Free Dark Dragons by Kevin Leffingwell Page B

connection exist?  He shivered again.
    The AG emitter produced a maximum acceleration of 3.5 miles
per second or about MACH sixteen in just 0.17 seconds.  Point-seventeen
seconds!  Darren imagined that if someone were watching his fighter take
off from a stationary position at that speed, it would appear that his fighter
had simply vanished quicker than it took to blink an eye.  A ring of force
field projectors inside the cockpit, equaling the acceleration in the opposite
direction, negated the crushing g-forces by pushing against every molecule in
the body, not just the body’s surface like other forms of acceleration.
    Sonic boom?  No such thing.  His fighter possessed
a third set of force field projectors that manipulated the air molecules, eliminating
air compression around the fighter’s skin, creating “potential flow”——smooth,
silent, loss-free . . . an aircraft designer’s wet dream.  Silent,
hypersonic flight . . . no bow shock in front of the fighter or heating of the
surface, and certainly no sonic boom existed.
    He moved on to the characteristics of the second
engine.  The primary engines, the sub-lights, were a pair of bizarre
animals born from another universe of physical law.  They too had no
visible, external components like the nozzles of a rocket engine.  The
pair of magic machines that pushed the dragons across outer space lay hidden
inside the fuselage on both sides of the AG emitter chamber.  A certain
wave particle similar to a superstring millions of times smaller than an electron
existed in the quantum soup——perhaps a billion within every cubic micron of
space——that fused the heavens together and kept the chaotic gods in
check.  These particles provided an interstellar road in which the
quantum wheels of the sub-light drives could push against in whatever
direction so desired.  No on-board fuel needed.
    These speed demon drives, far too fast to use for
atmospheric flight operations, could accelerate at full impulse to eighteen
thousand miles per second before a restricting governor called a
magneto-caliper put the brakes on to avoid relativistic peculiarities like time
dilation and dangerous mass increments.  Again, the anti-g cockpit fields
negated deadly centrifugal force on the pilot’s body.
    Darren did a quick bit of math and realized he could reach
the moon in just two minutes.  Logically, the sub-light engines had to
produce this speed in order to exceed the escape velocity of a super gas-giant
planet or main-sequence star.
    Hot rods of the gods , he mused.
    The third engine wasn’t actually an engine but a metaspace
warp generator that could produce an artificial wormhole in which to escape
from the known universe and reappear elsewhere.  The way Darren understood
it, every cubic micron of space surrounding a massive body like a planet or
star contained several fluctuating wormholes.  The warp generator dilated
these wormholes until they merged with one another to form an entry portal; the
generator then agitated the same fixed particles that the sub-light drives
pushed against to a higher frequency, preventing the wormhole from collapsing
in on itself.  The time it took to arrive at the destination depended not
only on the distance but the mass of the target object, too.  If heading
for Mars, about forty-five million miles away, it would take perhaps two
minutes.  If heading for the sun——much more massive than Mars——93 million
miles distant, perhaps two minutes as well.  Neptune, maybe ten
minutes.  Alpha Centuari?  Darren thought with a smile but
with a cold chill on his skin.  A couple of days perhaps to reach the
nearest solar system to Earth’s own.
    The fighter’s power plant was probably the most astonishing
feature that Darren barely had enough mental capacity to understand.  At
least the three propulsion systems had some sort of far-out logic to them that
an eighteen year-old could decipher.  The power plant had a pair