Of those twenty-five capital ships, twenty survived the gravimetric turbulence. For weeks before, smaller vessels not outfitted with a Ribbon drive had been leeched onto the larger ones with dry dock clamps and cables, like infant sharks pressed against their mother’s belly. It did and humanity achieved the ability to fold space. Nakamura made his calculations and rolled the dice, praying the Ribbon Drive would work as the solar system started to disintegrate and wipe out nearly ten billion people with it. One final act of Murphy’s Law.īy that time, most of the people were already on board the ships and the military were on route to pick up final passengers. Frantically re-designing the device and increasing its output by a thousand, he worked around the clock to develop a working model while across the solar system, the evacuation lottery to choose several thousand people out of ten billion began.Īs luck would have it, critical mass arrived a week early. Suddenly Nakamura's drive went from being a prototype to humanity's last hope for survival. It would happen fast and no science they possessed could stop it.Įxtinction would happen, not in seven billion years, but in a matter of weeks. Every instrument they possessed showed the core of the sun collapsing on itself and when critical mass was reached, it would go nova taking the entire solar system with it. Something very large had hit the sun, something with enough reactive material to destabilise its solar fission.

Albert had just been about to sign off on the installation when astronomers all over Sol flew into a panic. His original prototype was being installed in a test flight ship given to him by his project funders, The Tiger Alliance (the federation of Asian nations). No one blamed him, of course, not the inventor of the Ribbon Drive responsible for saving humanity. Albert Nakamura stared at the faces before him, wishing it was anyone else but he who made it. Never in the history of the world, were there such grave consequences for not carrying a zero.ĭr. A journey intended to take four weeks now stretched into its sixth month. Instead of emerging from the Ribbon a little over a light year away from their destination, they’d overshot their exit point by seven light years. Just being off by a fraction may seem insignificant, but in astrophysics, it was the difference between life and death.

It was never wise to make hasty calculations even in the face of impending disaster. Savage World (Babel Series Book 1) by Jennifer Slusher and Linda Thackeray Book excerpt

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