Wil McCarthy - Lost in Transmission

acknowledgments

With thanks to Kathee Jones and Laurel Bollinger, who insisted this part of the story could not be

skipped over, and to Anne Groell and Rich Powers and Gary Snyder, who helped give it shape, and to

Cathy, whose influence is more pivotal than she sometimes suspects. Thanks also to Paul F. Dietz and

Malcom Longair for help with the astrophysics of condensed matter, to John H. Mauldin for his

authoritative book on starships, and to Chris McCarthy for his data on Barnard’s Star.

This story rests on a foundation of ideas built up over many years, with the help of dozens of people

who’ve been copiously cited for it elsewhere. Nevertheless, special thanks are owed to Shawna

McCarthy, Mike McCarthy, Vernor Vinge, Scott Edelman, Chris Schluep, Anne Groell, Bernard

Haisch, Richard Turton, and Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

Any errors in this book are, I assure you, the printer’s fault.

By Wil McCarthy

Aggressor Six

Flies from the Amber

The Fall of Sirius

Murder in the Solid State

Bloom

The Collapsium

The Wellstone

Lost in Transmission

appendix A

in which an appendix is provided

engineering issues

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On the subject of his engines, Money Izolo waxed loquacious. “Deutrelium burns clean, sir—only

charged particles are produced, so we can steer them out the back with electric fields. Meaning there’s

no radiation hazard to the crew, in theory. But there’s impurities, yah? Teeny little bits of the ship that get

mixed in with the fuel slurry. These cause side reactions, releasing stuff like high-energy neutrinos, which

convert some fraction of the electrons in the exhaust plasma into pions, which are harder to stop. That’s a

problem, a danger, that never goes away. I could use a whole person full-time, just monitoring the pion

flux.”

Conrad smirked. “A true pioneer, eh?”

But Money missed the pun and just looked at him blankly for a moment before continuing. “When we’re

nonpropulsive, the demands on the reactor will be a lot less, and a lot steadier. Lighting, heating, life

support . . . Those are predictable loads. Still, data processing can take a lot of power when the

hypercomputers get large enough. Working on a tough problem they can fill this whole wall, with the heat

sinks glowing red from dissipated information, which is the same thing as heat. And we expend about one

hundred watts continuously on waste management, mostly dust.”

Conrad’s eyebrow went up. “Dust?”

“Yah, there are mechanical parts on this ship: fans, bearings, hinges, and seals. Stuff like that. It’s all

subject to mechanical wear. And the stuff that rubs off winds up mostly in the atmosphere, as a

nanoparticle smog which settles out on surfaces. And to the extent that we have people onboard, out of

fax storage, there are always shed skin cells, and hair, and what have you. People shed an incredible

amount of mass over the course of a month. Almost half a kilogram per person, which is more than the

weight of your hand. Yah, I know, it’s disgusting.

“Anyways, the wellstone bucket-brigades that stuff to the nearest fax machine for disposal, but it takes a

certain amount of energy and computing to do that, see? And inside the fax there’s a sorting penalty.

We’re fighting entropy itself. To turn a kilogram of dust into a kilogram of buffer mass sorted by atomic

number, you need as much energy as you’d get from burning a thousand birthday candles. On a planet,

that process happens naturally, powered by sunlight, and the fact that it’s wickedly inefficient doesn’t

matter. But here it’s a part of our daily maintenance. Like holding back the tide with a mop.”

“I thought entropy always increased.”

“It does, yah. All you can do is push it off somewheres else. With enough energy, you can reduce it

locally, but there’s a larger increase in the rest of the universe. It has to be that way, right? Or else life

and machinery wouldn’t be possible at all. But entropy is the great bill collector; it always catches up,

oozing around every barrier. It’ll find us in the end.”

“How comforting.”

“Isn’t it? And then there’s the occasional juking maneuver—we’ll be in Sol’s Oort cloud for another

thirty years, and later on we’ll be in Barnard’s for ten. Juking takes energy, and requires a minimum

reactor temperature. But yah, I think most of that can be handled automatically.”

Conrad ran his hand along the wall, feeling the flat, smooth texture of the wellstone. He tried to imagine

the electrical potentials in there, dancing as oversized pseudoatoms flexed their orbital “arms” to pass a

dust grain along. “That’s interesting about the sorting penalty,” he said. “I’ve never heard anything like

that before.”

Return to text.

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astrogation issues

Said Robert M’Chunu on the subject of getting lost: “You remember the term ‘drunkard’s walk’?”

“No,” Conrad answered.

“Really? I thought you were one of the navigators onViridity . Drunkard’s walk is where you get

random, quantum-level noise on a rate sensor. This is inevitable; no sensor is free of it. So you’ve got

multiple rate sensors, each with its own random noise. This is fortunately very small, but you add up your

rates over time to get your orientation, and suddenly you’re accumulating and then squaring those errors.

So they grow exponentially. If we let ours drift for six months, then the orientation we compute is

complete gibberish. Six months is a long time for a planetary voyage. A really long time. But out here, it’s

nothing.

“Our Cartesian location—the XYZ of it—is even worse, because there you’re integrating from

acceleration to velocity to position, which cubes your errors. Of course you can always get a fixed

reference for orientation, from the stars themselves. There are bright ones, distant ones, with close to

zero proper motion. They’re fixed against the sky, even though we’re moving very fast. Those make

excellent references, and they keep our attitude numbers sane. Downrange velocity we can get from the

reference pulsars, which are neutron stars with very precisely known rotation rates. They flash like

beacons, and we can measure the Doppler shift to obtain a fairly accurate velocity.

“But cross-range, perpendicular to our direction of travel, our references are poorer, and our precision

is a lot lower. Just about the only lateral references we have are Sol and Barnard themselves. We’re

running a straight-line course between them, so their proper motion should be zero. They shouldn’t drift

against the background stars, not at all. So we look for very tiny motions, and compensate when we see

them. But even on a good day that leaves us with velocity errors of walking speed or higher. And those

errors are integrated to get position. You see the problem? Garbage in, garbage-cubed out. That’s

navigation for you.”

Return to text.

pressing problems

“Pressing neubles isn’t so easy,” Money said to Conrad against the backdrop of the hypermass. “If you

just wrapped a blob of neutronium in an ordinary diamond, you’d get an explosion. The sad truth of it is,

those neutrons would slip right through the diamond lattice, because there’s nothing to hold them in. Pull

this mass away from the black hole and you’d have the same problem: no confinement.”

“Well how do you make a neuble then?” Conrad objected. He had seen it done. He’d seen a neuble

with his own two eyes: a two-centimeter sphere of diamond with . . . something inside. The color was

difficult to describe: somewhere between light gray and mother-of-pearl and shiny silver superreflector.

Money chuckled. “It’s one of those things, sir, that seem really simple until you try ’em. At the kind of

pressures we can achieve industrially, we get only slightly past the drip line, which is the point where the

neutrons start to condense. Where the electrons and protons are squeezed into neutrons, you see? They

don’t want to lose their identity that way. They fight it.

“I don’t know about a neutron star or anything, but the neutroniumwe make is only about fifty percent

neutrons by mass. Mixed in with that you’ve got superfluid protons and ordinary conduction electrons

moving close to lightspeed, which is equivalent to a very, very high temperature. They want to fly

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energetically off into space, yah? This creates a phenomenal outward pressure, over and above the

density of the neutronium itself. So the first thing you’ve got to do is pull the electrons out, and isolate

them from the protons with a superinsulator.”

“Which diamond is not,” Conrad said. Because he did know some things about the behavior of

materials.

“Which diamond is not, right. Actually, the insulator isn’t a physical substance at all, or not precisely one.

It’s more like a quantum state which forbids the electrons from being on the other side of the barrier.

Anyway, once you’ve got protons and neutrons on the inside, and relativistic electrons whizzing around

on the outside, you’ve got what amounts to a gigantic atom. But it’s unstable, yah? The attraction

between the protons and electrons has a tendency to hold the thing together, but it’s powers of ten

weaker than the outward pressure of all those neutrons, which desperately want to fly apart. It’s the

mother of all atomic nuclei, and large nuclei are always unstable.”

“Meaning what?” Conrad asked. “That neubles can’t exist? You’re not making sense, Money.”

“Oh, they can exist, all right. But they’ve got to be a particular size. An atom is just a really small piece

of neutronium, yah? Most potential atoms don’t exist in the real universe, because they’d be unstable.

Too big, too squishy. But stability islands occur all up and down the periodic table, and there’s a strong

one centered on atomic number 1038. That’s a billion-ton atom, you see, and its mass equates to the

Schwarzchild radius of a proton-sized black hole, which is a magic number. Gravitic engineering is full of

numbers like that. Anyway, ‘stability island’ is a relative term, because the thing still wants to decompose

in a couple of picoseconds. It still wants to explode. But we’ve brought the pressures down into the

realm that diamond can withstand.That’s how a neuble is made.”

Return to text.

about the author

Engineer/novelist/journalist Wil McCarthy is acontributing editor forWired magazine and the

science columnist for the SciFi Channel, where his popular “Lab Notes” column has been running since

1999. A lifetime member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, he has been nominated

for the Nebula, Locus, AnLab and Theodore Sturgeon awards. His short fiction has graced the pages of

Analog, Asimov’s, Wired, SF Age, and other major magazines and anthologies, and his novels include

theNew York Times Notable BookBloom,Amazon.com ’s “Best of Y2K”The Collapsium (a national

bestseller) and, most recently,The Wellstone .

Previously one of those “guidance is go” people for Lockheed Martin Space Launch Systems, and later

an engineering manager for Omnitech Robotics, McCarthy is currently the Chief Technology Officer for

Galileo Shipyards, an aerospace research corporation with projects ranging from rockets to high-altitude

balloons to quantum nanoelectronics. He can be found online atwww.wilmccarthy.com .

appendix C

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technical notes

wellstone

For those readers only now joining the series, the programmable “wellstone” material which pervades it

may seem a bit startling. However, it’s drawn for the most part from established science: other than mass,

the observable properties of matter are determined by the electron clouds surrounding the atoms and

molecules. By confining electrons in approximately atom-sized spaces, it’s possible to replicate these

properties, or to produce temporary new “elements” which could never occur in nature. Anyone

interested in such programmable materials should check out my nonfiction book on the subject:Hacking

Matter (Basic Books, March 2003, ISBN 0-465-04429-8).

invisibility

Near-perfect invisibility is a technically feasible (though power-hungry) application for programmable

materials. Indeed, if computing power continues its relentless advance, then a form of “stealth fabric” may

be achievable even with mid-twenty-first century technology. Anyone interested can look up myWired

article on the subject athttp://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/pwr_invisible.html

The illusion will work under most circumstances if the material can emit light as bright as the sky, as well

as the light reflecting from the ground and other objects. This presents a challenge during daylight,

however, since the sun is around 20,000 times brighter than the sky around it. Stealthed warriors will cast

shadows if their fabric’s light sources are unable to match this brightness, because the light shining

“through” them will appear dimmer than the sunlight falling around their edges.

deutrelium

This is my own name for a material consisting of equal numbers of deuterium (hydrogen with one extra

neutron) and helium 3 (helium with one missing neutron) atoms. Although3 He is rare on Earth itself, it’s

quite common throughout the universe, in gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn. It’s favored by fusion

energy enthusiasts (particularly armchair starship designers) because when fused with deuterium, its

reaction products are all charged particles, which can be contained with magnetic or electric fields. Other

fusion reactions are either less energetic, more difficult to ignite, or produce neutrons or gamma rays

which present a radiation hazard. Other than antimatter, deutrelium is the likeliest fuel for practical

starships.

Of course, without ertial shielding these could be nowhere near as large asNewhope .

the planets of barnard

In the 1960s, astronomer Peter Van de Kamp claimed to have discovered, in the wobbling motion of

the stars, a pair of gas giants in circular orbits around Barnard, with periods of twelve and twenty-six

years. Since both alleged bodies were slightly smaller than Jupiter, it now seems clear that his instruments

and methods were not sensitive enough to make this detection, although his observations continued, and

he remained adamant about the discovery until his death in 1995. Meanwhile, George Gatewood

published a number of papers—the most recent in the year of Van de Kamp’s death—detailing the

upper mass limits for Barnard planets based on theabsence of a conclusive wobble in images taken of the

star. However, the planets claimed by Van de Kamp fall within Gatewood’s limits, and thus were not

disproven per se.

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In 2002 and 2003 I corresponded with an astronomer named Chris McCarthy (no relation to me that I

know of), who’d been patiently compiling Doppler data on Barnard. He assured me that given everything

he knew, a terrestrial planet like Sorrow was entirely plausible, though of course not provable with

current technology. He had other measurements which promised to detail the orbits of any large gas

giants that existed around the star, but as of this mid-2003 writing his results remained unpublished, and

therefore politely secret. However, a related paper, “The low-level radial velocity variability in Barnard’s

star” by Kurster et al.,Astronomy and Astrophysics, v.403, p.1077–1087 (2003), tightens

Gatewood’s maximums with an upper mass limit of 0.87 Jupiter masses between 0.017 and 0.98 AU

(8.5 to 488 light-seconds) and 3.1 Neptune masses in the “habitable zone” between 0.034 and 0.082

AU (17 to 41 light-seconds).

Interestingly, this still leaves room for Van de Kamp’s planets. For the purposes of this story, I opted for

the somewhat romantic notion that Van de Kamp was exactly (if flukishly) correct. (“I know of nothing to

rule this out,” Chris McCarthy reassured me. “You can certainly let your imagination set the limits.”)

Thus, one of the planets is named after Van de Kamp and the other after Gatewood, with the small inner

planets—discovered much later and with minimal human intervention—being, like the majority of comets

and asteroids here in our Old Modern Sol system, nameless. I would have loved to have named a planet

after Chris McCarthy as well, but wanted to avoid the appearance that I was naming it after myself or,

nepotistically, after someone in my extended family. I did name the system’s first and only shipyard after

Martin Kurster.

Given the small size of this system I’ve also abandoned the Earth-centric AU in favor of the light-minute

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as a planetary measuring stick. Note that P2, with its thick greenhouse atmosphere, falls just outside the

habitable zone defined by Kurster for Earthlike planets. A comparison of the Sol and Barnard systems

follows.

The radius of Barnard is 0.4 light-seconds. Coincidentally, this makes the star appear 1.00 degree wide

in the skies of Sorrow—almost exactly twice the size of Sol in the skies of Earth. Since people tend to

overestimate the size of the sun anyway, I suspect this difference would go largely unnoticed.

Planets so close to their parent stars are generally presumed to be “tidally locked,” with rotation rates

synchronized to their orbital period, so that the planet always presents the same face toward the star (just

as Luna does toward Earth). However, this is not always the case. Mercury is an example of a planet in

“3:2 resonance,” completing two revolutions per three orbits. In a similar way, Sorrow takes 1036.8

hours to revolve around its axis, and 691.2 hours to complete an orbit around Barnard. If the planet

didn’t rotate at all, Barnard would assume the same position in Sorrow’s sky at the same point in every

orbit, and the day would be 691.2 hours long. However, the rotation has the effect of shortening this to

460.8 hours.

Barnardeans consistently refer to the day as being 460 hours long, reflecting the fact that a “Barnardean

hour” is 3593.75 seconds long—6.25 seconds shorter than a standard hour. Technically speaking, the

0.8 hour day-length difference should be rounded up rather than down, but since 461 is a prime number,

no convenient clock could ever be constructed around it!

I’ll note that these numbers are no invention of mine; if a truly habitable planet exists around Barnard’s

Star, it needs to be near or just beyond the outer edge of the star’s liquid water band—as far from the

star’s flares as possible—with a thick greenhouse atmosphere to keep things warm and protect against

radiation. And preferably, yes, it should have some sort of day-night cycle rather than a pure tidal lock.

Also, given the scarcity of heavy metals, it must be larger than Earth or its gravity won’t hold the

atmosphere down. In other words, it needs to look very much like Sorrow, or it couldn’t be there at all.

notes on the tongan language

All the Tongan words used in this book are authentic. However, with hundreds of years of history

between ourselves and the events of the story, I’ve taken some slight liberties with the meanings and

nuances of certain phrases. Therefore, any use of this book as a language reference may get you some

puzzled looks from native Tongans. Next time you’re in the Friendly Islands, do please keep this in mind.

appendix D

mursk in lalande, act two

Lalande was another metal-deprived dwarf, with three gas giants and one tidally locked terrestrial—the

half-frozen world of Gammon. Allegedly it was named after a historical person of some sort, but Conrad

had always figured it was really because, as in a well-won game of backgammon, all the black was on

one side and all the white on the other. It might also have been named “eyeball,” for the frosty whites

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extending just beyond the terminator, the coal-colored iris beyond it in the daylight, and the clear blue

“pupil” of tidally raised ocean.

Conrad’s image found itself appearing on the front porch of a brick-veneer ranch house, beneath an

awning of translucent gray wellstone. A woman stood before him, out on the grass beyond the porch’s

concrete. She was barefoot and whipped by a strong steady wind, so that her hair and the hem of her

long dress flailed out beside her. She didn’t appear cold, but from the look of things Conrad would be if

he were actually standing here in front of her.

Behind her, in the distance, was an ocean shrouded in fog.

“Hi, Benny,” he said. “Nice to see you again. It was windy like this the last time I was here.”

“It’s always windy here, Conrad Mursk of the Kingdom of Barnard.”

“And always three in the afternoon,” he said, looking up through the awning at the sun, resting motionless

in the sky. It was difficult to say for sure, with no landmarks around it for reference, but it seemed to

Conrad that it was both wider and dimmer than the sun of P2’s own sky. Certainly it was much redder.

She laughed. “Always, yes, but not forever. The planet is locked, but the snow and ice builds up on the

Darkside, bleeding off the Brightside Ocean. The water gets shallower and shallower, and the Darkside

gets heavier and heavier, and every eight hundred years the planet flips.”

“I’ll bet that’s a fun ride.”

“We’ll evacuate the planet,” she said, flashing a don’t-be-daft look in his direction. “We’re actually due

for a flip in just two centuries. Which is good, because the melting glaciers will expose all kinds of fresh

ore, which we can really use.”

“So the shoreis farther away than it used to be.”

“Yup. It retreats about twenty meters every standard year.”

Conscious of the time, Conrad looked around the immediate area. The house was large, and it was up

on a hill overlooking the city of Moll. And the hill was grassy where most of the landscape beyond it was

bare slate or shale. He hadn’t noticed this on his previous visit, but it didn’t surprise him now. Finding a

pen pal here on Gammon had taken decades of back-and-forth prowling on the Instelnet’s

low-bandwidth message boards, and anyone who could afford to take him up on the offer was, almost

by definition, a member of the planet’s upper-crustpalasa . Wealthy, at least by colonial standards.

“Benny N.,” Conrad mused, now looking over the woman herself. “You must think I’m an idiot.”

“For what?”

“This doesn’t look like a palace,” he offered, by way of excuse.

“Ah,” she said. “No, it doesn’t. So you’ve found me out, have you?”

“Bethany Nichols, the Queen of Lalande.”

She smiled sheepishly. “Guilty. We can still flirt, though, can’t we?”

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“I don’t know,” Conrad answered seriously. “Your philander might have something to say about it.”

“I don’t have philanders,” she said. “I have old-fashionedboyfriends . And right now, I’m in between.”

“Oh, I see,” Conrad told her, then made a show of eyeing her even more appraisingly. “If only I had a

body. And some time.”

Her giggle was pleasant, unhurried. “Maybe someday, Architect. But if I’m going telefuff, I’d rather pick

someone closer to home. Lalande is less than five light-years from Wolf system and only six and a half

from Ross. We have our own little club: we can actually trade fashions quicker than they go out of style.

Whereas Sol is a round trip of seventeen years, and all the other colonies—including yours—are twenty

or more. Wolf has an ocean, too, and a biosphere, and a mean case of tidal lock. So really we have a lot

in common.”

“You can’tsee Wolf from here, though. Can’t see Ross, either. Right? Not with the naked eye, not even

on Darkside.”

“We can see Wolf when it flares. God, they have lovely flares. You thinkyou’ve got radiation troubles,

try living on Pup!”

“I’ve visited there in message form,” he said. “Stay out of the water, is my advice.”

She snorted regally. “And the air. There’s areason the capital is under a mile of rock, along with most of

the population. King Eddie is many things, but stupid is not one of them.”

“Ah,” Conrad said, “so it’s Edward Bascal you have your eye on, is it? It wouldn’t be the first time he

and I crossed swords over a woman.”

“Well,” she admitted, “he is kind of cute. Younger and more charming than his so-called cousin. A girl

could do worse.”

Running through what little he knew of her bio, Conrad asked, “Aren’t you a playwright or something?”

Her smile grew pained. “Used to be. I fear my muse has fled, and anyway the bitch only ever gave me

one solid hit. If you’re looking for the next Rodenbeck, I’m afraid it’s not me.”

“Well,” he said, “life is long. You never know.” And then a chime sounded through his virtual bones, and

he added, “I’m done here.”

“Already? I haven’t even shown you my tattoo. Ah well, see you in twenty.”

“God willing,” Conrad agreed, and vanished.

And while it may be true that the digital summary of these experiences was lost in transmission, theywere

thoughtfully archived in the Brick Palace Library, and moved off the planet’s surface in the Turnabout

Evac, there to find their way into a letters archive which survived intact for nearly twenty thousand years.

In a quantum universe, as they say, almost nothing is ever truly lost.

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chapter one

unto a nameless world

Radmer vividly remembered his last sight of the old moon,before King Bruno’s terraforming

operations had begun to squeeze it. . . .

He was called Conrad Mursk in those days, and he was standing on the bridge of the QSSNewhope,

falling past the Earth and moon on a sunward trajectory. They had started their fall at Mars, and would

keep on falling until they were within a million kilometers of the sun. At that point, scorching even through

their superreflectors, they would swing around and rise again.

Their path was like the orbit of a comet: long and narrow and lonely, descending briefly to kiss Mother

Sol and then racing back up into the dark again for another long orbit. Except that they’d be firing their

fusion motors down there at the bottom, unfurling their sails, catching the light of the sun and the laser

boost of a dozen pocket stars to hurl them into deepest space. Past Mars and Neptune, past even the

Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud where the true comets lived. To the stars themselves.

The windows on the bridge weren’t made of glass, weren’t made of anything really. They were just

video images on the wellstone walls. Holographic—though with nothing close by to look at, this was

difficult to discern. The images could of course be tuned and magnified and filtered to the heart’s content,

but looking out the portside window at that moment, what Conrad saw was probably an unadulterated

view: a blue-white Earth no larger than a grape, with a fist-sized moon lurking in the foreground.

There was no man in it. With Luna tidally locked to its parent planet, Conrad was looking at the Farside,

the side faced permanently away from Earth, where there were no familiar landmarks at all. Funny: he’d

been living in space for most of the past eight years, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Farside before. It

looked flat and gray, mostly featureless, and the half that was lit by sun revealed no superreflective gleam

of dome towns. The dark half of it, washed out by brightness, revealed no city lights, no sign of human

presence at all.

This strange, precivilized moon drifted down the window, from fore to aft, with quite visible speed, like a

soap bubble blown from a plastic wand and settling to Earth. But a bubble was small and close, whereas

Luna was a quarter-million kilometers away, and huge. The QSSNewhope was fallingfast , at

twenty-seven kps—almost thirty kilometers per second. As fast as a comet. They were still a hundred

and fifty million kilometers from the sun, but perihelion—their closest encounter with the furnace of

Sol—would occur in just thirty days.

Practically speaking, there were human beings who had traveled faster than this. Several hundred of

them, in fact. ButNewhope was the largest object ever to break the ten kps barrier. Not the most

massive, though, for it was capped fore and aft with shields of collapsium, a foam or crystal of tiny black

holes, and the mass between these “ertial” shields kind of . . . dropped out of the universe or something.

The ship and crew had mass, had inertia, but not enough. Not as much as the universe wanted them to.

Such vessels could be flicked around effortlessly, with even the tiniest of forces generating enormous

accelerations, barely felt by the crew inside.

But not many ertially shielded craft had ever traveled this fast, either. Generally speaking, it wasn’t

considered safe—any more than a hail of bullets could be considered safe. Interplanetary vacuum or no,

there was a lot of debris to run into out here.

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Wil McCarthy - Lost in Transmission

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