Trans Solar, Book 2

Approaching Colossus, part 1

TS 4101

Far across the outer reaches of the vast Kuiper asteroid belt, thousands of times further away from Sol than was the Earth, a small cluster of spacecraft hurtled outward at trans-solar speed. TSS, or Trans-Solar Speed, was fractional to light speed. A comparison to any other speed was pointless, as a thousandth of light speed was too fast for any eye to see. Beholding light diffusing in atmosphere was nowhere the same as seeing light at light speed. Light rebounds from anything moving slower than itself, which is logical, except that if that object is already moving faster than conscious ability can comprehend it still cannot be seen. The flicker of a kilometer-long object passing in front of one's eyes at a million kilometers per hour is too quickly past for the eye to register. This welded-together group of four spacecraft, passing now through nearly utter darkness and emitting faint light from exterior nodes, was moving at one-quarter of light speed. Only the occupants knew faintly of their speed relative to the universe, and that's what mattered.

Why would relativity matter?

Relativity is proven by the expansion of the universe and the outbound stars moving away. The rate of expansion was once so rapid that the light emitted by stars was variable in all directions. The outbound star, moving away from the universe's center at half the speed of light itself, had faster light moving ahead of it. Light can and did move outward at 1.5 times the speed of light, ahead of the very stars that emitted that light. The alternative, if it had existed within relativity, was that the light moved at half its own speed relative to the star that emitted it, as if there were a traffic cop keeping light from going over a speed limit. Light moves outward from any emitter at a constant speed relative to that emitter. This is why light sent from stars moving away from the universal core reaches towards the center of the universe slowed by the rate of expansion.

There were instances of expansion faster than the speed of light, but scientists cannot explain how light behaves in that instance, since it suffers zero inbound speed towards the universal core and doubled light speed away from the core. What that means is that light existed at zero speed at some points in space relative to that space...and it could not rebound from any material, thus a great expanse of invisible material which was not bound to a black hole or any gravitational body. That is only true if there were materials there for the zero-speed light to rebound from.

With respect to spaceships which invariably move at fractional light speed, at some point in space and time they will encounter zero speed light which those ships are catching up to. The ships will be going in opposition to the direction of the light, thus finally giving that light something to rebound from, and at that instant an outside observer could see the spaceships illuminated as if from a nearby star. The star will have continued moving away, billions of light years from that point in space by now, but the light emitted remained at this point.

Long before this present group of spaceships moved into this region of space, the matter of the Oort cloud and then the denser field of the Kuiper asteroid belt coalesced from the formation of this solar system. Those immense bodies of stuff swept through the space and gave all that low-speed light something from which to rebound, along with all the varied light emitted by Sol and the planets forming and colliding in solar space. That occurred long, long ago, but was still relative to this point in space and time to spacecraft moving along at fractional light speed. Because time, also, is relative.

The time that it took for the asteroid belt materials to coalesce and jumble around to become a more or less dense field of objects was before the existence of mankind. The time of mankind's existence occurred immediately before their inhuman offspring, and the subsequently refined inhuman species which now flew spacecraft to contend with humanity for control of this portion of space and time. This misperception of time being of little effect upon space was a critical flaw in the inhuman reasoning process, for the humans that had fled from solar space during the Titan War had achieved travel at a bit faster than the fractional light speed of the inhumans. Humanity had arrived first, and then second, and finally with understanding they had arrived permanently and inhabited the utter darkness through which these inhuman descendents of genetically modified species flew.