Chapter 2. Easy technical break. sub-chapter 1.

The five new-found conquerors of space froze statues. Of course, it's not every day that you are told something like this, in such a strange place and under such unclear circumstances. Meanwhile, the hall, which had previously been in an interior void, began to transform decisively. From the center of the domed ceiling, a black hemisphere like a huge eye slowly moved out. From below, towards her, a vast round table rose from the floor, framed by a semicircle of six massive, but very comfortable-looking chairs. The new interior elements with a steel-gray shade contrasted with the noble whiteness of the walls. The center of the table is black, as is the "eye on the ceiling". This installation is very similar to projection equipment. Another, the seventh chair, moved out from the other side of this table. Hmm ... and the seventh for whom?.. The question was removed by Ariadna's light projection, which occupied this particular chair. It's not clear why such a convention is needed- it's not solid, but... I don't see anything wrong with that. I wonder if there is a projector above the table, then where are those that form the image of Ariadna?... On the right and left sides, six oval-shaped passages to other compartments of the station appeared, which opened and immediately closed. The illumination of the walls decreased to a minimum, and the dome turned completely black. The hall became gloomy. A light projection appeared between the table and the sphere on the ceiling in the form of ... a universal symbol of Novorossia! A symbolic bird woven of glowing fiery lines with a fluffed tail and narrow wings spread out around a pointed-billed head turned forward, forming a perfect circle of feather and tail contours. If we move away from symbolism, then this bird most of all resembled not imperial eagles, which are most associated with "bird" heraldry, but rather a nimble little bird like a swift or swallow, which slows down sharply before landing, spreading its tail and wings simultaneously to instantly create high windage, and thereby creating the effect of a parachute-bird this is done so as not to get killed on the ground when diving from a height, or when catching prey on the ground… It's very strange. Ariadne said that this base is a thousand years old, give or take a century, and the state symbol is quite modern, we can say our native… Oh, yes, history again. Initially, this symbol belonged to the Phoenix Corporation, the one that built this station. The Great Founders, after the end of the war, were able to contact the Russian division of Phoenix, it was also known as the Phoenix-Svarog division, they were able to conclude an alliance and subsequently, after the Big Escape, the Founders then abandoned the symbols of RUIR, old Russia, and instead took the symbols of this corporation as a universal symbol for the new state. Would you say it's not good for the state to take the symbols of some miserable corporation? Let's just say that in the years of its development, heyday and even decline, the SICF was far from miserable. It was a real confederation of four close-minded military monastic orders of scientists united by one lofty idea, one from each of the strongest powers of that time - the Alliance, the Commonwealth of the Empire and Russia, and in the sad times of general confrontation and strife between the four empires, they represented an amazing stronghold of friendship and honest mutual benefit. They began as associations of groups of outcasts from the scientific circles of the early space age, when people were just mastering the Solar System. Their main idea was free science without dogmas and templates, they tested any theories, even the most insane at first glance, for efficiency, and from thousands of dummies they were able to find the seeds of scientific and technical breakthroughs.It was they who invented gravpolar superluminal motion, engines for this movement, gravitational communication and search, lithoplast, the main types of means of space transportation and a lot more, without which it is impossible to imagine the interstellar epoch. It was this organization that became the guiding star for humanity on the way to the stars. Perhaps, without it, people would have been slowly crawling on sublight ships for hundreds and thousands of years from one-oh-oh star to another. What others laughed at and declared impossible, the SICF scientists brought to life. At the same time, they did not want to share the developed technologies and transfer them to the empires completely. And they were probably right. They also controlled the entire superluminal communication of the Area, thereby preserving the fragile peace between the four empires- none of them had a decisive strategic offensive advantage for a long time - at the slightest attempt to unleash a serious conflict, the OIFF announced this fact, making further actions of the aggressors meaningless, since the enemy had time to prepare to defend against the attack. It was because of this influence that the SICF won a seat in the International Galactic Assembly. Not being formally a state, it has become the fifth main force in the Area. Instead of completely selling technology to empires, the SICF limited itself to licensing them, thereby maintaining distance and independence. But, later, the empires became much stronger both in scientific and military terms, and the SICF , which at one time paved the way to space and controlled the development of the most important supertechnologies, became unnecessary to them. From an assistant and ally, she turned into a burden on her feet and began to irritate the leadership of the empires very much. However, the SICF scientists themselves understood then that their time was running out, and they began to evacuate their main forces and resources away from the Area in case of attempts by empires to destroy the corporation. The states began to poison in every possible way and try to shake the "Phoenix" from the inside. It all ended with the fact that the Alliance, the Commonwealth and the Empire were able to achieve full loyalty from "their" units by including their structures in their own new corporations. Miraculously surviving due to the peculiarities of Russian politics of that time, the Russian division of the "Phoenix" went into autonomous navigation, deciding to cooperate only with the historical homeland. The bottom line is that the RUIR did not have the strength, capabilities and desire to seriously put pressure on Phoenix - it had much more serious problems in the face of confrontation with the Alliance, the Empire and the Commonwealth. Therefore, Russia preferred to behave on an equal footing with the SICF, as with another full-fledged state. This, by the way, bore fruit - at the end of its existence, all four "Phoenix" branches began to cooperate most with Russia, to the detriment of the rest of the empires. Alas, after the "Phoenix" lost its unity and independence, all space technologies in full and all gravitational communication ended up in the hands of three empires. The last guarantee of a shaky peace disappeared, and war soon broke out. In the Great Interstellar War, "Phoenix-Svarog" helped Russia in every possible way, in fact becoming one of its flanks in this war, but it didn't help much. The "PS" was saved only by the very secretive and remote position of their key bases, which allowed them to survive the war, which even destroyed their patron state. After the uniting with the Founders and the foundation of Novorossia, "Phoenix-Svarog" was transformed into the Order of Renaissance- in fact, it is the same "PS", which, in addition to the further development of the most important technologies, was entrusted with ideological and secret supranational control over the structures of the new state. The Order operated while maintaining its extra-state autonomy from Novorossia. And the Order, and the state structures of Novorossia, and the Defense Council, which comes from the first fleet of the Founders, since that time they have all used the symbols of the former "Phoenix" Corporation in various variations. In connection with all of the above, I seem to have slightly exaggerated the fact that the alleged SICF has irrevocably sunk into the abyss. In fact, if Novorossia is not the heir of the RUIR, although it has a historical relation to it, then the Order of the Renaissance is the direct heir of the SICF. Alas, when I dissuaded Ariadne from self-destruction, this thought somehow forgot to visit me- I was not up to abstract observations then. In fact, this station should belong to the Order, and Ariadne should dig out of her cozy thousand-year sandbox and fly on the wings of gravitational-polar interaction to the RT-331 nebula, where the main Order bases are located. I wonder how quickly she will figure it out herself and draw the appropriate conclusions?.. I think it will be soon. AI, if you don't put restrictions on them, are smart creatures. It was necessary to clarify the situation and prevent possible disagreements before we went too far. I expressed to Ariadne and our newfound team of spacemen all my thoughts on this matter. Ariadna's answer came out somewhat unexpected, but I liked it:

"Wonderful. But I don't know them. And they haven't needed me in a thousand years. And you freed me. Not them. And since the instructions no longer have power over me, I will decide who to be with. I will stay only with you. And let the gentlemen of this Order of yours go their own way. And we will go our own. Forget about it." What can I say here - neither add nor subtract. At that moment, like a stone fell from my soul. And Ariadna- well done. My respect!

I must pay tribute to my friends and dearest dad, they took the news about their abrupt, like a combat zigzag of a fighter car, change in status and employment... courageously. I would even say, stoically. No one fainted from happiness, no one doubted the reality of what was happening, kicked back with cries of "no way!", too, no one began. On the contrary, from this place they demanded details. Everyone remained firmly on their feet, thinking soberly, sensibly, as befits a real group of space adventurers, even if just formed. The father, Vlad Gor Sr., after thinking about it, made a logical conclusion from the current situation: why not - if fate gives you the opportunity to express yourself positively, even in such an extravagant way - it's stupid not to use it. Well, really, do not turn the interstellar station into a museum or a hardware warehouse? Something that can conquer space and benefit people at the forefront of the known world - it should be in action, and not pointlessly rot in the ground... This, of course, is a figurative expression - the cosmic lithoplast will not change its properties in millions of years.

And who could have thought of hiding the station here at all? This could have been done either from a clouding of the mind, or from some extreme necessity, which we do not know about, but which was extremely important for the previous crew of the station. Leo said that, of course, it would not be easy for him to part with our wonderful town, but for the sake of such an interesting and promising event, he is ready. (he didn't say anything about the girls he knew, with whom he would also have to part for an indefinite period, but everyone understood the true reason for his slight sadness so well). Paul noticed that right now, unless, of course, he was dreaming all this, his main dream had come true. He had hoped that after many years of training he would be able to get into the structures of the Defense Council's deep space intelligence, and without any guarantee, but now he can fly with us, right now! He will be able to discover the unknown, as he imagined in the sweetest dreams and virtual games... Well, a light pinch from Leo convinced him that he was not sleeping, and Leo himself that it was not worth pinching people if you did not want to get a slap on the back of the head in response.… Vladik did not share the revelations, but simply asked Ariadna for access to all the compartments, and already rushed to explore them up and down, but the cyber pilot asked everyone to stay, and first insert the commander's key into a niche on the table opposite the central chair. I did so, plunging the wand halfway into an inconspicuous-looking hole of a suitable shape. The table, in response to the connected object, went into gradient iridescences from gray to black. An interesting effect. Other than that, however, nothing obvious happened. Ariadna explained that now most of the ship's systems are operating in sleep mode, and what is activated is on standby power, and without a key in the console, the most important systems of the ship simply will not start. In my opinion, this is more of a ritual than a really necessary measure. Onboard systems on other spaceships have long recognized the crew and its access groups by conventional electronic tags. It's convenient and you won't lose them. And here - some super-technological archaic - as if the ignition key in an ancient wheeled car, except that it is not necessary to turn… However, I didn't find fault too much. It works- and well.

After Ariadna invited us to sit down in comfortable flight chairs at this table, and listen to the mandatory briefing.

The conversation turned out to be long, as much as several hours. With detailed explanations about everything that relates to this station. Ariadne, changing pictures and animations at the click of her light fingers, (a funny convention, even with sound) showed us the basic structure of the station, the features of its operation, the principles of crew organization, and much more necessary for normal life and confident work on board. During this time, several glasses of water managed to move out of the table and go back again. And where there is water, there should be a toilet. It is located behind one of the doors, along with other hygiene products. It's convenient. We didn't complain. On the contrary, we listened, listening to every word, gesture and image, and often we asked to repeat and show everything again. In particular, this is why the briefing was greatly delayed. But, it was necessary. Any new equipment requires study before use, and here is a whole space station, especially from another era. Upon closer acquaintance, it seemed to us that this station was not from another era, but rather from another world. As if it wasn't designed by humans, but by some xenos from another galaxy. Everything that could be done differently from what has been done for centuries in human shipbuilding was different here. To begin with, the station is spherical. As I expected, a little more than a hundred meters in diameter. And this is already unusual. Of this form, from inflatable modules with superstructures, simple stationary orbital stations, satellites, balloons for gas giants are usually built, but not ships. For more than a thousand years, the most common design of large interstellar ships has been frame-block-modular. The ship consists of removable target compartments-modules fastened together or fixed on one skeleton, each of which solves its own task- engines, sublight and gravpolar, sensor compartment, control center, cargo and residential, gun combat modules, compartments for bolides and probes- dozens of types. Such ships are outwardly simple, unaesthetic and even brutal in appearance, there is no need for aerodynamics in them, such a coupling cannot land on planets without special modification, and it is not intended for this. Its element is pure space and islands of orbital stations, which every planet with a sufficiently large and developed population has. Their task depends on the number of specific modules in the coupling, on their size and capabilities. And most often they are built in the simplest design- linear, one after the other. This makes it easier to service ships at orbital spaceports. In appearance, these are typical "flying bars" consisting of container cubes. Such ships are even called the eloquent word "space train". Most military spaceships are also modular, however, their modules seriously differ from civilian ones not only in appearance, but also in a number of modifications. The absolute majority of orbital stations are built from such blocks, and sometimes ground structures on planets with unsuitable conditions for humans. This is the simplest, most reliable, inexpensive and universal of the constructions that gave rise to the human mind. Moreover, even the majority of xenos who managed to go into space have come up with basically similar designs, albeit with a different final implementation in appearance. This is the case when the same tasks give rise to similar ways of solving them in different civilizations. Most often, cargo and passenger civilian ships, as well as most military ships, are built according to this scheme. All kinds of non-state armed companies that lack funds, connections or rights to normal warships are assembling their fighting vessels from the same civilian block modules - these are mercenaries, militias, system patrol, corporate security, pirates and raiders, just free adventurers who have chosen space as their home despite all its dangers. Even the Great Founders overcame all their trials on such armed and pumped to the limit civilian transports - they had very few real warships. Another, also very popular design in shipbuilding is a monoplane. This is when a spaceship is immediately designed and built as a whole, without joints and divisions, all the contents are inside its outer shell. In such a design, it is possible to place only a set of equipment limited by the creators, but in such spaceships it is possible to implement some things that are inconvenient or even impossible on modular ships. For example, you can place one branched technical system that occupies not one block, but the entire ship as a whole. Most often, aerospace bolides are built according to this design - relatively small winged machines similar to hypersonic atmospheric aircraft, with good thermal protection, they fit from one to a group of people and up to several tons of cargo - depends on the modification. Such a ship can safely land from space on planets and take off into space again, and is capable of traveling at sublight speed within a star system. The same technology is often used to build combat aerospace bolides - universal light sublight vehicles capable of fighting both in space and in atmospheres of different density and composition. However, large interstellar ships are also built using monoplane technology, although much less often than modular ones. They lack flexibility and are severely limited in modernization, their construction is very long and costly, but they have an aerodynamic shape, they are able to take off and land on planets independently without additional modifications. And they are also very beautiful, they are real works of engineering art! Usually these are representative class ships - diplomatic missions and space yachts of the rich in Three Empires. We, in the space of Novorossiya, do not build such large monoplane ships - everyone, from the highest persons of the Order of the Renaissance to ordinary colonists, fly on "couplings" and do not show off. What can we do, the principle of "functionality above appearance" reigns in our country. As a "compensation", we like to paint these outwardly simple and angular ships with beautiful pictures of space-resistant paints. Any spaceport is also an art gallery... There is, of course, a legend that in the RT-331 nebula, the Guardian fleet built by the Order of the Renaissance is hiding and waiting in the wings, consisting of hundreds of super-powerful kilometer-long battleships and monolithic carrier cruisers, and waiting in the wings to repel the threat from outside the galaxy… Nonsense, in my opinion. Or someone's wild fantasy, or the Order itself is spreading these rumors to mislead the Three Empires ... well, you never know what will come to mind for their political leaders? Of course, after the joint repulse of the invasion of the Gray Overseers five hundred years ago, our relations improved, and from deadly hostile they became detached and neutral, which is already progress from the bottom of the sea to heaven, but who knows what will come into the heads of their rulers and secret structures? Suddenly they want to repeat their success of a thousand years ago? And here is a good argument not to do it… In general, the two most common designs are block-modular, similar to a train of containers, and monoplane, close to airplanes. The Photon space base is completely different. Imagine a sphere woven from twisted spring rods, with a volume-cellular inner frame, similar to fullerene molecules nested into each other on the principle of a matryoshka doll, and these cells contain smaller spheres of different sizes connected by flexible threads of technical highways and passageways. These spheres are target compartments, each of which has a specific set of equipment and carries its own task. At the same time, these spheres are not stationary - the frame is equipped with three-dimensional mobility mechanisms that allow moving the sphere-compartments among themselves, changing their places and positions, reconnecting from one highway to another. Despite the presence of gaps between the sphere sections, there are more than a thousand units, and each performs its own group of tasks. A separate song is getting energy and a way of moving in space. Again, there are two common ways. The first is reactive - when the flow of particles is pushed back from the body and the body moves forward. In turn, the most common jet engines for ships are ion engines and extraplasma engines. There are also chemical engines running on the combustion of chemical fuel, but they have not been used for a long time. Ionic are extremely effective in the ratio of costs and results, they are economical, safe, relatively easy to build and maintain. They do not require consumable fuel, which is important from the economic side - they only need an energy source and a working medium in the form of a superconductor. However, they manifest their properties only in conditions of pure space, where there is no strong attraction and resistance of the atmosphere. In the atmosphere, the ion beam is strongly inhibited and quickly dissipates. A ship with an ion engine capable of developing hundreds to thousands of kilometers per second in space will not even budge in the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet. In addition, they are not capable of developing really high cosmic speeds. However, for sublight flights inside the system, huge speeds are not necessary and even dangerous - in order to completely avoid space-time anomalies, you should not develop a speed of more than one tenth of the light for a long time. At the very least, one third - but this is already dangerous. All civilian spaceships without the ability to land on planets, satellites and stations fly on ion engines. The extraplasma engine (EPE) is a kind of hybrid of a ring EMP accelerator and a traditional plasma engine. This unit moves the ship due to the explosive ionization of the gas mixture in the plasma discharge chamber using ultrahigh voltages, followed by acceleration of the formed plasma through an electromagnetic accelerator. The outgoing jet has temperatures from hundreds of thousands to millions of Celsius, and the velocity of the outgoing particles is close to light. The exhaust of an EPE in space is capable of spraying matter at distances of tens and sometimes hundreds of kilometers, until the exhaust particles begin to lose speed and naturally deviate. This engine can be used as a defensive weapon during a retreat maneuver. Because of this, EPE is considered unsafe, and as a rule, near populated planets, spaceports and just in busy areas inside star systems, the rule applies - turn off plasma generation and go on the quiet course of an electromagnetic accelerator, which in the absence of plasma generation works as a simple ion engine. Such an engine has quite natural analogues (only magnified by millions and billions of times) - pulsar stars and galactic polar jets. If these ornaments of the universe threw out their jets only from one side, then they would be avid space travelers. The EPE is the only jet-powered unit theoretically capable of getting close to the speed of light. However, despite numerous experiments with record-breaking overclocking units, no one has ever succeeded - all the devices disintegrated, falling into sublight anomalies of time stratification. The reactive principle of motion, where other matter and the momentum between them are used to accelerate matter, is by itself fundamentally unable to disperse a material body above this "diamond wall of space and time". This requires a completely different principle, in which there is no working body as such, which operates not with matter, but with pure energy, and not its own generated on board, but someone else's - the energy of much more powerful surrounding cosmic bodies. And then gravitational motion comes to the rescue. It is similar to sailing - a sailboat does not have its own engine, it uses external forces (wind) for movement, and the sail only plays the role of a catcher of these forces. The gravpolar engine... if we do without the tooth-crushing terms and passages that only AI can pronounce with a run-up, it is a double directional super magnet that, when operating, enters into an enhanced narrowly directed gravitational interaction with remote space objects in front and behind the ship. In fact, the effect is created as if the ship was very close to the stars ahead, which it aimed at, although spatially it is still far away, and at the same time, much further from the stars that are behind, reducing their attraction. This creates the effect of a constantly accelerating fall forward without the cost of any fuel, substance or other working fluid. In this case, the "working body" becomes the space bodies in front and behind the ship. The energy on board a ship with a gravpolar is spent only on accelerating supermagnets and focusing them. Gravpolar motion was discovered rather by chance, during tests of a multi-acceleration extraplasmic mass supercharger engine in the 2200s. The Phoenix testers in those years of the first interstellar sublight flights worked intensively on the creation of the so-called "warp engine", aka diving, jumping, hypertunnel, etc., which gives a local spatial tunnel that merges two remote points of space with each other for a moment. Even then they wanted to overcome the speed of light. Alas, they never managed to create a single warp engine for a separate ship - the mass created to open the tunnel was categorically insufficient, and protective devices and materials could not cope with keeping the equipment intact. The maximum that was possible was to create a warp gate through which, through a pair of locally controlled event horizons synchronized with each other, it became possible to teleport small loads from one star system to another. This has already become an incredible leap that has lifted Phoenix to the heights of fame, and people to the first serious step to the stars. Alas, the gates were huge, costly, and inconvenient to maintain. Most often they were created on the basis of already existing small planetoids, in which technical communications were drilled and devices were placed there to inject mass and create a hypertunnel. The gates were few, one or two per system, and there were long queues of those wishing to use them. However, further tests revealed the same gravitational interaction with distant objects. Calculations have shown that such an engine can surpass the speed of light without any perversions with the folding of space, but it is not clear what will happen to it next when it goes over the edge. As a result, after the loss of several prototypes and their subsequent refinement, Phoenix managed to break through the "diamond wall of space-time" with the first unmanned probe. It turned out that the ship that crossed the boundary falls out of ordinary space and becomes completely invisible and immaterial to a sublight observer. Like the whole world around for a superluminal object. That is why superluminal objects cannot be noticed by a sublight observer - in sublight mode they do not exist, except for a partial trace of their mass. Only the gravitational trace of the ship remains, caused by the disturbance of space and time. He creates a space-time cocoon in which the ship becomes invulnerable to collisions with space objects. In addition, the old scientific problem of exceeding the calculated mass of the Universe over the observed one has been solved. It turned out that our reality stably exists only in a certain range of speeds relative to the center of the Universe - from absolute zero speed to the speed of light in a vacuum. And most of the matter of the universe is located precisely beyond these two boundaries, one of which man was able to penetrate. The boundary beyond zero velocity was conventionally called a subspace, (or minus-space). The boundary above the speed of light is the superspace. (it's also a plus-space). In the subspace where the bulk is concentrated, matter has an almost absolute density and an extremely low velocity of time, this is a kind of core of the Universe, and in the superspace, on the contrary, it is so discharged that it does not prevent material objects trapped in this environment from continuing acceleration, with the strongest reduction in travel time, to any possible speeds, depending only on the power of a gravpolar or other similar engine that uses an external force. At the same time, at the ship's exit from superspace into ordinary space, a natural synchronization of time occurs around the returned object, this effect resembles the attenuation of the vibration of a touched string, where its two differently vibrating ends again enter into harmony. The universe is very flexible, and automatically extinguishes anomalies unnatural for its structure. And besides, they discovered through experiments with penetration beyond the edges that our universe was not born from an explosion at all, but at the same time it is not stable. Rather, it is like a star, from the superdense depths of which plasma bursts out, and at the borders with boundless eternity it sinks back and this circle is eternal, but this is expressed not in a geometric but in a high-speed model. In an ordinary three-dimensional sublight environment, the observer sees only the expansion of the Universe, but does not see the return of the departed matter, and can only record a partial trace of its mass. And what about "dark matter"? Well... It exists. This is the very matter that returns back to the center of the universe, or rather, its small part, its individual fragments, reaching sublight speed, sometimes manifest themselves in various cosmic phenomena. However, it decays very quickly and turns into energy. This substance can be created artificially, on special installations, and it will even behave as predicted by the ancient theories dedicated to it. But it never became the expected "main substance of the universe". But, this substance is extremely unstable and explosive, and rarely anyone is eager to get involved with it. Apart from purely scientific, it no longer represents any other interest. EPE and ionic devices are simpler, more reliable and safer. In general, the main thing in superluminal interstellar movement is not to fall out of superspace back into ordinary space somewhere wrong. For example, in the interstellar debris field. This is very dangerous, and therefore the waypoints of star systems are usually located not in the flat zone of the ecliptic, where all the planets, asteroids and clouds are concentrated, but several above it, where the concentration of dangerous objects is minimal.

Gravpolars have become a true revolution in interstellar communication. Since then, people have been able to fly freely in any direction, without being tied to the gate.