2193 AD ..
I looked across at my Grandfather. The old man was iron grey and and stubbly under his battered fedora. He hed a paunch and quietly trembling hands, but his eyes shone brightly. He took a slug from his hip flask and throttled the skycraft’s engine up until it throbbed deep and growly.
“Hey Grandad! there's the old spacefield down there!’
We were passing over a fractured concrete apron, massive rusting frames stood proud of it.
"Yeah, see the launching towers, son?’ Grandad swung us in and around the spacefield, looping the skycraft tightly. “Did I ever tell you about my second flight out of here? To System Five in Orion’s Belt?”
“Yeah, but I forgot it - tell me again,”I liked Grandad’s stories. They were always a little different, a bit more extravagant every time he told them.
"You're a good lad, Chris; good to your senile old Grandad.”
I grinned back at him. My father reckoned Grandad was sharper than the rest of us put together.
Dad was always warning me against the old man. Grandad once gambled away his son’s big yellow sports car, and I don’t think Dad ever really forgave him for that.
“Well, you know I was one of the First Pilots - an Explorer.. Into The Unknown! And all that sort of thing.. Nowadays the ThinkShips can just fly themselves, but back then the fancier computers would get totally addled by all the cosmic rays as we got close to light speed, so humans flew ‘em instead..”
Dad said the only reason humans flew the first, experimental ships was because Thinking computers cost more.
“Only the best got to be Pilots, mind,’ Grandad carried on, “You had to be quick as lightning and dolphin-fit to throw that Hammock about, and kick in with the atomics at the exact moment..”
40 YEARS EARLIER..
Ben Wedfry wormed into the straps and slings of the Hammock and donned the goggles of his Augmented Reality headset. He rolled forward involuntarily, then kicked back - righting himself again, until he finished strapping in. His pulse pounded in his ears, ramped up by the reflex-enhancing StimBrew that was mandatory for every Pilot. Ben deliberately slowed and deepened his breathing, to help him access the Zen-like state of relaxed alertness he needed.
He waited calmly; staring blankly at the data scrolling through his Heads-Up Display (HUD). A grey authoritarian face flickered into one corner of his vision, “Control Bunker to Explorer 901," it said, “you are cleared for lift off. Good luck.“
“Cheers,” Ben grinned. He clicked a button in his sling-glove, flicking to a view of two figures lying on padded couches. They were tense, anticipating the crushing fingers of sudden acceleration.
“Ready you two?”
They murmured assent and Ben grinned wider. He wasn’t handsome, but his smile was pleasant enough, if a little manic. Right now it was fit to split his face.
Ben set his teeth and pushed back, kicking down hard against the Hammock straps. Engines burst into life, roaring. He tensed his whole body, stretched out and up. The Ship leapt into the sky on a column of flame, climbing fast through the Blue; eagerly reaching for the Black.
Ben watched the altimeter rise, sweat beaded on his brow as he strained to resist the G-forces that were trying to fold him up. In a few minutes they were over 100 miles high, clear of the dragging atmosphere and Ben eased off the acceleration. Then he twisted and kicked out left. Gouts of fire from the engines hurled the Ship sideways into a high, fast orbit.
Ben let her flick round the world a few times, and then pushed out and down with all four limbs. More flames from the engines, but silent now, in total vacuum. The ship slung out of orbit and away from Earth at terrific speed.
Now they were sufficiently clear of the planet’s gravity well, there was a hum and a series of resounding clunks as the newfangled Inertial Damping Field powered-up; always a reassuring sound for any interstellar spacer - the InDam Field bubble protected a Ship’s humans from being crushed to a pulp by the extreme acceleration needed to approach light speed.
As the Ship barrelled away from Earth, Ben kept a constant eye on the astrogation plotter that charted their course. Alarms would ring if they went astray, but the harsh claxon piqued his pride. Suspended in the counter-tensioned slings and gimbal rings of the Hammock, Ben remained poised, ready to leap into action at the next way-point.
~~ Some egg-head down in London [by 2153 everywhere south of Watford and east of Cardiff was London] had dreamed up the Hammock. They needed a way for the decision-making brain to trigger and steer the Ship’s engines as though it was a living entity, reacting rapidly by reflex. Conventional switches and levers took too long; too many fiddly motions gobbled up the time.
Through the Hammock each Ship “felt” its Pilot’s movements, and a Pilot knew their Ship’s responses like their own body.. So, the thought that closed a hand would fire a braking retro rocket, while whole-body stretches and bends turned the entire Ship’s course.
Strain receptors in the straps and position sensors in the gimbal frames gathered intent from the Pilot’s dancing body. Simple enough in principle, but there were thousands of little sensors; it took a medium powered legacy computer to integrate all the commands; this Integrator had to be designed with quintuple redundant parallel processing for on-the-fly error-checking, plus it was hardened and thickly shielded against the inevitable deluge of data-corrupting, bit-flipping cosmic rays.
In 2153 the whole set-up of Pilot, Hammock and Integrator was still ten thousand times cheaper than designing and building a computer that was both robustly hardened and shielded, yet also sophisticated enough to run the five-ply machine intelligences they'd’ve otherwise needed to fly a Ship on its own, without a human-in-the-loop. ~~
Once the Ship crossed the Moon’s orbit into translunar space Ben kicked a big steel plate set in the Hammock’s rear. A huge explosion hammered the Ship forward; blasting it onward to Mars. Ben had just detonated one of the “small” shaped charge H-bombs mounted in the stern. He triggered the atomics again and again, accelerating the vessel through the void.
The squishy human crew were protected from the shockwaves by the Inertial Damping Field’s bubble, and they were shielded from the storm of radiation by a thick neutron and gamma ray absorbing shield, made with complex alloys and ceramics. The shield was cast in a swollen funnel shape that helped channel the force of the explosions backwards, hurling the ship forwards. Thus, the quarter-of-a mile long Ship screamed towards Mars at 0.999C*. Time itself dilated at such speeds.
Even with Inertial Damping, the felt acceleration was still brutal. Ben almost blacked out for an instant, his vision greying at the edges. He came round bathed in adrenaline, with his heart pounding on his rib-cage. Straining, he arched his body; in response the ship wrapped itself into Mars orbit and slung out faster than ever.
Ben leapt and danced through the Asteroid Belt, twisting and turning around ancient rocks that threatened him. The asteroids flashed past him until suddenly he was out.
He flew on, travelling ever closer to the speed of light, with the Sun at his back and the depths of interplanetary space yawning ahead of him.
Jupiter loomed ahead, monstrous and bloated, its Red Eye glowered at him. Ben laughed and threw the ship around and around the giant, winding up to greater and greater speed. Breaking free he piked back through the Belt again and around the back of the Sun.
In a flash he was out again, travelling so fast he reached Pluto’s orbit before he knew it. Moving faster than he could think, Ben wrenched around the Sun one more time, looping the whole Solar System. Eyes on the HUD read-outs, he watched for the critical moment, the point where he must break the loop to reach for Orion.
The controls registered 0.999999C, if he ran into anything at this speed.... even a fleck of dust! Fortunately Ben had no time to think on this, he reached the correct angle and kicked steel again. Another atomic blast shook the ship, and Ben struggled against the residual wrenching g-forces, as numbers scrabbled higher and higher on the HUD’s read-outs, until they topped-out at 0.999999999C. He’d hit the light speed barrier, but that last bomb blast was still pushing him on!
~~ According to Einstein nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so anything with any mass that gets close to the to the speed of light and still tries to accelerate will increase in mass not speed. And Einstein wasn't daft, you know.. ~~
Ben gawped as his feet fled from him and the walls of the cabin seemed to expand. Growing, growing huge. The ship swelled, dwarfing the Sun it had left behind. In a moment it seemed to fill the Universe, before somehow mind-bendingly rising above the Universe itself. Ben gazed downward - he was All! He was Everything! The feeling of transcendent power was overwhelming and intoxicating..
Part of Ben wanted it to last forever, but two things jolted him from this line of thought:
- Firstly, there was the strangest sense of being somehow watched.. Watched by an incomprehensible something (or somethings) that lay outside the Universe, which registered with Ben as a kind of pressure on the back of his skull, which triggered a creeping chilly fear in his very spine..
- Secondly, the stony face of a lecturer loomed large in his memory, “..To maintain infinite mass for any length of time requires the ship to leave the Universe - permanently.” the face grinned like a skull,”.. We guess it’s rather cold out there..”\
ABOUT: >> I'm giving this sci-fi short-story of mine a re-write.. This is the first of 4 parts in total.. I wrote the 1st edition way back in 1990 (when I titled it 'On Swan's Wings') but I've learned a wee bit more about life, astronomy and physics in the last three decades.. And oh boy, the tech revolution since then! .. \
>> If you enjoy my stories, and feel like dropping me a tip on my Ko-Fi, that'd be cool and helpful, ta! Link is in my comment below, and in my profile too.. :) \
I did try putting the link here, but it turns out that slapped a GIANT ko-fi pic at the top of the story in mobile, which was not my plan at all! \
No, Bardic Inspiration & therefore UW resets with Long Rests, and you'd have to get your CHA to 20 just to get 5 in a day.
Anyway, this is all getting into interminable essay length discussion now, so to conclude. You want SB or any other setting content at your table? That's your choice of course - have fun.
Likewise: at my table, the fun derives at least in part from playing in a setting that is both mechanically & flavour-wise distinct from other settings, with its own specific homebrew, inclusions & exclusions.
How I got my players not to take Silvery Barbs
DnD