You know people have it in for you when they start trying to poison your new first officer against you.
You know you have the best and wisest first officer around when he answers the attempt with such grace that he silences his captain's foes.
This I had in Cmdr. Helmut Allemande, a man who might have been captain of the Amanirenas but for the accident for which I had been reinstated to the fleet. Some of the older captains who were upset that I had been given my first command under such a circumstance thought they might bring it to Cmdr. Allemande's attention that he might have – nay, should have – been captain of the vessel on which he remained first officer. His answer ended the discussion.
“No, sirs,” he said in his soft but deep bass voice. “We learned in quantum physics that time and all that will happen in it has been laid out from beginning to end. I also learned that at my mother's knee from the Holy Scripture. I am not prepared to contradict the testimony of God and all of His creation in this matter, so, it is for me in this time to gladly and loyally serve as first officer to Captain Biles-Dixon.”
Cmdr. Allemande's loyalty presented itself to me in reports coming four times a day about all the scientific work he oversaw on the Amanirenas, and in how he made sure everything that was going to go into my reports to the commodores and admirals above me had been checked, double-checked, and triple-checked before even coming to me. In so doing, he once saved the entire galaxy and everyone in it a great deal of trouble.
One expects strange readings from any area of space through which a comet transmuted to anti-matter riding a trans-warp wave has passed – of course! But in one particular parsec-sized region (a parsec is fifty light-years) the readings we had gotten were strange by comparison to the surrounding parsecs. This region was well-known because it contained the lovely Pruilliforn Cloud you see above, but the fleet had not had occasion to deeply study the region before.
Since the analysis of that parsec fell into the Amanirenas crew's allotment, I read about it daily in Cmdr. Allemande's reports and talked with him in real-time about different aspects of it. It was therefore not the surprise to me that it would be to the fleet when he delivered his final report on the matter, five weeks in … but I was still stunned by what he had uncovered.
Twenty-four hours later I was presenting the findings to all the assembled captains, commodores, and admirals in the exploratory fleet assigned to the aftermath of the accident, and it was quite a briefing, because the implications of humanity not being the first and only to be developing trans-warp capability meant that our whole strategic plan to defend the planets in our consortium might need to be retooled for the 24th century.
“I don't expect you've been a captain long enough to know how much research and development and engineering there has been to give us superiority in this area, Captain Biles-Dixon,” one of my rivals hissed at a pause in my presentation.
I turned around and looked him in the eye.
“I expect that you, sir, are scientist enough to know that when the data says you are wrong, you follow the science, not your preconceived notions.”
He turned red and would have said something else, but calmed right down as the cold look of Admiral Modell landed on him.
Full Fleet Admiral Vlarian Triefield didn't bother to look over at the red-faced captain – a sign others interpreted as his career already being over though he didn't know it yet – but moved right on.
“We certainly will double-check the findings from the Amanirenas's crew, but in the meantime, Captain Biles-Dixon, there is a shorter way, provided there is what your data says there should be inside the Pruilliforn Cloud.”
“Yes, ma'am,” I said. “Cmdr. Allemande my science officer has consulted the history records the local civilizations have been gracious enough to give us, and according to nine of those local civilizations, the Pruilliforn Cloud was an inhabited star system that was destroyed in a single day some four thousand years ago, which also corresponds to our data. Old High Vulcan and Uppaaimarn records contemporaneous to that time also have some mention of that incident, with the Uppaaimar having noted a strange occurrence in the Canis Major dwarf galaxy that corresponded with the event.”
“How is it that some captains are getting access to the ancient Uppaaimarn libraries all of the sudden and others are not?” another of my rivals spat.
“All captains who updated their ship's libraries in the last nine months have access,” I said without turning around so he could fume at my back as I went on. “More to the point, the Uppaaimar were able to determine that whatever destroyed the Pruilliforn system came from outside our galaxy.”
“The Canis Major dwarf galaxy is 25,000 light-years away,” another of my rivals offered. “How in the world did they see a concurrence in real time?”
“I will interject here,” my uncle, Admiral Benjamin Banneker said, “because yes, there is a 25,000-light-year gap between the two galaxies, but consider how fast trans-warp really is. We know from an incident with a ship of our own that, at least for brief periods, Warp 9 is only half of the capacity of a warp engine – the log of that incident shows a top speed of Warp 18.1 was achieved owing to a runaway reaction in the warp core. So, if we did not have quaint things like getting where we are going alive to consider, we could be zipping around at about 5,700 times the speed of light. That's just what can be done at warp speed, to say nothing of trans-warp.
“Now, about the accident we have all been investigating: because of that comet transmuted to anti-matter was at low trans-warp speed, we were all running our ships around at the equivalent of Warp 9.75 playing tag, getting it in position to nudge it the way we wanted it to go. Anti-matter has no mass, and thus no weight to push … so even at the trans-warp equivalent of, say, Warp 10, 1,000 times the speed of light, how long would it have taken that bubble to travel 25,000 light-years?”
“Just 25 years,” Admiral Triefield said aloud.
“And in stellar terms, that is real-time concurrence,” I said, and then pulled up the data showing how the Uppaaimar had tracked it all … except it hadn't taken 25 years.
“So, another civilization, somewhere in Canis Major, thousands of years before humanity had even airplanes, had an accident about 2.5 times the speed of our own, and the result of that accident made it into our galaxy in just ten years? Commodore Baraka said.
“That's what the data is suggesting,” I said.
“And I also have double-checked it,” Adm. Banneker said, “as chief science officer for this exploratory fleet. The suggestion is sound.”
“That also tells us,” Adm. Triefield said, “that we have a bit more work to do than we thought in this galaxy concerning the adoption of trans-warp speed, since we are concerned about quaint things like getting where we are going alive and not killing off everything when we arrive. Captain Biles-Dixon.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“Prepare to take the Amanirenas into the Pruilliforn Cloud in six hours, and see what there is to see.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
By the time the Amanirenas came through the dust to see what was inside the cloud –
– all the other science crews in the fleet had taken the opportunity to check Cmdr. Allemande's work, and to see what he predicted being on the other side of that cloud. He was largely correct in his prediction, except –.
“I did not conceive of it being so beautiful,” he said, in awe with everyone else viewing.
All the matter that had been left of a star system that had been ten to twelve times the mass of the Solar System was there, with the splatter and wave pattern as if someone had thrown a stone into some quick-drying resin in gem tones. It appeared that the blob of anti-matter had made a direct hit on the system's blue hypergiant star, and one could see how the damage had radiated out from there and then began to fall back and orbit around the remaining center of gravity, leaving about three Solar System masses of material. This meant, of course, that the amount of anti-matter involved had been seven to nine times the size of the Solar System.
Dr. Shaaka iMaru, the galaxy's leading authority on ancient Uppaaimarn history and culture, provided a sidelight from a deep dive into the incident: the Uppaaimarn theory of the matter was that a whole civilization had destroyed itself, and the aftermath had made its way into the Milky Way ten years later. Sure enough: careful imaging of Canis Major showed that there was a corresponding dust cloud and a loss of about seven to nine Solar System's worth of stellar material that should have been at that spot – the gravitational shifting of everything around that area showed that.
“So, playing around with trans-warp and anti-matter when you really don't know what you are doing has consequences, and a little bigger than we thought,” Admiral Triefield said grimly about it when the final reports were in. “Do we still have the confidence we did before these discoveries that we as the sentient inhabitants of this galaxy know what we are doing with that combination?”
No one said anything until my uncle spoke up.
“I'm older than all of you,” he said, “and I can tell you that you live longer if you learn the difference between confidence and hubris. That may be what you want to share with the high command on the subject of trans-warp, Madame Admiral, in light of these discoveries.”
Meanwhile, the man who made the discoveries that changed the course of fleet development for the safer and better got up from the captain's chair when I returned to the bridge, handed me his third report of the day, and returned to his science station without any change in his attitude. He knew there was no reason to get excited because he understood the fleet we were in. I put him up for a commendation and promotion to captain myself. Adm. Banneker seconded it, and Adm. Triefield agreed, but other influential people in the fleet were not having it, because Cmdr. Helmut Allemande had dared to let good science interfere with their plans.
Cmdr. Allemande never worried about any of it. My husband, my uncle, and I had great joy over what my uncle referred to as “that young man's essential and utter unbotheredness.”
“I learned at my mother's knee, from Ecclesiastes and Acts, what quantum physics would tell me later,” he said to my uncle about that. “All things in their time, and are beautiful in their time."
In due time, honor caught up with Helmut Allemande in a spectacular way. Today, on official charts the Pruilliforn Cloud and Interior Formation remains as such, but Allemande's Gemstone is now the common reference term among civilian scientists discussing the issue in public. As far as the strange and long-lasting adjustments in background radiation that multiple trans-warp signatures cause, that is now known officially as the Allemande Resonance.