Book 5: Chapter 1: Destination Galactic Center
Icarus
March 2309
Interstellar Space (en route to Sagittarius A*)
Daedalus and I had been accelerating for fifty-two years now, Earth time. The universe, if you looked at it without any visual compensation, was unrecognizable, nothing more than a bright smear in front of us. Also Doppler-shifted to lethal levels, but who’s counting? Fortunately, the SURGE drive field protected our ships from the onslaught of radiation and oncoming dust by warping it around us. And computer simulations allowed us to produce an image of the universe as it would appear if we were floating at rest in space, at this spot.
It didn’t really look that much different from the view of the sky from Earth. Fifty-odd light-years, on a galactic scale, was diddly. And we were on a twenty-six-thousand-year trip.
“Twenty-five thousand, nine hundred bottles of beer on the wall, twenty-five thousand, nine hundred bottles of beeeeeer,” I muttered.
“I heard that, Ick,” Daedalus said. He’d been relaxing in a lawn chair, doing calculations on some kind of spreadsheet as usual, and paused only long enough to comment. I smiled slightly. We’d become like an old married couple—long silences, working side by side while hardly acknowledging each other’s existence. Today I was visiting Dae’s VR—a garden setting, warm sun, slight breeze, birdsong in the background. Relaxing. I’d accepted the theme and conjured up a lawn chair of my own, but the reclining kind since I wasn’t working on anything.
“If we keep accelerating at this rate, we’ll get there in fifty years, personal time,” I continued. “Of course, who knows what will have happened back home in twenty-six thousand years?”
“Well, you know the standard nightmare, right?” Dae replied without looking up. “We arrive at Sagittarius A* and find a bunch of Bobs that have been there for twenty-five thousand, nine hundred years, FTL having been invented just after we left.”