for our jump specialist, June?” Jackson asked.

June looked like she hadn’t slept in three days, her hair frazzled and papers covering the conference table in front of her.

“What? Oh, right, the Jump. We have found out more in a single day than the last hundred years. I had every scanner I could think of going and well, this is likely the single most powerful human initiated Jump. We’ve learned more about deep KF space and the lower levels—it’s just—“

“Ahem,” Jackson pulled his daughter up short. “I think they want to know about jumping.”

“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.” June said. “And scrapping the core to make more ships… That’s not gonna happen, at least not like we planned.”

“What?” Silva said. “The core wasn’t that badly damaged, it would have wrecked the ship.”

“Yeah, but it has no more oopsium.”

“What?” one of the civilians, a matronly woman Jackson remembered from HR asked. “What is—“

“Of course nobody bothers to study the thing that makes FTL possib—okay. Way back in the day, the max range of KF drives was fifteen lights, and trying to dock a ship to a jumper was an expensive form of suicide. Also, the only design was what we’d call a compact core. Every attempt to make it better, well… expensive form of suicide. Then  a certain Engineer, Darcy O’Brien, screwed up a purity test and they poured a new KF core that should have been downchecked. Well, they try to jump the ship, it vanishes and appears 30 light years away, only nobody dead, and no damage. And the reason was…” June grinned and gestured, “the germanium feed stock had been mined from an asteroid in a system that had had a really big CME smack it, and well, it turned out that stars also contain an element with the atomic number 118—way off in what we call the island of stability. You dope a core with trace elements of that,and it stabilizes the jump reaction, both for the ship, and once they resarched it, for any ship with a KF boom attachment.  Unfortunately, our jump seems to have caused all the oopsium, to degrade so at best I can give you 15LY cores with no collars.”

“Um…” The woman raised her hand.

“Yeah?”

“Why oopsium?” 

“Darcy said that she shouldn’t be rewarded for her screw up. I think she knew a lot more people would remember oopsium than some dead engineer’s name.”

“Can we mine it?”

“No. Island of stability isn’t permanent. It’s an isotope with a half life of about 50,000 years before the isotope breaks down. Plenty good if you’re using it, but the possibility of finding some in nature… not good. The first find was just luck after all. No,  we synthesize it, and that takes a lot of energy, as in, a couple of hundred square kilometers of solar collectors.”

“Is it a big deal?” Silva asked. “Fifteen light years is more than enough for us to explore in the region… once we get into the system.”

“What’s in the system?”

“We haven’t got a read on the whole thing,” the astrographic’s director said. “But we have two gas giants and further out a companion star. Both stars are main sequence Type Gs which is good, but as we get closer, since we know the plane of the ecliptic, we can get a read on the primary targets planetary companions.”

“Any thing showing other people?” Jackson asked.

“No. EM spectrum is dead, save for natural radio sources.”

“We could send a survey mission, right around when we do turnover,” June said.

“Good idea,” Jackson said. “But what do we do now?”

“I’m thinking maybe it’s time to explain to all of our passengers…” Silva said. “And that, Mr. Kline, is well, your job.”

“Great. Keep a seat for me on the scout mission.”

*****

By the time Christa had gotten the Runt calmed down, they were under gravity again, and would be for about a day. According to the announcement, they’d spend six days under .1 G thrust and 1 day under regular 1G, so that nobody would see their muscles melt. So now they were under normal G and being ushered to a multipurpose room on their level.

Five hundred kids. There were more in their pod, but each level had its own meeting place.

Everyone was muttering about the jump, and when they’d be going back to Inglesmond.

Then the big screen came on, the old guy who had funded their new home was looking down at them.

“Hello all. There’s no easy way to say this. As we were leaving, forces of the Draconis Combine were attacking Inglesmond, but most importantly, this ship is equipped with an experimental, single use jump drive, which we used. You may have felt different side effects, but we believe we are now roughly 1400 light years from Inglesmond. We won’t be going back.”

The room was silent, but then Mr. Kline started talking again. “Many of you, especially the youth who lost everything in the Amaris war, know that things were bad. You just didn’t now how bad they were. Every House Lord will drive to become the new First Lord—without General Kerensky, without the SLDF, there’s nothing to stop them, and they will destroy whatever they cannot hold.”  He sighed. “And they will never, ever, let the Hegemony rise again. We would either die in their wars—or be subjugated, to well, die in their wars.” He shook his head. “There is no stopping it. Even before Amaris was destroyed, the House Lords were doing everything they could to kneecap the Hegemony. And so, I, without asking many of you if you wanted to come along, helped build this ship. We have everything needed to live—everything needed for a comfortable life. Right now, we are so far out that the light hitting this ship’s hull from Sol comes from Earth’s Middle Ages. We are hidden—safe, not just for our lives, but our children’s lives. Right now, we are journeying to the system that will provide us with a new home—and if there is not one to be found there, we will find another. But we will not live under the terror of the fusion bombs and mechs of those who would destroy what they cannot have. Thank you.”

Christa blinked as she looked at the empty screen.

Fourteen hundred light years?

“Christa?” The Runt asked.

“Yeah?”

“We’re not going home—I mean, not back to Earth, are we?”  The Runt had always wanted to go back home.

But… “No. I guess we aren’t,” Christa said.