Archaea Read Online Free PDF

to warping you somewhere you don't want to be. That's not an outcome I think the captain would appreciate, so I'll try to stay focused on not letting it happen.
    Slipspace is terrifying enough.
    Luckily, the Archaea has some of the nicest slipspace gear I've ever come across, and as most of it is modular, factory sealed technology, there's really not much to repair. Given enough power, it should work as advertised.
    I can remember growing up, reading about faster than light experiments of old Earth, and the rule of law handed down by Einstein regarding the absolute limit of the speed of light. Of course, that meant that just traveling around in this arm of the galaxy would take a few lifetimes at sub-light speed.
    Luckily, slipspace engineers figured out a loophole allowing movement far in excess of the speed of light, by using pseudomass and good old gravity to pull a chunk of normal space through spacetime, like a bubble of air moving through a tank of water.
    In a slipspace warp, a bubble of normal space is formed around the ship, and then that normal chunk of space is accelerated by a focused projection of pseudomass. The material inside the slipspace bubble is not moving in spacetime, as such – the atoms are just hanging out, relaxing – but the bubble around it is warping, falling 'down' towards the pseudomass projected to the front of the bubble.
    The speed of a ship in slipspace is theoretically only limited by the amount of power that can be converted to pseudomass. Luckily for us, the Archaea had a seriously overbuilt powerplant, harvested from the same destroyer from which I liberated the nexus core. Originally rated to provide flank speed requirements for a ship hundreds of times more massive, our current power output is many orders of magnitude greater than the original design specs.
    Yes, when I was a kid, my bike was probably faster than yours.
    So what sort of fate awaits us, when Dak orders me to firewall this beast? I am not sure. Theory defines the speed we should achieve, and my engineer's eye quantifies the structural integrity of the Archaea. I'd say somewhere between 'not moving', and 'flying into warping fragments of screaming bits', I will need to define the limit we will be referring to as one-hundred-percent maximum speed... and then subtract 10% from that for safety so when the captain screams how he needs even more speed (because he always does) I will have more to give.
    Speed is integral to our mission, which is to get from point A to point B faster than anything else out there. As much as I would like to say safety first, I know the captain will say 'Speed First!'
    Suprisingly, he hasn't yet asked me to paint that on the sides of the Archaea.
    Another issue will be one of survival. On the fringe, there's all manner of creepy-crawlie villainous scum just waiting in their modded and heavily armed runabouts for some fat independent to waddle on through their space.
    My goal is for them to think their gravimetric readings need recalibration, as they try to understand what just burned past them. We're going to be fast, for sure.
    Of course, slipspace is only one way this ship travels. Atmo ships like the Archaea use pseudomass tech to provide lifters for planetfall as well, and then there's standard reactive mass-drivers for inter-system navigation, achieving parking orbits, and the like. Reactives are expensive though in core space, and I can't imagine what we'll be facing on the fringe, so I would expect the captain will want to slipspace as much as possible.
    Now that I think of it, that may be one of his motives for allowing Pauli to build Janis. No one alive, not even Shorty, has the reaction speed necessary to pilot a slipspace jump inter-system. To try and shave as much time off a course as possible, we're always trying to find ways to cut the corner, to get to a slipspace point as early in-system as possible.
    A n expert system using a predictive analysis engine might give the captain the