Discovery: Prologue

From Star Frontiers Network

Current revision as of 19:25, 2 February 2011

“Raptor, this is Dauntless,” the radio crackled to life with the voice of the Dauntless's captain. “We've started to accelerate toward your position and will be engaging the dampening screen shortly.” As he spoke, the monitors on the Raptor began to register the Dauntless's motion. “Try to hit us if you can,” he added with a laugh.

“Copy that, Dauntless,” came the good-natured reply from the Raptor's captain, “You can't beat the laws of physics, son, we'll nail you on the first shot.”

This was to be the first full scale, real-world scenario test of the new Dauntless class scout ship. All other tests to date had been mocked and staged. This time, no one but the Dauntless knew what the planned maneuvers were to be. It was as much a test of the way the Raptors's weapon systems responded to the Dauntless's new engines as much as a test of the StarTech Dampening Field.

Everyone watched the tactical display as the Dauntless closed the distance. Light travel time was minimal, just a few tenths of a second between the ships, so the uncertainty band around the Dauntless's location was very small. Allison had to agree with the Raptor's captain, it was very unlikely that the Raptor's gunner would miss. There just wasn't anywhere for the Dauntless to go.

Dr. Allison Durrant was on board the JSS Raptor, the cruiser class ship in charge of the test, as an observer. An original member of the theoretical design team for the new defensive screen, she had been involved in the design of the Dampening Field system from the very beginning. After the design had been completed, she had transferred over to the engineering team that had actually built the system. Of everyone, she probably had the best working knowledge of how the thing was supposed to work, both in theory and in practice.

Just before the Dauntless entered the effective range of the Raptor's weapon, the radio came to life again. “Engaging the shield now.” The tactical display showed the Dauntless turning, trying to add some uncertainty to it's direction vector just as it entered weapons range. And then it vanished, completely disappearing from the display.

“What the ...?” cried out the technician monitoring the video feed from the telescope trained on the Dauntless. There was stunned silence on the Raptor's bridge for a couple of heartbeats before pandemonium broke loose.

“Dauntless, this is Raptor, come in Dauntless,” the captain started calling over the radio. “Dauntless, this is Raptor, do you copy? Over.” Switching off the radio, he started asking questions and issuing orders. “Radar do you have anything?”

“Negative, sir, the screen is clear. One second she was there and the next she was gone. It doesn't even look like there is any debris.”

“Crank the power up to maximum. I want a return on anything in that area,” the captained ordered.

“Roger, sir. Commencing scan now.”

The captain turned his attention to other areas. “Energy sensors, what have you got?”

“Nothing, sir. Same story here. We had a full spectrum read on Dauntless as she started to enter weapon range. We showed a brightening to one side as she maneuvered and exposed more of her engines. Then there was an intense flash of energy across the spectrum followed by the screen going dark. No residual energy of any sort, just empty space. We thought for a second the system malfunctioned but we ran a diagnostic and it checked out and we can see the Condor just fine.”

“Same instructions for you,” the captained ordered after hearing the report, “Go to maximum sensitivity and report on anything you find.”

“Yes, sir.”

It took Allison a little longer to respond to the sudden change of events as her mind was trying to process and analyze what she had seen. Like the telescope technician, she too had been watching the optical video feed from the Raptor's primary two meter telescope. It just somehow seemed more real to her than the tactical display with all its figures and statistics.

As the “Engaging the shield now” call had come in, she had seen Dauntless turn, main engines still blazing to put some cross field displacement into its velocity vector. That wasn't unusual, she'd seen that before in other tests, it was a typical combat move. She had seen the defensive shield spring into existence as it was activated by the Dauntless crew. It had a faint light blue optical component that she had seen hundreds of times before in development tests.

And then something strange had happened. It was barely perceptible, but Allison had seen the field operate too many times and was sure she had seen it. As soon as the field sprang fully to life, it was streaked with deep violet ribbons. This held for the briefest instant and then it flashed blindingly bright. The monitor had saturated and Allison had blinked and turned away from the display to clear the bright light from her eyes. When she looked back, the Dauntless was gone. It had vanished from the image.

Her first thought was that there was an explosion. But then she would have expected to see debris of which there wasn't any. Her next thought was that the telescope has lost it's tracking but that wasn't true either as the background star field hadn't changed. There were only three stars visible and they were still exactly where they were before. The Dauntless seemed to have just vanished.

Which took her back to her first idea, but the Dauntless hadn't blown up. That much was certain from all the sensor readouts she could see around the room. Radar, energy sensors, optical and infrared telescopes were all cranked up to maximum sensitivity and magnification and were scouring the area of space where the Dauntless was last seen. There was literally nothing there. No ship, no debris, nothing. Everyone was working frantically, trying to get some sort of detection of anything by any means but it was becoming rapidly apparent that that Dauntless was gone.

She sat at her station on the bridge for a few more minutes as the Raptor's crew tried fruitlessly to raise or locate the Dauntless. As she watched the empty sensor scans continue to come in, her mind wandered back to what she had seen in the telescopic view. What has caused the modulation? Had there been any effects detected by the other sensors? What was different this time?

It wasn't long before she decided that there was nothing left to be gained by staying. It may have been a bit cynical, but all that was left was to gather up what sensor data they could and head home. She keyed her console to store all the data from all sensors for the time period corresponding to the vanishing of the Dauntless and make it available at her workstation in her cabin. With that she got up to head out the door before all the questions started that she, as the lead of the Dampening Field system team, couldn't answer. She needed time, and somewhere quiet, to think.

Just as she reached the door, she was stopped by a hand on her arm. It was the first officer. “Dr. Durrant, what ...” he started.

She cut him off. “I don't know what happened,” she said, knowing what his question was. “I saw something but I need to think about this and look at the sensor data. And I need quiet. You guys are going to be pretty busy up here for the next little while and I'll just be in the way. I'll be in my room working on this. Just make sure I have access to all the data.” With that she pushed pass him and left, taking the elevator down to her cabin.

It was a long trip back to Jord. As the expert on the defensive screen, everyone was looking to her for answers she just didn't have. As far as she could tell from the telemetry the Dauntless had been sending, everything had worked flawlessly, there was no indication of any sort of malfunction or anomaly. Everything was normal right up to the point where she had visually noticed the field modulation. Beyond that, silence. No data at all.

At least she knew the visual modulation she had seen was real. It was clearly visible in the slow motion playback of the telescope feed. The energy sensors also confirmed that something had happened. Directly correlated with the modulation she had seen there was a corresponding shift in the energy spectrum being emitted to a higher energy output by about a factor of two. Then it went off the charts for the briefest moment, a few microseconds at most before there was nothing.

She poured over the telemetry and sensor data almost non-stop on the trip back looking for clues. As far as she could tell, there was nothing in this test that hadn't been done before. It was during dinner one night about three days after the accident, when a casual comment by another engineer triggered an idea.

His job had been to monitor the performance of the Dauntless's new Enigma engines. He had commented about the energy field used by the engines to achieve their high efficiency. This sparked a thought when she realized that maybe some interaction of the two energy fields had had some unexpected effect. As far as she knew, nothing had been observed during tests near Jord but she was at a dead end everywhere else. And with her degree in quantum field theory, this was right up her alley. As her mind churned over the idea, she got more and more excited. It was all she could do not to just bolt from the mess hall and race back to her room and in the end she lost that battle.

Once there she had gotten right to work. The two systems had been designed and built by two completely different companies. Her company, StarTech, had built the Dampening Field. The new Enigma engines had been built by Double-E, Evanston Enterprises. They both used some cutting edge theoretical physics to achieve their desired results. As far as she knew there was never a study done on how they might interact. All that existed was data from the trials near Jord and the data from the disastrous test they had just witnessed. A quick query of the ship's computer confirmed that there was no such data on-board.

Next she fired off a pair of queries via radio to Jord to search the networks there. The first was to look for any information on studies of the two fields together. She wasn't expecting that query to return any results but you never knew.

The second query was for any publications and data on the theory and operation of the field in the new drives. She knew the details of the actual implementation in the engines would not be available as that was proprietary information for Double-E. However, it was quite likely that the physical theory behind the implementation had been published in a scientific journal. That was actually what she was interested in anyway and there was a good chance of getting the information.

Because of their distance from the planet, it would be a few minutes at least before she got a response on her queries. While she waited, she pulled up the mathematics for the defensive shield theory and started to review them. After about twenty minutes, she got her query results back. As she suspected, no one had done any sort of theoretical analysis of the interaction of the two systems. This was not surprising since they were developed by different companies. And, as she hoped, the details of the theory behind the quantum field that made the engines work had been published. She pulled that data into her computer and settled back to read.

It was several hours later before she finished and she realized that she was both famished and tired. Looking at the clock, she realized that she had read through the night. “Not my most productive time of day,” Allison thought to herself, “but at least now I know where to start.” After a shower, breakfast and a short nap, Allison attacked the problem once again.

Adding the equations that described the engine's field to those of the defensive shield, she started to work out what effects they would have on each other when one was operating inside the other. It took most of the trip back to tease out the beginnings of a stable solution, but by the time the Raptor docked, she was beginning to understand some of the possibilities. And if she was correct, the implications were staggering.

As she felt the Raptor begin to maneuver into its dock at the station, Allison stared at her monitor which showed the most probable solution. The answer was simply mind-boggling. She looked up, her gaze landing on the last image of the Dauntless which she had taped to her wall. “Where did you go?” She asked the image, “and did you survive the trip?”