As far as progress goes, there hasn't been a lot of movement lately. Due to my commitments I had less time to spend to review the raw translations and pass them on to Steve. So that is all my fault.
Anyway, since there has occured another 'maybe' in terms of getting it published, we shall work really hard to get it completed as soon as!
Here now chapter three of Helge's story, re-written by Steve Miller.
CHAPTER 3
EARTH, LAKE EYRE
Provided that the laws of mathematics are
related to reality, they are not reliable. And if
they are reliable, they aren’t related to
reality.
Albert Einstein
The youthful looking man whistled a good humoured tune as he stepped out of the bungalow that had been his temporary home for the last few days. It was late enough in the the morning for the air to have lost the night chill and already the heat was seeping uncomfortably through his light blue coverall, the uniform of the United Space Command, a stylised version of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man prominent on the right shoulder. It was a symbol, a proud symbol that said the USC stood for the peaceful exploration of space, for all humankind.
Despite the two-day growth and the wrinkles around his eyes that hinted at nights with little sleep, there was a spring in his step as he stepped from the shadow of his doorway onto the rough stoned pavement, already coated with a film of red sand, blown in on the morning breeze. The bright sunlight left him suddenly dazzled, blinking and choking a sneeze the light tickled from his nose.
“Bless you Kyle!”
“Tha..” He began, as the tickle became a full-on sneeze. “..anks.”
Elena Kho laughed as she leaned against the door-frame of her bungalow. Unlike Kyle, she wore clothing suited to the coming warmth of an Australian winter’s day, sandals, fringed denim shorts and a check blouse, knotted above her waist to display her firm stomach.
“Did you sleep well Captain?” she asked, shielding her eyes against the already fierce sun to look out over the huge salt lake. Water came to Lake Eyre only a few times a century and this winter was one of those times. She felt privileged to witness the terrific spectacle of uncounted thousands of native birds, predominantly pelicans and flamingos, standing in one-legged groups, jostling for food and competing for mates in myriad, extravagant courtships of splashing water, displayed plumage and half mock combat that filled the air with cacophonous cries despite the two mile distance.
It was fortunate for the sleep patterns of the USC personnel that the night brought silence as well as a cooling breeze.
“Thank you Major,” Kyle managed to respond as the sneeze fit subsided.
Elena was tall, tanned, lithe and lissom with the well-defined muscle-tone of someone who kept in shape. Dark brown almond eyes, gleamed from a round face, framed by shoulder length black hair, almost a stereotype Asian beauty, but for her stature.
Kyle whistled appreciatively, openly running his eyes over her. It was expected.
“You’re a dirty old man,” Elena, Lin to her many old friends, grinned as she gave him a fierce hug. She had only arrived at SPAARF, the Lake Eyre Special Project and Advanced Astronomical Research Facility, late the previous evening and the long briefing had left her just enough energy to spare Kyle a short greeting before seeking out her new accommodation and sleep, deep, dreamless and immediate.
“It’s been a long time Kyle,” She said as she stepped back and returned his appraising look. Kyle William Brennan, ‘Willie’, if you wanted to get his goat, had dark hair, cut military short, blue-grey eyes and the smile of a young rogue. The word ‘chiselled’ could have been invented for his chin and the uniform coverall did little to conceal his broad shouldered, slightly stocky physique.
She tried to imitate his adoring whistle, producing only a tuneless puff that dissolved into chuckling laughter.
“I’m afraid I’m never going to get that.” She smiled.
“You need this,” Kyle grinned, displaying the gap between his upper front teeth. “It’s all in the dentistry!”
“Breakfast, at the canteen?” he continued.
“Lead on,” she replied, patting her stomach. “I haven’t eaten since the flight out and I’m starving.”
On cue, her stomach grumbled agreement. The final briefing was at 10 and was scheduled to run into the evening. She hoped there was time for a leisurely meal but she had left her watch in her new apartment.
“What time is it Kyle?” she asked. He licked his finger and held it into the warm morning breeze.
“It’s a quarter to, Ouch!”
“A quarter to ouch already!” she replied, pinching her long-time colleague and best friend again.
“It’s great to have you here, Kyle,” she continued. “Admiral Morrison is pretty easy going but can’t tell a joke to save his life!”
She linked arms with Kyle and broadened her stride to set a brisk pace.
“Move it soldier, I’m wasting away here.”
“Shouldn’t you lock your door first?” Kyle replied, indicating the open door of her bungalow.
“Rampaging gangs of underpaid command staff waiting to loot my kitbag and huckster my smalls to an Adelaide curio store are a big problem around here then?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t rule out the possibility,” Kyle grinned.
“Wait a minute.” She hurried back to her flat. “I’ve got something for you, from Europe.”
She reappeared a few seconds later, locked the door and returned to Kyle, conspicuously concealing something in her right hand.
“Close your eyes and hold out your hand.”
“What’s this?” Kyle asked, feeling the object. It was a small sphere, it felt half the size of a tennis ball, and it was heavy, much too heavy for it’s size. The surface was incredibly smooth and cool to the touch, yet Kyle felt there was also a warmth, that somehow transmitted itself straight into his fingers.
“You can open them now,” Elena instructed.
The sphere had a wondrous lustre, a rich blend of blues and whites, like an over-sized marble whose colours undulated over it’s surface, forming tiny turbulences in the white, which roiled as he watched, revealing green and earth contours. It was, he realised, a dynamic miniature Earth.
“It’s beautiful, Elena!” he exclaimed.
She smiled.
“Now let it go.”
Kyle let the sphere roll gently form his hand. It fell a few centimetres, as if sinking into cotton wool and then rose to the level of his chin and began rotating, slow and majestic, around it’s own axis.
Elena watched, as if spell-bound.
“Now,” she whispered, almost to herself. “Name one of the planets.”
“Mars,” Kyle said, without thinking.
The sphere was motionless for an instant, and then, slowly, it reversed its rotation and the colours transformed, blues and whites metamorphosing into unmistakable red and orange hues.
The Red Planet hung suspended before him.
“Wow!” the staggered Kyle managed to say. “Jupiter.”
The sphere began another transformation, expanding to four times it’s previous size and donned the ochre, cloud-striped face of Jupiter, the giant perpetual storm of it’s famous Red Spot, rotating into view as he watched.
“The scale’s wrong,” he observed. “Compared to Mars.”
“It would be, if you’d stepped back,” she replied. “Morphing Toys are all the rage at the moment. Terrific isn’t it?”
Kyle nodded agreement.
“What else is it able to do?” he asked, taking it again in his hands. The surface was still totally smooth, smoother than anything he had ever felt, almost frictionless, and it still had that strange cold and warm sensation.
“All the planets, the more interesting moons, a few comets, the Sun, the night sky from various locations, views under the oceans of Earth and Titan.”
“The Moon,” Kyle whispered.
He watched the sphere change dimensions and colours again and plucked the now, marble sized ball from the air.
“It must have been expensive.” He observed, feeling somewhat god-like as he held the satellite in the palm of one hand.
“A friend of mine made it. Gisbert, you know him I think, the love of Ayse McCallum’s life?”
She took his hand and gently folded his fingers around the sphere.
“He created it especially for the man who is going to lead us back to the stars. He made it for you Kyle.”
“But..” Kyle was suddenly left groping for words. “I’m little more than Prof Heng’s guinea pig. I…..I have to call him and thank him for this amazing gift.”
Elena gazed at him with her dark, almond eyes and linked arms with him again.
“You can’t Kyle, he died in a deep-sea accident over two years ago. His mother gave me this last week, with a message for either you or me, whoever was chosen. Do you want to hear it?”
Kyle nodded.
She touched her wrist-watch, which she had retrieved from her apartment, it played back the message.
“I want to believe that Ayse’s death hasn’t been completely in vain. I want to believe that she has helped push open the gates to the stars once again. I want to believe she has opened the way for humanity to flourish again, without repeating the same mistakes. Wherever you go, whatever you do, be guided by the human heart, not the sterile logic of the machine. I’ve created this morphing sphere so that you will always carry a memory of our beautiful home, keep it with you always and return it to Earth, unharmed and in peace, someday.”
“Seven years ago,” the Admiral summarised, four hours later, “We were able, at the cost of two lives and heavy salvage vehicle Rii-4, to capture a heavily damaged space ship that had emerged into the solar system. It was a Terraformer craft, with a drive system capable of inter-stellar travel, we think it dropped back into normal space due to either failure or miscalculation, without jumpgates, near the QUASI Synchotron.”
Admiral Molander took a deep breath and waited until the images of the salvaged ship on the large screen behind him finished scrolling. The last shot showed the QUASI installation.
Kyle threw Elena a pained glance. It was a story they had heard before, repeating it was unnecessary, particularly in long, convoluted detail. That the Admiral and the English language appeared to be mortal enemies, did not help.
Elena lifted a finger in a discreet gesture, familiar through long friendship. Patience Kyle, it said. Wait, I have important, new information to add. Kyle forced his attention back to the Admiral.
“We are almost certain the Terraformer ship, before we deactivated it, could not get to send out a distress call because, messages faster than the speed of light are, according to science, impossible, as you all know.”
Kyle winced on behalf of grammarians everywhere.
“We also believe we don’t have to fear immediate Terraformer attacks imminently. According to our latest findings, the accidental arrival of this single experimental ship has been an accidental oversight and to avoid global panic, we preferred not to inform the public but nevertheless we have taken precautions and we hope to be able to reconstruct, and as we believe, improve, the principle of the gateless jumpdrive, with the aid of the remnants of the Terraformer ship.”
Kyle was still attempting to parse some sense from the jumble of words when the Admiral summoned Elena with a curt nod. She joined him at the front.
“I’ll try and make this succinct,” she said, catching Kyle’s eye and throwing a ghost of a wink.
“We know the facts, the mission plan is firm. Captain Brennan,” she indicated Kyle with a short nod, “has been fully trained and is ready to handle any eventuality.”
The screen behind her now displayed a large, antique-looking space ship against a small moon, dark green in distant sunlight. The hull of the ship looked old, battered and the white hull paint, grubby. Only the USC symbol, gleaming from the flank, looked new.
A murmur of recognition rippled around the fifteen officers looking at the screen.
“Okay, yes, it’s an old model that should have fallen to pieces a century ago. A Series 1, Jupiter B, one of only seven ever built and all of them still in service. This one is the Getsu Fune, that’s ‘Moon Ship’ to you linguistically challenged English speakers, and that’s Io in the background. Appropriate, no? The Getsu Fune is over 130 years old.”
She paused to allow the group to absorb the next image. It showed a circular bluish-white light, a blurred shape seemed to be emerging from it. It took Kyle a few seconds to realise the shape was the Getsu Fune, frozen in a moment of immense speed.
“She carries the first prototype Quantum Singularity Tunnel Drive, to avoid twisting our tongues we call it a jumpdrive. It’s made pilotless jumps of up to two light hours. More than a dozen of them, all successful. Not to blind you with science, it creates a singularity that’s stable for a few nano-seconds, long enough to pull the ship through hyperspace to it’s destination instantaneously. And it’s safe for humans.”
Kyle flashed her a comic book grin of glee, which as he was in the front row, none of the audience could see. Elena managed to suppress her own smile.
“Captain Brennan will prove this tomorrow.”
The display shifted again. This ship was a medium shuttle, modern, streamlined and atmosphere-capable. Only the longnituinal bulge, running above the cargo bay and down the hull, distinguished it from the standard model.
“Captain Brennan will fly this for his mission. We had to remove life-support from the Getsu Fune to fit the test instrumentation. I’m sure he’ll prefer this sporty little number, given his playboy charm.”
The audience laughed. Admiral Molander forced a smile onto his face, although he did not know Kyle well enough to get the joke.
“And take it from me, that the proposal to call this eXperimental shuttle,” she emphasised the X, “‘Le petit X’ came from the civilian scientists, not the military.”
They laughed again, and Elena judged they had recovered enough from the trauma of the Admiral’s briefing, to follow her more detailed analysis. For the next fifteen minutes she described in detail the structural modifications carried out on the X-Shuttle and went over each step of the next day’s scheduled test flight.
Kyle listened attentively, absorbing each new detail. A small deflector shield and a single laser had been added to the normally unarmed ship. He wondered what they expected him to fight on a short, two light-month jump into the void of inter-stellar space. He guessed it was because the military never walked anywhere without a stick, big or otherwise. Hell, some of the officer he knew, would drive their grandmothers to their bridge parties in an APC if regs permitted it!
A slight smile played around his lips as Elena wound up the briefing.
“Le Petit X!” Kyle ribbed later. “Come on Elena, own up, that was your idea wasn’t it?”
“Never, I swear!” She crossed her heart and choked an unmilitary giggle.
“Yea, right,” Kyle replied, grinning like the proverbial Cheshire Cat.
He cared for her a great deal, he loved her enthusiasm and he loved her single-minded focus. They had much in common, including a shared sense of humour. She was though, Kyle had to admit, a lot more organised than him. They’d known each other since she was barely out of her gangling teens, almost nine years ago. They had lost touch for awhile, before being unexpectedly re-united as the crew of a two-seat interplanetary patrol ship.
Those four years, times of danger and hardship, had laid the foundation of an unbreakable friendship. In his more wistful moments Kyle missed those times.
“T minus 15 minutes and counting.” The voice of the mission computer broke the silence that had fallen after his last words.
Kyle had been sitting in the X-Shuttle’s redesigned, but none to spacious cockpit for over two hours now and the light pressure suit was beginning to get uncomfortable. To take his mind off it he remembered the simulator flights he’d taken, ten years previously, to qualify to fly this type of vessel; a rolling, twisting pretzel of orbiting rings he had to fly through, against the clock. He could do it, almost in his sleep.
This though, would be different. The X-Shuttle possessed not only the revolutionary jump-drive but also an enhanced M/AM drive, making it faster than it’s civilian counter-parts.
“Hey Willie.” Elena called over the comm, knowing the term would not help matters. “Your adrenaline levels are rising.”
“That’s because I was thinking of you Lin.” He dissembled smoothly.
She did not reply but he could picture her smile and her flashing eyes.
It was these little exchanges that fuelled the persistent rumours but although it had come close on a few occasions, they had never been more than friends. It was something both regretted at different times but in the end each valued their friendship too much to gamble it away on the vagaries of the human heart. It did not stop them from gleaning amusement from the rumours they occasionally fed.
“T minus 10 minutes.” The computer intoned before commencing the final, pre-launch checklist. Kyle dutifully confirmed the status of each system matched that shown on the Mission Control read-outs.
At T minus 5 Kyle activated the M/AM Drive and watched the giant mass of the mother-ship slide away, the central section rotating sedately around it’s own axis to simulate a gravity field. As the huge ship faded into the background of the grey moon the vibrations of the Quantum Synchrotron, deep in the bowels of the shuttle, increased as it siphoned energy from the M/AM engine to charge the jump-drive.
“All systems normal.” the on-board computer reported, simultaneously sending a complete status report to Mission Control.
“T minus four minutes.” The mission computer now was counting down the remaining time at sixty second intervals.
The vibrations intensified, slightly out of sync with the inertial dampeners. It was a known characteristic of this type of shuttle and Kyle ignored it.
At T minus one minute, space ahead of the shuttle began shimmer, and generate static bursts, blue and white, that coalesced into an emerging whirlpool effect that kept growing. Despite the filters, white noise grew in his headset.
Kyle crossed his fingers for the magnetic deflectors preventing the unimaginable energies generated by the singularity drive turning him and his ship into a second sun that would cause Elena sunburn, way down in the Milan Mission Control Centre.
At T minus 30 seconds, with green lights across the board, the drive went “hot”. The point of no return, where the drive would tear a hole in the space-time continuum, come what may.
The voice of Mission Control was distorted now, barely comprehensible, and the vibrations intensifying. Kyle offered a prayer of thanks to the designer of the compression tissue of his flight suit that prevented his insides liquefying.
The whirlpool had become a wild vortex now, dancing with light and shadow, a hurricane storm of static in his ears as energy discharges streamed over the hull.
At T minus 9 seconds a single red light lit up in Mission Control and the cockpit.
“Mission Control,” Kyle croaked, trying to control the sudden burst of fear. “We have a problem.”
The reply was unintelligible through the static and his pressure suit suddenly inflated, automatic protection against the threat of vacuum implicit in any emergency in space.
WARNING: QUANTUM FLUX OUT OF BOUND. DESTINATION PROBABILITY LOCK LOST. ABORT MISSION.
The words flashed onto his HUD. He knew what they meant. The statistical laws of quantum mechanics had played a dirty trick with probability and his ship would emerge somewhere other than the planned target.
Unable to disengage the singularity engine, only one option remained, emergency separation. Kyle strained against the rigidity of the inflated pressure suit to reach the red emergency switch. He hit it at T minus 3, the computer barely audible above the raging storm.
The explosion that separated the drive kicked him hard in the back. Almost unconscious, half blinded by pain and powerless to intervene he watched as the drive drifted past the cockpit on the momentum of the blast, which also propelled the X-Shuttle the last few metres towards the event horizon of the singularity, where the drive now loomed, frozen in time.
He knew he was screaming, screaming at the top of his voice, but he could hear nothing above the static feedback and the vibrations tearing his ship apart.
One last, deafening screech, a blinding white flash, and one final, murderous jolt sent his consciousness falling into blackness and the shuttle tumbling into the unknown.
Damn good read 
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