Chapter 449 - Hyperspatial Complications (Patreon)

Notes : Chapter 455 has been written and added to the queue !

Next week will have three chapter uploads, wednesday, friday and sunday. And, y'know, quite possibly my worst cliffhanger yet with chapter 450.

Also in IRL news I'm fine. The main street is a wreck and the city center isn't much better but my street was left mostly intact. How long that's going to last is an open question of course, but in so far as such things go I'm as good as I can be outside of being in the countryside.

I hope you'll enjoy the chapter !

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Chapter 449

Alexandra's Core

Simulation One

"This has gotten significantly cozier." Said Alexandra, as she plopped down into the couch, before chuckling. "I still remember when it was just a small place.

"Well, it's still small by most standards." Retorted Ghost, as she took the sofa opposite her other self.

"Not our childhood's."

"We lived in tiny apartments on a dying world. This is a simulation. Besides, you live in a giant superfortress, inside a dungeon, which has another superfortress on top."

"Touché." Alexandra stretched. "So. You told me you got something?"

"Me and Emylris, yes." Ghost grabbed a thermos of...something, and poured two glasses. It was bizarre seeing it, because Alexandra was so used to being able to create anything she needed with a snap of her fingers, something as mundane as conserving heat rarely came up.

It was even more bizarre knowing it simply wasn't necessary in such a simulation, and Ghost was doing it to keep herself grounded. Maybe...maybe she should be doing the same. Like it or not, her dungeon powers and status had untethered her from humanity. When was the last time she'd actually walked somewhere, and not jacked out of her body on autopilot to handle something else? At least when she wasn't talking on the way. Bless Emilia's heart, for still finding the time to accompany her around. And Allya's, for doing in person meetings even when she had an Empire to run.

Gods, we work way too hard.

Alexandra sniffed the glass, and brightened up.

"Oh my! You made chaclo!" She took a sip, before sighing. "Aaaah...The taste of childhood."

Ghost chuckled.

"I know, right?" She took a sip herself, then relaxed. "It's so weird. It's a freaking ersatz of chocolate, but..."

"Closest we had in the hab towers." Alexandra took another sip, and let the warmth course through her. She hadn't actually tasted 'real' hot chocolate until she went to the naval academy. She'd had actual chocolate, but as a very rare treat. Chaclo was the closest approximation for most people, after Earth's cacao producing regions got nuked and virus bombed into wastelands. Thankfully, it became more common once Arcadia built enough orbital farms to feed everyone, and started moving into non-essentials. Arcadia Systems brand coffee fueled the fleet as much as her reactor mix, or so went the saying. "Now we just need some mealpacks, a fold out bed..."

"Yeah, right. If you want it, you can construct it. I'm not making that sacrifice."

The dungeon core snickered.

"Fair enough." She took a third sip. This really shouldn't be this comforting. She sighed. "Alright, to business. What did you and our captive archmage find?"

"A few things really." Ghost took a sip. "First and foremost, I started by exploring the different options."

"So, deflection or intercept."

"Yeah. Those were the original ones." Ghost frowned. "They were unworkable. Deflection is just a probability's game, and it takes only bad dice roll for us to get fucked. Plus, they have an entire fortress' worth of guns. They can just use sheer weight of fire. Intercept is more reliable, and I think a kind of launchable decoy, like a missile, would be definitely possible."

"But...?" Alexandra gestured with her glass slightly, inviting her to go on.

Ghost winced, then took a sip of her own drink.

"Well, it'd be expensive. And be destroyed with every shot. We're not beating a bombardment with it. Though it might be a good idea against something else."

"I was afraid of that. But you mentioned those were the original solutions?"

"Yeah." Ghost took another sip, then sighed, and took a massive gulp. "Remember the Miranda problem?"

Alexandra blinked.

Miranda was the farthest colony to Sol in the Magellanic Marches, the region of space that went 'up' in the galactic disk, roughly the side the Magellanic Clouds were in. Some called it galactic north, but others also called coreward 'galactic north', and as with everything with people trying to apply cardinal directions to a three dimensional object so large it defied human comprehension, it was an utter mess.

Point was, Miranda was 'up' from Sol, and about as far 'up' as you could get in colonized space, just like how Trappist was about as far 'down' as you could get.

Miranda was also a complete backwater. The colony liked it that way, or so she was told, telling the European Federation they were perfectly fine being forgotten by Earth and it's bullshit.

The 'Miranda problem' was an issue the farthest colonies, up in the galactic plane, had started to experience. Which was that ships had to jump further and further out from the star.

In Sol, you could jump into hyperspace from Earth's high orbit, though it was considered prudent to jump out from farther for various reasons, not least of which that anything exiting within lunar orbit would be vaporized by the orbital defense grid if they even survived the jump to begin with.

In Miranda, you had to jump, in or out, in the outer system, past where Sol's asteroid belt would have been in this system.

"The outer colonies jump issues? Sure, why?"

"Arcadia had once speculated the effect could be artificial. I thought it was worth a shot." She took a sip of her drink, then grimaced, and picked up another bottle. This one, Alexandra didn't even need to smell to know it was nutrigel moonshine, and Ghost put a few drops of it into her glass, before downing another gulp. "Well, it turns out she was right. And wrong."

"How so?"

"In that the effect can be artificially replicated. But it's not what's happening with the outer colonies. It's more that the effect of decreasing hyperspace jump distance is collapsing."

Alexandra blinked.

"...What?"

"You know how we mused that teleports have to be different from hyperspace jumps, right? Well they're not. They are hyperspace jumps. You could make a teleporter with a hyperdrive."

"I don't see-" Then it hit Alexandra. "Oh shit." She whispered. "You can jump from Alcheryos' surface."

"Yep. That started me down a rabbit hole. I eventually stumbled upon hyperspace echoes."

Alexandra had to wrack her brain...errr, core, for that one.

"...Didn't Arcie complain about that? During pillow talk, I mean."

"Yeah. She couldn't solve it." Ghost looked at Alexandra face, and smiled at her lack of recall. "Oh, right, we really started talking about it after I was in the hivemind. It was that hyperspace emergence flashes were sometimes consistent, with no clear reason as to why."

"Oh. Right." When something emerged from hyperspace, it came out with an energy flash. Mostly the random decay of exotic hyperspace particles. But some of them had a common thread, and no one had any real clue as to why. "Wasn't the full name 'coherent electromagnetic radiation forming in an exotic environment?'"

"Yeah, basically. I had a hunch. Went to the observatory."

"...Let me guess. The 'coherent light' we found in those flashes...it was Alcheryos' star?"

She wasn't using its name because it had, like, fifty of them. For some reason. The most common one was Myletron, but no one was consistent about it. Not even the Sagitarius Empire.

Ghost smiled.

"Alcheryos' skies. Those blasts were like if someone took a three hundred and sixty degree snapshot of local space and ported them through. Yeah, the star tended to outshine everything else, but the rest was there."

"...You remembered all that from pillow talk? It's supposed to be a freaking abstract physics problem!"

"You've slept with Arcadia, haven't you?" They both exchanged smiles.

"Point taken." The AI hivemind was...err, interesting when it came to pillow talk. They'd once hammered out the Dawnstar's hyperdrive while one of her androids' head was nestled between her breasts. The AI had always been insistent she was at her best immediately after sex.

Alexandra...wasn't sure the AI had been wrong.

"Plus, as part of the hivemind, I had chunks of the data directly inside my mind." Ghost leaned back. "So yeah. Clearly something is linking our universes together through hyperspace. And whatever it is, it's far more powerful on the Alcheryos side than on Earth's."

"...We really need to run a full study."

"If we had time and brainpower to spare, I'd fully agree."

"Right. I assume that any echoes on Alcheryos are flashes of Earth's local space?"

Ghost frowned.

"That's the thing. They're not. The star isn't Alpha Centauri either. I don't have any other star's emission spectrum memorized enough to fully identify it. It's definitely a red dwarf though."

Alexandra blinked. Red dwarves were the most common stars in Sol's neighborhood. They were the smallest, coolest and least luminous of the main sequence stars, also known as 'the normal ones' and not the really weird shit like Neutron stars. That was a tad of an exaggeration, but main sequence stars made up ninety nine percent of the colonies.

"Doesn't narrow it down much."

"You tell me."

"...Shit." Alexandra grimaced. They were doing that a lot this discussion. Freaking tics. Just as she was starting to get her constant wincing under control. "As if we didn't need more questions."

"Yep. Every time we find an explanation, it just begs three more questions. In any case, as I said, we can attenuate this."

"And make hyperspace jumps impossible?"

"At least supremely hazardous."

"I can sense a 'but' coming."

"Yeah." Ghost downed the rest of her drink. "I'm only working off of theory, and most of it is magical and a good chunk of it suggested by Emylris, but it's profoundly unsubtle, and all hyperspace tech in the general area will fail. There's no 'whitelist' or mechanism to avoid it. Our teleporters, anyone else's...I don't even know what range it will have. More importantly, the hyperspace distortion is so powerful here I'm not sure what it'll do to any machine trying to counteract it. It'll be like trying to stop a tsunami with an energy shield. The second we flip it on, everyone will see it. If nothing else, it'll throw off every fucking hyperspace calculation in local space."

"Gods woman. I asked you to protect us from their hyperspace artillery, not make hyperspace weapons stop working."

"As I said, it's only theory for now." Ghost sighed. "But yeah. Pretty much. It'll be a last resort though. I don't even know if it will work. And we won't be able to know for sure until we activate it. Which we can't without unleashing hell"

"Well, to be fair, if we're flipping it on, the situation will be so fucked we won't have any other option."

And it would be worth the collateral damage. If it truly did throw off teleportation calculations...even having it on for a few minutes would probably kill dozens of innocents, at least. If not hundreds. Just because teleportation had fallen off on Arkhan after the Wars of Shattering didn't mean it had elsewhere, and the Eris Empire extensively used it if no one else.

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

If it did, they probably had already lost.