“Well Lieutenant Wan?” Missy leaned over her navigational officer.

  “I believe I think I may know where we are.” Wan moved the visual to the main laser screen with the swipe of her hand.

  “Roughly?” Missy inquired.

  “Exactly.” Wan smiled and there was a hint of pride in her voice. Now that Sam was on line the ships functionality had been enhanced ten fold. It was like flying a super computer.

  “I have no doubt.” Missy gently patted her on the back. “But don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “We are here.” Wan pointed to an area on the screen in the intersection of the two spiral arms of the Milky Way. “A hundred and fifty light years from the boundary of the galaxy proper in dead space between these two spiral arms near the core. We have jumped over a third of the distance of the galaxy away from Earth.”

  “Excellent.” Missy moved forward. “I have new task for you. Give me the location of all the nearest star systems.”

  “Yes ma’am.” Wan looked up

  “Ok Wan, what is your recommendation?” Missy looked down at Wan as she walked into the bridge.

  “Ma’am, there is a nebula 7.6 light years from our current position, it circles a red dwarf and appears to have once been a twin system or even the one star. It is separate from the galaxy by some 25 light years. At the very least it is a source of H5 for our fusion drives.” Wan nervously pointed at the small system. Missy still un-nerved her.

  “Have we got a lock on any planetary systems with a terrestrial planet?” Carver asked as he studied the map.

  “We are still too far out to determine any objects of that size but the cluster of stars systems at 25 light years increase in density far exceeding our own area of the galaxy.” Wan answered as she waved her hand brought up the new information.

  “Scott?” Missy looked at the science officer. Scott was tapping his chin in thought.

  “Wan has offered a good choice. The only other option is to drive forward off to the galaxy in a more direct route of 28 light years. The only issue here is the lack of a nebula for refuelling. If there is no nebula in a 40 light year radius of that we would have to back track to the original nebula to refuel or try a refuel at a red dwarf. Taking that in mind I concur with Wan on the nebula.” Scott chose his words carefully.

  “Sam?” Missy finally asked.

  “I have discussed this with ensign Wan and have concluded this is the best course of action to take.” Sam smoothly answered.

  “Set a course for the nebula Wan.” Missy nodded. It felt good to have her AI back in action, Sam could nearly run this ship herself, nearly. Sam was prone to being very conservative and there was a limit to the amount of complex processes she could undertake where humans were concerned. The Gen 7’s had their draw backs.

  “Yes, ma’am, we would be looking at a four day time line using five jumps on a 0.24 power cycle. That would still give us 87% reserves on our H5.” Wan answered.

  “So next we look for food?” Scott asked.

  “Amongst our other directives, yes.” Missy nodded.

  “Other directives?’ Scott did not like the sound of that.

  “Capture some mecoids.” Missy actually smiled as she patted him on the shoulder.

  Wan looked up at Missy, “I suggest a point 0.24 jump, a regulation jump in unknown territory. A 0.24 jump leaves little detectable H6 evidence after a jump and no Higgs Bison and is almost impossible to track.”

  “That will be fine.” Missy nodded.

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  Early Hyper drives were poor copies of the Mecoid’s, these ultimately failed due to their unreliability, even a 1% failure rate was unacceptable, that meant that for every hundred jumps there would be one failure, it was very rare to ever survive a hyper jump failure.

  What earth’s scientist had discovered was the use of Hydrogen 6 (H6) in Mecoid hyper drives. H6 was volatile and unstable, the UNF could barely contain Hydrogen 5 for more then a few seconds and most hydrogen was stored as H4.

  The early fusion drives used H4 to create energy and then attached a particle accelerator to the discharge to speed up the H4 particles to create H5 and H6. The challenge was to maintain the quality and quantity of the H6 for successful hyper drive. But nobody knew why or how.

  During an experiment with the Mars Particle Collider, a group of research students accidentally flooded the unit with H6 from the Particle Accelerator, travelling at nearly the speed of light the H6 particles stabilised until they collided. This normally produced the Higgs effect, creating an unstable particle called the Higgs Boson. Only this time the Particle Accelerator did not switch off line and continued to feed H6 into the MPC which continued to produce more Higgs Boson, a particle at least a 100 times more massive then the H6 with the kind of energy found in the big bang. This lasted for merely a fraction of a second, then the whole MPC complex collapsed and disappeared taking half of Mar’s moon Phoebes with it. More remarkable was the fact that Mar’s orbit moved 2.6358 metres closer to the sun. Fifteen space ships where drawn into the ruined moon and were destroyed.

  The Admiralty fixed a converted and much smaller Particle Accelerator and Collider together to an ageing star frigate out near Pluto. They fired the system and ignited the Ion engines. They found parts of the ship two light years away.

  The iconic Samantha Jones then produced the plans for a combined helical Particle Accelerator and Collider or the HPAC. This twin unit could produce the elusive Higgs particle continually without blowing itself up. They named the first Gen 7 AI Samantha in her honour.

  The secret of the HPAC was that the collision of the H6 particles occurred outside the unit and threw out the particles out like a rocket creating a massive gravity well that could pinch space together. This tore open space and the research vessel ended up half a light year away. More importantly, it was stable and humans discovered their own version of hyperspace. The HPAC units replaced all the poor Mecoid replications within two years.

  The HPAC units ran hot and could only run for a few minutes at first and used massive amounts of hydrogen. It took many more years to get a HPAC unit to run long enough to jump one light year.

  A hyper jump theory involved creating a virtual black hole. As this space is compressed the fusion drive fires pure H6 into the void and crosses the distance. A by product of this is that the Higgs Bison particle produces anti matter which in turn explodes with normal matter tearing a hole in normal space. The tear in space eventually collapsed throwing out the ship out the other end. While in effect this distance is covered in less then a few seconds an observer would see ship disappear in a flash of light and reappear in another location up to day latter. As the crew have no time reference the time displaced in hyperspace is indeterminable.

  This lead to each hyper ship having a relativity mass energy clock. The RMEC has a set mass and energy decay, regardless of the pull of any hyper black hole the mass of the clock measures itself against the energy decay of its core. Therefore it does not measure time based on the movement of light but on know decay and mass.

  Missy sat back in her chair and pulled the straps over her shoulder. She guessed she was probably the veteran of hyper jumps on this ship having made over a hundred of them in testing work. Despite this, she never enjoyed any of them.

  “H6 set and ready, fusion drive active.” Kosco monitored his screen.

  “Coordinates locked and processed.” Wan rechecked her parameters.

  “Start drive sequence. And spool up the HPAC.” Missy nodded.

  “Sequence engaged.” Wan touched the screen and a pop up window showed a sequence chart as each item first came up with healthy followed by running until it came to the hyper clutch where upon it system asked for confirmation. “HPAC spooled, Permission to engage drive.” Wan didn’t look up.

  “Engage hyper drive.” Missy nodded.

  “Engaging drive.” Kosco touched his screen.

  “Engaging drive.” Wan touched her screen. Normally gestures to the screen worked fine but critical commands required actual touch, the wall membrane could then identify the person authorising the command.

  A loud whirl could be heard through out the ship before a brief shudder as the twin 60MW HPAC drives sucked in enriched H6 and forced them out into the vacuum of space. The ship then started to vibrate as it was sucked forward pulling up to 12g’s in force. The stars on the front camera seemed to blur for a moment then disappeared.

  “We are in hyper space.” Wan confirmed.

  “It always makes my teeth hurt.” Carver gritted his teeth. He looked around the central command centre. Hyper space was always surreal, everything seemed to have a haze and it was difficult to concentrate. Distances were hard to measure.

  Time was a concept that was almost impossible to figure. He glanced at the RMEC, an hour had passed and he would swear it was only seconds. He looked around and saw the bridge was half empty. He shook his head.

  Missy returned to her cabin. Hyper space was a good time to sleep. Hardly anyone would bother you as striking up a conversation with someone was almost impossible. It was like you were living in two different time zones. The RMEC would send out an alarm after 6 hours to signify the jump was nearing an end.

  It seemed like just seconds when the alarm went off and Missy forced herself back to the bridge.

  “That felt like days.” Carver shook his head.

  “Try sleeping.” Missy shrugged. The computer would take them out of hyperspace. The ship then slowed and vibrated slight before coming out into real space. “Right Kosco, start producing another 0.24 worth of H6.”