Book 5: Chapter 58: Special Delivery
Bill
September 2344
In Virt
And finally, after almost two years of heads-down engineering, we’d hit paydirt. Garfield and I were in VR, with video windows showing the two ends of our test wormhole, on opposite sides of the Epsilon Eridani system. In normal light, there wasn’t much to see. Each wormhole was like a hole in space that showed the scene at the other end. And since it was a spherical hole, you could orbit the wormhole in any direction and look straight through it.
No, spherical wasn’t really the right description. There was no spherical surface. Rather, it was a flat, disc-shaped hole, like a stargate or the DS9 wormhole, but it was a flat, disk-shaped hole no matter which direction you looked at it from. Even multiple observers at different angles would see a disc-shaped view through to the other end of the wormhole. There was also a little bit of distortion around the edge, reminiscent of black-hole animation videos.
Of course, out in the Oort cloud, you’d only see stars, and it was virtually impossible to tell where the local starfield left off and the view through the wormhole began without a star chart to compare with.
The view in the microwave spectrum was more informative. The wormhole, even wedged open with a rotating charged negative-energy field, emitted a constant stream of virtual particle pairs around the edge, each of which put out a small microwave flash as they suicided.
We’d placed the two negative-energy-generating stations at opposite sides of the wormhole. Since we didn’t want someone coming through the wormhole to accidentally smack into one of the stations, we’d decided that, as standard policy, they would always be aligned with the galactic axis.
“Drone’s ready,” Garfield said, interrupting my thought train. “All sensor equipment is in the green. SCUT channels at both ends are trained for the drone’s signal.”