NationStates Jolt Archive

The platform behind him resembled a massive missile launching pad, and in fact it was not far removed from that originally intimidating object. Stretching hundreds of metres up into the air, it essentially constituted a launching pad for the first ever manned Harakian space vehicle, and had originally been a launch apparatus for ballistic missiles. Located in the vast deserts south of Haraki, just west of Isasi, the project had been top secret from the moment it was conceived, some months before the first discussions of the Alliance of Progressive Nations. Now it was their first ever joint project, the three founding members collaborating into a Harakian-Tiburonese space project with Scolopendran support.

The HSS Javelin was far from the sleek, smooth ships some other nations could create with such ease. It had taken many years of research into wormhole technology and a further two years of actual construction in a massive government complex, housing tens of thousands of people and tons upon tons of hardened minerals. Referred to jokingly as the Isasi Project, it had eventually produced a behemoth of a spacecraft, one that would be helpless against any form of sophisticated attack. Most of its rear section was taken up by its massive wormhole drive engine, a Harakian design - current research was mostly focusing on miniaturizing it while maintaining current power levels - that took up more space than anything else on the ship. It had only limited engines outside that, that would allow it to travel slowly outside its wormhole drive.

The belly, and main compartment, of the ship, was taken up by a massive cargo bay and thirty-six automated landing pods, each of which contained a sophisticated computer capable of autopiloting itself to a flawless landing on the surface of their target, in simulations anyway. They had planned this operation down to the most minute detail, and had mapped out every landing location. Taking into account speed of orbit, speed of rotation, and exact travel time, provided the ship left exactly on schedule, suffered no setbacks, and nothing went wrong, all thirty-six would be capable of making a perfect landing and setting up their portion of the field. It also allowed for a delay of up to twelve hours. Past that, the mission would have to be delayed until many more rounds of calculations could be done. This portion of the ship took up nearly as much space as the engine did, and essentially comprised a giant bloated belly underneath the grey ship's superstructure. Off the sides of the giant belly were several smaller, protruding manoeuvring engines, designed to turn the ship, though it did happen slowly.

The cockpit of the ship was located at the very front and was by far the smallest section. While the two others together were just under half a kilometre in length, it managed a scant twenty metres and several decks up and down. In the top at the front was the actual cockpit, where the giant beast's engines and other functions were controlled from, with the rest of the space taken up by living quarters for the team, a dozen highly-trained Harakian crewmembers and several more experienced Tiburonese observers and handlers in case something were to go drastically wrong. The quarters were cramped, the mess barely big enough for its sixteen residents, and much of the rest of the space taken up by supplies for the trip.

Haraki's allies had offered to provide more advanced technology for the mission, but aside from the Scolopendran builds housed in the cargo bay it was entirely Harakian in creation. The Prime Minister had been stubbornly steadfast about that. If they had just been taking others' things, he insisted, they might as well have just never tried in the first place. They could have been provided an entire space fleet by their allies, not without a fee, and never batted an eye. But he insisted on doing it 'the right way'. If anything went wrong, then they could jump in. He had no doubt that the Tiburonese would be watching the mission carefully and would have ships nearby to swoop in to the rescue, quite humiliating to Haraki, should the ship break down or something equally embarrassing happen. He just hoped HAEDA had been perfect in their calculations.

The ship was a monstrosity. Rising nearly five hundred metres into the air, odd parts jutted off it at odd angles and in strange positions, the cockpit sat on top of it like a last-minute addition, with barely even a connection to the rest of the ship, and the two main modules were essentially giant chunky grey blocks in odd formations. Looking at it, Jaime Wolfe just hoped they would get nicer looking in the future. He knew it was never designed to look pretty, but it was as ugly as anything he had ever seen. He nearly winced when he saw it. Of course, they assured him that the HSS Argo, the more permanent one of the two ships, was nicer looking, but he doubted it from what he had seen. It would be hard to reassure the ever-present press with this beast.

It relied on its massive engines and the launching platform's booster rockets to lift it off the ground, and relied on its own engines from there on. The booster rockets would fall harmlessly into the Harakian ocean, and from there be retrieved by ship crews. The ship itself, if it ever wanted to land and be refitted for its subsequent role as a transport ship, would have to nearly burn out its engines in the landing attempt.

On the sides of the cockpit were printed, in neat capital letters,

'HSS JAVELIN X-01
HARAKI AEROSPACE EXPLORATION AND DEVELOPMENT AGENCY'

Haraki's first space ship. A momentous day, indeed.


*


Its fraternal twin sister, the Argo, sat on a landing pad kilometres away, over the horizon from the Javelin's launching apparatus. It was part of the same project, but looked so different. For one, the ship itself looked like it was all one unit, and not three Lego blocks that had been stuck together by an epileptic three-year-old. It had been painted a nicer metallic grey colour, and had a rounded cockpit at the front as opposed to the angular one designed on the Javelin. It took had a large distended belly, but its included landing gear at the bottom. It was designed to take off from the ground and land again with just as much ease, and it showed. It even looked more graceful sitting on the ground.

It had much more powerful sub-wormhole drive engines, and besides the main ones, placed around the central wormhole drive and permanently pointing backwards, included manoeuvring thrusters on the sides designed to rotate and aim downwards as it took off. It was for this reason that no one was allowed within two kilometres of it during take-off and landing, and the reason for the location of its launch pad being in the desert. The potential damage done to organic material by the massive engines was catastrophic. The landing pad was designed to take it, but people were not.

Its belly was not filled with Scolopendran devices designed to land on an asteroid, but rather with construction equipment and materials. Three massive levels of its cargo bay housed the material needed to construct a small, domed base on the surface, large enough to house the forty colonists that were the rest of its cargo. Above the cargo bay, two massive tanks sat, one filled with pressurized air and the other filled with water. Its cargo bay was also much more aesthetically-pleasing than the Javelin's. It was obvious they had had very different designers and very different concept art. Its massive wormhole drive was housed in the centre of its larger sub-light speed engines at the rear of the ship, but it was no less large than the Javelin's. Its engine section was still the largest, taking up a full half the ship. Once again, miniaturization was being prioritized. The advantage to having such large sublight engines, however, was invaluable. It could reliably take off and land, according to HAEDA scientists' calculations. Unlike the Javelin, which would require first major repair to the engines following its rough landing, followed by months of refitting the engines bit by bit and converting the launch bay into a cargo bay to move more colonists and building supplies to the asteroid. After that, it was anticipated to be able to take off and land, albeit still nowhere near as smoothly as the Argo.

On the side of its cockpit, where the eight crew members - six Harakian, two Tiburonese - would live and operate the ship from, were written in small block letters,

'HSS ARGO CSS-01
HARAKI AEROSPACE EXPLORATION AND DEVELOPMENT AGENCY'

The Argo was the pride and joy of Haraki's space program. Sleek, smooth, and not ugly as sin, its use was vital. Haraki's first-ever offworld colony would be constructed by it and its engineers, and it was even nice to look at. Though that could merely be the comparison to the Javelin, which he had just been looking at, Jaime reflected. In any case, both ships were finished, the Javelin standing vertically, ready and waiting to go. It was eerily quiet around its launching pad, as the launch was not until that night. All the last-minute checks were being done, but it still was too quiet. He had half-expected the ever-present noise of machinery, as if in a factory.

The Argo was still full of bustle and vigour. It was not to launch until forty-eight hours after the Javelin, while the Javelin was completing its transit and deploying its cargo, and it was still being loaded up. The colonists, who would be leaving Earth for quite some time two nights later, were spending quality time with their families. Some had opted to join their husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, on the colony after some time, moving their entire life there. Others, HAEDA employees, would simple spend two-, three-, or four-month periods on the colony, at which point they would be borught back to Haraki proper to wait for another shift.

The Argo sat, ready, propped horizontally on its landing legs, the cargo bay opened and large vehicles transporting large equipment back and forth. Jaime sighed. Once upon a time, he would have wished he was up there with them. Now, he just concentrated on keeping funding going for it. The Shepherd Party was making it exceptionally hard to convince other MPs to keep approving funding for what they described as 'a veritable black hole of government funding'. It had already consumed trillions of Harakian Dollars, and they claimed defence was a more important priority. Luckily, they had been steadily losing power since the death of Angela Shepherd, and by now they were mainly reduced to a raving, though very smart, Jonathan Friedman. Jaime regretted his defection. It had been a blow.

Although most other parties were in favour of the project, enough so to keep approving more funding for the project, and subsequent space-based ones, Friedman managed to sway enough minds to even so much as consider his way of thinking that it had a negative impact. The only parties he knew he could always count on for votes in regards to it were his own Social Liberal Party and the Green Party. The Conservative Party, surprisingly enough, usually supported it, while the smaller left-fringe waffled back and forth. The Communists and Socialists, both of which enjoyed more support than most minor parties, both had conflicted views on the subject. Ribald and Spalding of the Socialist Party were visibly at each others' throats in a very publicized media brawl, and as the leader and deputy leader of the party it was hard to keep them apart. Every time Spalding made a speech, it was all about 'not spreading Harakian pseudo-capitalism to the stars', and every time Ribald made a speech it was all about 'peacefully expanding Haraki's idealist policies and socialist aspects of national policy into the stars'. The far-right parties tended to isolate themselves from the debate, and waffled back and forth on the grounds of Earthly defence and who had the best speech that week. Jaime usually won over Friedman, and they voted for him, going by the argument that 'others are in space, we need to defend ourselves against them' and 'we don't want to look weak in front of our space-faring allies, do we?', neither of which had ever been said by Jaime, but both of which were viewpoints of the far-right who supported the project. The others were just like Friedman. And the smaller, centrist parties, like the Libertarians and the aptly-named Centrist Party, tended to side with whoever they felt like. Harakian politics was a mess.

Jaime had watched the Argo for some time now, enjoying its contrast to the ship he had just seen some fifteen minutes earlier. Now, he reviewed the briefing one more time, as if he hadn't had it shown to him enough times by various puffed up HAEDA officials.

There was an asteroid, smaller than Charon, which contained rich mineral deposits and was as-yet uninhabited. They had renamed it from its exciting letter-and-number name to Dythis, and had analyzed the prospects of colonizing it as Haraki's first-ever space project. So far it had never been colonized thanks to frequent impacts by smaller asteroids against its surface, making any colony on it prone to sudden devastation. But HAEDA had hatched a plan, to move it into an orbit just outside the asteroid belt. It was prime real estate, and the solar system was crowded. An opportunity like that could not be passed up.

Haraki had been in the process of creating the Alliance of Progressive Nations with allies Tiburon and Scolopendra, and the matter of such a project had been raised by Prime Minister Wolfe at the APN founding conference. President Kennedy had instantly pledged his support and Tiburon's resources to the effort, and Speaker-Rrit had offered the use of more sophisticated Scolopendran technology for the actual act of breaking Dythis of its orbit and transporting it to a new one. Jaime Wolfe had accepted both offers of help.

The Javelin would arrive first, using its wormhole drive to travel to Dythis and deploy the thirty-six Scolopendran warp field devices. He wasn't exactly sure of the technical details, but they created a warp field around the entire asteroid and transported it outside the asteroid belt, at which point the Javelin would withdraw, back to Haraki for repairs and refitting, and the Argo would deploy. It would land at Dythis within three days of setting out, and land the cargo of construction equipment and colonists. It would then make repeated return flights to and from Dythis, taking more equipment and resources to the small bubble colony. Once the domes were actually set up, massive fields of soil and grass would be brought in, and field after field of harvestable crops would be established. These plants would not only provide oxygen for the colony once they got off the ground, but would also provide a renewable source of food. Of course, they would be massive fields, designed for a small base of a few hundred colonists.

Over time, the colony would grow. At first estimates, it would level off for some time at around three hundred people, who would set up automated mining facilities around the colony itself and provide valuable mineral ores which the Argo would take back to Earth on its weekly trips to and from Dythis. But once the colony got into a sustainable cycle like that, HAEDA had ambitious plans. They described the Dythis colony as many things: a research station for further projects in space, a jumping-off point for exploration and colonization in other star systems, and eventually a fully-terraformed planet. Ambitious plans, that would take many years to see through to fruition. Many of these things they didn't even know how to do yet, or how to even conceive of yet. It would take time, research and development, and part of that would be to silence the critics in Parliament. Hopefully, if everything went well, that would become easier with a successful mission.

For now, he was left to oversee it, and hope nothing went too wrong. Their allies, their friends, their enemies - they were all watching, waiting, and seeing what Haraki's first run into space would be like. It was a foreboding thought.

There was going to be no formal celebration. Although it was a momentous occasion, covered by over a dozen camera crews, their feeds hooked through all the news stations, providing live footage to hundreds of millions of people, there was no formal speech, no big ceremony. There were visitors from associated nations - mostly APN members, and Tiburon especially, but they were there more to make an appearance and show their solidarity with the Harakian cause than to attend anything in particular. Besides, Jaime wouldn't have wanted to have a ceremony for the Javelin. Its lumpy, misshapen form was not exactly what he wanted to show to the world, and he had no doubt millions of families had quizzical looks on their faces and were asking absurd questions to each other, such as 'why doesn't it look like the Enterprise, mommy?'

The launch was in under half an hour, the final checks were being run one last time, and he could see on the screen in front of him, embedded into the bottom of the back of the driver's seat, footage of the Javelin's grinning crew walking across a catwalk into the ship's cockpit, waving to the cameras. The Tiburonese looked more professional, especially with their job amounting to little more than babysitting, but he could tell the Harakians more than made up for it. Their excitement was contagious, and as he put a hand to his cleanshaven face he began to feel it as well. A smile played across his expression, as he turned his attention back down to the documents he was examining. "Space is big," he mused, more to himself than to the car's other occupants, "and yet it's all so far away."

The other man gave Jaime a strange look. "What do you mean, Jaime?"

"Hm?" Jaime asked, looking up. "Oh, sorry. Just thinking out loud. Yeah, it's big, but look at how crowded it is. Have you looked at the latest political map of the solar system, Brad? There's nothing that's not claimed. Every square metre of everything with a name is claimed, nearly. Not to mention everything within several lightyears of here. I just don't see what we have to offer that hasn't already been done a million times before."

His companion, Bradley Peck, was the head of HAEDA, Haraki's space program and associated agency. He shrugged. "We just have to look far and wide, and be creative. Like with Dythis. No one had thought to settle it before because of the high likelihood of any colonies being crushed by falling debris. But we figured it out. Just like that, we just need to get out there and try things that haven't been done before."

Jaime sighed. "Brad, I don't know if it's any use. I'm getting too old for all this shit."

"You're barely older than when we started, Jaime. Half a decade, a failed marriage, two assassination attempts ... you feel older than you are, than you look, Jaime. Besides, we both know dying is passé. These doctors, they're geniuses. You could probably live forever if you put your mind to it."

Jaime sighed. "I don't want to live forever, Brad. I've seen too much of the world to want to spend forever here. This place sucks, and that's why I'm so dedicated to finding a way off this rock. There's nothing here but strife, torture, war, genocide ... even the good guys are way off base. Half our allies are maniacal dictatorships, and the other half never do anything. This, the APN - it feels like the only real thing I've done in years. Everything else is political posturing, another fucking game. Who's the big man this week? The man with the most tanks wins, Brad. Every time. And all this shit, it doesn't get better, it gets worse. In the past few years I've seen countries invaded and millions of people die because someone insulted someone else. I've seen people massacre millions of their own countrymen and no one gives a shit. Brad, I hate it here. I don't want to live forever. I just want to live."

Bradley remained silent for some time before letting out a deep sigh. "I can't say I agree with you, Jaime. Maybe it's because I've spent the last ten years building a wormhole engine, but I don't see the world the way you do, and my view is probably closer to everyone else's than yours. You're an old soldier, I'm a technological idealist."

Jaime put a hand to his forehead, letting out a weak smile. "I know. I have to put on a good face for the world, I have to go out there and be the unshakable rock that Haraki looks up to. I have to be the Jaime Wolfe they remember, that brought them hope and out of the fucked-up Ryan era. But someday, I'm going to steal a HAEDA ship and just take off into space. Find somewhere new to live. Get away from it all."

Bradley nodded slowly, contemplating what his friend had said, and Jaime continued after a short while. "I retired once, Brad. It was the second best thing I ever did. Leaving politics is like leaving, I don't know, a factory farm. Suddenly you can see the sky, you can look around you and see everything for what it is, not for what it might mean. You can ignore the big picture and just spend entire days doing nothing. When I returned, I fucking hated it. I thought it wouldn't be as bad, thought I might have missed it, thought the country needed me-"

"The country did need you, Jaime," Bradley interrupted him. Jaime nodded, a sad look on his face.

"I know, Brad. But let me tell you this, and you better not fucking tell anyone, especially not Pete Firth. If he catches wind of this I'll never hear the end of it."

Bradley's heart grew heavy. Whatever it was, it couldn't be good. But he knew his friend needed to talk about whatever it was, despite the fact this was not the time.

"The day I did that speech in front of the crowd in Kiros, the day I denounced Shepherd for the lying imperialist she was, the day I was re-elected Prime Minister ... I went home and I drank myself half to death, because just that little taste had fucking depressed me so much."

"You're always so cheerful, Jaime. I never knew," Brad began, then stopped. "We never knew." Jaime knew who he referred to. The general public. his supporters. The people that loved him.

"I know. I try very hard to hide it. I can't stand this place, but I have a duty to the people of Haraki. Every time I leave something bad happens. I may hate it, but I have to do this job so all those other people down there, the ones watching today and thinking 'why isn't that ship pretty like in the movies?', the ones who see a speech and instantly change their minds about it, the ones who don't care. The stupid, ignorant masses. I owe it to them, because as much as I hate them, I love them too."

Bradley reached out and put a hand on his friend's shoulder, but Jaime shrugged it away and opened his door, standing up out of the car. "It's time," he said in a strong voice, leaning his head back down in for a moment. His sorrowful expression was gone, replaced by one of strength, determination, and not a small amount of boyish wonder. They both now knew it was all a farce. "Let's go."

Bradley let out a breath and stood up out of the car. Several kilometres away, behind numerous fences and walls, rose the behemoth, the HSS Javelin, attached to two enormous booster rockets and what amounted to a giant catapult to launch it into space like a missile. There were twenty minutes until they made history.

10...

Two kilometres from the half-kilometre high spaceship, a ten foot chain link fence with angled razor wire at the top kept back the news crews, where over a dozen cameramen filmed over a dozen reporters talking into cameras, and other cameras simply watched the launch, all in real time, Jaime assumed, back to the news station. Latest estimates had nine hundred million people watching this on various news stations, all of them live. if the Javelin exploded in midair it would be probably the biggest media frenzy in Harakian history. There would be probes, inquiries, all that sort of thing. And the media would go crazy.

Jonathan Friedman would have a field day if the Javelin went wrong. He would put a shit-eating grin on his face, step up in front of parliament, and announce that he had known it all along, that space was a waste of time. The smaller parties would side with him, and Jaime would be left feeling isolated. The Social Liberals enjoyed a comfortable majority, with over 600 seats of the 1,000+ seats in parliament, but still they had problems. If the Javelin was destroyed by mechanical error, something Jaime had spent sleepless night worrying about, the Social Liberals and the Green Party would be all-but doomed. They would stand alone, beside each other. Mass defections would probably rip the Social Liberals apart, and a newly-massive grouping of independent MPs would be able to topple the government quite easily. In an election that followed, they would be reduced to a minor party. Friedman would make huge gains. His neo-conservative, imperialist, near-fascist agenda would be pushed through, and he would achieve either a minority government or a coalition with someone larger, probably the Conservatives. A date with the devil.

9...

Jaime stood not behind the fence, but on the other side of it, in a small concrete bunker with two-inch-thick strengthened glass windows. With him was Bradley Peck, the head of the Haraki Aerospace Exploration and Development Agency, more commonly known as HAEDA, Haraki's space program, which the Social Liberals had poured several trillion Harakian dollars into over the past ten years. It had suffered during the two-year Conservative government of Bradley Albany, as its funding was drastically slashed, but Albany's failures in other respects had nearly led to the collapse of the nation, and subsequently the Social Liberals had regained power.

Peck had started out in the agency sixteen years ago, as a high-paid graduate from Susa's North Coast University. Out of university at age 28 with a PhD in quantum engineering, with the thesis title of 'Observation of the Pogrom-McKenzie Experiment Involving Wormhole Structures and Sub-Atomic Particles', he had quickly been snatched up by HAEDA, in its infancy at that point. From there he had quickly become the chief engineer of their most ambitious - and most successful - project, experiments in creation of small wormholes. By four years in, they had the capacity to move electrons ten to the negative forty metres through minuscule wormholes. Once that was able to be accomplished, Peck had left his team - not of his own volition - and been rapidly promoted through HAEDA's administrative structure.

8...

He had maintained strong connections with the wormhole project, though, and when HAEDA was told by Jaime's government years earlier to theorize how to create an efficient engine and drive system for a spaceship, he had been the first man HAEDA turned to. His intricate knowledge of the wormhole system had led to further projects and promotions, and the theory of the wormhole engine that had become a reality on the Javelin and Argo. When the previous administrator resigned five years earlier, Bradley Peck was a shoe-in for the position, which he had held comfortably since then. HAEDA had grown immensely since his recruitment by it, and he had been there for every step of the way.

Now he watched the culmination of sixteen years of his work, two kilometres away. As time went on, the people he had trained grew more and more skilled, and he grew less and less directly involved with the project, but it was where his roots were and where he would always see his ties to HAEDA as coming from. The people working on it now were young urbanites, and he was growing old, much as he didn't like to admit it. He liked to joke about the scientists that were close to a breakthrough in turning off the human gene that causes aging, simply by fixing the ratio of cells that die to cells that grow to replace them after the human body reaches its peak, and he liked to joke that he would be one of the first to receive the operation to fix such a thing, so he could live forever.

7...

The man that stood beside him, Jaime Wolfe, was much more troubled inside. He had originally been the smart and highly-paid bodyguard of Haraki's first Prime Minister, Chris Ryan. At a diplomatic function, he met and fell in love with Nathicana of the Dominion, and they had been married. With her support, and Ryan's impending insanity and jealousy of Jaime, he had been elected prime minister. His marriage had failed, and soon after coincided with his retirement from politics.

Now he watched something he had authorized years ago, and couldn't help but think that it brought with it a measure of hope. This was something real but something idealistic. He felt like he could actually believe in what they were doing here. He could believe in finding a new home in space, away from the distorted and twisted things that affected everyone on Earth. He felt jealous of the colonists that would live on Dythis, and found himself wishing he were one of them. If he didn't know for a fact that the political tensions in Haraki's parliament would fall apart nearly immediately, putting the parties at each other's throats and stopping anything from getting done, he may have resigned and taken himself up on that thought.

6...

But at the same time, the idealism he could feel within him was overshadowed by a deeply-rooted fear that something would go wrong and he would be forced to live with the consequences of it. The Javelin would be destroyed by asteroids, or mechanical failure would cause everyone on the Argo to suffocate, or something horrible like that. And then everything would come falling down on his head. This project had so much invested in it that his career, the Social Liberals' future as a Harakian political party, and HAEDA's future as an agency of any substance were all riding on it. If it failed... he didn't even want to imagine the consequences.

Brad assured him it wouldn't fail. They had run everything through HAEDA's very advanced simulations hundreds of time, and every time it had either worked or they had found the problem that cause it to fail and fixed it so it worked perfectly the next time. But Jaime couldn't help but wonder, what if they had missed something? What if there was one more problem that hadn't shown up in the simulations yet for whatever reason? What if something went wrong? Then he was forced to reassure himself, and convince himself that it would not go wrong. That everything would go fine. That people watching would simply see the Javelin lift off the ground perfectly, and three days later see the Argo do the same, though much more gracefully.

5...

The room they stood in had a window overlooking the launch site thousands of metres away. Standing with them in it were several influential Tiburonese officials, including President Kennedy, and a few other foreign diplomats, mostly from other APN countries. A bank of monitors on the right-hand wall showed mostly the sky, and several showed the planet from orbit, sometimes dead-on and sometimes from an angle. These monitors, mostly viewing cameras mounted on Harakian satellites covering the launch, would keep them in visual range of the Javelin for several hundred kilometres from launch, after which point it would swing past the satellites in orbit, beyond the wide-angle lenses, and be gone into space. Then they would rely on transmissions from the ship itself.

The bunker was part of a complex, much of it underground, that helped house parts for the Javelin, the control and command complexes for the mission, and other such things. A similar but larger one was built for the Argo, with a similar observation bunker from which Jaime, Bradley, and the diplomats would watch the launch of the Argo several days later.

4...

The scaffold which had lined two sides of the Javelin to attach the massive booster rockets to it had been pulled away, dismantled, and stored underground. The launch catapult, attached to a third side, was ready to launch. In the cockpit and the different areas of the living section of the ship, the sixteen crew members were strapped in and awaited liftoff, mostly somewhat apprehensively. For the Harakians it was a first, but their excitement mixed with the same fear that Jaime had, that something would go wrong, though their fear was more primal, hope for their own survival rather than worrying about the state of the nation should their mission fail. For the Tiburonese, veterans of space travel, it was more a fear that the Harakian engineers had failed in some way, and that it would directly cause their deaths.

But the excitement was more. The excitement of being Haraki's first people in space was too much. They had all volunteered, they had spent years training for such a day, and they were not going to back down at that moment. Within minutes it would be over, and the excitement of being airborne combined with the terror of being airborne would wash over them, making them forget everything they had in their heads. With four seconds until the launch, thoughts rushed through their heads. For some, it was safety protocols, the welfare of themselves and their teammates, and their duty to the mission. For some, it was friends and family. For one, it was his newborn daughter.

3...

The Javelin stood tall, alone in the middle of the desert, attached loosely to a massive launch apparatus, with two giant rocket boosters attached to its sides, a belly full of warp technology, and a cockpit full of apprehensive and excited people.

2...

In hundreds of millions of homes across Haraki, televisions were tuned to different news stations, watching the launch. Their screens showed the Javelin standing tall a long distance behind a fence, sometimes with a reporter in the way, and a countdown timer in the corner. They all read 0:02.

1...

In the observation bunker, Jaime Wolfe's heart pounded in his throat. He couldn't stop it even if he wanted to. Knowing he was now powerless in the face of everything in front of him, he shut his eyes tightly for a moment and then reopened them, letting his latent curiousity take over, and he simply watched.

Zero.

As Jaime's eyes reopened, they were just in time to catch a blinding light flaring from the bottom of both the Javelin's booster rockets, blasting down. Blowback off the landing pad sent walls of what looked like white-hot flame hundreds of metres into the sky even as the ship rapidly left the ground. The catapult structure, attached to the top of the ship, hurtled forward and stopped abruptly as it reached the end of its modified kilometre-long track, the ship careening quickly away from the end of the catapult and out into the sky, accelerating with every passing second. Slowly, the launched began to recoil and fall back to earth, and the flame on the ground died away. Still, Jaime could see the scoring and the blast scars left on the pad. They would be there forever.

But that thinking occupied only a small portion of his mind, as the Javelin quickly sped away from them and away from range of the naked eye. As one, the group assembled in the control room turned to the wall of monitors, their gaze switching from one to the next as the Javelin sped past the different perspectives. It continued accelerating until just before they reached the outer ring of camera lenses, wide-angled lenses at an extreme angle to the earth's atmosphere. Even as the Javelin entered the view from the left, its two boosters fizzled out and disengaged, dropping away and down to earth so many kilometres below. Built-in parachutes would engage to make their landing slightly more safe, and they would be brought in from the sea by Harakian tugs.

The Javelin's sub-light engines kicked in at that point, taking over the ship's manoeuvering, and Jaime could see the ship's crew making sure all engines worked properly as the manoeuvering thrusters placed on the side kicked in at the same time, not turning the ship at all thanks to equal thrust on both sides, but demonstrating that the thrusters worked. As the ship sped past the last camera, Jaime turned to his friend, Bradley Peck. "Well, Brad? Shall we patch in the telescope camera?"

Bradley nodded silently and the room's operator turned to his controls, fiddling with a few dials and hitting a few buttons, at which point the bank of monitors switched to show one image, a rear view of the Javelin making its way through space. Fed from Haraki's largest telescope, the camera feed would keep an eye on the Javelin until it made Haraki's first-ever faster-than-light jump, through Bradley Peck's wormhole drive, and sped off towards Dythis.

Static radio noises filtered through the room's speakers, and suddenly a voice came through. It was filled with wonder, excitement, and enthusiasm. "This is the HSS Javelin. All systems are in the green. God damn, that's a beautiful sight."

"We read you, Javelin. All checks are positive. Nothing at all went wrong in the launch," another voice responded.

"Damn glad to hear it, Mission Control," the Javelin's captain replied. His voice was still filled with awe.

"You boys getting ready for the jump?"

"Just running the final checks for simultaneous disengagement of the sublights and engagement of the primaries. Should be done in a few minutes, and we'll be on our way."

Jaime reflected on the vastness of space. Watching it hurtle through the atmosphere, it had seemed to be moving so quickly. Out there, in space, it seemed to move much slower, and on a much grander scale. It was humbling and, apparently, a damn beautiful sight.

"The stars don't twinkle out here, Mission Control. It's like nothing you've ever seen."

The controller laughed. "I read you loud and clear, captain. I hope I'll be up there with you one day."

"I hope you will too. It'll blow your fu - uuuh - damn mind. Sorry, Mr Wolfe."

Jaime had to contain a laugh. They knew he was listening in, and were trying to tone down their language for his behalf. It wasn't necessary, but he at least appreciated the effort, if only for his guests.

"How're those checks coming, Captain?"

"Almost done. Webley's just finishing up the last diagnostic on the warp drive. You remember the checks we worked out to make sure it doesn't get damaged in the launch?"

"Didn't, captain."

"Right, didn't. All right, I've got a thumbs up from Webley, looks like we're all clear. The blast retardant shielding on the warp drive did its work. We're good to go and will await your command."

"Just hold on, in the simulations we ran we didn't figure the post-launch checks would go so quickly. In order to get the jump series' timing just right, we've got to wait about twenty seconds. Be ready to hit the button when I call go."

"Roger that, Mission Control. Wormhole drive enabled, warming up. Good to go. Standing by."

A tense twenty seconds passed as a quiet, yet ominous, hum came through the speakers and leveled off after about ten seconds. Jaime's mind once again flashed to what exactly could go wrong.

"Five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... now!"

The hum suddenly cut out as the ship on the screen was suddenly consumed by a blue-purple field and instantly disappeared. Only a split second later, they suddenly heard the hum come back and slowly quiet down to nearly nothing. The captain's voice, slightly shaky, patched through again.

"That was a hell of a thing, Mission Control."

it was out of sight of the telescope, and Jaime gestured to the operator to shut down the screens, which he quickly did.

"Javelin, what happened? We are reading you exactly where you should be."

"It feels like my whole body just got moved hundreds of thousands of kilometres in a split second."

The mission controller laughed again. "Besides that. Side effects?"

"I'm feeling a bit dizzy, but that's going away. I've got a bit of a headache, but that's going away too. Some of the others are worse off than me. Webb's ... yeah, he's throwing up in a bag."

"Just think, Captain, someday you'll be able to tell space cadets that the first jump's always the hardest."

"If I live that long."

"Ha. Good luck. As you know, part of the Javelin's run is testing the power of the wormhole drive. You're right where you should be right now, but we're leaving a much shorter cooldown period between jumps than we've recommended. It's part of the plan, you know that, and we do have estimates for how far it'll take you. The physicists down here are damn good at the math. You've got about a minute until you need to make another jump. Think you'll be ready?"

"I hope it won't kill me. Ready when you are."

The hum slowly rose again, showing that the Javelin was once again powering up its wormhole drive, and a minute later the controller piped in again. "Five ... four ... three ... two ... one. Now!"

The hum disappeared for a split second again and then returned, once again low, complete with sounds of someone retching into a microphone. Jaime recoiled in horror for but a split second, wondering if he had sent the people to their deaths, but Bradley Peck simply kept his ears trained on the speakers.

"Javelin? Come in, Javelin. You all right?"

"You fucker," the Javelin's captain groaned. "You lied to me. The second jump is much, much worse."

"Sorry."

"Augh. Where are we? The whole room is spinning and I can't read the controls right. Even these Tiburon boys are looking worse for wear."

"You're right on target for a jump with such little cooldown. Don't worry, you've got ten minutes until we get into the four-minute recycle period between jumps that the unit was designed for. Just think, you're over a million kilometres away from Earth now."

"Oh god. If I live to see your face again I'm gonna punch you in it. One of these every four minutes? You bastard. How many of these do we have to make?"

"Nine hundred over jumps will get you to Dythis. I'm simplifying a bit. In our simulations, we expected a four-minute recycle period between jumps, which is what the system was designed for. I'm foreseeing we're going to have to build in some better stabilizers into future designs. Make the ride smoother, as they say?"

"I'm gonna kiiiiill you."

"Besides, we think most of the trouble you're experiencing was at least partially caused by the slow cooldown period between jumps, straining the wormhole drive. With the ten-minute wait we should let it recover, and then it should be into the routine of the four-minute schedule. I'm sorry about the second jump, really."

"Wait, can you tell us how much strain's been put on the engine? Webb's kind of indisposed at the moment."

"Nothing it can't handle with the extra cooldown period. No need to worry. Worry about staying alive through the third jump."

"Is the Argo this bad too? Those colonists don't have the training we do."

"No, they anticipated the drive would have some side effects and installed better stabilizers on the Argo. Not to mention they've now got three days to make them as good as they can be. Hopefully they won't get anything more than a little queasy."

Jaime turned to the rest of the group assembled in the room, that had heard every word of it. "I think it's time we leave. Chris here will show you all to the waiting room, where refreshments are available. I'll join you in a few minutes." Chris, a young man in a military police uniform, had appeared at the door and gave a formal nod and smile to the assembled international brigade.

"Ladies and gentlemen, if you would follow me, please."

Once they had all left and the door had been closed, Jaime turned to Bradley. "I need to talk to you," he growled. "Right fucking now."

Jaime shut the door behind them forcefully as Bradley Peck walked through and took a seat at the table. Jaime spun to face him. "What the fuck is this, Brad? You didn't tell me the wormhole drive would do this to people! Didn't this crop up in all tests?"

Brad shrugged. "Yeah, a bit. We usually haven't been moving people five hundred thousand kilometres in a fraction of a second. Yeah, our test subjects showed some signs of discomfort when we warped them across a vacuum-sealed room, but nothing too extreme."

"Then what the fuck just happened on the Javelin?"

"Bad stabilizers, not enough time between jumps."

"That's it?"

Brad nodded. "That's it. The stabilizers suck. They're essentially our second draft. The Argo's running on the fifth."

"Why doesn't the Javelin have the fifth as well?"

"Albany slashed the budget, and by the time you were back in office that part of the ship was already complete. Thankfully the Argo wasn't, or we'd have fifty colonists throwing up every jump." He smiled. Evidently the last part was a joke.

"God damn it, Brad, I hope you're kidding me."

"Don't worry, I am. Besides the shit stabilizers, we were experimenting. The engines are designed around a four-minute recovery period between jumps. They need time to cool off, and to recover from the first jump. Not to mention the people onboard need a chance to recover internally. A warp jump is a jarring thing, Jaime. Of course, we theorize that the better stabilizers a ship is equipped with, the less time will be needed between jumps to let the people onboard recover. Even if they don't know it, it screws with their insides. That's why the Javelin's crew is getting visibly sick."

"So the fact that the Javelin is part of the test is the reason for this? If we'd left four minutes between jumps this wouldn't have happened?"

Brad nodded. "That's pretty much it. Of course, we won't know until they're actually onto the four-minute recovery cycle, but we're pretty damn sure on this one."

"What about the Argo? Are we going to have the same problems in front of the international community as the Javelin's showing right now?"

"The Argo's running the same engine as the Javelin, but it's got much better stabilizers. Running on the same four-minute cycle, it'll probably actually be a fairly smooth ride, especially since there's no experiments being done on it. With those stabilizers we could probably cut the recovery time down to three minutes forty-some seconds and have the people still be okay, but we decided not to since the engines aren't designed for it."

Jaime sat down on the edge of the table facing his friend. "So ... how will this get better in the future?"

"We're working on better stabilizers, but those come incrementally slower. We can come out with them fast enough, but they don't get better faster. It'll be a while before we can run even a three-minute recycle period without it screwing with the crew. Engines, however ... once we break through the miniaturization plateau, we can shrink the engines enough that we can start adding supercooling systems that will allow it to cool faster, and bring engine recycle time down to maybe three minutes ... twenty seconds? Then from there it's anybody's guess. Of course, we can get around these problems by getting miniaturization and making engines the same size as we have now but much more powerful, allowing, say, million-kilometre jumps at a time. That, with a recycle period of three minutes forty-five seconds, would allow ... travel time to Dythis would be reduced to about twenty-eight hours."

"What is it now?"

"Sixty."

Jaime whistled under his breath. "You boys are good, Brad. How long until that becomes a reality?"

"A long time."

"Shit."

Brad shrugged apologetically. "We're doing the best we can, but too many of the new university graduates want to go into other fields. We snap up a good proportion, but we could use more, so we could run even more research teams at a time."

"More funding, you mean."

"Basically, yes."

"Well, if Project Dythis is a success, I can pretty much guarantee you a much larger chunk of the defence budget. And if it fails, I can pretty much guarantee you HAEDA will be no more."

Brad laughed. "Well, at least we know where we stand."

"Yeah, really. So ... If you were running as many research teams as you'd like to have, how long would it be before we could shrink that down? Get to the million-kilometre mark with a three minute forty-five recovery time?"

"No way to tell, Jaime. It all depends on when we figure out how to efficiently miniaturize the engine. From there, it's all downhill."

"Well when you manage it, let me know. Now, what about the Javelin? How much more of this are they going to have to endure?"

"Well, it's two and a half days to Dythis, but with the proper recovery time it shouldn't be a problem. I told you this already."

"I know, I'm just nervous," Jaime admitted. "All this makes me nervous."

Brad checked his watch. "They'll be jumping again in about a minute. Want to go see how it goes?"

Jaime nodded, and they made their way back through the door, down a short section of hallway, and back into the observation room, in time to hear the Javelin's captain, sounding slightly shaken, talking. "All right, I think we can try again. Webb's still looking shaky, but that's only to be expected. Weak stomach on him."

"You boys good to go?" the mission controller asked.

"As we ever will be," the captain replied apprehensively.

"Once we start into the four-minute recycle period we have to stick to it, Javelin. Starting in ten ... nine ..."

"Woah shit, this is not going to be fun," someone said in the backgorund of the Javelin, and was met by further talking from someone else, until the captain barked "Shut up!"

"three ... two ... one ... now!"

The hum blinked out for a moment once again and returned, low. The captain's voice was shaky, but he seemed all right. "That one was much, much better, mission control. I don't feel like I just lost a bar fight. I just feel like shit."

"Good to hear. Four minutes until your next jump. Everyone all right up there?"

"I'm fine, I'm fine. The ten minutes made all the difference in the world. Webb's ... well, he's Webb, and you should know that by now."

"Oh, I do."

Brad turned to Jaime. "See? It was the short recovery time. They should be fine from now on."

Jaime gave a half smile. "I suppose. Let's get something to eat."

They stood, and left the room.