Dark Omega

CHAPTER 23 - RIGHT OF CONSCRIPTION

The attack cruiser Oculus Draco—literally 'the Eye of the Celestial Dragon,' as opposed to the Tarot, the Oculus Draconis, which meant 'the Celestial Dragon's all-seeing vision'—accelerated at a steady fifty Gees.

The ship had been at rest relative to the Epiphanet system's primary star when the call from Xerza came through. They had been underway for slightly less than sixteen hours, and their velocity was now about ten percent of the speed of light. This feat was only possible thanks to the techno-magic of the Technocracy. Inertial dampening reduced the ship's mass to a mere fraction of its real tonnage, and the Casimir drive generated thrust without the need for reaction mass.

Another seventy hours and they would reach cruising speed—half the speed of light. At that rate, it would take them a mere thirty-four thousand years to get to Nuovo Venezia. A blink of an eye on the cosmic scale, but somewhat impractical for humans. Even if they could keep accelerating all the way to lightspeed and thereby enter the marvelous realm of time dilation, compressing their journey to mere centuries of relative time, the same thirty-four millennia would still pass in the outside universe.

Fortunately, the technomancers had a solution to this seemingly insurmountable barrier to interstellar civilization. As soon as the ship was far enough out, Agrippina, their helmswoman, would wrap the cruiser in a bubble of causality—for all practical purposes, an event horizon, like that surrounding a black hole. Information could not pass over this threshold, and therefore, the ship's velocity could not be precisely known—effectively recreating quantum uncertainty on a macroscopic scale.

Within the bubble, they were going half the speed of light, but relative to the rest of the universe, they could travel many hundreds of times faster than conventional physics allowed. Alpha Centauri, the closest habitable system to Earth, could be reached in days with a translight drive. The Epiphanet to Nuovo Venezia trip would take only a few generations.

The final part of the puzzle was the collapsar gates, stable wormhole nexuses—created from naturally-occurring black holes by the Revenants—that allowed an object to reach near-infinite speeds relative to the physical universe. If a ship hit a collapsar at the right velocity and angle, it could even manage to catch another collapsar further out and return to the physical universe.

Missing your egress point was not advisable: you'd be caught in interdimensional space until such time as you hit another collapsar by chance. Space was infinite, so it would happen eventually, but you might have to wait a few million or billion years.

Epiphanet had a very conveniently located collapsar, a mere three thousand astronomical units—half a light-year—from the primary. In less than forty-eight hours, the attack cruiser would plunge across its event horizon, disappear from the universe, and reemerge, moments later, hundreds or thousands of light-years away. Several such jumps would be needed to make it all the way to Nuovo Venezia. A couple of weeks, maybe as little as eight days, was all it would take thanks to a well-placed string of these gateways.

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I am the Harbinger. I am the Wrath. I am the fiery breath of the Dragon.

Lord-Commander Kaminsky—also known as Asset Sigma Draconis—again floated in perfect weightlessness within the solitary confines of the psychic null-tank. His two-meter plus frame was curled into a fetal position, knees touching his forehead, arms tightly wrapped around his legs. Freed from the constraints of gravity, his naked body spun ever so slowly without ever touching the walls of the chamber.

The tank had been a gift from Venera Romanov, a particularly grateful—and well-connected—technomancer. In all of the Successor Kingdoms, there were only a handful of people qualified to make such artifacts. It had been constructed according to the most exacting standards, and no expense had been spared when it came to ornamentation.