The Euclidian: When Worlds Collide (uncut) Page 2
The space mining business, which had grown to be the most profitable enterprise on the planet, started gradually. Before conquering space, the Euclidian had to first learn to conquer the skies. According to Euclidian history, which dated back some 120,000 years, it took them 30,000 years after the first written word to invent the first aircraft. There were disputes over who had created the original glyphs that made up the early written languages. It was known that in prehistory, there had been two other humanoid civilizations on Euclidia, both extinguished during early tribal wars.
The Euclidians of the modern era were intelligent, tall, muscular beings who averaged just over 2.5 meters in height. They had rough brown skin much like the Central Bearded Dragon. They had flat noses with two nostrils. They had small pig-like ears. They didn’t have much for hair, just strands here and there. The other two humanoid species were smaller, more agile creatures. Disputes over land and food had often led them to war, and while the modern Euclidians were outnumbered, their brain and brawn was more than a match for the smaller, less intelligent creatures. At the time the climactic wars began, the modern-day Euclidians had advanced to metal weapons and shields while the other humanoids were still using wooden and stone weapons. After an attack by one of the smaller humanoid tribes killed over 50,000 and destroyed many of their villages, the modern Euclidians were so enraged that they decided to exterminate each and every one of the other species.
Museums displayed the skeletal remains of the other humanoid species, but that was all that remained of them. The modern Euclidians continued to evolve, forging new kinds of metals, discovering new ways to use minerals, and inventing new technology. After 30,000 years they learned to fly. A hundred years later they were flying into space. And after 31,000 years, they had mastered intergalactic travel using a gravity-based technology. In their early history they had spread across their planet and brought home new discoveries from far off lands. Now, in the age of space, they brought home new discoveries from far off planets. They discovered many other planets as they spread across their galaxy, but they never considered attempting to populate a new planet. There was plenty of room on their planet and no one showed an interest in setting up a colony light-years from home.
After the Euclidians developed gravity-based space travel, getting around their solar system became routine. They simply used a negative gravity field to lift off from their planet, pointed the gravitational engine at a target planet, and away they went. Their ships reached speeds in excess of 50,000 kilometers per second, which would get them to any planet in their solar system within a day. The Euclidians soon learned, however, that they had to develop shield technology if they wanted their ships to survive a voyage at galactic speeds. Any small piece of material floating in space that a ship traveling at high speed encountered could easily rip through the hull and destroy the ship. Before they developed shield technology, they would send out a scout drone to fly ahead of the ship and report any objects that were detected. This technique mitigated the risk of hitting an object in space, but it was not foolproof, and they typically lost several drones on each trip.
After several failed attempts, the Euclidians finally developed a shield technology that kept their ships safe. The next challenge to overcome was teleportation. If they were going to bring back loads of minerals from other planets they had to find a simpler means to move material from the surface of a planet into the orbiting mother ship’s holds.
When visiting foreign worlds, the Euclidians rarely ran across humanoid inhabitants. When they did, they were careful to share only technology that would make the inhabitants more productive. They kept all weapon and space technology to themselves, and were careful not to expose the inhabitants to any advanced technology that might place the Euclidians in a difficult negotiating position. At this stage of their societal development, the Euclidians sought friendly relationships with other civilizations. They only strip mined uninhabited planets and were careful not to disrupt a planet’s composition to the point that it would be destabilized or left uninhabitable.
The minerals and goods that were retrieved from mining operations were used to improve the lives of all Euclidians. Their polluted air was even recycled with clean air from other planets. They were surprised to learn that some civilizations had created cheap clean sources of energy, but had not discovered space travel. Even the civilizations that had achieved space travel were primitive in their abilities compared to the Euclidians. None were to the point of being able to leave their solar systems in manned vehicles.
The Euclidians eventually established outposts on their three moons. These were used as expensive getaways for the extremely wealthy. The idea of creating a colony on a distant planet still did not interest the government or the average Euclidian. Nor was the idea of using distant outposts for military purposes of any interest to the Euclidians who thought it would be a waste of resources and manpower. But with the invention of long distance space travel, they eventually changed their view on colonization.
The Euclidian’s discovery of technology for long distance space travel was purely accidental. There were many challenges to overcome, and plenty of mistakes during the early phases. An extensive trial and error period as they refined the technology did not prevent subsequent unforeseen events from occurring.
Gravity propulsion to provide high-speed travel for the mining vessels was developed through hundreds of years of research. The technology involved simulating gravity to propel a ship toward or away from any celestial body, and it did an amazing job of moving ships of any size quickly or slowly through space. Controlling the engines was a challenge. Taking off too fast, stopping too fast, going at too high a speed, or trying to operate more than one engine at a time tended to cause the ships to become unstable and disintegrate.
Once the kinks were worked out in the gravity drive, extraterrestrial mining became a growing concern. The Euclidians mined the planets and moons in their solar system as much as they dared and then went to nearby systems. The mining ships had to be large, to make the multi-year trips worthwhile, and they incorporated all the creature comforts needed to attract a crew beyond just the money. Artificial gravity permitted the crew to walk around easily. There was a gym, a library, a pool, and an entertainment room and bar where the crew could socialize with each other.
Crewmembers were free to fraternize as long as they did their jobs. The standard complement of 120 seemed a bit large considering the simple mission of the ship, and for the most part they didn’t have much to do until the mining started. Then they were all busy ensuring that the mining progressed as efficiently as possible. Most of the crew were trained in several areas. Doctors were cooks, mechanics steered the ship, and everyone knew how to drive the mining vehicles. They also had to understand what to mine for because they didn’t want to fill the ship’s stores with useless rock.
Because of the length of missions and the dangers of space, there were not a lot of applicants to join mining crews. Most missions were to locations an average of three light years away. At 200,000 km/sec, the speed of the fastest ships, it took just under three years to reach their destinations, and made for a round-trip commitment of about five years. The high-speed got the crew there and back quickly, which is what they wanted because they hated the isolation of space travel. The increased speed was welcomed, but there remained a huge danger from the minute possibility of the ship running into something in space. An object only a centimeter across could rip through the ship, destroying it and killing the entire crew. To minimize this risk, the crew was housed in the center-rear of the ship. Critical systems were duplicated and dispersed throughout the ship.
The innovation that made high-speed travel truly practical was the force shield. This shield, once perfected, extended for two kilometers around the ship, and helped to destroy, block, deflect, and cushion objects that came into its path. The shield was the biggest energy drain on the ship. Once the ship got up to speed the gravitational engines were no long
er used, relying instead on conventional synthetic fuel engines. These were used to adjust the direction of the ship and help get it in and out of orbit around planets.
An important discovery was made on one of the newer ships, on a long-range mining mission to a planetary system about two light years from the Euclidian system. The route had been planned to minimize the chance of running into an object in space. The crew, however, could not plan for a random object coming out of nowhere, and a couple of days into the flight a large meteor appeared in the path of the ship. When the meteor was detected, one operator initiated full reverse gravity, placing the focal point of the gravity drive on the meteor to slow down the ship, while another operator activated forward thrusters to move the ship out of the meteor’s path.
Because of the size of the meteor, no one expected these tactics or the space shield to protect the ship from annihilation. Everyone watched in horror as the ship collided with the meteor, but nothing happened. The ship continued on its path. That was not all that had changed. The stars had vanished from the sky. The navigator shut down the engines and tried to figure out where they were. All the instruments seemed to have gone haywire. It was if they were somewhere else. The captain attempted to employ the gravitational drive but there was nothing out there to lock onto. The captain figured they were caught up in some kind of space cloud and spent several days using the thrusters to try to escape the grips of the dark environment they had entered. The crew became restless. Some thought that maybe they had died and this was their eternal fate.
The captain and the science officer examined everything that had transpired just before entering the endless void. They concluded that they must have opened a portal in space that placed them in a wormhole or another dimension. They weren’t sure if it was the meteor or their use of the gravitational drive and plasma thrusters at the same time that had placed them in their predicament, but they decided to try to reverse what they had done before they entered the hell that they were in. The captain ordered the navigator to bring the forward gravitational engine to full power and focus on a spot in front of the ship while engaging the forward thrusters at the same point. The cloud around the ship began to dissipate. The stars gradually came into focus and eventually they were back in normal space.
The navigator took some readings and it appeared that they were several light years from where they intercepted the meteor. The captain was not sure what had happened, and focused his attention on how they might get back home. Using gravity propulsion, they would run out of energy before they made it back. The captain decided to turn around and try to recreate the exact same events that had brought the ship to where it was.
The captain performed a one-eighty and brought the ship to full speed using the gravitational drive. He then simultaneously engaged the forward negative gravitational drive and the forward plasma drive for the same amount of time as they had when they detected the meteor. Once again the stars disappeared. The captain then engaged the positive gravity drive along with the plasma drive and the stars reappeared. The navigator took some readings and it seemed that they were only about 80,000 km from where they first encountered the meteor. The captain assumed the discrepancy had to do with the movement of the galaxy and his inability to more accurately determine the exact path back. He decided to scrub the mission and head home to report what had transpired.
Back at home base, the captain recounted his story about being trapped for over a week in some hole in space. The operations officer was confused by the captain’s story because the ship had not been away for more than a day. An investigation by the executive council determined that they had fallen upon an amazing discovery. They canceled all further mining missions and devoted the next few years to researching a way to duplicate what had happened to the resource extraction ship when it disappeared.
They learned that directing a negative gravitational beam at a point just in front of a ship and at the same time emitting a plasma pulse at the same spot would open a door into a higher-level dimension. Using a positive gravitational beam then opened a portal back into the lower-level dimension through which the ship eventually reached normal space and the transition ended.
When opening a portal, the intensity and duration of the plasma pulse determined how large the opening grew and how long it remained open. If the opening closed before the ship made it all the way through or if it was not large enough to accommodate the ship, the portions of the ship that didn’t make it through the opening were sheared away and the ship destroyed. They lost several unmanned ships trying to perfect this new means of travel.
Once they determined how to move a ship in and out of a dimensional portal safely, they had to learn how long to keep the plasma engines engaged because this controlled how deeply the ship went into higher-dimensional space. Leaving the engines on too long moved the ship through several dimensional levels and made control over velocity nearly impossible. They found they could only leave the plasma engines on long enough to open a sufficiently large portal for the ship to go through. The ship could then travel through dimensional space in a predictable manner.
Once a ship entered dimensional space, light and sound from normal space were obscured as a factor of the gravitational velocity of the dimension they were in. Once the dimensional velocity went above 300 m/s2, sound from normal space could no longer be heard. Once the dimensional velocity went above 300,000 m/s2, light from normal space could no longer be seen. Much later, the Euclidians found they could use this ability to spy on planets before they conquered them.
Gravity did not impact objects in dimensional space, which had its benefits and drawbacks. The gravitational drives didn’t work, but really weren’t needed. Ships could go past and even through large bodies and not be affected by them. If a ship wanted to study a planet it had to adjust its speed to match the planet’s orbital and rotational speed. Otherwise, the planet continued to move away from the ship.
This one discovery sparked an amazing amount of innovation: wide dispersion plasma drives; directional tracking beacons; unmanned navigational probes; computers that could calculate the proper dimensional depth, speed, and direction to track spatial bodies; and remote teleportation devices that could grab a body and convey it across multiple light years of space into an interrogation cell.
Through several studies, it was determined that the velocity of a ship within a dimensional level was equal to the ship’s current velocity times the gravitational force used to open the dimensional portal. For example, if the force of the gravity drive was equal to 100 m/s2 at the time the portal was opened and a ship in the dimensional space was moving at 1 m/s2, it would cover 100 m/s2 in normal space.
The Euclidians used a gravitation constant of 1000 m/s2 to make calculations of travel velocity simpler. Euclidian ships in dimensional space traveled at a speed of 36 km/hour or 10 m/sec. Upon entering the first dimensional layer, a ship would travel at a relative speed of 10 km/sec. In the second dimensional layer the ship would travel at 10,000 km/sec. By the time the ship entered the third dimensional layer it was traveling 10,000,000 km/sec or 30 times the speed of light. At that speed an object that was one light year away could be reached in less than 12 days. But why wait 12 days when one could arrive in a fraction of the time? In the fourth dimensional layer the ship had a relative speed of 10,000,000,000 km/hour. At that speed, reaching an object a light year away took about 18 minutes.
Initially, unmanned research ships were used to study dimensional space. The gravity engines accelerated the ships to enter dimensional space at high speed in order to maximize the distance that they could travel, although that made it difficult to control the dimensional depth in which the ship traveled. A secondary dimension would open before the plasma engine could be shut down, causing the ships to go deeper into space than planned. Because the same speed was required to reverse the process, the ships were traveling so fast when they reentered normal space that instead of entering a standard orbit around a planet, they c
rashed into the planet or overshot it by thousands of kilometers.
Of all the problems that the Euclidians encountered while trying to perfect jumping through multiple dimensional portals and traveling light years away, the two biggest were calculating the destination properly and finding the way back home. The objective of a resource extraction ship entering dimensional space on a mission was to exit and arrive in normal space at the planned destination, able to easily place itself in orbit around the proper planet. Once mining was completed the ship had to be able to return to home space near its entry point without colliding with anything.
Probes scanned distant solar systems for planets worth mining. This monitoring was always done at a dimensional depth of 100 m/s2 to maximize the ability to see and hear while still being able to track the movement of a planet, without expending excessive amounts of energy.
Observers on the home planet could see what the probes saw via transmissions that were relayed through a series of beacons that the probes deployed as they traveled through the dimensional levels. The initial beacon was dropped when a probe entered dimensional space, programmed to track the movement of the probe’s home base and find the most efficient path back. Since objects in dimensional space were not influenced by a spatial body’s gravity, a planet would quickly move away from a beacon, causing the entry point to be thousands of kilometers away by the time a probe returned. Likewise, when a planet worth mining was found, a beacon was dropped to track the planet and make it easy for a resource extraction ship to enter the planet’s orbit. If the probe didn’t find anything, it retraced its path to retrieve the beacons before proceeding to its next destination.
In the Euclidian’s Juban Galaxy, solar systems averaged about three light years’ distance from one another, which could be traveled in just under an hour by going through four dimensional levels. To travel the full extent of the 200,000 light year-long galaxy required going through six dimensional layers, though the Euclidians’ system was only 120,000 light years from the farthest point in the galaxy. They could travel anywhere in their galaxy in as little as two minutes, depending on how many dimensional jumps they wished to make.