All hands, prepare for battle. Alcubierre transition in two minutes.”I know that we aren’t really going faster than light speed—in an Alcubierre bubble, the ship moves at subluminal speed while the drive shifts the space around it—but it still feels like we’ve been racing through space for the last few hours. A ship keeps the forward momentum it had when it entered the bubble, and Colonel Campbell hit the node at four gravities of acceleration with the fusion engines going at flank speed. When we pop out of the bubble on the solar system side in a few minutes, we’ll be shooting out of the node like a ship-to-ship missile.“The second we get out of Alcubierre, we go cold on the engines,” Colonel Campbell reminds the helmsmen. “Shut it down and coast ballistic. EMCON check, please.”“Everything’s cold,” the weapons officer says. “All active radiation sources are full EMCON. Once those engines shut down, we’ll be a black hole.”“I want this ship to do its best impression of an asteroid.
