Free Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative by Owen R. O'Neill, Jordan Leah Hunter Page B

abyss.
    Taken together, it all worked. A ship in a statis field
could safely traverse a wormhole along a manifold, the pseudo-velocity being
related to the ratio of the virtual mass of the drive to the ship’s rest mass;
a higher ratio made the wormhole go deeper—some said straighter —and
took less time.
    Of course, there were limitations. A detailed understanding
of them required tensor calculus, which Kris understood only vaguely, and
hypergonic fractal geometry, which she didn’t understand at all. But she
grasped the practical aspects well enough. One was that not all
pseudo-velocities in a wormhole were permitted; they were constrained by the
allowed vibrational modes of the manifold it was on. These modes, called manifold
phase layers—usually just phase layers —were quantized, just as the electron
states of an atom were quantized and for the same reason, so the only way to go
“faster” was to have a drive “big” enough to jump to the next deeper phase
layer.
    Another limitation was that getting in and out of a wormhole
was not a simple matter. The act of accessing or exiting a wormhole was called translation
(usually ‘drop translation’ in, and ‘lift translation’ out), and the virtual
mass units required was known as the translation potential. A ship could only
create or leave a wormhole if it’s mass rating was greater than the translation
potential.
    To drop translate, it was beneficial to use the gravity well
of a star or other massive body to lower the translation potential, but there
was a problem: the efficacy of a stasis field was not unlimited—it depended on
the ship’s mass rating. Above a certain limit, gravity shear would defeat the
stasis field, destroying the ship. So while using a gravity well helped a ship
translate, the gravity gradient of the well also increased gravity shear and a
ship that translated too close to a massive body, where the gradient was too
steep, risked destruction.
    Once in the wormhole, translating out was, in principle,
just a matter of reversing the gravitic polarity. But a ship had to be careful
not to fall deeper into the destination well than its gravitic systems could
handle. At some point, the attraction of the ship’s virtual mass and the mass
of the primary at the wormhole’s terminus would overcome the gravitic system’s
antigravity potential and the doomed ship then raced to impact.
    Finally, no adjustments to course or velocity could be made
from inside a wormhole. If you’d screwed up, there was no way to tell before
the end—probably the end in all senses of the word.
     All these factors limited where a ship could translate. The
boundary between the allowed and denied regions was called Fraser’s Limit
(named for the woman who derived it, not the ship captain who proved it by
ignoring it), and it depended on the gravity gradient, the local mass
distribution represented as sets of gravity isoclines known as ‘Teller rings,’ and
the ship’s virtual mass rating.
    Calculating Fraser’s Limit was the critical part of
hyperlight travel. It was handled by a branch of mathematics called jump
convolution and it was here that Kris nearly gave up. Jump convolution was
based on something called C-star algebra, a weird topological algebra with
strange non-abelian operators that defied normal description.
    Having successfully dodged tensor calculus and hypergonic
fractal geometry, C-star algebra finally reduced Kris to tears. Written out, it
was pure gibberish. For months, she tried futilely to understand it but when
she’d finally resolved to give it up, she figured out the navigation text’s
plotting module. C-star algebra suddenly made sense. Seen holographically, the
operators became real: changing shape, touching and melding, stretching and
splitting. The discovery made her happy for weeks—she could finally do the
problems in the navigation text. Trench never did figure out why she was so
cheerful.
    One of the first advanced problems was