The Alpha Protocol: Alpha Protocol Book 1 by Duncan Hamilton (free ebook reader for iphone .TXT) 📗

fact that the klaxon sounding on the bridge was to indicate that they’d reached their destination. He felt as though he should breathe a sigh of relief that they had made it there without any further deterioration of the reaction matter, but they weren’t out of danger yet. The agitator remained below charge, as he hadn’t dared run the power plant hard enough to provide power to both it and the propulsion system, so they had to heave to for several hours to complete the required charge.

That meant more hours on the power plant, and more opportunity for the reaction matter to decide to completely disintegrate. All the while, there would be little for him to do other than sit and wonder if the bombardment of energy on the ship while in the Nexus Current would cause the reaction matter to go into cascade, or if the Bounty would be able to hold together long enough to make their transit to Capsilan.

He had never heard of anyone trying to eject reaction matter while in the Current, but he couldn’t imagine the results would be good. If the Nexus Current could destroy a warship that remained within it for too long, he reckoned reaction matter would instantly detonate on contact, finishing the Bounty and ending their struggle for survival in the blink of an eye.

Samson looked out of one of the viewports to where the nav computer indicated the Nexus portal was, and stared out into the inky black of space. There was nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the void. He always expected something to be there—something, anything—but like the rest of open space, it was nothing more than nothing.

What made that unremarkable spot special was a discovery in physics a few hundred years earlier that had identified an anomaly in Earth’s solar system. Up to that point, physics had told humanity that travel between the stars would take too long to ever be practical. The Nexus changed all of that. In one fell swoop, the key to the galaxy had been handed over.

Despite humanity having had access to the Nexus for centuries, only the tiniest fraction of the galaxy had been explored, an even smaller portion colonised. The universe beyond remained the great unknown. Even now, the scale of the universe awed Samson. At a time when a journey to the next planet was measured in years rather than minutes, it must have been unfathomable.

Shortly after the discovery of the anomalous and invisible aggregation of energy at a seemingly random spot in the solar system, the quest to understand it began. In an incident still celebrated by a holiday called ‘Leap Day’, playing on the words of Neil Armstrong, the age of space exploration truly began. A science vessel conducting tests on the anomaly disappeared in a swirl of energy. Everyone thought it was a tragedy, but the ship reappeared in the same spot a month later, with an incredible tale to tell.

Since then, humanity had learned that the Nexus was everywhere, a subatomic energy current flowing beneath the fabric of space-time in infinite directions. It was called the ‘subway of the stars’, existing as it did beneath ordinary space-time. It had been argued on many occasions that the Nexus could not be a natural phenomenon, that it must have been created by a highly advanced race of beings, but the seeming absence of any higher life in the galaxy gave the opponents of that theory more than enough ammunition to shoot it down.

In a nod to the ocean currents that had been exploited by the ancient mariners on Earth, humanity stamped the name ‘Nexus Current’ on the phenomenon, and started using it to spread through the galaxy.

Every star system humanity had explored contained an anomaly point, now known as Nexus portals, but rarely more than one. As best as anyone could tell, the Nexus could only be entered at these points, by agitating them with a high energy discharge. Objects with mass could then enter into the Nexus and be driven along at limitless speed by the energy flow toward an exit point of their choice.

Although the Current could only be entered at those specific spots, it could be exited anywhere. Nexus navigation was a science, and a good Nexus navigator—with the help of some serious computing power—could drop a ship out of the Current within hours of their ultimate destination. A bad one? Weeks.

Energy, such as communications transmissions, could be injected into the Current from any place, allowing for near-instantaneous cross-galactic communication, although a ship within the Current, cocooned in its agitator-created shield, could neither send nor receive messages for the duration of its transit. This speed of communication, even more than the fast travel provided by the Nexus portals, had kept humanity’s ever-expanding empire a cohesive entity rather than a scattered, disconnected diaspora.

As wonderful as it seemed, the Nexus carried with it a limitation. The Nexus preferred energy to matter, and did its best to convert things to suit itself. Anything solid that went into the Nexus was bombarded at the atomic level, as the Nexus did its magic in an effort to convert matter to energy. Ships needed enough shielding and structural integrity to allow them to survive within the Current long enough to make transits of useful length. Bigger, more powerful ships could make transits across several star systems, while a vessel like the Bounty might struggle to make the transit between two. Only a very poor ship’s master didn’t know exactly how long their vessel could remain within the Nexus before things would start to go wrong—the situation Samson now found himself in.

In addition to the danger the Nexus posed in trying to turn ships into streams of energy, there was the navigational danger. Every naval officer was trained in Nexus navigation, but he was far from an expert, and the Bounty lacked the computer processing power to make up for his shortcomings. Getting his transit calculations wrong was a serious