Victory Or Extinction: USA Edition - Book Three of The Rational Future Trilogy

Book Three of

The Rational Future Trilogy

With American Imperial (Standard) measurement units

A Smashwords Digital Production

Copyright2015

By

Wayne Edward Clarke

All Rights Reserved

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters in this book and any real person living or dead is strictly coincidental.

The purchaser of this eBook may copy this eBook to any computers, eBook reading devices, or backup digital storage media that the purchaser personally owns. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people by the purchaser. This eBook may not be loaned by the purchaser to other people unless the purchaser is also loaning the eBook reading device that this eBook will be read on. This eBook may not be copied to any device or media that is not personally owned by the purchaser. The purchaser must delete this eBook from any devices or media that the purchaser is selling, giving away, or disposing of. For the purposes of this statement of rights; corporations are not people. Corporations must purchase one copy of each eBook for each human person associated with the company who will read them.

Books By Wayne Edward Clarke:

Science Fiction:

The Rational Future Trilogy:

Book 1; People Of The Tiger

Book 2; Hunters In The Sky

Book 3; Victory Or Extinction

Epic Fantasy:

The Nexus Of Kellaran Trilogy:

Book 1; Blessings Of A Curse

Book 2; The Fire And The Storm

And coming in 2015;

Book 3; Chaos Of A Demon War

These novels are available in popular eBook formats at

Smashwords.com who have provided format conversions

And at leading eBook retailers

And on popular eBook apps for Apple and Android devices.

Forward

This is the USA Edition. Measurements are given in American Imperial (Standard) units.

It's been at least thirteen years since I started writing this trilogy, and many things have changed since then. For instance; when I began there were no 'tablet' or 'pad' style computers available in the world, so they were science fiction. Now they are reality, and they're everywhere, much sooner than I expected. This inability to accurately predict the pace of innovation and the course of the future is the biggest problem with writing science fiction, but we do what we can.

Many of the characters in this book who are closely related and of the same gender have very similar names, (Tika daughter of Tira, Raz son of Naz, etc.), so names must be read carefully. This is done to show relationship in a subculture that does not use family names.

The characters who are from the predator peoples in this story speak Formal Standard English, which does not use contractions like doesn’t, or you’ll, or isn’t. It may seem like they speak strangely, but the reasons for this are valid, and are explained in Book One.

The lifestyles of the predator peoples in this book, especially regarding fighting and homes, are completely frivolous plot devices, only designed to contribute to a good story.

Many of the other sociological changes that have taken place in this series are practical solutions to global problems. They include policies, infrastructure, and/or laws dealing with the environment, climate change, overpopulation, transportation, human genetic engineering, recreational alcohol and drug use, and sexuality. I can’t say for sure whether they will work until we try them, but I believe they are the best solutions available.

The thinking that led to these solutions is bio-sociological engineering, and I developed it from bio-sociology as introduced and advanced by Professor Edward. O. Wilson, and sociobiology as introduced and advanced by the zoologist Dr. Desmond Morris.

Since languages began they have constantly changed and evolved. The advents of written language and printing both slowed language evolution, but it still goes on. Sometimes the resulting conventions that make up ‘proper English’ don’t make a lot of sense, and they're slightly different in every English-speaking country. In most of these cases I’ve caved and used the American conventions anyway in order to avoid irritating my readers who are sensitive about these things, like writing ‘seven thousand, three hundred and fifty-five’. It makes no sense that the compound words for numbers up to one hundred are hyphenated, like fifty-five, and the others aren’t, like three thousand. But I go with it anyway.

However, there is one English convention that I absolutely refuse to follow because it distorts the emotional connotations of the writing. I’ll point it out here so that you’ll know that it’s not a mistake; I’m doing it on purpose.

If a quoted sentence is a question or an exclamation, it is conventionally written as a complete sentence within quotations, for example;

Get down! she yelled. Or;

Is that right? he asked.

However if a sentence that would normally end in a period is a quotation, correct English says that it should be ended with a comma. For example;

I live here, he said.

But the comma makes it a sentence fragment rather than a complete sentence, and leaves the reader hanging, giving a different emotional feel to the writing compared to the way I would write it, which is;

I live here. he said.

I only use a comma to end a quotation if it truly is a sentence fragment, because the sentence was interrupted where a comma would normally go. For example;

I live here, he said, And you’re not welcome.

I suppose in that case I shouldn’t capitalize the word ‘And’, since it’s not really the first word in a sentence, but it bugs me if I don’t.

It’s hard to change what is considered Correct English, but I hope that other writers who read my books will agree with me about these points and do the same in their own writing, and that eventually doing it our way will be correct.

I declare and retain my complete ownership of all intellectual property rights in this novel, including the copyright of the story, and the Industrial Design and/or Patent rights of all of the original technological concepts and devices described therein.

Wayne Edward Clarke,

January 16, 2015

Victory Or Extinction

Chapter 1

April 3, 2156 C.E.

The crew of the United Nation Space Ship The One Gee were silent and introspective as they approached turnover, halfway home from their interdiction and intelligence-gathering mission against an Attacker ship in interplanetary space, somewhere around the orbit of Mars.

It had been war. Tension, excitement, terror, rage, blood, pain, death, victory, exhilaration, celebration, sorrow. Then the cold intellectual control of cleanups, interrogations, and more cleanups. Mourning.

The quiet pink noise of the fusion rocket ended, leaving them in silent zero gravity for a moment, then the ship started rotating with its maneuvering thrusters.

Tika, humanity’s foremost child prodigy and the ship’s owner and captain, suddenly reached out and tapped her main control screen a few times. She interrupted the ship’s navigation sequence, cancelled their rotation, and a sudden complete silence fell as they returned to free-fall. With her were Pina, Ali and Assan Bhil, Almona and Susan King, Raz, and Jena.

I do not want to go home yet. Tika stated, sounding a bit emotional. I really am not ready to deal with everything that I will have to do when we get there. I sure wish Slin was here with us. Her voice cracked a bit on the last word. She covered her face with her hands and started quietly crying.

In a moment Pina had released herself from her crash-webbing, pulled herself over to Tika’s Captain’s chair, released Tika’s crash-webbing, and scooped the petite girl up into a warm and supportive hug. Another moment after that, and the rest of the crew had joined them in a warm group hug that started drifting around the big open space of the ship’s bridge.

Slin will be fine. Pina re-assured her. It was a bad wound for sure, but you know that he is dealing with it well, he is getting the very best med for both his mind and his body, and you know that Traveler has assured us that his hand will grow back without impairment or visible scarring.

I know. Tika said with a sniff. I just wish he was here.

I think we need some private time. Almona quietly stated, reminding everyone that the bridge cameras were streaming live, as usual, and that much of humanity were watching the emotional scene.

No. Tika stated with a sniff. Maybe it is politically unwise of me to cry like an eight-year-old girl in front of the whole world, but that is what I am, and sometimes eight-year-old girls cry. Some of our crew mates were killed and some close friends were horribly injured, and my heel was shot off. The body of available evidence would support the assertion that it is not a sign of excessive emotional instability or functional incapability for me to cry right now.

True. Almona chuckled as the group hug broke up.

While I fully support the idea of not going home yet, Raz commented with a smile, The fact remains that we cannot simply ‘stay here’, since we are still traveling toward Earth at this journey’s maximum speed. We need to make a decision about navigation, and fairly soon. If you want to take a vacation, just turn the cameras off and be off-duty for as long as you like.

No, I am being childish. Tika sadly stated as she wiped her eyes. She gently pushed away from Pina so she could float back to her chair. We will go home, and I will do what I have to do.

The rest maneuvered themselves back to their seats as Tika recalculated their navigation program to account for her having delayed it, then re-initiated it. The ship resumed its rotation, then cancelled it, there was another moment of free fall, then apparent gravity slowly returned as the main engine built up thrust to one gee.

Tika took her seat, planted her elbow on her arm rest, and rested her cheek in her hand. Everyone waited expectantly for a few minutes as she visibly ordered her thoughts.

All right, I have some things to say. she announced as she sat up straight. "Since I announced the results of our interrogations of the Attackers, I have reconsidered many things. My artificial instincts were in full arousal then, from our battle with the Attackers and from interrogating them after. Since then, my normal instincts have re-asserted dominance in my mind in one respect; I am not going to have any babies anytime soon, despite what I said before.

"But then, perhaps the decision to not have babies now, despite how much they might help our war effort, has little to do with my natural instincts.

"My artificial instinct to hate the Attackers, and to kill them whenever I can, and to protect humanity from them; that instinct is taking over my mind. Without Traveler’s medicine to reduce the strength of it, I would be absolutely fanatical about it right now. Even as it is, I can think of little else. But the fact that I am genetically programmed to want to do that does not mean that it is not the right thing to do. It is the right thing to do, by any rational analysis.

"I cannot spare any time to have babies and raise them, even if I felt I was completely ready to do that, which I most definitely am not.

"And right now, humanity cannot spare a moment from our most important task; As quickly as we possibly can, we must build a force that can defeat the approaching Attacker armada, and do so with certainty. We cannot let them get any closer to our solar system than absolutely necessary. We must kill them all, and as quickly as we can, and do so as far from here as we can.

"Everyone knows we have been working on building many robotic weapons ships to guard the far reaches of the solar system from any invasion by the Attackers. We started that during the first mission to WP5, well before the recent mission, before we knew for certain that the Attackers were coming here, before we knew about the approaching armada.

"Now, we must alter our plans in order to deal with the reality that we are faced with. All of humanity must dedicate every bit of our available effort and resources, and all of our scientific and technological ability, to building and launching the mission to destroy the Attacker fleet as soon as we can.

"Almost every element of our mission to destroy the Attacker armada will be robotic, but at least a few people must be on location at the battle to observe. If things do not go well, we may have to reprogram the attack robots on the spot, and in the middle of the battle. Of course, ‘on the spot’ is a relative term; any reprogramming of the robots will be done by encrypted radio from tens of thousands of miles away.

"We will bring millions of robots, and if they cannot achieve victory, a few humans in two or three ships will not be able to make a difference by fighting directly. Therefore, our personnel on that mission will not engage the enemy under any circumstances. If our stealth technologies work as we hope, none of our manned ships will ever be detected by the enemy, however the battle progresses.

We will not leave our civilization defenseless while we mount our offensive, but we will not spare the robots it would take to patrol the entire outer solar system, either. A dense defensive network of robotic ships will be established around the Earth-Moon system, and another around Mars and its moons, and that is all we really need for now. After the Attacker armada is destroyed, we can reconsider our deployments.

She faltered for a moment, then continued with less resolve.

"I... I realize that I have already committed acts that have turned some people against me, and I cannot blame them. I tortured captive Attackers who were helpless to defend themselves, in order to learn what we needed to know to ensure our survival. I executed captive Attackers when there was nothing more of value to be learned from them. If they were humans, those acts would be inhumane, and violations of their human rights.

"Human rights used to mean the universal rights of all the sapient and intelligent beings, when humans were the only ones we knew of. Now, human rights means; the rights of the humans.

"Some have argued for those rights to be extended to whales, dolphins, and apes, but we have not done so. We cannot teach those species to control their own population numbers without our intervention, and we cannot teach them to contribute to their environment with any sort of ecoculture. Now that we have restored the vibrancy of the Earth’s ecosphere, those species are all very successful, and they are breeding rapidly. Without our intervention, every one of those species would breed numbers far beyond the balance, until nature responded with a die-off that would have huge repercussions throughout the ecosystem.

"And that is the bottom line; Like us, Traveler and Swimmer are citizens of The United Nation because they are fully sapient, and they are capable of understanding that they must control their numbers and their breeding rate in order to co-exist peacefully and harmoniously. They will act on that understanding.

"Whales, dolphins, and apes are not capable of having that understanding, or acting on it, so when their populations exceed the balances, we cull them. We hunt them and kill them like any other animals, despite the fact that they display impressive intelligence. By doing so, we make sure that they thrive, and that their populations maintain healthy numbers. Our ecocultural system ensures that there are many more of them now than there ever were before their numbers were originally reduced by human technology. To fail to cull them now would be to allow them to destroy other species.

"We also do not tolerate aggressive weed species. No matter how beautiful or admirable a species is, we will not allow it to spread quickly or unchecked into new environments that have not evolved the means to contain the new species, at the expense of the native species. We exterminate aggressively expanding weed species whenever we find them outside their natural environment, while making sure that they thrive in their home territory, where they are not weed species.

"The Attackers are not capable of voluntarily limiting their populations, and they are not capable of acting to co-exist peacefully and harmoniously with other species. It is simply not in their nature. They will only slow their expansion when forced to do so, they will take what they want wherever they find it without regard for anyone else’s possession or occupancy, and they will exterminate or enslave anything that gets in their way. That is just the way they are, and they cannot be changed without a radical redesign of many of their species’ most important survival instincts. All of us who worked with them during the recent mission are in agreement about this, including our most qualified xeno-zoologists, xeno-psychologists, and xeno-sociologists. Therefore, the Attackers cannot qualify to be citizens of the United Nation, and they are not qualified to have rights.

"Furthermore, they are unisexual, and every one of them that is old enough to walk can reproduce very rapidly and stealthily by laying hundreds or thousands of tiny, almost microscopic eggs, and their hatchlings can be reliably commanded to attack. They are like biological war robots; they are simply too dangerous and intelligent to keep around, and anyone who thinks we can contain any of them completely and forever is gambling the survival of our species on a bad bet. We cannot keep them as prisoners or slaves.

"And as I have said; if the Attackers I killed had been allowed to report back to their superiors, their superiors would have executed them by cannibalism for their failure.

"Attackers are the worst kind of weed species. According to the principles of ecoculture, they should be re-introduced back to their home world and allowed to thrive there, but only so long as they can be effectively quarantined there. They must be exterminated everywhere else, wherever they are found. And if their home world is no longer survivable for them, then they no longer have a place in nature.

"We have dealt with species like this before. Hybrid Africanized killer bees were an unnatural man-made blending of species, and they were distinct from both of their natural parent stocks; African bees and South American bees. They were one of the worst and most aggressive weed species. Since they were native to no ecosystem, we exterminated them completely, in order to protect the native species. The same can be done to the Attackers, as far as I am concerned, for the sake of our own species’ survival, and our future well-being.

"Anyway, I completely understand those who feel badly about the fact that I tortured and killed captive Attackers. There is no doubt that I have failed to uphold the humane standards of behavior that have been universal among us since Rationalism became our dominant way of life. But it had to be done. That fact is independent from my feelings about doing it. I will not change my attitudes towards Attackers, because I cannot, and I would not if I could. Please be assured that those attitudes are completely species-specific. I will never feel that way about any member of any other species, nor am I capable of it.

"Those who wish to lodge a complaint about my behavior can take it up with the peoples of Sedecia, both humans and Sedecimapods, who are responsible for my emotions and instincts regarding the Attackers.

"Now, if we act quickly enough, we may be able to strike at the Attackers twice, if necessary, before they can attack us. Of course we hope to finish the job the first time, but we cannot count on it; there is simply too much that we still do not know.

"We do not know the capabilities of their new technologies, except for their hand-weapons, because the Attackers who came here did not know that. Other than knowing that the Attackers consider their armada to be sufficient to defeat the Sedecian-Species Three alliance, we have no knowledge of their capabilities. We do not know how many ships they have, how many Attackers they carry or of what size and development, what speed and endurance they are capable of, or the destructive capability of their ships’ weapons.

"So, if it is at all possible, I want us to have time for a second strike mission against the Attackers before they get here, in case the first one fails. This makes our need for haste even more critical.

"I am sure there are ongoing discussions at the highest levels about these matters, which we will participate in as soon as we are close enough to reduce the com lag to practical conversational durations. In the meantime, I am doing all I can to increase our production of robotic weapons ships as much as possible, as soon as possible. I am asking everyone else that can spare any intellectual or industrial capacity to do the same, including every company, every clan home, and every department of government.

"On another matter; Traveler is the only Sedecian Sedecimapod in The United Nation, though there are many of her species on Sedecia. But Swimmer to Earth is the only one of her species; the first sentient space-adapted species, which must be considered critically endangered, and on the verge of extinction. The threat of the approaching enemy armada makes the possibility of the extinction of her species much more likely. The enemy threatens us all.

"Traveler and Swimmer were given defined limitations in the amount of population expansion they would be allowed; both long-term limitations on their numbers as a percentage of ours, and short-term limitations on the number of children they would be allowed to give birth to over the next few years, dependent on the effectiveness of their integration into our society, basically. Their long-term population limitations still remain, unchanged. However, due to our new circumstances, I have used the authority I have been legally granted to remove the short-term limitations.

"I have told Traveler and Swimmer that they can have as many babies as is practical and healthy, for at least as long as we are threatened by the enemy armada, and until further notice, or until they reach their long-term limits. I consider this act of compassion to be morally imperative, and I hope everyone agrees with me on this.

Thank you.

She paused, then continued more conversationally; Almona, Raz, I have decided that you are right. Having announced everything that I wanted to avoid dealing with, I will take a vacation from public scrutiny until we are back in convenient com range.

With that, she tapped her screen to end the broadcast of the ship’s cams and mics.

Of course, I did not announce what I am most worried about on a personal level. she mused as she turned to Pina, and glanced at Raz to include him. "What I am really worried about is how long we will be gone.

"The Attackers said the enemy fleet should be about point eight of a light year away, and decelerating. It is good that they are decelerating, as we can approach them from the blind spot created by their fission rocket exhaust, directly astern of them, which is in front of them according to their direction of travel.

"Speaking of which, we are also flying blind right now, since we are also decelerating. We cannot see around our exhaust, since we are dispersing it into a wide stream to reduce the possibility of damaging anything ahead of us in our path.

Assan, launch two observer drones to fly beside us but far enough away that they can see around our exhaust, and have them alternate decelerating and looking ahead so that our view forward is uninterrupted, and make this a standard procedure for any ships we operate or manufacture that are decelerating with dispersing exhaust.

She continued as he nodded and turned to his screen to comply.

Anyway, I want to figure out how long it will take us to prepare for the mission, and to perform it, and to return. Most importantly, I need to know how much time it will take us due to relativistic time distortion caused by our velocity, compared to the passage of time on Earth.

I will calculate the relativistic duration, that is; both our subjective travel time in both directions, and our apparent mission duration to those on Earth. Pina decided as she turned to Raz. You figure out our maximum time to manufacture enough firepower to be absolutely guaranteed to destroy the enemy fleet. The time cost for the actual battle will be so short in comparison with those two factors as to be irrelevant.

No. Raz said with a shake of his head.. That is to say; we need to solve the manufacturing time question first. You seem to be assuming that it will not take us very long to build enough attack drones, so you think you can calculate our travel time to the Attackers’ present position, and be fairly close to the right answer. But I think it could take us between two and four years to build enough hardware. That is long enough to make calculating the travel time impractical until we know that. If it takes us more than twelve years to build enough drones, the enemy will be here before then, and we will not have to travel anywhere.

I think we’re on the wrong track. Ali opined. "I think the idea of having people along on the mission in order to reprogram the drones if necessary is a huge mistake. Even with our present technology, our drones can accelerate and decelerate continuously at tens of gees, or hundreds of gees if we choose to build ‘em that way. I say; as soon as we have a hundred big attack drones built, send ‘em out with one observer drone. When we have another hundred built, send them out right away too, and keep doing it.

"The first observer drone would remain on the scene until the first hundred weapons have completely destroyed the enemy fleet, or until the enemy fleet figures out a way to counteract the drones, or until the second wave arrived with its own observer, at which time the first observer would come home to report. That way we have the maximum number of weapons deployed against the enemy in the minimum amount of time. If the Attackers don’t figure out a way to counteract the drones, great, they get destroyed in the minimum time possible.

"If the enemy does figure out how to counteract our weapons drones, our observers will report back about it as soon as they can. This way we don’t have the ability to reprogram them on the spot, but reprogramming them may not be enough. If we need to change their entire design, this plan allows us to reprogram them or completely redesign them the maximum number of times before the enemy can attack us. Especially if we design all our drones, both weapons and observers, to be able to accelerate continuously at a hundred gees or more. We could have the first drones’ reports back and have completely redesigned drones in the battle long before any humans could even get there in the first place."

Of course, all that is assuming that Pina’s right, and Einstein was wrong, and we really can exceed the speed of light in any way. Assan pointed out. Otherwise it’s faster to just have the attack drones report back by radio, and not bother with observer drones at all.

Susan spoke up as soon as Assan finished. "There’s some good points in there, for sure, but I think that with as many Attackers and unknown aliens as the enemy fleet is sure to have with them, they’re likely to be able to figure out a way to counteract anything we send against them if we give them enough time. So I say; don’t give ‘em any time. Build the most hellacious weapons we can; which is drones equipped with fusion bombs. The thermonuclear missiles that threatened our ancestors for generations are still the most destructive weapons we’ve ever come up with. Keep building as many of them as we can, as fast as we can, until the last possible minute.

Just before the Attacker fleet gets close enough to attack us, we’ll hit ‘em with our biggest possible attack, and they’ll have no time to adapt to our tactics, or our strategy, or our technology, before they’re completely destroyed. That’s our safest and most effective possible plan of attack.

"That’s probably our safest and most effective possible plan of attack, Almona said before Raz or Pina could respond, But what if they have a way to avoid being destroyed by our fusion bomb equipped drones? I don’t think it’s very likely, but if they do, then your plan doesn’t leave us any chance to try something else. It’s an all-or-nothing plan."

Hm. Good point. Susan nodded.

But supporting Susan’s plan, Jena opined, "Is the fact that there is no amount of weaponry that is guaranteed to be able to destroy the enemy fleet, since we do not know how many ships they have, or how vulnerable they are to our weaponry. All we can do is hit them with our absolute biggest possible attack, all at once, and hope for the best."

And if we do go with that plan, then it again becomes practical to have humans along on the mission, to adapt it to the unexpected. Tika mused.

It also allows us to hit them with our most varied possible attack. Raz nodded. If every company and concern is going to contribute what they can to our arsenal, some will build lasers, some will build cannon, some mass drivers, et cetera, according to the tooling and abilities they each have. We will hit the Attackers with absolutely everything of absolutely every variety, all at once. There is no way they will be able to avoid or defend against all of that.

No one spoke for a moment, then Raz chuckled to his sister; "I keep forgetting that we are not the only geniuses in our clan anymore.

Good thinking, you guys. Especially you Susan, I think you had the crucial realization.

We still have two problems with that plan though. Tika stated decisively. "The first is that we still need to send out an observation mission, as soon as possible, so we can get at least a minimal understanding of their capabilities as soon as possible. We can at least learn the number and size of their ships without revealing ourselves. The advantage we will gain from that intelligence should far outweigh the possibility that we will suffer some disadvantage because our observers were noticed by the enemy.

"That fits with the second problem, which is that the plan otherwise offers no way to take action for almost twelve years. I am sure I cannot wait that long. I need to act.

So, we will launch a mission with a few dozen of our stealthiest and fastest possible unarmed observer drones, as soon as we can. And, we will launch our fastest possible manned observation mission, as soon as we can.

So we still need to know how long it will take in travel time, including relativistic effects. Pina grinned. I am glad, as I am looking forward to figuring it out.

You still think the light speed barrier is an illusion? Assan asked her with a raised eyebrow.

I am sure of it. she grinned. Einstein was wrong about that because he did not fully understand the nature of the fabric of space-time. And of course, because he did not realize that gravity is quantum.

Can you explain it so it’s understandable to a non-physicist? Almona asked. I’m smarter than I was before I got the mods, but I still don’t understand relativity at all because I’ve never studied it, so I can’t understand how you’ve proven it wrong.

All right. I will review the ideas behind the light speed barrier. Pina patiently explained. "Einstein said that four qualities of an object change when it is in motion, and the effects increase as you go faster. As you go faster and faster to get closer and closer to the speed of light, your mass increases to infinity, your energy requirement to accelerate any more increases to infinity, your length in the direction of travel decreases to zero, and the passage of time for you decreases to zero. Since any of those four are impossible, actually reaching the speed of light is also supposed to be impossible.

"But Einstein also said that three of those are relative, and therefore, they are illusions of perspective. He said that if your ship travels very close to the speed of light, the ship and everything in it still seems normal to a person inside the ship, only the view outside seems abnormal to them due to Doppler shift and the tunnel effect illusion.

"This spacecraft we are in right now can accelerate to the speed of light, according to classical Newtonian physics. We have the thrust capability to accelerate long enough and hard enough. And right now, we are already going fast enough that relativistic effects are great enough to be easily measurable. Our mass has increased as far as the rest of the universe is concerned, but we know that it is an illusion, because to us, our mass is still normal.

"If we accelerate so close to the speed of light that our theoretical mass relative to the Earth increases to that of a neutron star shaped like our bodies, we will not collapse into a spherical neutron star, because we are still normal mass relative to us. When we slow down to normal speed, we will not have suffered any of the effects that would really happen if this ship and everything in it had weighed as much as the same volume of neutron star material.

"Similarly, our length will be the same after that journey as it was before. We will suffer no ill effects from having been shortened in our direction of travel to almost nothing in the view of the rest of the universe.

"Similarly, if we can complete that journey on half a tank of fusion fuel from our perspective inside the ship using Newtonian physics, we will still have half a tank of fuel left when it is over, even though relativity says that we used an almost infinite amount of energy to accelerate that close to the speed of light.

"So the mass increase, the shortening in the direction of travel, and the increased energy costs are not completely real, since they revert back to normal when you slow down again.

"Of the relativistic effects, only the time distortion is completely real. If Einstein is right, once you are traveling at ninety-nine point nine percent of the speed of light, you cannot practically go any faster, according to the normal human perspective in the rest of the universe. If you spend fuel energy to try to go faster than that, you will, but only according to the perspective of the ship and those inside it. In the outside universe, you just increase your speed to ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the speed of light, then ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent, getting closer and closer to the speed of light in smaller and smaller increments, but never actually passing light speed.

"So really, you burn more fuel to time-travel into the future more and more, and it has no other practical effect, meanwhile the external view of the speed of your motion does not practically change; it still remains a tiny bit less than the speed of light. This time travel into the future is completely real, because the time change remains after your ship returns to rest; it does not return to what it was before the trip, as the mass and length and energy cost do.

"All of that is a very smart thing to do if the ship is colonizing and the occupants know that they will never return to Earth, especially if the destination is more than a hundred light years away. They accelerate to very very close to the speed of light, they arrive in a few months according to the ship’s clocks, including acceleration time to get close to light speed, and deceleration time after. So for very long one-way trips, even Einstein said that light speed is no barrier. Unless you need to make sure that conditions at your destination do not change during your trip, you can go anywhere in the galaxy in a reasonable amount of time, and for the first trip there the trip duration will not matter.

"But for any return trip, the relativistic time distortion serves exactly the same real-world function as making the trip in suspended animation. It may seem like it did not take very long to make the trip, but when you get back, you have been gone a bit longer than the travel time at light speed, plus acceleration and deceleration time up to ninety-nine point nine percent of light, and that is all there is to it. So thousands of light years of distance still take you thousands of years of time to travel, according to everything outside the ship. According to Einstein.

"Now that almost all of humanity has the Sedie mods and biological immortality, the worst problem of interstellar travel is removed, even if I am wrong. If you go on a trip that takes you a thousand years, there is a good chance that your loved ones will still be alive when you return. If we had a good enough rocket to make it practical, we never needed biological immortality to preserve the youth of interstellar travelers; relativity does that for us. By conventional wisdom, we needed biological immortality to preserve the youth of those who stay behind.

Do you follow me so far?

Yes, I’ve got that. Almona nodded.

Our elders who are newly young, like Davdan and Pabano, would not change much if we are gone for a century or two. Tika thought aloud. "Their personalities are pretty well established. But if we are gone on a journey for millennia, everyone may not seem like the same people when we get back.

And the immortality does not help much if our loved ones are young children when we leave. They will be grown and be completely different people when we return, even if we are only gone a few years. We can still get to know them when we get back, and they may still remember us, but we will have missed their childhood. It is not the same.

Okay, I’ll admit we can treat the relativistic shortening and energy cost as illusions, for most practical purposes. Ali told Pina with some determination. "But you’re making a mistake if you think the relativistic increase in mass has no practical effect on reality. If you go so close to the speed of light that your ship’s matter has the relativistic mass of the same volume of neutron star material, your gravity affects other objects as if that mass was real, as if your ship really did weigh as much as a gigantic star, even if you feel no effects from it!

"Your navigation will be affected by the gravity of the stars and planets that you pass just as much as if your relativistic mass was real. Your gravity will affect other objects as you pass them just as much as if that mass was real, and if you pass very close to anything, there will be huge effects. If you pass close to a ship or a space station or an asteroid, that object’s orbit or course will be drastically affected, and the object may be completely destroyed. If you passed really close to something really massive, like the Moon, it could be a cataclysm of unimaginable proportions!

"And regardless of whatever you say is gonna happen when you go faster than the speed of light, we all know that those effects are going to happen as you approach the speed of light! Relativity is pretty damn well proved!

"We can’t even risk an experiment to show whether you’re right, because we know that just before you reach the speed of light, your effective mass will be almost infinite! At least momentarily. And it won’t matter if you really can actually pass light speed after that, if you’ve already disrupted the orbits of every star and planet in the galaxy with a pulsed gravity wave of nearly infinite strength!"

Pina chuckled. "I am fully aware of the full reality of sub-light-speed relativistic effects, and I do account for them when calculating our navigation. As to their destructive potential; the conservation of energy law still applies. Even if Einstein was right, there is nowhere near enough energy contained in a ship’s fuel tank to have that huge an effect, not even if we stored the same mass of antimatter, which we can also actually do, by the way.

"The amount of velocity and relativistic mass we can gain, and the gravitational effect we can have because of it, is limited by our fuel’s energy. In practical terms, the maximum amount of stuff you can destroy with a given amount of fuel is about the same, regardless of the method. So, if you picture our entire fuel tank of hydrogen being used in perfectly placed nuclear fusion bombs, you could destroy a lot of stuff, and have a big effect. But it could not make a very appreciable effect on the orbit of the Earth, for instance, and practically none at all on the mass and momentum of the entire galaxy. And if you could not do it with that much explosive, then you could not do it with that much gravity wave. The total available energy is the same.

"It is an important fact that in practical terms, none of the relativistic effects are great enough to be dangerous or even noticeable until you get to within ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the speed of light. And if I am right, when a physical object made of conventional matter gets to that speed and continues to accelerate, the state of reality for that object starts to change, and those changes increase logarithmically with further acceleration. Conventional relativity has proportionately less effect as the state of reality changes for the accelerating object.

"Believe me, even if I am wrong about this, and Einstein was completely right, the experiment would be harmless. The ship or drone would get close to the speed of light, it would experience mass increase and time dilation, but it would not be able to gain near enough mass to be gravitationally dangerous before its fuel was expended. In order to gain near-infinite mass, you really would need near-infinite fuel, and you still could not reach light speed, if I am wrong. You can do the math on that yourself, you know."

I know. he grinned. I may not have been a super-genius like you, but I was a professional spacer with a genius IQ, and was significantly smarter than average, even before I got the mods. Despite my down-to-earth space-cowboy demeanor.

Me too! Assan added with a chuckle.

So what is your point? Pina laughed. That you are more than smart enough to do the calculations, but you did not bother doing so before you accused me of endangering the galaxy?!

I was thinking of the situation of your being able to pass light speed by beating the infinite energy problem, without beating the infinite mass problem, I suppose. Ali responded with a shrug. "You say you can exceed light speed, which I’m still pretty sure is impossible, and I still don’t get how you’re going to do it, so I don’t know what parts of normal reality you aren’t violating.

But I’ll admit that if you’re right about the change in space-time as you near light speed, then what you’re saying about the rest of it does make sense. Sort of. I guess.

Thanks. Pina chuckled, then turned to Tika.

"If I am wrong and Einstein is right, the trip to where the Attacker fleet is right now, at eighty percent of a light year away, will take more than fourteen months but less than two years in each direction, depending on how much acceleration we want to withstand during the trip. It will seem like it took somewhat less than that to those who make the journey. At one gee it takes about three and a half months to accelerate to light speed, and the same to decelerate; the rest of the trip would be spent near light speed.

"The Slaver armada is about eight trillion kilometers away, and it will only take us about one point three trillion to get to light speed at one gee of acceleration, so if I am right, it will really make a big difference.

And when we consider the unmanned mission, composed of drones accelerating at tens or hundreds of gravities; being able to beat light speed by a significant amount could dramatically shorten the real, external duration of the mission.

Okay, you’ve made me understand the light speed barrier due to relativity. Almona said as she looked up from her screen. "And while we’ve been talking, I read what you said when you first announced the results of your research in Tokyo last year. You also released a lot of mathematical predictions that day, describing what you think will happen when a ship exceeds light speed, among many other things. But you obviously, intentionally, didn’t say why it would happen. I mean, you’ve said that reality gets weird and changes near light speed, allowing the barrier to be broken, but you’ve with-held the real why of it."

No I did not! Pina laughed. "I just made it difficult to grasp it! If you have a comprehensive grasp of conventional relativity, and you really read everything we published that day, the answer is there for anyone who has a complete understanding of what I was saying to deduce!"

So, you’re saying that you’re not going to tell us, you’re going to make me read and understand that entire publication and figure it out for myself? Almona asked, a bit irritated. It’s what, over three terabytes, right?

Well... Pina grinned. That has been my policy so far, but since you are such a darling, and we are all family here, I suppose I can tell you. In a moment, as soon as I make absolutely sure that all of our channels are secure. If certain very intelligent people learn this, they may be able to deduce a few things that we plan to patent and develop ourselves first.

She tapped her screen a few times as she spoke.

"All right. Einstein thought that gravity was a distortion in the fabric of space-time caused by the existence of mass, which is a property of both matter and energy, as they are both attracted by gravity. And indirectly, he was right. But it is not the simple existence of mass that causes the distortion that results in gravity.

"One of the results of our research that is related to the light speed barrier is the fact that gravity is quantum. The motion and vibration of all quanta that have mass causes the generation of gravitons, which propagate outward in every direction at faster than light speed.

"A graviton is actually a weakness in the fabric of reality, so some would say it is not really a particle, but it has a discrete, quantized, amount of energy. It can propagate faster than light speed in the same way that a tear in a sheet of flat material can propagate faster than light speed. If the sheet separates perfectly and cleanly in half all at once, the speed of the tear can be infinite. If the tear starts at one edge and propagates across the sheet, there is no reason why the leading edge of the tear cannot travel across the sheet at a speed exceeding light. Similarly, no matter how precisely the speed of gravitons are measured, it will always be found to be a tiny bit less than infinity.

"The fabric of reality is real, and space-time exerts a kind of pressure on everything. The graviton is a weakness in the fabric of reality between two quanta; the mass-bearing quantum particle that causes it, and another quantum particle that happens to lie in the same direction that the graviton propagated toward, like two electrons, or a neutron and a photon, or whatever. Those two mass-bearing quanta are then pushed toward each other by the pressure of the fabric of space-time around them, along the path of the weakness in reality that is the graviton.

"It is similar to the way two close beach balls will move toward each other if you suck some air out from between them with a vacuum hose. They are not really sucked toward each other by the vacuum between them; they are pushed toward each other by the higher air pressure all around them.

"Like all quanta, gravitons behave as both a particle and a wave, depending on how they are detected or measured. The gravitons do not come out of other particles; as a weakness in reality, they are merely caused by the existence of other kinds of quanta, which is how mass-bearing quanta can seem to emit gravitons for all of eternity.

"In almost every circumstance it makes no difference whether gravity exists because the space-time continuum is distorted by mass like Einstein said, or because the fabric of reality is weakened by gravitons, as I am asserting. Unless there is a massive, macroscopic object moving at close to the speed of light, the math works out the same either way.

You are still with me? Pina asked, then looked around.

Sure, no problem. Almona smiled, and the rest nodded in reply to Pina’s inquisitive glance.

All right. Pina continued. "Another important part of why the light speed barrier is an illusion, is a relativistic effect Einstein predicted called ‘frame dragging’. Essentially it means that when a massive object is moving through the fabric of reality, it seems to cause a friction effect, and the framework of space-time is dragged along with the object. It is usually such a tiny minor effect that it is only measurable when the object is as big as a planet.

"Rotational frame dragging of the space-time around the rotating Earth has been thoroughly investigated, and was proved early in the last century after decades-long experiments. As the Earth rotates, it drags some of the fabric of space-time around with it.

"However, linear frame dragging has been completely neglected by the scientific community, since there was no practical experimental method available to test it, and it seemed to have no practical effect on anything anyway. Almost no one has even mentioned it since Einstein himself introduced it and discussed it briefly in a lecture at Princeton University in nineteen twenty-one. The same lecture where he introduced rotational frame-dragging, actually.

"But linear frame dragging is still a fact; when a massive object moves through space in a straight line, it drags some of the space-time around it along with it, and the more massive the object is and the higher the speed of the movement, the more of reality gets dragged along with it. When an object moves close to the speed of light, that object becomes very much more massive due to relativity, and it drags a lot more of reality along at a logarithmic rate with the increase in speed. This is a well-established fact, and part of the reason it has not been investigated is because they all take it for granted, since rotational frame dragging is so well established.

"Now remember, gravity is a quantum weakness in reality that propagates at almost infinite speed; much faster than light! So as a spaceship approaches light speed and becomes super-massive, it is not only dragging some reality along behind it, as might be the case if Einstein’s vision of gravity were correct; the gravitons that propagate out the front of the ship weaken reality ahead of it at greater than light speed. At very close to the speed of light, some reality in front of the ship kind of piles up in front of the ship like an ocean ship’s bow wave, and it spills around the front of the ship, and then around the sides, to join the reality that is being dragged along behind.

"I could increase this effect by shooting very high energy photons out in front of the ship, in the form of a gamma ray laser, to start reality moving in the right direction in front of us, increasing our frame dragging effect. After all, light is affected by gravity and therefore has mass, so even light must drag some reality along with it. From our point of view inside the ship, our gamma laser still propagates out in front of us at the speed of light compared to us, so it would be the highest energy light possible, and would initiate frame dragging more than any other available practical method.

"The bottom line is that a ship moving very close to the speed of light drags a lot more of the framework of space-time along with it and around it than could otherwise be expected, because of the quantum nature of gravity. The pocket of dragged reality moves at different speeds, on a gradient, depending on how far from the ship it is. The very outside of the pocket is barely moving compared to most of reality, but the reality right next to the surface of the ship is being dragged along almost as fast as the ship is moving.

"In other words, while nothing within the fabric of space-time can go faster than the speed of light, a ship dragging a big enough pocket of space-time around it can go faster than the speed of light according to outside reality, while still being slower than light speed within the pocket of reality it is dragging along with it. The faster you go, the bigger the dragged pocket and the greater the gradient of the speed it is moving from the inside to the outside of the pocket.

The physics of action and reaction still works in those circumstances. If you keep firing stuff out the back of your ship, you keep accelerating. Nature takes care of itself.

There was a very long moment of silence as everyone else absorbed all of that, with the exceptions of Raz and Tika, who already knew it.

Wow, that’s really absolutely brilliant. Almona murmured as she considered it.

Anyway, Pina said to Raz, You tell me how many gees of continuous acceleration our observation drones will be able to make, and how soon they will be available for launch, and I will calculate their travel time on the mission to the Slaver armada and back.

I feel a bit dull for asking this; Jena hesitantly interjected as she rubbed her chin, But considering the travel times involved for the Attackers’ armada due to their lower thrust and the thousands of light years of distance from their origin, and the far more limited amount of fuel energy they can carry, not only for their ships but for their communications missiles as well, I do not understand how they could be within a light year of us already.

I think you are unaware of our latest understanding of the course of events, my love. Raz told her with a smile and a gentle rub on her lower back. Also, I think that you are not picturing the correct geometry of the three relevant star systems, being us, Sedecia, and the home system of the species that the Attackers have enslaved.

He tapped his screen and brought up a three-dimensional map of their neighborhood of the galaxy, and drew lines on it as he continued speaking. "I will refer to the Attackers who have access to the enslaved species’ technology as the Slaver Attackers, or Slavers for short, and their captives as the Slaves.

"Okay, this view is the space within about six thousand light years from here, centered on us, looking down on us from Galactic north. The galactic core is in this direction, and the galaxy turns counter-clockwise.

"Here, outlined with this yellow line, mostly toward galactic center from us, and somewhat clockwise, is the area of space somewhat controlled by the Sedecian-Three Alliance. Here, on the near side of that area, is Sedecia.

"Here, outlined in red, mostly outward from galactic center from us, and again somewhat clockwise, is the area of space mostly controlled by the Attackers. Here is the Attacker home world, almost directly clockwise from us.

And here, directly outward from us, is the home world of The Slaves.

Oh, I see. Jena nodded.

"Exactly. We are almost directly between The Slaves’ world and Sedecia. The Slavers only have to go a little out of their way to stop off here. That is why Sedecia sent colonists here in the first place; Species Three’s astronomers had detected a life-bearing world here, but they did not want it. Earth was beyond their territory and a bit too close to Slaver-controlled space for their liking, so they ceded it to the Sedecimapods.

"So here is the chain of interstellar events that directly affect the Earth;

"The Slaver Attackers started building their armada at the Slaves’ world at least eleven thousand years ago, and a few hundred years later they sent a squadron of scouts to Sedecia to spy on them. The scouts passed within ten light years from us, but they had no reason to look this way, and their instruments could not detect life here from that distance anyway. They were not the first scouts that the Slavers sent to Sedecia, but they were the squadron containing the Attacker ship that eventually came here.

"A few thousand years later, the Sedecians sent Swimmer and her first colonist here to Earth, and during their mission the Slaver scouts arrived at Sedecia, or as close to it as they dared, considering the Species Three military presence there.

"Then the Slavers launched their armada from the Slaves’ world toward Sedecia. Then Swimmer arrived back at Sedecia from her first mission.

"Then the Slaver scouts around Sedecia noticed Swimmer’s second launch from Sedecia to return to Earth with Traveler, and one of them followed her. They lost track of her on the way here, then they re-acquired her when she decelerated into our solar system, then they lost her again in the asteroid belt.

"When they saw our space stations and ships, they communicated by messenger missile with their armada, who decided to come here on the way to Sedecia.

"Now the armada is about eighty percent of a light year away, that is about four point eight trillion miles, and they will be in attack range of the Earth in twelve years, decelerating all the way.