Astronomicon: Icarus

25 - Debriefing

"Am I right in guessing that whatever happened to your vessel, it was due to your drive test?" asked Captain Taylor of the Oppenheimer crew survivors, all now gathered in the rec room and drinking cupsules of various hot beverages.

Enzo had returned to the control room, and Ishaan Joshi, the freshly recruited cook had joined them too.

"You know I can't answer that question," replied John Hill, Oppenheimer's first officer.

"What difference does it make now?" shrugged Maria Martinez, the only remaining physicist.

"What do you mean?" asked John Hill.

"The experiment's over now. It failed," she sighed. "The field was uncontrollable and what happened will take us decades to investigate and decipher. What are these guys going to do with any information they get from us? They can hardly sell it."

Captain Taylor selected an extra strong coffee from the machine attached to the wall beside the only door, then turned to the group, "From what you've told me already, it sounds like your drive system was much more than just a variant on an ion drive."

"I can't tell you any more than that," replied the First Officer resolutely.

"Oppenheimer uses a completely new form of drive," explained Maria Martinez. "We call it the Torus drive. It's designed to create the most powerful artificial electromagnetic field ever imagined. The aim is to bend the fabric of space, pull what is ahead of us forward towards us and use the conventional ion engines to move us forward in the temporarily distorted, condensed space. Once we reach our destination, the field is shut off, space returns to its usual shape and we are left further forward than would even be possible via conventional means."

"Warping space for faster-than-light travel?" replied Captain Taylor, looking impressed.

"Precisely. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, but a straight line isn't always the shortest route. Oppenheimer was designed to create its own shortcuts," she smiled.

"I thought that concept had been dismissed because of the vast energy requirements. I heard that warping space to travel to the nearest star system would use an entire star's worth of energy."

"That's what we used to think, but there are ways around that. There are usually loopholes with this sort of thing, it's just a matter of finding them. We've found that by modifying the shape of the torus we could reduce that requirement by an order of four, then by oscillating the field we increased efficiency another twenty-fold on top. A few more tweaks to the design and we had a system which six large fusion reactors can maintain."

"That doesn't explain how you arrived here."

"It misfired, distorted the structure of the ship and catapulted us into Jupiter's orbit," she replied matter-of-factly. "That's simple enough."

"I didn't mean the location, but the date," he replied.

"We don't have any way of establishing an accurate date. The magnetic field has leaked, parts of the Oppenheimer have been charged up via magnetic induction. None of the clocks that survived the accident were able to keep accurate time afterwards. Without night and day, all we can do is guess at how much time has passed."

"So how come you arrived here four years before you left Titan?"

"That's impossible," she replied, looking slightly puzzled.

"I tend to agree," Captain Taylor replied, "But you're going to insist that it's 2082."

"Which it is," she replied slowly.

"What year do you think it is, Ishaan?"

Ishaan Joshi looked a little startled to suddenly be included in the conversation.