Chapter 11

I gave her an analgesic from the infirmary for her sore butt, as sitting in the galley chair was painful. After dinner, we had gone back to our cabin to lie down and watch a movie. We made love, with her on top and fell asleep cuddled together. When I woke up the next morning, Thivkari was once again gone. After using the head, I went up to engineering and found her happily tapping away at the workstation. When she heard me come in, she turned around in her chair. “I found it! I found what’s wrong! Wait! How does it go? I have good news and I have bad news.”

“So taking a break helped?”

She blushed and nodded. “Getting fucked like a slut let me see the problem in a new way, and early this morning I woke up with something new to check.”

I smiled. “Ok, what’s the bad news?”

“The SuperLight core is broken.”

“I knew that. Ok, what’s the good news?”

“No. It’s actually broken. Fractured. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s fractured in multiple places. That’s what the diagnostic numbers are.”

“What? Hang on, what’s the good news, again?”

“The good news is that I can fix it. More bad news is that it will take a long time.”

“Ok, I’m confused. How is it fractured?”

She sighed. “How much do you know about the core?”

“It’s a five km length of superconductive wire wound around a superconductive core.”

“Yes. Have you ever made an electric magnet?”

I stopped. “Like, copper wire wound around an iron nail?”

“Yes. In simple terms, the iron core acts to focus the magnetic force. In the SuperLight core, the superconductive core focuses the magnetic waves generated by the rapidly changing current flowing through the wire.”

“Sure.” This was never explained in the starship captaining courses that I took. I only knew about the superconductive components because it was given as an example in high school physics of a practical application of superconductivity. I only knew the length of the wire because it was called out in the ship’s specifications.

She looked annoyed. “Do you really not know how it works?”

I laughed. “I’m the captain. You’re the engineer.”

She sighed. “What about physics? Forces are equal and cancel each other out?”

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction?” I asked. She nodded. “That’s Newton’s Third Law.”

“Ok. What about the relationship between electricity and magnet?”

I remembered this one from high school physics. “Faraday’s Law? A current moving through a conductor induces a magnetic field, and a magnetic field moving through a conductor induces a current?”

She nodded again. “Yes. What about the relationship between magnetic and gravity?”

My physics teacher had only mentioned Tarja’s Law, mainly to use the Tarja threshold of 3.7THz as an example of a physical constant. “Magnetic fields oscillating at higher than 3.7 trillion oscillations per second will begin to affect gravitic fields. I never learned the equations, though.”

She gestured dismissively. “That doesn’t matter. The inverse is true: gravity can affect an oscillating magnet field. It can push back. But the effect is proportionate to the power of the field. A gravatic drive utilizes the pushback to create thrust. But a SuperLight core translating a ship can be torn apart by a strong gravity field. This is why you need to be away from a star when you engage the drive. SuperLight communications don’t require much power to translate photons, so those can be used from orbit around a planet as the pushback is minimal.”

I nodded, then shrugged. “I guess that makes sense. I just know that the computer won’t let me engage the drive this close to a star.”

Her ears twitched with annoyance. “So, the current in the coil creates a magnetic field. The field creates a current in the core. The current moves through the core and creates a magnetic field. Those fields are in harmony, but they produce a gravity field that pushes against...” she looked at her survival computer for a translation, “spacetime?” I nodded. “Right. Space pushes back. The ship has mass, and mass creates gravity, and gravity pushes back. But not just the ship. The nearby star. Passing asteroids and other interstellar bodies. Too much mass, and the system will shut down to avoid damage. But, exposure over time puts stress on the core. It causes microscopic fractures.” She pointed at the terminal. “You recalibrate every so often because those small fractures cause interference in the fields. The computer needs to know about them so it can adjust how it modulates the power to keep the field in harmony. Interference can create more force, which causes bigger fractures.” She tapped a few keys. “This was the test you ran when you dropped out of SuperLight, and this was the one you ran when you landed. If I subtract the gravatic vector fields out, I’m left with the same results. These numbers are a set of vectors that describe interference in the field coming from...” she tapped a few more commands into the terminal, and the display showed a diagram of the SuperLight drive with a highlighted... something ... running axially down the middle, “the core,” she finished.