An Ever-Reddening Glow

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We were tooling along at four nines to c, relative to the Hercules cluster, when our Captain came on the intercom to tell us we were being tailed.

The announcement interrupted my afternoon lecture on Basic Implosive Geometrodynamics, as I explained principles behind the Fulton’s star drive to youths who had been children when we hoarded, eight subjective years ago.

“In ancient science fiction,” I had just said, “you can read of many fanciful ways to cheat the limit of the speed of light. Some of these seemed theoretically possible, especially when we learned how to make microscopic singularities by borrowing and twisting spacetime. Unfortunately, wormholes have a nasty habit of crushing anything that enters them, down to the size of a Planck unit, and it would take a galaxy-sized mass to ‘warp’ space over interstellar distances. So we must propel ourselves along through normal space the old-fashioned way, by Newton’s law of action and reaction… albeit in a manner our ancestors would never have dreamed.”

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