All wormholes lead to Adama.
Prologue: Genesis
God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light! — The Book of Genesis Chapter 1 Verse 3 New English Translation.
In the beginning, was nothingness. Not even time existed. There was no inky blackness of space because there was no space. All there was was the potential for being and becoming, timeless and eternal.
The universe sprang into existence from this potential and for the first time in the history of the universe something happened. To say it glowed would be an understatement for light itself was only one facet of a unified and rapidly expanding ball of space, time, and matter.
Within the first ten to minus forty three seconds (zero point forty two zeros and a one), the Planck time, the universe expanded far faster than light speed. All forces were unified into one and even subatomic particles could not exist. The universe was a quantum soup with particles at all energy scales popping into existence and vanishing.
Almost nothing is known before this time.
After that point, something emerged, however, that would define the destiny of the universe for billions and trillions of years to come and represent its very shape. This something was a force but also far more, for it defined the very structure of space, time, and motion. We call it gravity.
Before this time, gravity, electromagnetism, weak, and strong forces had been combined together. After this time, gravity existed alone.
This symmetry breaking, like the condensing of water out of the air onto a cold drink on a hot summer’s day, condensed gravity from the other forces, separating it and making it its own unique force. From that point on, gravity would shape its own destiny and the destiny of the universe and its inhabitants.
As the universe continued to cool, the other forces also separated from one another. The weak and strong forces became bound up in radioactivity and subatomic nuclei. Electromagnetism dominated this period. The universe was too hot for stars and planets and was a miasma of opaque ionized gas.
Finally, after 370,000 years, the universe cooled enough for neutral atoms to form, electromagnetism lost some of its power, and, for the first time, the heavens became transparent. The cosmic microwave background appeared filling the entire universe with its light. Still the universe was a disorder of plasmas, and there were no stars, planets, or galaxies. It would take gravity to create order out of that chaos.
The plasmas continued to cool, and, after millions of years, gravity collapsed the hot gas to form the first stars. Light burst forth into the universe for the first time since the beginning.
Over the next several hundred million years, gravity formed the universe like a baby in its mother’s womb. Stars combined into galaxies and galaxies into clusters of galaxies. These came in countless shapes and colors, all arranged in a cosmic dance through the attractive force.
After about 1 billion years, gravity had completed its work and the cosmos looked much like it does today. The universe might be said to have become grown up at that point. But gravity had yet more work to do.
Thanks to gravity, rotating clouds of primordial gas formed stars which burst forth in nuclear fusion while the remaining gases collected into planets, gas giants and rocky terrestrial worlds.
As those terrestrial worlds formed, gravity caused the heavy iron and nickel in them to sink deep into their hot, liquid cores, so that, as those heavy metallic plasmas roiled inside them, outside magnetic fields sprang into place, deflecting harmful solar particles away from those worlds.
Lighter elements, liquids like water on temperate worlds, methane on colder, and even lead on hotter, were forced onto the surface. Gravity pooled these together into lakes, rivers, and oceans, forcing the water off of the dry land for the most part and into the lowest places, separating them.
Gases, with their lighter and more energetic molecules, gravity layered above the land and the water to form atmospheres, separating them. On heavy gas giants, these were multilayered affairs thousands of kilometers deep. On terrestrial worlds, they could be very thin, when gravity was too weak to hold them. On some worlds, those where gravity was just right, the atmospheres were like transparent blankets, not too hot and not too cold. They protected from radiation and meteors and regulated the temperature.
On worlds with single large moons and liquid oceans, gravity created tides. These tides were the result of the moons pulling the oceans towards them so that the oceans became a little deeper on the sides of the planet both towards and directly away from the moon and shallower on the sides perpendicular to it. As the moons orbited their watery planets, the tides created a regular rise and fall of the oceans.
Rocky pits near the shore filled with water at high tide and then were left alone as the tide let out. These tide pools were like incubators for something new in the universe: life.
As life evolved on these worlds, they learned to deal with gravity. Some, living in the ocean, learned to use buoyancy, the tendency for gravity to force lighter things up and heavier things down. This allowed animals to moderate their internal density to go up and down in water. Others clung to the bottom, relying on gravity to keep them firmly rooted. Some crawled out onto the dry land and learned how to fight gravity with legs: two, four, six, or eight, sometimes more or slithered on their bellies. A few learned to use lift to fight gravity and took to the sky.
All of these lifeforms took gravity for granted and, whatever capacity they had to think about it, did not worry about that force that kept them from flying off into space. It was simply something to be used, as when dropping onto an unsuspecting meal, or avoided as when leaping from tree to tree in a jungle canopy.
Ape-like species learned a new way to handle gravity as they went from tree dwelling to walking on two feet. Because of the difficulties of balancing against gravity, their hand-like feet evolved into large platforms designed to keep them from tipping forward while standing and enabling them to run on two legs after prey.
This precarious relationship with gravity freed their hands to develop and use tools which sparked their brains to become more and more adept at tool making and the abstract thinking that went along with it.
They learned how to judge gravity’s effect on objects launched into the air more adeptly than almost any other species so that they could hit a creature at a distance with a rock or, later, a spear, arrow, or a gun. Gravity was written deep into their ever enlarging brains.
Despite the intuition that evolution had bequeathed them about gravity, thinking about gravity wouldn’t take another leap until this species started to build out of stone.
Building anything out of stone requires a lot of thinking about gravity because stone is heavy and tends to fall down easily. The earliest stone buildings were crude, merely stacked up pyramids of stone blocks with small cavities inside them.
As they learned more, however, they found ways to make thinner walls and buttress them from outside with graceful arches to keep them from falling down.
The arch was the ultimate conquering of gravity’s pull as all the will to make a building fall down was transferred from the top to the bottom like a lightning rod conducts electricity. Thus, civilization created both the means to conquer and to understand gravity.
Still life had a lot to learn about the force that had enabled its birth.
Gravity was tame on small worlds, and even near most stars it didn’t do anything unusual. It made things fall down. It made planets and moons orbit. It made tides go in and out.
When gravity got strong, though, it showed that it wasn’t just a “falling down” kind of force. Two small, dense stars orbiting one another close together rotate so quickly that they send out regular pulses of radio waves. These binary pulsar systems have another strange feature, they spiral into another because they release energy in the form of gravitational waves. Theses waves carry orbital momentum away from the star system, rippling space and time, and causing them to fall towards one another.
The waves they send out into the universe are ripples in space and time itself, causing lengths and time intervals to fluctuate by tiny amounts.
A large star, running out of fuel to burn explodes in a supernova and collapses. Its gravity is so strong that nothing can withstand it. It squeezes down to the point where even light cannot escape and time and space are so bent that they switch places. A black hole forms.
The expanding universe stretches space and time so that two distant points move apart faster than the speed of light.
Galaxies bend light around them causing objects behind them to look bigger as if through a pense thousands of light years across. Gravitational anomalies produce vast quantities of ripples in space and time.
Even the vacuum of space has gravity of its own, a neutral force at large scales but a sea of quantum foam at small producing exotic phenomena like white and black holes that pop into and out of existence in an instant and tiny entangled tubes in space and time that non-scientists call wormholes.
All of these features meant that gravitationally, the universe was a complicated place but also far more exciting than just falling down. And only by mastering gravity, could a species master the stars.
Chapter 1: Galactic Runaway
You can’t escape destiny by running away — Nosferatu
Far from Earth, on Adama, the capital world of the Adaman Empire, the Imperial Corps of Engineers was responsible for surveying navigational routes throughout the Imperium. Every day survey ships came and went from the docking tree orbiting Adama to measure gravitational anomalies and establish safe routes for the Imperial Fleet’s wormholes.
One could access the docking tree by means of a shuttle system that rose from the main transfer complex near Adama’s equator. The shuttles rode upwards on invisible lines of force countering Adama’s moderate pull with a steady acceleration until a tether hooked them and boosted them into geostationary orbit. This technology was considered extremely old fashioned by Imperial standards and the nobility would never be caught using it, preferring their private antigrav shuttles instead. Still, for troops and commoners the tether method was reliable in the way a staircases is more reliable than an elevator.
Zazel rode in one of these now, strapped into the padded, metamorphic seat that conformed to her curves. She wore a formless gray tunic, cinched at the waist, a typical commoners outfit, cheap and disposable.
She looked out the window and saw her reflection. Her face was that of a stranger. She couldn’t get used to seeing herself like that. She stroked her cheek, so much lighter than her own tone. Her hair fell over her face blonde instead of her usual spiky rust color. She had paid a lot of money for this face.
She looked over at Pon, who was seated next to her. She envied his ability to change his face at will. Of course, Pon wasn’t a flesh and blood citizen like her, only a metamorphic android, programmed to be her companion for life. He was pretending to be her brother and so his face now resembled hers in a familial way.
He had been silent most of the way, almost broody.
Even with their disguises, they could be recognized in other ways. She rubbed her fingers together. Her transformation was at the cellular level, but a brain scan could reveal her true identity like a fingerprint. She looked at her face again. It was the face of a dead woman as was her false identity she carried. And now her old self was dead too and it was as if she had taken over this dead woman’s body. The thought made her shudder.
At least it wasn’t permanent. She glanced down at her bag where a small vial was hidden. Down it and her “new” body would slough off in a few hours, leaving her back to her old self. (At least that’s what the barbarian black marketeer woman had said.) She hoped one day she would be able to get far enough away from here to do that.
She had chosen this, she reminded herself. In a way this was an answer to a prayer, her prayer, that she was even here.
She touched her personal prayer book. She was used to it being over her heart and often touched herself there only to find it sewn into a pocket on her hip in commoner fashion. It had been altered to fit the dead girl she was impersonating. Another falsehood. Blasphemy? Perhaps, but She would understand.
Each Adaman had their own, with the name of their namesake upon it. Most were plain gray books like the one she now carried. Before she changed herself, hers had been ultrablack and borne, in gold, the most intricate lace pattern of the ancient script, spelling out simply the name Zazel.
Zazel was the goddess of Birth and Death. It was she who led the virtuous dead back to the Tree of Life from whence they came, to eat its fruit and live again. It was she who ground the wicked into mulch to feed its roots. Bestowed by the Oracle at Shor, Zazel was her name but also her destiny. Alive or dead, Zazel would give her new life.
She studied the planet receding below, its white clouds and greenish-blue atmosphere shrinking as they rose.
To turn her mind away from her situation, she thought about how the shuttle was navigating an invisible force line in the planet’s gravity well. This was all basic ballistics, something she had studied on her own time at home, when she was supposed to be studying other things.
Gravity of orbital dynamics of this kind works by what are called “conic sections”. These are where you take two cones placed point to point and cut them with a flat plane. The intersection of the plane and cones make a section. Conic sections can be parabolas, circles, ellipses, and hyperbolas (as well as straight lines). If a shuttle failed to be grabbed by the tether, (or were interrupted by Imperial guards) it would make a parabolic path up from the ground and back down using its safety parachute to interrupt its fall. Assuming that doesn’t happen, when the tether grabs it, it gets boosted into orbit. An orbit will either a circle or an ellipse. The tether will boost it into an ellipse that has a particular “eccentricity” or shape and orientation to take it to the docking ring. When a ship leaves the Adama docking ring for its moon or another planet, it boosts into a hyperbolic orbit that escapes the planet. Simple.
The distances and speeds in space were so fantastic and yet compared to the size and breadth of the empire it was like a water molecule versus an ocean.
There was an announcement: “please prepare for orbital boost.”
The shuttle was fully automated, and they were the only two passengers. She wondered if the tether ever boosted a shuttle wrong. Maybe it would grab it and let go at the wrong time and the shuttle would go hurtling off into the atmosphere, too fast to stop. It would just burn up and nothing would be left but charred remains.
They felt a gentle acceleration as the tether gripped the shuttle. She pictured the shuttle’s trajectory line in her mind. This was the path it would follow if no forces were applied. As the tether tugged on the shuttle the line would grow from a parabola impacting Adama, bigger and bigger until it rose away from the planet to become an ellipse. That ellipse would then grow until it reached a geostationary orbit at the docking ring.
In space, getting from one place to another was always a matter for following a curve, rising or sinking in an orbit, never traveling a straight line from point A to point B. Going «up» for example, away from the planet, meant going faster in the direction you were going.
The docking ring itself maintained a constant position over one spot on Adama, orbiting with the same speed as the planet rotated. That spot contained the Imperial control station for orbital operations. High speed optical links connected the docking station with the rest of Adama through that ground station.
Several other docking rings were situated at Lagrangian points, points where they maintained stable fixed positions relative to Adama and its moon or Adama and its Sun. These were useful for transfers to the moon or outer planets. Civilian ships would often boost to this one and transfer to one of the others.
As the tether accelerated the shuttle towards the docking station, the other end of the tether was swinging back down as a counter weight, so the central fulcrum was stationary.
The docking station stretched out for tens of kilometers, a branching tree of habitat pods, and docking pylons. It functioned like a city in space housing thousands of workers and a small garrison of troops. It had its own defensive systems in case of barbarian attack. Food production pods grew most of the food on the station microbially just like deep space ships did but it received regular supplies from below of luxuries.
In space, without the refraction of the atmosphere, the shadows were sharp and jagged across it. It could easily dock multiple Imperial Warships with up to ten thousand crew and perhaps a few hundred thousand troops each.
There were two ships docked there now. The Imperial Flagship, HIMS Peerless, and a small Corps of Engineers Survey ship, HIMS Roaming. The Peerless lived up to its name. It dwarfed the Roaming, stretching kilometers in either direction. Bulbous protrusions held numerous weapons bays including graviton cannons capable of breaking apart moons. Its fusion disrupters, meanwhile, could destroy an entire star system by turning a stars own nuclear furnace against itself.
She had to be careful to avoid any of their security officers who might be wandering the base looking for barbarian infiltrators. They might be on the lookout for rogue metamorphs or face-changers like Pon and herself.
The shuttle thumped into place in the docking port.
Pon stood and looked at her, “you are still sure about this?”
They had had this conversation many times before. “Never more than now that we’ve come so far,” she said.
“They could be looking for us on the station. We should move quickly,” he said.
He was programmed to obey her but also to be a friend and a sort of conscience. Right now, the obedience and the conscience were fighting a war. She could tell by the way he moved, the tightness in his normally fluid motions, that he was torn by letting her get this far.
The door hissed open and the station air flooded in.
As soon as she stepped outside, she saw two uniformed security personnel walk by. Their black reflective clothes and shiny black helmets revealed they were military police. She half expected that they were coming to arrest them and she held her breath as they approached.
They glanced in her direction but continued on their way.
She let out her breath.
She and Pon had to find the crew chief for the Roaming. The sooner they were off the station, the better.
Older stations were shaped like wheels and rotated to create gravity. This tended to restrict how a station could be built. This station was newer and used artificial gravity.
Most people thought artificial gravity came from the floor. She knew that, on the contrary, negative gravitic generators in the ceiling generated a repulsing gravitational field that pushed everything down.
Negative grav engineering was her specialty, at least she liked to think so. She had never had the formal schooling. Her goal was to impress the Roaming crew chief enough to get a position. Sometimes they took people no questions asked.
Surveying was unglamorous and came with most of the dangers of military service but none of the glory. Working in deep space, far from any outposts, they risked attacks from barbarians, black holes, ion storms, relativistic accidents that could leave crews prematurely aged or cause them to return decades late not having aged. Half their crews would quit each time they returned to base, sometimes with their families and friends long dead.
She had even heard rumors of a crew that returned before they left and it had all been hushed up to avoid causality violations.
They found the Roaming’s docking port easily enough, just near a crowded mess hall where quite a few of the Peerless crew were enjoying some R&R.
As they approach the port, however, they could see something was wrong. Instead of the usual crew guards, it had at least four military police standing outside it.
“What’s going on?” she whispered.
It was mostly to herself, but Pon responded. “Imperial Guards.”
At that moment, one of the police glanced in their direction. He pointed at them and he and another broke off and started walking towards them. “Halt citizen,” he said. He was holding a scanning device that she recognized as one the military used to identify spies. She wasn’t sure if her identity would hold up against it. Pon would clearly ID as a metamorph though not, she hoped, exactly which one.
Zazel wasn’t sure what to do. She had had an idea that if she were caught, she might be able to talk her way out of it, but now she saw that was probably a fantasy. She had just gotten lucky until now. She eyed the scanner in his hand. If they figured out who she really was it would be over for her. Running didn’t seem to be an option on station like this.
She froze as the MPs approached.
To Be Continued