Gadohi

Chief Calvin Archer finds evidence that ships are going missing in deep space. He fears that humanity has finally gone to war among the stars.

Calvin Archer was at the center of a web consisting of threads of space and information. Swirling colors lit his face in the darkened workspace. Cal was normally a cheerful man with smile lines at the corners of his brown eyes and on his weather tanned face, but the results from mining the latest data dump were disturbing. Somewhere out among the stars humanity was at war.

Cal didn’t have enough information yet to know who was fighting whom. The enemy could be other men or unknown alien life. It would be months before Cal would know if Earth was losing ships to colonists or aliens. It was even possible that Earth was violating the 220 year old treaty with the known colonies.  

Unexplained losses of starships were almost certain to happen. It was very unlikely that Earth would lose six in one year. It was even more unlikely that they would all be lost in the same system.  

Just outside the city of Gadohi, Cal’s subordinates and other analysts were working quietly in the rustic building where they collected information from throughout human space and looked to find the patterns that lurked there. Some held promises of trade and prosperity. Others held the scent of failure and death. Some held bits of both, as calamity to one might be opportunity for another. 

Most starships traveled between stars through a series of jump-gates. The jump-gates were based on quantum entanglement theory. For every gate that transmitted there had to be another gate to receive. These gates transmitted not only starships, but information as well. A pair of jump-gates were hideously expensive to build. Once built, they had to be placed at each end of the star lane they served. This meant that one jump-gate had to be moved through other jump-gates and eventually interstellar space to their second terminus. Once built and installed, though, they were very economical to operate.  

The center of the jump-gate system was not Earth or even the Solar system. It was in Echota’s Oort cloud. Data was collected and was transmitted from the jump-gate termini to a facility in the local asteroid belt then relayed to a data center on the second planet, Echota. 

Echota is a blue green marble with swirls of white reminding any human of a slightly smaller version of the mother planet. The planet had little surface industry. There were several small villages, two small cities, three university towns and two starports. Orbital works, shipyards and several large habitats swung in orbit. Not visible from the planet’s surface were asteroid industries which harvested the nickel iron asteroids in an orbit between the third and fourth planet. Far out past the last planet’s orbit a small number of comet chasers tracked and captured comets with the rare elements necessary to build jump-gates. 

Jump-gates were not the only form of interstellar travel that man had discovered. In fact, there were half a dozen methods that had been found practical and a few dozen more that were proven but not practical. They were, however, the most economical form of transportation between stars. When the technology was first proposed, Earth’s governments refused to fund the development and testing.  

The first wave of people had left Earth over 250 years ago. They had settled in what could only be called “model” colonies that were extensions of Earth’s nation states. There were six planets settled by alliances of nations. American, Western European, Russian, Chinese, Indian and Japanese led colonies were set up on separate planets. Each colony taking one of the six closest planets needing the least terraforming. These early colonies needed capital that only a wealthy Nation-State could afford.  

The second wave of the Human Diaspora was a combination of corporate and socio-ethnic combines who wanted profit, to be left alone or both. Among these groups were American Express, groups of romantics looking to reclaim the French Monarchy, Texas, the Confederate States; religious groups  including Zionists, Muslims, Gaians, The Holy Roman Empire; a joint Scots/Irish Gaelic group and several groups of former indigenous peoples including a group of Gurkha's who went with the Gaels and several groups of American Indians. 

Echota was settled by a group of Cherokee during the second wave. Echota was also fortunate to attract an off planet campus of three separate universities. Perhaps the gravity of 86% Earth normal and a moderate climate contributed to the attraction as well as the Cherokee tendency to studiousness. 

A joint research center in orbit was the source of the breakthrough that allowed the creation of the first jump-gate. That breakthrough was 250 years in the past. Echota sent a gate to Earth and quickly found that Earth’s governments didn’t want to pay for access to the jump-gate. They wanted to take them and control them. The Sino-Indian Alliance sent warships to seize the Solar System terminus of the jump-gate. When they attempted to force a warship through, the ship blew its reactor and damaged the Solar System jump-gate ring. 

The Earth’s ill-advised attempt to hijack the jump-gates convinced everyone that the hub should not be in the Solar System. Instead, the hub of all of the jump-gate traffic was at Echota. Echota built and dispatched jump-gates to each of the star systems humanity had attempted to settle, only to find that on some of the worlds, the settlements had failed. 

Earth was thwarted in its dedire for military and economic domination of the established colonies by its own mistake in damaging the Cherokee jump-gate. The jump-gate now only worked for traffic going into Sol System. Ships leaving Sol still had to use warp drives to reach the nearest star with an undamaged jump-gate.  

In a reversal of history whose irony was not lost on the Cherokee of Echota, the other colonies looked to them for leadership. Instead, they offered communications in near real time between all of the colonies and Earth. The jump-gate technology offered Faster-Than-Light gate-to-gate communications between matched pairs of jump-gates, even if the jump-gates were the size of communication consoles. Since the power required to create a jump-gate went up exponentially as the size increased, small communications-only versions were much easier to construct. They were still expensive to build, but economical to operate. 

Cal stood up and stepped out of his work area and went to the break room to get a cold bottle of water. Nodding to a colleague, he walked down the hall to the entrance and stepped outside into the dark of the night. He heard the sound of crickets and tree frogs and the rustling of the trees leaves. Looking up, he could see the stars. Somewhere, out there, someone was making a very big mistake.  

He finished his water and put the empty bottle into a return container. Then he sighed and trudged home.