15 August 2018
"Ulltracapacitors A, and B, are go."
"Main relay grid is go. Secondary relay grid is go."
"Fifteen seconds. Start increasing the induction."
Hermione Weasley, wand ready, eyes as curious and intelligent as ever, shifted nervously within the chamber. This was, by definition, an experimental vessel. Still, she was among the best Apparators in Europe; that was one major reason that she'd been chosen for this mission. If anyone could make this thing work, it was she. Also, her Muggle upbringing made it easier for her to use and understand the complex technology upon which this was based. (It was a shame, really, that no "science" was taught at Hogwarts. As Jeff Sheldon would eagerly tell you whenever you asked him, it was certainly not irrelevant or worthless compared to magic. She'd talk to Kingsley about it once this mission was over.)
She watched the Muggles, intent on their tasks, through the thick plexiglass (with some copper compound thrown in to increase the relative permittivity value so neither her magnetic field nor the machine's magnetic field would destroy the electronics). They seemed well-prepared and competent, in contrast to Cho, who looked nervous and uncertain. Cho was intelligent and had lived as a Muggle for a while, so she understood technology well enough to make herself useful, but her main purpose was a backup Apparator. Hermione had learned by now that space agencies liked to have at least one backup for everything, if at all possible.
This was the third day of the mission. A SpaceX rocket had carried them into orbit two days ago, and the following day had been spent running careful tests of every spacecraft component. Hermione, as was her wont, spent the time reviewing ship's systems for the thirtieth time.
The Muggles, in fact, were just as nervous. Unlike every spacecraft test NASA and the ESA had ever conducted before, there could be no unmanned flight first. The spacecraft had been designed so nothing could possibly go wrong, but so had Apollo 13.
The room would have been very cramped in gravity, and was only somewhat cramped as it was. Display screens flickered along the "walls". Cho glanced at the GNC console, seeing nothing wrong. The trajectory numbers were exactly as specified. The EECOM console showed plenty of air, electric charge, and water, as well as perfect connection to the satellite relaying transmissions. The three Muggles also in the room were intent on their consoles, not panicked, but alert and intent. Cho was mainly trying to stay out of the way.
The speaker crackled. "Mission Control to AHAC-One. You are go for maneuver. Ronald, Mary, and Celia send their best wishes." Hermione, mentally reviewing what she had to do, barely noticed this.
"Roger," Pierre answered, smiling for a moment as the last name was spoken. "We're ready to disable the communications system; we are awaiting your go-ahead."
"AHAC-One, you are go to disable communications. Good luck. Over--and out."
The speaker cut out abruptly as the antennas were disabled to protect them during the "maneuver". (There was a nontrivial chance someone could be listening in on this frequency; if so, discussing Apparition would be a rather bad idea.) Cho remembered nervously that most of the electronics were supposed to cut out a few seconds before transit to prevent them from being burned out.
"Induction at one hundred millitesla. Two hundred. Four hundred."
"Ten seconds."
"Rate of change of distance to target point is stable. Distance is currently 408.13 megameters." (The ESA had recently begun to use megameters, gigameters, and terameters instead of thousands, millions, and billions of kilometers, respectively.)
"Main relay grid is solid. All distribution nodes reading normal."
"GBAR is go. ADOP is go."
GBAR, Cho knew, stood for Gravitationally Based Apparition Rejection. It was supposed to keep them from accidentally ending up in the center of Jupiter, or some other undesirable location, in case the control systems failed to put them on top of the target. The target was near the orbit of Luna, but not close to it. That way, they could get back with normal propulsion if they couldn't Apparate back, but the distance was enough to determine whether Apparition was the long-sought FTL drive. One of the lead engineers had privately told Cho a few days before launch that he honestly thought the GBAR was a piece of useless junk. Fortunately, space was very large and planets, by comparison, were very small. The chance of them hitting anything large was in the billionths range. Cho didn't remember what ADOP stood for, which wasn't surprising, she thought, considering the number of different parts on this ship. She had studied very hard, but as one of the other engineers had explained, Apollo 11 might have been aborted due to Armstrong and Aldrin not knowing the significance of some alarm, if not for an "almost precognitive" SimSup. There was just too much to know.
"Five seconds."
Hermione held up her free hand in acknowledgement, closed her eyes, and set her feet. She gripped her wand very tightly.
"Induction approaching critical value."
"All systems go."
"Mrs. Weasley, three, two, one, now!" Lawrence called out briskly. Hermione hauled in her breath, whirled, and Disapparated. An instant later, Cho, with an awful wrench, was seized and hurled into the crushing black of Apparition. She felt frozen and crushed, nothing, nothing, nothing, what if they never came out, she couldn't breathe...
The ship reappeared around her. An alarm began to blare. Air was sucking violently at Cho, whipping her hair about and ruffling her clothes through the neck of her space suit. Her ears popped and she yelled in fear. Hermione, feeling dizzy, pushed off the "floor" wildly, hit the chamber wall, and went into a spin inside the narrow chamber that brought her face into violent contact with the door. Fortunately, the intercom had cut out, and the rest of the crew was spared her comments on this.
"Warning," sounded the computer. "Explosive decompression. Warning. Explosive decompression."
Pierre Gaston pressed several buttons on his console rapidly. Heavy thuds rang through the deck, causing Cho to start slowly drifting upward. The gale stopped abruptly.
"What happened?" Lawrence asked after a long moment to regain composure. "GNC, report. Is the ADOP working?"
"No reading from the ADOP, sir," Nate Bernard answered. He flicked through screens of data, looking steadily more confused. "I have no telemetry from engines, fuel tanks, oxygen tanks, or electrical subsystems in the stern half of the spacecraft. No communication with the main computer. Auxiliary computer is at about 70 percent CPU usage and I don't know how much more it can handle. We've got no navigation information. All cameras aft of the RCTs are down."
"Bring up a forward camera," Lawrence snapped. "Gaston, are we in immediate danger?"
"We have hull integrity in this part of the ship. There eez no sign of any pressure leaks here, but I, have, no environmental telemetry aft of the RCTs. Oxygen tanks one and two are not...hmm...reading anything, and the pipelines leading to them have been sealed off automatically due to ze leaking. Oxygen tank three is at eight point six megapascals and steady. Batteries five through seven are reading in, parameters; all other batteries are reading ze zero. All solar panels either, not registering or, capturing negligible energy."
"I don't think we're in immediate danger, then," Lawrence answered.
"It does not look like zis, no."
"But what is going on? Why is everything behind the roll control thrusters dead?" He paused, then spoke quietly and calmly. "Does either of you have any reading at all that originates from behind that point on the AHAC-One?"
Hermione got herself stabilized and began to pound on the plexiglass of the apparition chamber. Cho nearly used an incantation to release the door before remembering what that would do to the computer systems. Instead, Lawrence pushed himself across the cabin, gripped a handle, and yanked a lever marked "Emergency Release." The door popped open.
"My apologies, Mrs. Weasley," Lawrence said. Hermione nodded, but forced down her questions; the Muggles were doing the best they could. Lawrence glanced into the apparition chamber, which seemed to have several char marks on the walls. "Bernard, do you see that?"
"See what?"
"The apparition chamber. Look at that damage."
"Well, at least we didn't blow a whole panel of the service module off, Scott."
Lawrence snorted. Cho, of course, had no idea what he was referring to.
"Hermione, did you hear what was going on?" Cho asked nervously.
"I did. This doesn't sound good. It almost seems like the whole back end of the ship disappeared, Cho."
Cho thought about that for a moment. There was silence in the cockpit. She suddenly had a thought. "Could it have...Splinched?"
Hermione grimaced. "It would make sense."
There was a pause as the Muggles tapped away at their screens, and Cho and Hermione desperately tried to remember everything they knew about Splinching.
"Lawrence," Bernard said finally, very quietly and calmly,"I have looked through all the forward cameras. Our TCR should have brought the entire star field into view over the last minute. The highest-magnitude object in the sky is about negative one."
"My God," Lawrence said. He was rapidly turning white. "We're not even in the solar system."
"We have one working antenna, sir," Gaston said. "I will try to find the television stations, and figure out how far away we are. If we are two of the light-years away, then we see the TV from two years ago."
"Good idea." Lawrence took several deep breaths, trying to remain calm and think clearly. "Gaston," he continued, "I will also need an estimate of how long we have in terms of consumables. Bernard, can you use the spectrum of nearby stars and star systems, say Sirius (the witches glanced up for a moment, startled, then realized what Lawrence was talking about), Alpha Centauri, and Vega, to determine what they are, then triangulate our position?" He turned to Hermione and Cho. "You're the only ones who understand...what is it...this Splinching. How do you people put things that are...splincherized...back together?"
There was a pause.
"I should have stayed at home," Cho said to Hermione.
Hermione grimaced.
3 September 2014
Kingsley Shacklebolt considered what the man in front of him had just proposed. He considered it very carefully.
"You are completely mad," he told the man. "We have about seven violations of the International Statute of Secrecy just from what you've said so far."
"Look," Jeff Sheldon answered hotly,"the British government is rather good at keeping secrets, from what I've heard. Certainly much better than we are across the pond. You've got an 'Official Secrets Act', for God's sake! Anyway, it's not as though this has never happened before. What about the WADVs? Wizard Air Defense Volunteers?"
"It was a completely different situation. The Germans were pounding the hell out of London and we could not allow that. Besides, as I understand it, no one knew how far Grindelwald might have been prepared to go. We needed to be ready in case he decided to reveal himself to the Nazis and coordinate with them. But this is just a harebrained quest."
"Was the moon landing a 'hairbrained quest'? The Muggles are catching up, Minister. In centuries of trying we never found a way to reach the moon, and the Muggles put a few decades of effort in and Neil Armstrong's up there skipping around." He thought of another example. "Peter Pettigrew blew about a block to pieces. One city block. At Hiroshima half the city was reduced to powder! What if the Muggles invent something that can see through Invisibility Cloaks? Or a headset that blocks Muggle-Repelling Charms? We need to show the Muggles, now," he struck the desk as he said this,"that we are good friends to have. Or do you want to go back to Salem and the Inquisition? Because if the Muggles decide to try to wipe us out again, they'll be able to do it. Flame Freezing Charms are all well and good, but I suggest you see how they hold up against Sidewinders and smart bombs and plastic explosive and God knows what else."
Shacklebolt frowned.
"You are only convincing me that we should be even more cautious."
"Minister, sooner or later the Muggles will find out about us. I think it's better if it's by us telling them than by them inventing some gadget that can see through all magical concealment when they won't know the first thing about us."
There was a pause.
"You have no idea whether this will work."
"Sir, I was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, what we call MIT, for three years before I finally found out I was a wizard. I slipped through the cracks of the Americans' notification system. I have been conducting experiments for the past several years, and I have arrived at the conclusion that magic is an analyzable, quantifiable, and manipulable phenomenon subject to laws of physics, like everything else. Apparition is a localized displacement of spacetime through higher-dimensional space. The 'pressure' phenomenon is due to the effects of higher dimensionality on the body's ratio of surface area to volume. The displacement can be manipulated by a combination of gravitational singularities induced in a particle accelerator, and a strong magnetic field to tie the Apparating person to a device."
"Have you done this?"
"Welll, I could show you the theory, but I don't think your Hogwarts' Arithmancy covers tensor calculus and general relativity. It's all based on general relativity, Kip Thorne's work with wormholes, and the Standard Model. These are established theories, which have been tested and proven." As he would later admit, he was stretching the truth about Thorne's work. Stephen Hawking, for example, had taken an opposing view on the matter.
Kingsley got up, walked to the window, and looked out, ignoring the fact that they were actually fairly deep underground. He finally turned. "Fine. I will give you a permit to speak to these blokes. But I will warn you that if they start to blab, I will not take any responsibility for it. Is that understood?"
"It is indeed, Minister."
Test Flight by William Brennan
Story Notes:
I've had to go through quite a few drafts to get this working. This is my first; reviews, positive or negative, are appreciated.