Free Annihilation: Love Conquers All by Saxon Andrew, Derek Chiodo

and knew that humans were still in caves when the light of that star had left to arrive at his current location. “Someday I’m going to visit that star,” he thought.
     
    He would often discuss with Lieutenant Mikado, his sensor officer, the places he would travel were it not for the twenty-light-year limit the Alliance had imposed. “Sir, I just don’t understand how Adam Douglas discovered the principles of the star drive,” Mikado said. “Our technology was so primitive at that time and you have to admit that being able to jump around the universe with no loss of time was a major discovery.”
     
    Kosiev liked passing the long hours with this type of discussion; it helped keep the bridge crew alert. He chewed a few more kernels and said, “It really wasn’t a quantum leap in genius. He developed an instrument to measure the resonance of space around him. It was then a certainty that he would uncover the fact that no spot in the universe has the same resonance on the frequency reader he was using. He never got the same reading anywhere he went. Once he developed it so that he could measure the resonance and vibration of stars, then the hard part was over.”
     
    Mikado leaned back and asked, “Why do you say that? Reading the resonance of stars or galaxies doesn’t give you a star drive.”
     
    “That’s true, but once he turned his viewer that gave resonance readings on a star, he made two huge discoveries; one was that that particular resonance frequency of that distant star was being read in real time. There was no loss of time because of distance, unlike the speed of light, where in some cases light took centuries to reach Earth from the star it left. The second discovery was building a field that would contain one of his devices that could vibrate the field at any resonance he chose, which led to its immediate disappearance; then simple logic was all that was necessary to make a star drive.”
     
    “How do you get that?” Mikado asked. “It took him another ten years to finally build a drive.”
     
    “Yes, but he had to eliminate all the other possibilities before he could understand it,” Kosiev said. “He learned that every place in the universe has its own unique resonance frequency and that anything that resonates at the same frequency as another place will immediately leave normal space and time and, for lack of a better term, instantaneously jump to the place that resonates the corresponding frequency. Of course the jumper must be surrounded by a field resonating at the frequency of the place targeted for a jump. If you remember, he built a small field and resonating device and put in the coordinates of the table on the other side of his lab. Once the resonance matched, the small device immediately appeared on the other table.”
     
    “But then he was stuck,” Mikado said. “It would move no further than the width of his lab. It was five years later on a trip to the orbit of Jupiter to work on the engines of mining equipment that he tried his little experiment again, and the device disappeared out of the ship. He had an ‘Aha’ moment and discovered that the sun’s gravity prevented the device from resonating over any distance within Jupiter’s orbit. He actually modified the field around the ship he was in and scanned the resonance of Neptune and actually jumped the ship to its orbit and then back to Jupiter. It probably would have taken many more years if he had not made that trip to Jupiter.”
     
    Kosiev nodded and said, “But he did make the trip, and now we jump from star to star. He also learned that it was impossible to jump into a planet or star because just like the sun, its gravity would force the jumping ship out of star drive.”
     
    Mikado thought for a few moments and said, “Where do you think ships go when they jump? They don’t stay in normal space.”
     
    “No one has ever really answered that,” Kosiev said. “But there are some theories. The current