I took a deep breath, letting the reality of it wash over me. We were four point three lightyears from Earth. But the relief was quickly overshadowed by the blinking diagnostic lights on my secondary console.
"Archi," I said, turning away from the viewscreen. "Local chronometers are going to be completely out of sync after riding inside that warp bubble. Is there any mathematical way for us to figure out exactly how much objective time has passed back in the Sol system?"
"Affirmative, Surgrim," Archi's voice replied smoothly. "While internal atomic clocks are compromised by relativistic drift, the galactic baseline remains constant. I can utilize the passive tachyon array to lock onto the emissions of distant pulsars. By measuring the phase shift in their rotational timing relative to our new position, I can calculate a precise temporal delta."
"Do it," I ordered. "I want to know how long the scientists on Anchor have been waiting."
Numbers cascaded down the main holotable as Archi ran the correlation. It took him less than five seconds to process the light from neutron stars thousands of lightyears away.
"Calculations complete," Archi announced. "The time dilation factor during transit did not hold at the projected 7.83. Due to extreme sub-dimensional drag, the ratio spiked. Subjective elapsed time aboard the Nomad: forty-five days. Objective elapsed time in the Sol system: approximately eighteen months."
"A year and a half?" Judy whispered, slumping back into her chair.
Mereel let out a low whistle. "Well, let's hope Rey and Sarah didn't blow up the station while we were gone."
Subjective Time: Week 4 (System Transit). The Nomad, Engineering Deck.
Exploring a new star system wasn't like a movie. You didn't just point the ship at a planet and arrive five minutes later.
Without the Warp drive - which I had absolutely forbidden Mereel from using until we understood what went wrong - we were relying entirely on our conventional sub-light thrusters. Moving from the outer edge of the Centauri system toward the inner rocky planets took time.
It had been nearly a month since we dropped out of warp. Over the last three weeks, we had slowly cruised past Centauri's outer periphery, scooping raw deuterium from a massive, violent gas giant to refill the primary fusion tanks.
Now, we were in transit toward the inner system, and I had spent the last twenty days buried in the structural logs with Archi.
I stood in the center of the engineering deck, staring at a holographic cross-section of the Nomad. The entire hull was glowing angry red and orange.
"I don't understand," I muttered, rubbing my temples. "I forced a hundred-percent redundancy loop into the wrapper. We pumped twenty percent more power into the Alcubierre field than your original math required. The bubble strength was massive. So why did the titanium superstructure experience grade-four micro-fractures? The ship was literally twisting."
"The error," Archi began, his synthetic voice sounding uncharacteristically slow, "was in our foundational material-stress models."
I blinked, looking up from the data. "Our models? We miscalculated?"
"I am an entity of pure logic, Surgrim. However, my logic is constrained by the parameters of my origin," Archi explained. "When I calculated the shear forces of the subspace barrier, I modeled the structural integrity of the ship based on materials I am historically accustomed to processing. Hyper-dense neutronium weaves. Phase-locked carbon states. I failed to adequately account for the primitive nature of this metallurgy."
I stared at the console. "Primitive? We forged this hull with molecular nanites."
"It is still just titanium and carbon, Surgrim," Archi replied matter-of-factly. "It is exceptionally well-forged mud. Under the extreme temporal shear of a prolonged Alcubierre jump, your metals behave unpredictably. Even with your redundancy loops, the physical hull cannot endure another jump of that distance. The ship will snap in half."
I let out a long, frustrated breath. He was an incredible system, but he was so used to theoretical perfection that he had completely overestimated our physical hardware.
"Alright," I said, leaning over the console. "We have a bug. We need a patch. How do we reinforce the bubble so the hull doesn't take the friction?"
Over the next four days, as the Nomad cruised through the empty void between planets, Archi and I tore the Warp wrapper apart.
The solution we eventually engineered was essentially a hardware hack. Instead of letting the warp bubble rest directly against the physical hull of the ship, we needed to route a secondary frequency through the Nomad's deflector shield emitters. By creating a physical gap a cushion of hard-light energy between the hull and the subspace warp the friction would be absorbed by the shields, not the titanium.
"There is a bottleneck," Archi noted on day five, projecting the new schematic. "The current shield emitter arrays were designed to deflect micro-asteroids and standard plasma fire. Pumping a continuous sub-dimensional harmonic through them for weeks at a time will cause the focusing lenses to melt within seventy-two hours."
"So we upgrade the emitters," I said, pulling up the nanite foundry queue. "What do we need to reinforce the lenses to handle the heat?"
"High-density refractory metals," Archi stated. "Specifically, large quantities of raw Tungsten, Rhenium, and traces of Osmium. Materials that can withstand extreme thermal load without losing crystalline cohesion."
The intercom clicked on.
"Surgrim, get up to the bridge," Mereel's voice came through, sounding excited. "We just entered scanning range of the second inner planet orbiting Centauri B. You're going to want to see this."
I left the engineering deck and jogged up to the bridge. Mabel and Judy were already standing behind Mereel's pilot chair, staring at the primary holotable.
Floating above the projector was a beautifully detailed scan of a terrestrial planet. It wasn't a dead rock. It had a thin, wispy atmosphere, deep canyons, and massive, jagged mountain ranges that looked like they had been violently pushed out of the crust.
"Lets, run a deep-penetrating spectral analysis," I ordered.
"Scanning," Archi replied. The hologram pulsed with a green light. "Atmosphere is highly toxic primarily sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Surface temperature is approximately four hundred degrees Celsius. However, the tectonic instability has pushed massive veins of heavy metals close to the surface."
I crossed my arms, staring at the scrolling elemental readouts on my terminal. "Don't tell me we actually caught a break for once. Do we have any luck? Is there viable Tungsten in that mess?"
"Abundant," Archi confirmed. "Along with high concentrations of Rhenium, Palladium, and Titanium. The tectonic shearing has exposed deep-crust deposits. It is a highly active, geologically violent world, but extremely resource-dense."
I looked at the glowing sphere. It was an absolute hellscape, but it had exactly the hardware we needed to patch our ship.
"Alright," I said, a grim smile pulling at the corner of my mouth. "Mereel, put us in a low orbit. Judy, prep the heavy Mules for atmospheric entry. We're going mining."
Mereel didn't touch the flight yoke right away. He was leaning forward, staring intensely at the thermal and atmospheric telemetry scrolling across his own screens.
"Wait a second," Mereel said, a heavy dose of skepticism in his voice. "It's four hundred degrees down there, and those clouds are basically boiling sulfuric acid. Are we sure the Mules can even survive that kind of atmospheric entry? Hell, won't the nanites just melt into slag the second they try to process that rock?"
Judy looked up from her logistics panel, frowning. "He's right, Surgrim. The nanites have thermal limits. If they hit four hundred degrees while trying to maintain molecular cohesion, their internal logic gates might literally fry."
I looked back at the holographic projection of the blazing planet, running the math in my head. It was a brutal environment, but it was just another hostile system that needed to be managed.
"The Mules share the same titanium-carbon-weave as the Nomad," I pointed out, tapping the holotable. "Their structural integrity will hold. They'll get hot, but they won't melt. As for the nanites... Archi, can we write a localized thermal-override patch for the swarm? Sacrifice their replication speed for enhanced thermal shielding?"
"Affirmative," Archi replied. "By restricting their molecular replication cycles to ten percent, I can divert their onboard energy entirely to thermal deflection. Their operational lifespan will be severely reduced, but they will survive long enough to extract the Tungsten."
"There's your answer," I said, looking at Mereel. "They'll burn out fast, but they'll get the job done. And if we lose a batch of nanites, we'll just print more. We don't have a choice. Without that Tungsten, we are never making another FTL jump without tearing this ship in half."
Mereel sighed heavily, shaking his head as he finally pushed the flight yoke forward. The Nomad slowly began to angle its massive, black nose toward the glowing, toxic world below.
"Alright," Mereel muttered, his fingers dancing across the descent controls. "Descending to low orbit. I'll prep the Mules' ablative shields. Let's go swimming in a volcano."