Jake's Fortune Ch. 14

Jake was pacing restlessly. They'd kept him in quarantine at Ita for an additional two weeks and it was killing him not being able to hold his son.

His immune system was in shock after exposure to the atmosphere of Tansa. He would have died if it wasn't for the medicine Ita's doctors injected into his bloodstream.

But still they had to keep him quarantined.

His body fought the pathogens with fierceness that rivalled his own at the battle of Tansa, where he disabled the entire Tansan fleet and routed entire battalions of the local militia.

He had managed to convince the government to cease all hostilities against the peaceful alien race known as the C'Nosi. He had even managed to secure everyone at the abandoned base of Ita citizenship of Tansa, in addition to diplomatic immunity.

Thanks to his actions they were finally free, and a race of sapient beings was spared the bloodshed that lasted for centuries. At least by one of the governments in the local cluster.

The quarantine was a boring ordeal, and he really wanted to see his son and wife. They had been visiting him frequently but he still missed them greatly, and talking through an intercom was no substitute for a real conversation.

Hannah was furious at what he did, but he thought he'd managed to calm her down. She was worried sick about him and wouldn't stop pestering him about it.

He'd been working on fixing and reinforcing his armour ever since. He was about to get to work on it yet again when the intercom buzzed. Doctor Lev greeted him.

"I think it's safe for you to be out of here, Jake." he heard the doctor's voice.

"Thank god." he said as he moved towards the hatch.

He found Hannah at the hydroponics facility. She was having her daily time there with little Jaden, who apparently loved the greenery. She squealed in delight when he hugged her from behind and whispered loving words in her ear.

When he took little Jaden in his arms he found that the baby was thinking to him, only in emotions instead of words. The baby projected love and comfort when Jake hugged him tightly and tried to tell him how much he loved him.

"I missed you." he whispered to Hannah as they embraced.

"We missed you, too." she told him.

They were heading to their quarters when Hannah turned to him.

"Will you tell me first before trying to get yourself killed next time?" she asked.

"Hannah, I wasn't trying to kill myself. I had to do this!" he defended.

"You had to take on an entire fleet and god knows how many soldiers by yourself?"

"It was the only way, I had to spare you the bloodshed."

"I was worried sick, you have no idea..." she started in anger.

"I know." he interrupted her.

"Well, at least it's over now." she said with relief.

"It's not over yet."

"What do you mean it's not over yet?" she asked in trepidation.

"The rest of the cluster is still at war with the C'Nosi, Hannah, and I have to stop them."

"Do you mean we'll go into relativistic travel again?" she asked him in anger.

"Hannah, the UEF is the source of this problem. If we can stop them, everybody else will take heed."

"But Jaden is too young for relativistic travel!"

"Then I'll go alone."

"No! I'll be old when you come back!"

"I'll try to figure something out, but first, I need to have a conversation with a friend."

The C'Nosi was waiting patiently in the hangar bay.

"Don't you ever sleep, or eat?" he asked it.

"We do not need sleep you speak of. We eat when we need to."it responded.

"What kind of food do you eat?"

"Rocks."

"Like, asteroids?"

"Yes."

"What about those crystals that I ate, the ones that gave me wings in my dream?"

"Nos is the essence of life."

"So, you eat it too?"

"To heal, to learn, and to grow."

He sighed. This C'Nosi was not particularly talkative it seemed.

"We know what you came here to talk about. You want to go to your homeworld."

"Yes."

"You fear that you'll never see your companions again."

"Also, yes."

"Do not fear, we can travel faster."

"I suspected that, but how?"

"We will show you on the way."

"I need to prepare myself first."

"We shall wait."

He went to visit his uncle, who'd been silent this whole time.

"Not even a single visit to your nephew, uncle?"

His uncle averted his eyes and sighed.

"You thought I was going to die, didn't you?" Jake said with a smile.

"God damn it, son. I told you not to go." his uncle finally said.

"Uncle, you know I had to."

"You didn't have to fight an entire planet."

"I'm sorry, uncle. Things got out of hand."

"What's done is done, son. I'm glad you're alive and well." his uncle said as he held his shoulders.

"But there is something else... What is it?" Jake said as he held his gaze.

His uncle stayed silent for a moment.

"I'm worried about you, son. I've seen what you did out there." his uncle pointed in a general direction, supposedly at Tansa.

"I'm worried that you're becoming less human with every passing day."

Jake stared at him in silence.

"I'm scared." his uncle said in a low voice.

"Scared of what? Scared of me?" Jake whispered.

"I'm scared of what you're becoming."

He found Hannah in deep thought at their quarters, little Jaden was asleep in his cradle.

"Hannah." he startled her out of her deep reverie.

"Oh, hey Jake." she said.

"I came to say goodbye. I'm leaving for Sol in a few hours."

"And how are you planning to do that exactly? You know I'll be much older when you return, right?"

"With the way I plan to go, no."

"What? How are you going to travel faster than light?"

"The C'Nosi can."

She sighed in relief.

"Is that even possible?"

"I have no idea how they do it, but apparently they can do it."

"Just be careful, okay?" she told him.

"I will."

Michael was adamant about accompanying him. Jake tried to convince him otherwise but he was insistent.

When he approached the airlock to the hangar bay. He found Michael and two men waiting for him in military-issue powered armour. It was nothing like the relic Jake was wearing. It had an advanced suite of sensors and mechanised joints, and it had an internal reactor instead of a battery pack. It was in great shape and looked more like a menacing tank than a piece of armour.

Jake whistled over the comms as he circled around them for a closer look at the modules they had installed.

"This looks great." Jake told them.

"Not so bad yourself. Are you sure you don't want a piece of this?" Michael asked as he pointed at his form.

"No, thanks. I prefer the speed." Jake replied as he banged on his breastplate. "Besides, I made a lot of modifications to this one."

"You could always move the modules over. It'll offer you much more protection." Michael tried to convince him.

"Yes, but speed is what I'm after. I can't dodge much in that tin can of yours." Jake joked.

"Perhaps that is true." the joke didn't register on Michael, who was otherwise occupied looking at the C'Nosi.

"Are you sure your friend here won't swallow us whole?" he pointed at it with an armoured fist.

"Positive." Jake responded as he entered the airlock. Michael followed him through.

They waved goodbye to the crew, Hannah and his uncle stood there gave him their thumps up.

"Hang on, I have to do something." Jake said as he exited the airlock.

He went back to Hannah and kissed her full on the lips.

"For the journey." he said with a smirk.

He flipped his visor back on and entered the airlock with a big smile. The men followed.

Michael was jumpy as he'd ever seen him. He was bewildered, but also visibly scared.

He paced around the enormous mouth and inspected it with awe. The men sat in silence.

Jake was trying to talk to the C'Nosi.

"So, how does your method of travel work exactly?"he thought to it.

"Look through our eyes and see."

So he did, and the sight that greeted him was awe inspiring. A great bright band of red light was stretching as far as the eye could see. The C'Nosi was drifting along with it. Nothing else was visible in any direction.

"I've seen those lights before, but never this close. What is that?"

"When you look through our eyes you see the undercurrents."the C'Nosi said.

"What undercurrents?"

"The undercurrents in the æther. These are natural phenomena that happen at the lowest levels of existence. We call them bands."Siren explained.

"You knew about them?"

"Yes."Siren responded.

"What are they?"

"Think of them as wrinkles in the fabric of reality. It's all very complicated, but I'll try to explain."

"They are caused by massive gravity wells. A star could anchor a big one. A planet wouldn't be able to sustain a very large one. A moon would have a minuscule undercurrent. We call this property bandwidth."

"If you can attach yourself to one, it will carry you in the same direction you were travelling along their axis."

"The more massive the object you're moving towards, and the less massive you are, the faster you can go."

"The C'Nosi is using something akin to your mass drives. It forces its body into a molecular configuration that gives it the ability to generate a resonance that has an effect similar to that of your mass fields."

"You are personally lighter than a feather now, since the effect propagates to the C'Nosi and everything inside it."

"This lets the undercurrent carry you faster than light. You can leave the undercurrent whenever you want."

He was visibly excited at the prospect.

"Because we're travelling faster than light, this conversation should not be happening. At least it should be happening in negative time, where your body would be growing marginally younger, but the bands have their own concept of time. They warp time as well as distances. It's fascinating."

"But how does the C'Nosi attach itself to it?"

"We let it carry us, as we did since the dawn of time."the C'Nosi replied.

"Why didn't you use them to reach our world?" he asked Siren.

"Because rocks can't manoeuvre, dummy."she quipped.

"Can our ships use them?"

"We may teach you one day."the C'Nosi responded.

"General, you might want to hear about this." he said to Michael aloud.

After two days of travel, the C'Nosi exited the band near the edge of the solar system.

They all stared in disbelief at the scanner readings. They had spent only two days inside the C'Nosi, and only a month had passed to the rest of the universe, yet they had crossed a distance of twenty-two light years.

Travel in space was a strange thing indeed, but this was even stranger than their wildest imaginings.

The C'Nosi travelled through Sol for another day, then reattached itself to a band and headed towards Saturn.

It repeated the process until they were in proximity with Mars. The red planet was aglow with its red lit soil and looked as marvellous as ever. Shiny domes adorned the surface, marking the magnificent domed cities of Mars. A red ring of dust orbited the planet, signifying humanity's greatest failure and success: the weaponisation of sub-light kinetic projectiles.

Humanity had tried to weaponise the mass drives by equipping them to missiles that could accelerate to near light speed in a very short period of time. The warheads detonated near the target and released a cloud of debris that travelled near the speed of light. The liberated kinetic energy from an impact at such speeds could devastate entire planets, and they chose to test this theory on the largest of Mars' moons: Phobos. The weapon worked, but it was deemed too dangerous to use ever again, and it was banned from use by all human settlements.

"They use them against us."the C'Nosi told Jake.

"Why am I not surprised?" Jake said.

"What?" Michael looked at him in puzzlement.

"Oh, I didn't realise that I said that out loud. The C'Nosi was just telling me that the UEF used sub-light kinetic projectiles against them."

The men looked appalled.

"Dear lord. I didn't realise that things werethatbad. How did I not know about this?" Michael said as he clenched an armoured fist.

"Beats me, but I think they'd keep such knowledge limited to very few people at the top of the pyramid." Jake said.

"Good point. So, how long until we get there?"

"To the Earth? I would say in twelve hours, I'm not sure though. The C'Nosi use their own calendar, and they track time very differently."

"Unidentified ship, you are entering UEF space." they heard the voice say over the comms as they approached Mars.

"Power down your reactors and prepare for boarding." the patrol leader commanded.