As Sarah peeled herself off the bulkhead behind her station, she took note of what she knew would be the first repair project she and Richard would need to undertake. “Inertial dampening system not up to fully dealing with FTL acceleration. Check.”
It took the better part of a minute before the system compensated and everyone was able to move freely again.
Still, the ship shook as it traversed space at speeds man had never achieved before. Jack spun around to Sarah, a worried look on his face. “Is she going to fly apart?”
Sarah checked the data screen. “I don’t think so. Shield system adapted to the speed way better than the inertial dampeners. The running shield is at maximum.” She looked out at the rest of them as she spoke. “Before you ask- the running shield also acts like a tourniquet. It keeps things out, but it also maintains structural integrity. We’re fine.” Her next words were spoken only inside her head. “For now.”
Richard eyed the tachyon system carefully, watching for any signs of damage to the physical pieces of the scoop or surrounding systems. That was the real test of what he had created.
“Look,” he had explained to Sarah early in the mission. “I don’t think there’s any real question that faster than light travel is possible. Certainly we have seen that ships can come exponentially close. The Omegans are proof of it. They beat our long range sensors and probes because they’re flying faster than our equipment can follow. We spotted anomalies each time, but never quickly enough to make a difference.”
“I sense there’s a ‘but’ coming on, Richard,” she said.
He smiled. “But the real issue is that the Omegans were, I believe, limiting themselves. They’re extremely long lived. Their ships went as fast as they cared to. In part, I think, because they use actual fuel cells to feed propulsion. The cells are energy based, but they still have to collect that energy. So every once in a while they have to stop or slow down and fuel up.”
Sarah looked skeptical. “In case you forgot, so do we.”
“Not as often,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe more frequently if we were trying to leave the solar system. But with the tachyon scoop, once we drop a particle into the field and absorb its momentum, it’s pretty much perpetual until we eject it. At that point we’ll drop back to regular space and be dependent on fuel. But as long as we ride the scoop in active mode, we’ll be zipping along nicely.”
“The risks?” she asked him, knowing he had to be hiding one last “but”.
“That the scoop tears off in flight. That the speed and energy are so powerful that even the running shield can’t hold it together. If it tears even partially, it could change our course and send us spiraling into a planet or a star.”
She felt a headache coming on that never quite went away.
Richard began to talk but found himself without a voice. He took a swig of water and tried again.
“51 seconds to scoop shutdown,” he rasped at Jack.
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