Second Wave - 11
Chapter 11
You'd think that starting on a long space voyage would require a lot of preparation and checking. It didn't. The Sunnys just didn't do things the way humans would. Frazzle sat down and pushed a button that caused the entire vessel to make a kind of low humming noise. Then he keyed a few coordinates in with one of the flat matrix keyboards, checking the video screen as he did. He finished up by pushing a button. The entire time, he didn't seem the least concerned that we were standing behind him. I don't know if he even thought about it.
Suddenly the view in the forward window started to shift and Uranus moved out of the screen. I had already forgotten the Sunnys had told me that there was artificial gravity on the ship, so I started to look for somewhere secure or something to hang onto at the least. Then I realized that I didn't have to worry. Despite the obvious movement of the ship, it felt as if I were remaining perfectly still.
Obviously, Newton's laws were held in abeyance by the Sunnys' technology. The artificial gravity not only maintained our weight, but the field did something else. It negated the effect of a change in momentum on our mass. We were perfectly cushioned and immune to any movement, no matter how abrupt.
I looked at the two guards and they seemed oblivious. They hadn't even realized that they might have been in danger. Erin, on the other hand, was clinging to the back of another seat with a death grip. She suddenly saw me and realized that I was standing unassisted. When she did, she released her grip and tried to act as if she were nonchalantly just leaning on the seat. I let it pass. She had an attitude problem when it came to men and there was no sense in aggravating the situation.
The ship smoothly rotated until it was pointing upwards, orthogonal to the plane of our solar system and then it began to accelerate. There wasn't any flash or dash about it. The thing just started moving. I could see the Sun from the edge of the window and it was rapidly getting smaller. In just a few minutes we were moving at a significant fraction of light speed. Once again, there was absolutely no sensation of movement. I might as well have been standing on the Earth or even lying in bed. The Sunnys had conversed among themselves and then each carefully occupied one of the seats in the rows behind the control station. They had the expectant attitude of a group of theater-goers just prior to the curtain-raising.
I was disappointed. I'd kind of hoped for some kind of fanfare or an impressive blast-off or something. In fact, I wasn't sure what was disappointing about it. The ship moved so effortlessly that I was impressed. It would probably get us where we were going rapidly.
Even though we were moving rapidly and it looked as if we were going to continue accelerating, I wondered what would happen when we got to light speed. Einstein had made some predictions about that speed limit that indicated that nothing good would come of the exercise. I caught Frazzle's eye and asked him, “What happens when we get to light speed?”
He answered with a series of clear mental images rather than trying to speak English. It seemed that the ship wouldn't actually cross the light-speed barrier in normal space. Once it reached a critical speed, about three-quarters of light, the FTL system would engage. This system created a special field that had the effect of converting the matter composing the ship and contents into a waveform that was similar to the quantum energy waves of the universe. We'd become, in essence, frictionless waves. The ubiquitous virtual particles wouldn't interact with those that made up our form. When that field took effect, the effect somehow allowed us to almost surf on the faster-than-light torsion waves in the quantum field.
I tried but failed to understand what was going on. I sent Frazzle my conception, but he rejected my interpretation. He tried again, laying out the same series of images, but more slowly. It was kind of like the way humans tend to shout when they are trying to communicate with someone who only speaks another language. Being yelled at mentally didn't help my understanding either.
I gave up and resigned myself to my feelings of inferiority. Then I had a cheering thought. Just because I didn't understand the technology, didn't mean that I couldn't use it to good effect. I just had to know what the specs were, so I could make sensible plans. I didn't have to know how it worked.
That thought made me feel better. I mean, I normally think I'm pretty smart, but this required a jump beyond anything human science had come up with to date. Maybe I was being too hard on myself. Expecting to grasp it without the appropriate background was kind of silly.
I regrouped and asked Frazzle, “How long will the ship take to travel to your planet?”
This time the answer was a little simpler, but I still had difficulty. He answered definitively with a single visual image. It came through to me as if I were seeing him holding a yardstick with another, much shorter one beside it. The short stick was quite short compared to the longer one. I suddenly realized that the longer stick was his conception of how far light traveled in a certain length of time. The short stick then must represent the length of our voyage.
I started to say, “I see,” but then I realized that I really didn't. How long was the long stick, anyway? Was it one of our light-years or maybe a much shorter distance? I didn't understand the scale and therefore I didn't understand how long a time the short stick was supposed to represent. I asked for clarification, “Can you tell me how long it is in Earth days?”
This request was met with puzzlement. He knew what I meant, but he'd never been to Earth and hadn't studied it much either. He didn't really know how long a period of revolution Earth had. We compromised, or rather, I should say, he compromised and I just went along with the idea, by visualizing the distance from Earth to the Sun. I knew this was what he meant because he showed me the solar system and indicated the third planet as a base point. The short stick image was much longer than the Earth-to-Sun scale. I tried to mentally estimate the difference but finally gave it up as a bad deal.
The best I could do was to guess that the voyage was going to take a time that could be measured in our days, but how many, exactly, I couldn't quite figure. However, thinking about being confined in the ship made me realize that I'd better learn about the thing. We needed food, places to sleep, and toilet facilities. I also hoped fervently that there would be at least some weapons available on the ship. With the latter in mind, I looked around for Whistle. He wasn't in sight, so I walked back to the command chair and asked Frazzle where he was.
“He in the place where eats,” was the response. I was starting to get used to their English if it could be called that.
“OK. Where is that place?” I responded, realizing that at least my worry about food might be solved with the answer. He simply pointed at a transporter on the left wall. I left the bridge through that exit and found myself in what was obviously a dining hall.
There was a large bank of machines that reminded me of a similar bank of human vending machines. Whistle was squatting on a bench near one of them, consuming some kind of fish-like thing. He'd finished eating before I got close enough to identify it.
Seeing me, he made some unidentifiable noises in his own speech and then pointed at a sub-group of the vending machines, “Dose gives food humans can eats.”
I inspected the displays dubiously. The operation seemed simple. You determined what you wanted and then pressed a button by the item's picture. The dish popped out immediately and, voila, dinner was served. Unfortunately, it wasn't really that good. The one that I selected looked kind of like a bowl of meatballs, but it turned out to be some rather oily vegetables. I tried them, but they weren't anything I'd ever seen before. They didn't taste very good, but I don't like broccoli either.
“Are these from Earth?” I asked.
“No. Dey from other planets like yours. Humans eats those before.”
“Where did those humans come from?”
“Dey captives of Great Ones. Dey all dead now.” He moved his hands back and forth in a negating gesture that somehow conveyed sadness and sympathy at the same time.
Obviously, the Pug-bears had captured enough humans and held them long enough for food to become an issue. My previous conclusion, that the aliens' captives didn't live very long, was apparently incorrect. The Sunnys had been forced to find food for the captive humans and this was to our benefit.
I was assuming that Whistle wouldn't steer me wrong on this issue. I had a moment's hesitation before I started eating, but I was hungry. In the calculus of survival, I knew that I'd have to eat sooner or later. I trusted Whistle enough not to worry too much about the quality of the food.
I didn't finish the vegetables. Dumping the dish in what proved to be an advanced type of garbage can, I inspected the other 'human' vending machines. One served some sort of fish and another yielded up something that looked like yogurt but tasted like meat paste. It was actually rather good and I ate the full serving. I noticed that it was quite filling and I cocked an inquiring eye at the Sunny.
He was sitting quietly, watching me try the food and he instantly caught my meaning.
“Dat meats with other things human bodies need,” he volunteered. “It keep you healthy.”
“It's good, too,” I responded. “Did your people come up with these types of food for humans or do you eat these also?”
“No, we eats other things, not those. We studied human bodies and fixed these foods specially for you.”
Not only were the Sunnys way ahead of us engineering and physics-wise, they were also far advanced in the biological sciences. I couldn't imagine a group of human researchers coming up with food for a strange alien life form, especially a recipe that tasted so good.
I had been worried about water, but that problem was easily solved. There was a surprisingly ordinary sink and faucet assembly beside the machines. It was paired with a human-made paper cup dispenser. When I saw it, I laughed and pointed. Whistle made some noises of his own and then informed me that, in his opinion, humans weren't totally hopeless. He thought the dispenser was a useful design and the Pugs had simply lifted a few of the things in between trying to take over our planet.
Turning to my primary concern, I asked him about weapons. This elicited a series of whistles and clicks that I couldn't make anything of. I moved to mental communication and got the sense that there were plenty of weapons on board. These were stored in a central location.
I didn't think too highly of the idea. My immediate thought was that there should be weapons lockers disbursed in convenient locations, but he indicated that wasn't necessary and sent me a visual of the passage into the ship. There was really only the transporter link that was used. It wasn't like there were numerous ports that could be broken into by boarding crews. Everyone normally came aboard through the transporter and that served as a choke-point that could be easily defended. As we talked, my train of thought was distracted by another idea; could we trust the other Sunnys? I didn't think they were directly antagonistic to us, but there was something about them I didn't quite trust.
We went on a short walk and he showed me the armory. It was a small room that held enough weapons to arm twenty or thirty Pugs. There were plenty of the chemical-powered, poison-splinter shooting handguns, but I was more excited about the five anti-matter rifles that I called 'eraser-guns.' These were just about the ultimate in no-muss, no-fuss hand-held weapons. You could shoot them at anything and it would crackle and disappear. The longer you held the trigger, the larger the effect. The only problem with them was they were often too powerful. I remembered that I'd inadvertently destroyed some of the transporter links by shooting incautiously in the past.
There weren't any of the electo-bolt shooting things. These were larger weapons that required a tripod for support. I supposed they amounted to a sort of crew-served weapon for the Pugs, although a single Pug had taken a shot at my group with one in the past. He'd missed, fortunately. It was probably because the weapon was a little too large for a single individual, even one as strong as a Pug.
Towards the back of the room, I found two things that really made me happy. The first was a case of the anti-matter bombs or grenades since that was their approximate size. These were incredibly powerful little bombs that I'd used to good effect before. They released a wave of anti-matter that caused a very strong implosion when it came into contact with normal matter.
I immediately stuffed two in the pockets of my vest. You just never know when a good bomb will be necessary. It had been quite a while since I'd had one of these things and, under the circumstances, I found their weight very comforting.
The other discovery was a different type of pistol. It was about the size of the splinter-shooters, but it looked like it had more in common with the eraser-rifle. I held one up, displaying it to Whistle. His aversion to violence made it difficult for him to actually look at it, but he glanced at it briefly.
“Dat, whoosh, disappears things,” he muttered, turning away partially, so as not to have to look directly at it. “It same as dose long shooting things.” He waved in the general direction of the rack of eraser-rifles. If it was a pistol version of the anti-matter rifles, it was a very welcome discovery.
I took one of the eraser-rifles and one of the eraser-pistols, finishing off with a splinter-shooter. Together the things didn't weigh as much as my hunting rifle. There was definitely an advantage to the advanced alien weapons. Something struck my mind at that point. I had some difficulty conveying the idea to Whistle verbally, so I gave him a mental visualization of two spaceships shooting at each other. The thought nearly gave him a conniption-fit. His return thoughts were first of vehement denial and then of impossibility.
It turned out that the spaceship wasn't armed. The Pug-bears had encountered no other space-faring races and the idea of space combat hadn't come into their consciousness. Of course, the Sunnys couldn't conceive of such a thing either.
Whistle was somewhat aggravated with me. “You has bad ideas, now I got bad thoughts, too,” he said, with an air of regret.
I felt guilty for giving him the idea of space combat, but it made perfect sense to me. I was only regretful that the ship itself wasn't armed. That was something that I resolved to rectify as quickly as I could.