Sumatra wrote:Loving the story unfolding. Seems to be coming to a head. Guessing Centrum secretly controls all Temar's slaves, not just Elenis?
Normally religion mixed into science fiction doesn't work for me, glad to see it turn out quickly. Couple of confusing points. What was with Sister Jane's tongue? All the sisters were modified like that? Do the Themiskirans have a presence in Elysia?
-Sumatra
The tongue? Temar getting his freak on when he changed her. Yes, all the other nuns were similarly modified.
No, the Themiskirans don't, officially. I have a 3D map of the stars within 75 light years of Earth which is the basis of human space in this setting (with some minor tweaks, such as some fictional stars to allow jump routes where I need them). In the map, both Themiskira (Tau Ceti) and Novaroma (Delta Pavonis) are "below" the Sol system (Earth), with Elysia (Chi 1 Orionis) off to the side. Elysia is near the start of a loop of stars that runs up and "over" to stars "above" Sol. Because of the way the stellar hypertunnel links are situated, in order for someone from Themiskira to ship something to the "other" side of Sol, they would either be forced to go through Novaroman systems or by Alliance-controlled systems (based on Sol). The Great Bear Loop (so named because it starts "above" Sol in stars in the constellation of Ursa Major) allows the Themiskirans (or someone wanting to go the other way) to go "up and around" the Alliance and Novaromans. It's long, but very sparsely populated and mainly consists of stars that are of no interest to anyone.
Elysia, while not on the Great Bear Loop directly, is off to the side of the "lower" end of it, and as an inhabited (and fairly corrupt) planet, makes a good place for smugglers to do business and catch some R&R.
Hmm...some background about the setting.
Humans and the parahuman species based on humans use a type of hyperspace travel. The arties may have their own methods aside from using the hypertunnels, but they don't tell anyone. If stars over a certain minimum mass are within 8 light years or so of each other, a hyperspace tunnel (hypertunnel) forms between them. The entrance to a hypertunnel is a single-dimensional point in space called a node: how far it is from the star depends on the mass of the star. The greater the mass, the farther it is away from the star. For our solar system, the nodes to nearby stars are located at about 30 astronomical units out from Sol.
Since a node is a single-dimensional point (a form of singularity), objects obviously can't fly into it, however, the node has a region roughly a few light-seconds around it where a ship with a hyper engine can "tear open" normal space and enter a hypertunnel to the other star. The engines use "pseudo-gravity" (or "p-grav"), a force which they also use to drive the ships, create artificial gravity (or antigrav), forcefields, weapons, and the like, to create the distortion they use to enter the tunnel. Once in the tunnel, it's a one-way trip. They
will emerge at the other end without any further effort on their part. The amount of time (from the ship's point of view) spent in the tunnel depends on how close the ship was to the node when it entered the hypertunnel: the closer, the faster the trip. Theoretically, a ship sitting directly on the top of the node will spend the minimum amount of time in transit.
However, there are two factors which cause a ship never to have the theoretical minimum time, one safety related, one practical. While a ship can
enter a tunnel anywhere within the node's sphere of influence, it will always
exit directly on the node at the destination. So a ship wanting to enter a hypertunnel will keep some minimum distance away from the node to make sure there's no collision with someone suddenly emerging. You can think of a hypertunnel as sort of like a funnel: there's a big, wide end that you can pour stuff into, but a very small end where it comes out.
(A ship in a hypertunnel, incidentally, is totally cut off from the "normal" universe. Each ship forms its own unique hypertunnel where it is isolated from anything outside it's p-grav drive field.)
The second factor is that the node is affected by gravity. While the node from Sol to Wolf 359 will always be about 30 AU from Sol and in the direction where Wolf 359 is now (which might not be where it appears to be: the light from that star shows where it was 7.8 years ago), it, for lack of a better word, "jiggles" due to the gravity of not just the Sun but the planets and other junk orbiting around it. This makes it extremely hard to locate precisely at any given second, which means that a ship wanting to enter a tunnel doesn't know for certain exactly how far it is away from the node until the instant it enters the tunnel, and then they can figure out exactly how long they will be in transit. This is also a good reason for a ship entering a tunnel to keep a respectful distance away from where they think the node is when the enter a tunnel. In stars that are "barren" (very little in orbit) it's much easier than with stars with crowded systems.
This has obvious military consequences: you know, generally, where an invading ship
must appear, which gives fixed defenses an opportunity to be ready. (Note that Temar wants the system defense command codes so he can seize control against internal threats if/when his puppets launch a coup. Now why would
Centrum need them, hmm?) On the other hand, the quasi-random nature of entry--you don't know how long the trip will take until after you've already passed the point of no return--makes multiple-ship invasions practically impossible: you can't coordinate a fleet's timing, and it would be annoying for the battleship that was supposed to cover your command ship's arrival to show up only to discover the command ship had arrived the day before and had already been blown up.
Lessee, what else...ships are limited to sublight speeds (roughly 10% speed of light maximum) in normal space, which means a great deal of the time spent traveling between stars when there's multiple jumps is actually spent in normal space accelerating, cruising, and then decelerating between a solar system's nodes. This can take days, even at maximum acceleration.
The 8 light year limit on hypertunnels (and a certain minimum mass of the stars involved to be for form a tunnel in the first place) also means (a) there may be only a limited number of ways to get from here to there, and (b) you might not be able to get "there" at all. For instance, from Sol the only way to get somewhere else is Sol -> Wolf 359, Sol -> Alpha Centauri A/B, Proxima Centauri -> Ross 154, or Sol -> Bernard's Star -> Ross 154. (This is why I had to actually invent some stars to link up some routes). These means the shortest route between two stars might involve what looks like going in circles and backtracking.
The route the
Valkyrie takes from Earth to Elysia was Sol > Wolf 359 > DX Cancri > Luyten's Star > G099-049 > Ross 47 > LHS 212 > Chi 1 Orionis. Chi 1 Orionis is only 28 light years from Earth, but the ship had to cover over 47 light years to actually get there.