Entropy Risen (The Syker Key Book 3) Read online

  And very shortly afterwards, they were much, much closer.

  “She’s good. She wants to build a fourth dome dedicated to livestock, so we don’t have to import meat.”

  “Sounds like a good idea.”

  “Yeah, except nobody here is a farmer, so we’d have to find some farmers willing to work up here.”

  John smiled at him. “Leave that to me!”

  Jack knew it wouldn’t be a problem. With news of the engine becoming available, people had literally been flooding Virgin Galactic with calls about where they could sign up, to the point where they’d even set up a new company: Virgin Colonial. He didn’t think the irony was lost on anyone.

  Space was about to become a very busy place, but Jack was still worried about the Draconians. They were still around, but becoming scarce. UFO sightings were significantly down, and the base they had reportedly had on Luna was mysteriously destroyed by asteroid impact.

  Were they gone, or just hiding? Whichever it was, he was just glad to have John on his side.

  ***

  The idea that you create your own reality was a bit of a joke. Except when you died, then it became true, or so Jessica was finding out. Technically, she was in the fourth density, not fifth where the angels tread, and fourth was more of like the regular world, physical, but you could change it at will.

  Crossing into the third density took real effort and energy though. It was like being on Earth and trying to have a conversation with a rock; no matter how loud you yell, that rock’s not going to hear a damn thing you say. More accurately, it will hear, but it won’t understand.

  Which surprised her...stones actually had intelligence. Not much mind you, but it was there. It was one of the things that made things like telekinesis possible. It was like living inside a massive network filled with neurons capable of transmitting every thought.

  Time was another funny thing. Moving through time was like walking, and no more difficult, at least for some. Even for some beings in fourth, time seemed to be rigid, but it was an illusion they were simply unable to overcome. That didn’t mean time was inflexible, quite the opposite. The entire universe could change on a dime, on a whim. On every person’s whim. The complexity was staggering, and staggeringly simple too. Upon each soul bears the actions of an entire universe. Wow, really. Unlimited universes.

  So much she understood that seemed like impossible concepts when she was human. And at the same time, it was so simple. Obvious. Love was not what she imagined, but neither was hate. It was simply the inclination to help others, or not to.

  Jessica knew which she was, and her inclination to help others filled her with energy.

  She was going to need all the energy she could gather, since she had seen the cost of all the teleportation she and John had done. It was literally robbing the fourth density of energy, unfortunately from the creative forces, not the entropic ones. Though they had succeeded in turning away the Draconian World Ship, they had in fact weakened what John had started to call “the forces of good.”

  Every act of teleportation done in the service of others robbed creative energy from the fourth density. Likewise, every act of teleportation done in the service of the self robbed entropic energy, so at least it was balanced. Draconians could no more steal energy from the Sirians than could the opposite happen.

  She could see John’s desperation in her absence, but it had been offset somewhat by the knowledge that she was still alive, albeit transformed and out of reach. But he had asked for help, whatever help she could offer. So Jessica had decided to use as much of her energy as she could to help John, to protect him and replenish the expenditure of all that teleportation.

  Even if it meant using all of her energy in the process.

  ***

  Pan actually got to be the first test pilot for the new engine design. There had been a long list of folks who volunteered to be the first, but given Pan’s talents, the folks in power agreed that having him at the controls was a good idea. The military wasn’t too happy about it, but fortunately it was a private enterprise.

  The ship sat in the New Mexico sun, painted white and gleaming like a piece of limestone sticking out of the sand. It’s construction probably set some sort of record for speed. Having John and Pan helping probably had something to do with that.

  The flight itself was probably going to be anticlimactic, but Pan surrounded himself in a shield anyways, just in case.

  He checked the controls of the Endeavor, the first of the new tugs. If this one worked, Virgin Galactic had another twenty lined up to be manufactured, and SpaceX wasn’t far behind with a larger design, since the engine technology was no longer a secret.

  “I’m activating the drive now,” he said to nobody except the radio in his ear.

  “Roger,” came the reply.

  The tug was about twice the size of a large semi truck & trailer, but only carried about two thirds the cargo. The rest of the space was taken up by the cab, airlock, and most importantly the drive.

  The drive was the real innovation, though Pan knew it had been secretly in use for decades by the military, and millennia by the aliens who had been controlling mankind. It was nothing more than a plasma generator, one that was able to actually manipulate neutrinos, push and pull them in any way demanded by the driver.

  The effect was artificial gravity, and two separate generators were actually used in the ship: One outside, to propel the ship, and one inside, to provide controlled gravity for the occupant. The math had suggested the craft was capable of withstanding over twenty gravities of acceleration. It would actually get the craft from Earth to Mars, depending on their orbits, in anywhere from less than ten to just over fifteen hours.

  The entire frame was made of carbon fibre for strength, which made it very expensive, but it was the only material readily available that could withstand the forces generated by the drive. The hull itself was titanium, with a thin layer of lead sandwiched between to help with radiation shielding. Under normal circumstances the lead wouldn’t be required, since the drive itself had the effect of being able to block all harmful radiation.

  Thankfully the nuclear power plant at the heart of the ship’s system wasn’t a large radiation contributor; it was a simple thorium salt reactor designed by Toshiba, a design they had been trying to market for years that finally found a home. Pan didn’t imagine they had never envisioned it being used in a glorified truck.

  He hit the start switch, and there was a low hum throughout the ship. Within a second, gravity was gone, and Pan was glad to be strapped in. He hated zero gravity, and quickly reached for the controls that enabled the internal gravity.

  “Switching on fake gravity.”

  Another second later and almost normal gravity was restored. That was it. The ship could now be hung upside down or on it’s side but to the occupants they would always feel “down” as being the deck plates. Pan grinned. He’d half expected it not to work, even though he himself had already tested it. Things always tended to go wrong when the world was watching.

  “Control, we have gravity.”

  He looked out at the New Mexico desert, the midday sun hiding all shadow and betraying the distances of objects. He could see Spaceport America, off to his left, gleaming, it’s population doubled in the last few weeks as the prospect of a new space race attracted literally billions of investment dollars. A lot of people were watching his flight.

  “Roger Endeavor. Pad reports your mass is null.”

  That meant the outside drive was working as well. Perfect. Time to pick a direction and throttle up.

  “Control, I’m cranking it up.” He couldn’t resist the familiar language, steadfastly refusing to use the military-grade speak that the space program demanded. Another stab in the back of the insane powers that had held the planet in it’s grip for so long.

  Pan slowly lifted the craft, pointing the nose towards the sky. “Pressing the big red button in three, two, one.”

  He keyed the seq
uence to accelerate, and the craft quickly started climbing, as if falling into the sky. Inside, Pan felt nothing, no acceleration, no indication of movement.

  He knew he could pull sudden right angle turns and it wouldn’t, shouldn’t, have any impact on the vehicle or the occupants, but this test wasn’t about doing anything too radical.

  The ship’s engine was at one gravity, meaning it was truly moving forward as if falling towards Earth. Instead, it continued to accelerate into the sky. In less than a minute it was in space, and Pan entered the key sequence to increase the acceleration to five G. The ship started falling into a hole five times more powerful than Earth’s gravity.

  In less than two minutes he was forced to turn the ship around and use that same gravity well to slow the ship down; halfway to Luna already.

  For someone used to using teleportation, travel was always slow, but as travel went, this was pretty good. It wasn’t long before he was at Luna. He didn’t need to orbit since the Moon’s gravity had no impact on the ship, but he flew around it anyways. He wanted to see the property he’d bought, though it was ridiculous because without the computer to tell him where it was he had no idea exactly what to look for. He knew where it was near though.

  “Control, I am now looking down at the Sea of Tranquility.”

  “Roger Endeavor, reaching the moon in under six minutes is a confirmed new record, by three days.” Pan could hear the laughing and cheering in the background. He smiled.

  The ship worked.

  And the new space age had begun. For the first time in centuries, Pan felt like humanity might have a chance.

  Requiem for a Gambit

  John was amazed at the progress they had made. In five years the human race had no fewer than two hundred and fifty thousand people living off-planet. Many were on Luna, some in the asteroids, and the rest on Mars. A new massive space station was even under construction, and it was going to orbit Hermes, not Earth. It would spin to produce gravity, since artificial gravity was a bit of an energy sink, and would look much like any of the round space stations from science fiction.

  John realized he was living in the age of that very science fiction become reality. Space tourism sprouted up within months of the mining operation, and there were now three companies catering to the growing industry.

  Boeing, who had helped with the construction of the Virgin space tugs, was now retooling their entire operation for the new drive technology, since it was going to apparently make flying safer everywhere, not just in space. Their own fleet of 700 series aircraft were obsolete overnight, and they were trying hard not to be left behind.

  Likewise Airbus started to design and build passenger craft with the same technology, and in typical Airbus fashion, theirs were both larger and more luxurious. For a price.

  Fuel was probably the biggest driver, however. A 747 burned a gallon of precious jet fuel every single second. It was very expensive. In contrast, the thorium salt reactor at the heart of the new power trains was economical; thorium salts were easily extracted from the ground, and were hardly exclusive to any region. So instead of paying for fuel for the trip, you were paying for the service.

  Manufacturing and processing weren’t cheap, which was the only thing saving the old flying craft, but the price of production was already starting to tumble as more firms wanted in on the action. Toshiba was the largest player, but at least fifteen other firms were now either selling or actively developing competing thorium salt reactors. It was going to be a busy market.

  The other thing that had saved the other airlines and given them time to recover was the sudden drop in the price of oil, allowing them to reduce ticket prices to nearly match their technically superior competitors. With perceived demand for oil dropping, consumption actually went up, at least for a time while companies struggled to produce enough thorium reactors.

  As for airliners, Boeing was first out the gate with their 1101, the first commercial thorium salt/gravity drive passenger airliner. Alaska Air was their first customer. They undercut every other carrier by 30%, made a huge profit, and cut travel times by eighty percent. And they were taking it easy. It also make Alaska Air the second airline to go interplanetary (behind Virgin, who had simply retrofitted some of their tugs to carry passengers) since the same Boeing 1101 worked to take passengers to the planets just as easily as to Pittsburgh.

  The countries that embraced the new technologies saw their economies explode; those that dragged their feet, buried in decades of bureaucracy driven by the sociopaths were left stagnant, and even home-grown businesses left for greener pastures; most of Boeing’s construction took place in Peru, while Airbus distributed their facilities in Africa.

  Virgin’s Spaceport America was just the first public space port, and they were in the process of constructing space ports on every continent. Even competitors like SpaceX were using their ports. The very need for a space port was almost non-existent, since the new craft could take off from any existing airport, but many nations found it simpler however to have a single point of entry for space travelers.

  John’s own tug, the fifth that Virgin and Boeing had built, was named “Jessica,” and it had become his home. Converted, in fact, the first space ship to become a personal motor home, though in the past few years a few more had undergone similar conversions, the chairman of Virgin not to be outdone.

  He tried very hard these days not to teleport, since he had been able to sense for some time that Jessica had been making up for the energy he expended. It was relieving and disheartening at the same time; he could sense Jessica was around, and that gave him joy, but that his actions were causing her to work harder, whatever the motivations, caused him concern. And he still missed her dearly.

  John’s last teleportation had been three weeks ago, to attend Zack’s high school graduation, since he hadn’t been able to plan ahead effectively to get there in time. He spent most of his time in the asteroid belt now, on Ceres, planning.

  In the years since receiving his personal space ship, the software had been upgraded three times and the engine once. It was now faster and smoother than ever, able to make the trip from Earth to the asteroid belt in under four hours. Mars, depending on the time of year, took from three to six hours. Short trip indeed.

  And he was hardly the only craft out there. In fact there was so much traffic they had all had to get together to design an interplanetary traffic control system. Gravity drives hadn’t been the only secret technology kept by the military, there were many others, but one in particular was the gravity detectors, and the design of the engines was such that you could typically detect an oncoming craft easily enough, but it was still dangerous. The traffic control system was at least enough to put the minds of the tourists at ease, whatever the misgivings of the miners.

  With all of this, light speed communications wasn’t fast enough. Pan and Arthur had worked with NASA to create IPC, InterPlanetary Comm. Instead of radio waves, it used neutrinos to generate microscopic gravity waves that could be detected on the other side of the galaxy...in theory. It did work at least; John’s own IPC allowed him access to the Internet no matter where he was. It was hardly fast though, barely faster than the dial up Internet of his youth. Enough for voice, not video. Yet anyways. Arthur was convinced they hadn’t even approached the upper limit of it’s capabilities and was working furiously to increase it. Their new traffic control system depended heavily on it.

  It was one thing the Sirians hadn’t been forthcoming about; they didn’t see the value of simply handing over all sorts of technology, and felt the Draconian method of doing just that had caused it’s own problems.

  On a lark, John had taken a day trip out and flown past Voyager 1, temporarily stealing the title of “farthest man-made object from the Solar System”. His pictures of the ancient human craft made every news program in the solar system. It spurred NASA and the ESA, and within a few months they had their own manned tugs heading out deep into interstellar space, taking measuremen
ts of the surrounding areas and confirming the electric universe hypothesis.

  In theory they could keep going. With the new drive, it would take less than two years to reach Alpha Centauri, which was five light years away. Physicists didn’t think it was possible, but the simple fact was they didn’t have to exceed the speed of light to do it, since the gravity propulsion literally changed the local space for the ship. The ship didn’t move, but the gravity well it created was able to be projected out quickly enough that to external viewers only it travelled faster than light. Inside that gravity well, they were only falling as fast as gravity would permit. It was the same method the incoming Sirius World Ship used, though in their case they had chosen to spin the ship to create artificial gravity because it was more efficient, rather than use a secondary gravity propulsion.

  The group on Ceres, whom he spent more time with than anyone else, had actually gone to the trouble of creating their own government and charter, and with the backing of himself, Pan and Arthur and Catherine, the United Nations had agreed to recognize them. Really they had little choice, it was an inevitability, not something that could be swept under the rug.

  Damned fools had even asked John to be their President. He’d accepted, but only after much convincing from Jack. He knew it was just a figurehead position, since his friend was the one doing all the real work. But he considered the crew at Ceres to be his new family, all two hundred and thirty five of them. He had made a point of memorizing all of their names.

  President of the Asteroid Belt. The chess club in New York probably had a bigger membership.

  Corporations were always at risk of owning everything, but Arthur had helped push through legislation that prevented some of it; no corporation could own more than five million tons of cargo capacity, and any corporation that owned cargo ships was banned from owning any mining facility, and vice versa. In addition, no corporation could own more than ten mining stations. They hoped it would prevent the creation of the massive companies that had nearly destroyed the Earth.