Synchronicity War Part 1, The Read Online Free PDF Page B

going
back to the battle system was a mistake and respectfully said so, but Omar was
adamant. Since there was no point in 344 waiting to find out if the 301 or the
299 showed up before heading home, Shiloh ordered the now fully refueled ship
to leave orbit as soon as her more seriously injured crewmembers had been transferred
to the Command/Support ship for further treatment. With that task accomplished,
and with plenty of fuel to burn, 344 left orbit at maximum acceleration. Her
destination was the same Space Force base that the message drone was headed
for. The message drone was not a waste of effort. Standard operating procedure
was that important data/communications were to be sent by more than one method
to create a redundancy that would minimize the loss of the information due to
unforeseen circumstances such as a malfunction.
     
    It was with a wistful sigh that Shiloh examined their
intended jump route back to the Sol star system. Exploration Frigates had
enough fuel capacity to travel up to 12 light years in a series of short jumps,
or a maximum of 18 light years in a single jump. The Sol system was just under
90 light years away, but places where they could refuel weren’t spaced out
evenly enough to permit the ship to make the trip in just five jumps. It would
take a total of seven, and almost 440 hours of transit time. That was almost 18
days, a long time to ponder recent events ... and the future.
     
    Though his duty shift was over before the ship reached the
specified pre-jump velocity, Shiloh stayed on the Bridge until 344 was safely
in Jumpspace. He then spent some quiet time in the Officers’ Mess, which he had
to himself. Soon he was thinking about the vision that had led to his
deployment of the recon drones. Had he not had the vision, he doubted he would
have taken the action on his own initiative. Shiloh had never considered
himself a spiritual person. If he looked deep within himself, he supposed that
at the most basic level he believed in some kind of higher power. Most Space
Force personnel eventually came to believe in one version of God or another.
The universe had so many awe-inspiring vistas that it was hard not to feel at
some emotional level that it had to have been planned that way. In Shiloh’s
case, he also had a thirst for knowledge about the sciences. The order that he
had seen and heard about, ranging all the way from the inner structure of atoms
up through the mind-boggling complexity of human DNA and the marvelously
perfect functioning of a human body, all led him to the conclusion that it was
just too complex and too perfect to have been the work of mindless random
forces. From that deep basic belief in a higher power, he now wondered if that
higher power had intervened, and if so, why? Was it to save him personally? He
didn’t think that likely. Maybe it was someone in the crew whom God or an angel
was looking out for. As he often did when he was pondering a mystery, he
started making a list. At the top he wrote ‘Possible explanations for the
vision’. Under that he wrote the following.
     
    It was a hallucination
    It was a use of unsuspected pre-cognitive esp talents
    It was the result of external intervention
    intervention by God
    intervention by aliens
    intervention by humans
    from within the ship
    from within the squadron
    from the future
    from some other source
     
    He looked at the list and couldn’t think of anything else to
add. The only possibility that seemed to be halfway plausible was the use of
unsuspected pre-cognitive esp talents. He remembered scoring above average when
he was a student in a university lab experiment testing for esp ability, but it
wasn’t above average by enough to be considered significant. Even if he did
have some unsuspected esp ability, he was at a loss as to how to turn it on or
off. If he couldn’t control it, then what good was it? Would it happen again? And
if so, when? He discounted the other possible explanations, mainly because