"This is decidedly unpleasant..." Beatrice groaned.
Lou sighed, looking up at the ceiling as he tried to let the headache that was filling his skull ease. But it was hard. The past three days, he had been doing nothing -- not enjoying his lovely wife, not reclining in the idle comfort of pastoral life aboard an interstellar starship, not even trying to think about how he planned to handle resuming his normal duties as a prince once the lighthugger had reached the SOL system.
No.
Instead of any of that, Lou had been spending his entire week studying the basics of stabdrive construction. It required several degrees in physics that he simply did not have and a grasp of mathematics that left his head pounding. He had been raised on a diet of Newton and the surviving pieces of work by Archimedes, not on the fundamentals of scientific figures with names like Totally Not Steven Hawking and Skip Bowling Get Laid Instead. The Neopolitan Star Kingdom, on the whole, liked to think of their universe as being an orderly, Newtonian one and used devices like stabdrive only under the extreme duress of the war with the Bugs.
And now, Lou had to
build
one.
It was less hopeless than that sounded. The schematics and tutorials and fabrication patterns that he had access to were all excellent at guiding him towards the end product that he wanted. It just took effort -- and it was effort that he resented. But the schedule that he and Beatrice had worked out together, in the long, quiet evening after he had broken the news to her, the news that the Federated States were likely constructing a weapon to aim at her, that the evidence of that weapon was located on their starship, that the only hope they had to foil their plan was to reach it during the narrow window projected by Cornelius...well...
It didn't have a lot of room for breaks.
Beatrice's other bodies were at work handling the construction of the actual life support unit that would be strapped to the stabdrive properly. This was, comparatively, the easy part of the mission. Constructing spaceship hulls was a centuries old skill and humanity had broken it down to the point where a sufficiently determined child could handle it. That just left him and her moth body, trying to focus on untangling the steps in constructing the stabdrive itself.
It wasn't going to be a
large
stabdrive. In fact, it being a large stabdrive would have been counterproductive if he wanted to survive the crossing from the lighthugger to the
Invisible Hand
. As it was, the drive would be able to exceed the thrust of the lighthugger -- which was currently chugging along at a stately one gravity. All he needed to do was accelerate at two gravities long enough for him to catch up with the
Invisible Hand,
which was coasting. It would, in fact, continue to be coasting for the better part of half a year.
It's crew was all asleep, contained in non-Newtonian fluids and filled with acceleration drugs and cryogenic buffers. They could wait until their ship was relatively close to the SOL system, then activate their stabdrive at max power, dropping in a matter of hours from 90% the speed of light to a relative stop. It was how most starships operated -- more efficient, in terms of reaction mass, than the long, slow coasting that Lou and Beatrice were on.
If the ships had only been going at intersystem speeds, this entire operation would have been ludicrously easy. A chemical rocket could have carried Lou the distance required -- no need to build a highly sophisticated piece of technology that he barely understood. But the problem was that they were in the void between solar systems, traveling as close to the speed of light as humanity could possibly go. They were traveling so fast that the stars were distending, that the light ahead of them was shifting from visible light to hard radiation and the light behind them was dipping below red to become infared. The were traveling so fast that
time itself
was distorting like taffy -- for every second that passed on Lou's ship, three second passed on Earth.
This warping of space and time had another effect, one that was invisible to Lou.
He (and every other kilogram of his ship and his wife) had been getting more and more massive. It took more energy for the ship to accelerate now than it had a month ago, and it would take even more energy to accelerate a month in the future. It was all well within the power curve of the lighthugger's stabdrive -- but for any personal shuttle that he would need to make, he would need to overcome that added energy requirement.
Hence...
"Okay," Beatrice said, standing up, her antennas drawn tight. "That's it."
"Huh?" Lou lifted his eyes from the technical schematics he had been reading.
Bea placed her hands upon her hips. "We have been working upon this drive for days. You are exhausted, I am irritated, and we have enough time in the schedule to take a break."
Lou rubbed his thumbs against his eyes, working grit out of them. "Bea-"
"I have read a great deal of books about humans now," Bea said, cutting him off. "All of them say that humans need to take breaks. They need to let their minds rest. And I believe that I am learning the same thing." She shook her head. "You would think that you, of all people, would understand this fundamental human condition. That is the basis of your ethos! Of your polity's ethos!"
Lou rubbed his thumbs into his eyes again, then planted his palms on the table as his wife looked down her almost invisible nose at him.
"Or!" she exclaimed. "Is this some kind of long buried example of machismo in my husband's spirit? Are you unwilling to stop work lest you be seen as weak? Hmm?"
"No. I just...want to get the engine finished and get this all over with," Lou said. "Bea, if Cornelius is right, then the Federated States are a threat to you -- not just-"
