Yes!

One of the star systems I list in my fictional account of man's new journeys to the stars is 61 Virginis. Now Astronomers have discovered three new planets in orbit around that star.

In my first MSS, 61 Virginis has an Earth type world orbiting in the 'Cinderella zone' around said star. Another planet has been found at 23 Librae, which does not appear in the MSS as all the stars I list are similar to the Earth within a fifty light year radius. I'm feeling slightly smug and prescient right at this moment.

All that has to happen now is the CERN team cracking the physics. I'm smiling.

Falling through the stars mars base notes

This is some raw text from the MSS 'Falling Through the Stars', and is an excerpt from a sequence where characters are filling in backstory for the MSS in a conversation about a lead character's (Corwen Blount) backgrounds. The finished product is a lot better fleshed out than this sample.

“My grandfather got us out after my Dad was killed in the battle of Winchester.”
“That was rough. Didn’t the Europeans slaughter all the English rebels who surrendered? Shot them with anesthetic darts and removed their brains to power those bloody cyborg things of theirs?”
“I was too young to know. Granddad never said. He got my brother and me out on a private flight to Denmark, took the overnight ferry to Oslo, and flew us out via Iceland. That was before the European invasion of Sweden of course. I was only nine at the time, so the details are pretty hazy. I mostly remember the cold.”
“What about your mom?”
“She was the reason Dad went to war, so Granddad said. She was an English monarchist. A dissident. She got arrested, sent to El Hierro, and that was that.”
“Yeah, we all know what went on there.”
“Well no one really did until Dick Windsor escaped.”
“Does anyone know how many people died out there?”
“Several million. That’s the gossip. I heard an intelligence team sent a remote stealth probe to El Hierro. Twenty separate compounds holding five thousand people, each serving a central lab facility. Ten week rotation.”
“Like a twentieth century concentration camp?”
“In spades. Better organised by an order of magnitude.”
“You want to hear the worst of it?”
“Go on.”
“All the remains were used for transplant and food cultures.”
“You mean…”
“When a body was done with, they broke it down into the protein soup used to grow spare transplant parts for the ruling elite. The remainder, rumour has it, was turned into high protein food supplements. Granddad said the Gaian food agency called it Go-Quorn and pretended it was part of a healthy vegetarian diet.”
“I feel sick.”
“Well do it in the lower corridor.”
“How could they? Europe is a civilized culture, all those churches and mosques. All that history.”
“I don’t know. They just did.”
“So why didn’t we just wipe them out? We still had a few nukes.”
“North America wasn’t very strong at the time. The politicians wanted to pretend that it wasn’t happening because no one could afford a war.”
“If we ever make it back to Earth, I’m going to write my Congressman.”
“You do that. We have to get back to Earth first. Hey, here come the search party. Anything to report?”
“No way to the surface. We’ve lost about sixty percent of the base, but the good news is that all the agri-modules are okay, and we’ve got heating, power and water.”
“We’re just trapped.”
“We think we’ve got atmospheric containment, but there’s a slight leak showing up on instruments.”
“How slight?”
“Five litres an hour. We think.”
“We can live with that. For another nine months at least. What’s the state of mental health?”
“We lost half our personnel, so there are some issues with grief and shock. Two cases of genuine confinement disorder under sedation. A few frayed tempers. I think everyone’s got a little cabin fever after this long trapped underground. Tell you the truth, I think we got off lightly.”
“Lightly?”
“Could be a lot worse. The last view we had from the surface indicated that the attackers had been pretty well slaughtered. That was months ago.”
“So Earth either thinks we’re all dead, or the Europeans are.”
“Hope it’s the latter.”
“Hope there’s an Earth left to go back to.”
“How about communications?”
“Still off line. An ECM pulse fried the main comms net and we don’t have any spares.”
“Can we improvise something?”
“Spark transmitter, or we can rig a transmitter dish and booster amplifier for when we’ve dug our way to the surface again.”
“If we can.”
“How is the digging coming along?”
“Slowly. Half the caldera wall came down on the upper levels during the first assault. Millions of tons of rock. Most of our mining equipment is worn out and failing. It just wasn’t designed for this kind of use.”
Corwen was silent for a moment. “We need to think sideways here.”
“Such as?”
“You tell me the upper levels are blocked, and I’m guessing it will take us months to clear a safe path through the overburden.”
“And..?”
“Why don’t we go sideways?” Corwen suggested.
“Explain.”
“We still haven’t explored all the galleries still in Mars atmosphere. Why don’t we just expand the base sideways?”
“Because there are active vents full of toxic fumes. The kind that can even eat through an environment suit in a couple of hours.”
“Do we still have any suit gel? That blue stuff which acts as an emergency sealant in case of puncture?”
“Of course. Ten cases. No one uses it any more.”
“That’s acid resistant isn’t it?”
“Yes of course, it’s an inert compound gel. It can handle ph levels as low as minus point five. Just in case someone is sick inside their suit and vomits gastric acid on the helmet joints.”
“Cover the suits with it. That will extend the working time in any corrosive atmosphere.”
“Be damn slippery.”
“Better that than dead from decompression. We can keep on expanding the base until we find a vent leading surfacewards.”
“I’ll talk to the digging crews. We’ll go back to vent and passage mapping.”
“Bart, Colleen, Lafik. We can do this.”
“I hope so, Corwen. For all our sakes, I hope so.”
”Let’s just do it, and spare me your existential doubts.”
“It’s how we built Arsia Mons base, and I’m pretty sure we’ve got enough expandite foam and partitions. I recall arguing with the construction chief about storage just before the attack.” The ever cautious Lafik put slender brown fingers to his cheek.
“Joanna, how many effective personnel do we have?” Corwen’s head swung like a laser targeting system.
“Technicians and construction, forty. Administration, fifteen including me. Medical, eight, three Doctors and five nurses out of twelve. Food production, nine. Combat, six. Thirty eight Combat in the infirmary, six awaiting discharge. Oh and Professor Merriman and his five merry roving Areologists.” Joanna Lindstrom, a pale Nordic blonde answered crisply.
Corwen Blount drummed his fingers for a moment. “I want everyone put into two hour shifts. One construction technician to lead each shift. Teach two Comms technicians the fine art of pressure sealing and testing the new sections. Two shifts searching passageways at any given time, two putting in partitions and hatches at fifty metre intervals. That way we can give everyone sufficient rest and keep them focussed on getting out of here alive.” Orders, make the judgement call and put it into action, no matter how scared you feel inside went his inner narrative.
“I’m good with that.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.”
“This means all of us. We lead from the front.” Corwen’s face split into a schoolboy grin. Confidence, Corwen, confidence. Bullshit baffles brains and confounds insuperable odds.
Lafik raised a sceptical eyebrow. “What about the chain of command?” He asked archly.
“We have to be the strong links.” Corwen grinned back at him.

Lafik turned his face away and thought he loves this, he truly does. Corwen saw the flicker of doubt and decided to assign his lead technician a less mission critical role. Lafik might crack and run in a real emergency. Highly competent as he was in his speciality, that anxiety streak of his might sabotage a tricky situation. “Get Merriman in here if you can find him.” Corwen ordered. “I need his input on the local geology.”

MSS Notes: Extraterrestrial life

There is as yet no trace of tool using life forms in the planets explored by pre colonisation teams, apart from the Leonine life form (Known as ‘Felixes’ to the colonists) discovered upon New Philadelphia. While there are a great many earth-analogue planets, ‘intelligent’ life forms, apart from human colonists and visitors, appear to be completely absent. There are a great many apex predators, such as the highly dangerous ‘Snowbeasts’ of Einsteins world, and the swarming ‘Trinocs’ of Cordoba IV, but none that have developed cognition in a similar manner to humanity. There are no species more advanced than humans within the current sphere of colonisation.

MSS Notes: Sub space drive

The Sub space or ‘Omega’ drive was developed from the physical principles discovered by Eleanor and Koor Kawaresen during Eleanor’s postgraduate semester at Florida State University. Successfully proved by the Omega III crew of Commander Corwen Blount, co-pilot Paul Stovek, Astronavigator Liam O’Reilly, and mission specialists Edith Paget and Edward Mulholland.

According to data obtained, the physical properties of sub space are not as predicted by the initial research. There is a significant but small anti relativistic effect which means that if a journey is begun to within a particular set of energy parameters, there is a risk that the craft may return from a round trip several minutes before beginning a journey through sub space. Because of the energy disparity effect of a craft returning out of sub space, mission profiles that might result in such an occurrence are strictly forbidden. This is because of the phenomenon named the ‘doppelganger effect’; i.e. two bodies of identical origin may not occupy the same space / time point as the short-lived isotopes of antimatter and quantum foam ‘residue’ from a sub space journey have massive explosive potential. There is no empirical data to support this hypothesis, but the mathematical models that sub space theory relies upon indicate enough significant risk of should such circumstances occur.

Sub space has proven highly efficient as a means of travelling between star systems up to a hundred plus light years distant. However, the fuel requirements are such that longer journeys are at present not practical.

A Sub space ‘bomb’ based upon the Omega drive was discussed by certain defence research institutes, but after numerous attempts to make a controllable device failed spectacularly, such research was deemed too dangerous, and all funding was withdrawn.

The energy requirements of the drive are high, and require a direct power source with at least thirty Gigawatts output. Only a Nuclear Fusion reactor with a minimum rating of one hundred Gigawatts at is able to deliver this level of power when required. Larger scale reactors such as a hundred Terawatt model have been proposed, but the cooling systems required for reactors of this size are considered too bulky and unwieldy for practical space travel purposes. Only one of this scale (Thunder Bay) is currently operational and requires several massive superconductor heat sinks to remain safely operational. However, the Thunder Bay installation has the significant environmental benefit of keeping the northern shores and much of Lake Superior ice free. Thunder Bay also provides backup energy for much of North America. A second installation is planned for the currently deserted city of Winnipeg, which will make North America a net energy exporter for the first time in over a century. An alternate site at Trois Rivieres, Quebec, was vetoed by the bloc Quebecois on environmental grounds, shortly before the city of Quebec was declared deserted in 2081.

The idea that sub space technologies would support some form of instantaneous teleportation was finally proven impractical in the late 2020’s because of the disorganising nature of sub space energies. While it has been known for many years that teleportation is possible, unprotected ordinary matter can never be restored to its previous matter state having passed through sub space. For example, it is a well understood phenomenon that unprotected organic matter disorganises and disintegrates into random inorganic compounds after exposure to conditions both in subspace and through ‘wormholes’. The Omega drive creates a hypermagnetic bubble or ‘tame space warp’ in which a craft made of normal matter may traverse the medium of sub space and return to ‘normal’ space intact.

Quantum foam erosion damage has been noted following return from sub space. This phenomenon has been linked to poor hypermagnetic field design allowing miniature sub space vortices to come into contact with unprotected matter following exit from subspace. Improved field coil array design has been instrumental in preventing asymmetric field collapse and thus almost eliminated such damage since the near disaster with the Vancouver.

Re: Vancouver, Cargo class 100 tonne capacity sub space transport. Third off the production line after the Atlanta and ill-fated Boston. First to suffer near catastrophic field collapse on the approach to the New Philadelphia star system. Massive loss of argon from the frontal field coil arrays almost crippled the Vancouver. Fortunately, New Philadelphia colonists with specialised metallurgical experience effected repairs to the frontal hull section, and enough argon was available in the Vancouver supply to repressurise the frontal coil arrays and return them to full use.

MSS Notes Re: Plague

Plague: Ebola type virus prevalent in tropical climates. Believed to be artificial mutation / variant of African Ebola, but currently (Late 2000’s) decimating poor South American populations. Predominantly droplet type infection also believed to be first spread by a particular species of flea / flea parasite. 90% fatality rate. Survivors suffer high rates of Liver and Kidney failure, also damage to Pancreas and Spleen. High short term cancer risk. Only 1.2% of sufferers have no measurable aftereffects apart from massive weight loss and muscle tissue atrophy.

Origin; Possibly cultivated in terror call laboratory for dispersal throughout North America. Current multiple outbreaks are thought to be a result of poor containment protocols. Virus breaks down 72 hours after death of infected host. Burning does not destroy virus. Disposal Protocol is for 6 days quarantine in sealed casket / impervious bag before interment. After this time, corpse is deemed to be ‘safe’ for burial / incineration.

MSS Notes re Communications

Despite the fact that properly shielded craft can successfully enter and leave sub space, in the late 2000’s no one has yet found a means to use the medium for transmission of voice / video communications from within a gravity well of more than one third of Earth Gravity. Energy requirements are very high, and signal quality is poor at over one parsec. A ‘Quantum wave’ effect sub space transmitter once showed promise, but research has since been discontinued after hazardous and random ionizing radiation levels were found to be a deleterious side effect.

News and materials are transmitted via transport vessels such as the Atlanta, a hundred tonne capacity unarmed interstellar cargo carrier.