Book 3: Chapter 6: Launch
Bill
January 2223
Epsilon Eridani
Garfield shook his head in awe. “It’s like those cartoon muscle cars when we were a kid—the ones that were all engine.”
The images in the video windows were indeed impressive. Epsilon Eridani 1, now in a completely new orbit around its sun, was surrounded by eight hundred mover plates. Trailing it by a million kilometers or so was one of the larger ex-moons of Epsilon Eridani 3, with a similar array of plates.
It had taken years to not only build all the equipment, but also to figure out how to control the assemblies. Forty supervisor AMIs were dedicated to maintaining and balancing the fields for each planet, in addition to the AMI in each plate.
And overseeing each planet would be my latest clones. They’d named themselves Daedalus and Icarus, which I privately thought was a little pretentious. But hey, it’s a free galaxy.
Garfield looked at me, his face flushed with excitement. “Short-range test complete. There’s a lot of room for error, but at minimum this setup is good for hundreds of Gs.”
I smiled and leaned back in my chair. “I guess we’re about ready, then.” A quick ping to Dae and Ick, and they popped into my VR.