Warp speed

But don't worry. Humans are quite resourceful. We will survive this and in fact thrive again in no time. I feel bad about all the damage and especially about the lost lives. However, and I'm not just trying to justify myself here, the Earth is becoming a better place now. China finally had to really open its borders to Western business or it was going to starve to death. The destruction of most of the Russian government destroyed a lot of their organized crime problem since most of the crime bosses were government officials. The Russian people asked us for help. So we moved in and helped them prop themselves up and clean up their act a little. Europe joined in to help since they were least affected. Although there was no longer a Germany, the rest of Europe was trying to help. Interestingly enough, no governments tried to take advantage of the situation. Also, the stock exchange was unfrozen a few weeks ago. World trade is back to normal or much better. Again there was some initial concern about global climate changes causing mass crop failures and global starvation. And once again this was mostly junk scientists making noise to get themselves on television. All of that original Carl Sagan nuclear winter nonsense continued to rear its ugly head—idiots. I wanted to strangle some of the fools I saw on TV bitching about the coming ice age and the end of the world. Tabitha eventually convinced me that I just had to let it go.

One thing that really bites me in the butt is that not long after the Secret War a damned group of Islamic Jihad fools car-bombed the American Embassy in Kuwait. Then they claimed that the meteors were due to us being the infidel and some other nonsense. About fifteen Americans were killed and a few from other countries. And we didn't do a damned thing! For now the world still depended on oil so we had to let those fools act as they had for thousands of years. Like fools.

I vowed that day that I was going to design a less efficient and less explosive energy collection dumbbell that we could leak into mainstream technology. If these weaker dumbbells generated only a millionth of the energy that the flubells do, the Middle East would be out of business in no time. Then we wouldn't have to put up with the bastards. I put Sara to work on the new dumbbell design. Jim was more than happy to volunteer to help her. Tabitha and I went to work on a plan to leak the technology.

The American way of life barely made it through the Secret War. We got lucky in a lot of respects. Tabitha and I talk about it every now and then. We both agree that neither of us would have thought of another way to defend against the final Chinese/Russian assault in time. If 'Becca hadn't been infected by that damn flubell virus, the outcome could have been a lot different. We might could have escaped with the partial Clemons Dumbbell ECC we had but who knows? I don't like thinking about how lucky we really were. Tabitha tells me that I think about 'what- ifs?' way too much. I think she is right. We survived, America prevailed, the human race will continue.

CHAPTER 22

It was going to take a while to figure out the tricks of interstellar navigation. We decided to start small and take baby steps out of the solar system. We warped to Mars in about two and a half minutes. We had christened our little warpship the U.S.S. Einstein. Tabitha and Margie were at the controls. Jim and I were in charge of celestial navigation. Rebecca and Sara were watching the power plant and warp core. Al and Anne Marie were in charge of general mission logistics. We entered into an orbit around Mars and started looking for interesting things. We landed in Cydonia. There were no pyramids to be found anywhere. We found no face either. I was always hoping there would be something.

We traversed several canals and headed to the Martian North Pole. Near where the ice caps met the desert, we took a few core samples. I never noticed any living creatures crawling around. It's possible that there might be some microbes in the core samples. When we had completed checkout of our exploration capabilities, we would come back to Mars and hang out a while. This time was more of a shakedown flight. We did hit the list of experiments and observations that a lot of planetary scientists had been writing about for decades.

We started near the equator then flew southwest to Ophir Chasma and back around east to Juventae Chasma. We saw all sorts of slope and bedrock material, cratered plateaus, and degraded craters. Then we turned northward toward the northern plains, Kasei Vallis, and the Viking I landing site. We finally sat down on the peak of Olympus Mons.

We hadn't developed individual warp fields yet. In fact, we were several years from that if at all, so we had to steal about ten new SAFER EMUs from NASA. We had our Earthside black bag connection take care of the paper work. NASA never knew that they had the spacesuits to begin with. We sat up a group in the Research and Development Dome back on Moon Base 1 to reverse-engineer the EMUs, redesign them, and make them more mobile and useful. That would take a year or so also.

At any rate, we suited up, cycled through the airlock with a lights-off lights-on maneuver, and descended the loading ramp of the Einstein. Once we had set foot on the Martian surface, Tabitha and Margie set up an American flag. The view from Olympus Mons was incredible. Sara scratched into a rock with a screwdriver 'Sara Tibbs was here.' Then she passed it around and we each took turns. Jim signed it last and dated it.

This wasn't a science mission. This was a technology demonstration mission. We had proven we could fly about four times the speed of light and navigate to a specific point. We had proven we could determine where we were once we dropped out of warp. We then demonstrated that we could locate and land on a planet and conduct EVAs. It was time to head back home. Tabitha corralled us back into the Einstein and we began the liftoff checklists.

'Ramp up?' Tabitha asked.

'Check.' Margie replied.

'Everybody on board?'

'Check.'

'Okay, liftoff.'

'Check.'

Not much of a checklist. The warpships made spacetravel almost as easy as a Sunday drive, as long as there were no technical difficulties. This time we stressed the ECCs up to three percent and shaved another minute and thirty-seven seconds off the trip. It took about twenty-three seconds in warp to travel back to the Moon. The average speed was about twenty-four times the speed of light.

Tabitha brought us into the spaceport's waiting zone, which was just outside the spaceport warp field. The spaceport's field is always set to oscillate on and off at a kilohertz or so. She simply flew Einstein through it when it was in the off position—of course, that was done in fractions of a second via a flight control computer and was transparent to her. We debarked and transferred the samples and EVA suits to a quarantined lab for analysis and cleanup, respectively.

Analysis of Einstein showed that it was in tip-top condition. The space travel at