DISCLAIMER: I do not own Harry Potter, Stargate: SG-1, Star Trek, or any of the real quantum physics and science in this story, the characters, plots, or stories from those series, but I do own my own characters, plot, and story. However, if in my zeal to squish real science together with sci-fi, if I accidentally stumbled upon something that works, I do want my Nobel prize (there is a cash reward that comes along with the trophy right?) Oh, and if you build one of these things and it works, you damned well owe me a ride.
Harry Potter and the Cochran Effect - Chapter 2
Harry and his Headmaster scoffed. "A prophecy? That is your big reason for thinking it has to be me? C'mon man, you don't really believe in that garbage do you?" laughed Harry, with a meaningful look to his Headmaster who just laughed along with him and added
"Professor Dumbledore, Salem hasn't taught prophecy or divination in over a century. Ninety-nine percent of them are utter hogwash that never amount to a single thing and the rest are open to interpretation and those even are normally only set into motion when fools who believe in them take it upon themselves to act in such a way as to cause the prophecy to appear to be fulfilling itself. Please tell me that you and this Riddle aren't of that sort?" he asked.
Dumbledore sort of stuttered and hemmed and hawed, trying to give a reasonable reply to that. He could reply to it, but considering what he said was correct, it wouldn't sound reasonable even to him. Could he have been wrong all these years? "Yes, but what about the fact that Mr. Potter here is the only person in history known to have survived the killing curse? That must account for something beyond the norm going on here."
"Hmm." started Harry. "Mr., I'm sorry, Professor Dumbledore, what makes you think I survived a killing curse that night? That's not what happened at all."
"What? What do you mean? How could you possibly know, you were only fifteen months old?" replied Dumbledore sounding like that observation was the dumbest thing he'd heard yet.
"If you say so. But then, since no one else who is alive to tell the tale was there when it happened, how do you know he used the killing curse to try to kill me?"
"Well, everyone just assumes, he always uses the killing curse to kill people." said Dumbledore, not realizing how obtuse he was then sounding.
"Let me tell you what really happened. Because as it so happens I have an eidetic memory. Of course, even with that I didn't know what happened either for many years because I had forgotten about it by the time I ever wondered about it. However, in looking back into my memory I saw what he did and now that you've mentioned the prophecy to me, if he believed in it, I can finally surmise why he might've done what he did." countered Harry.
"Then please enlighten us." said Dumbledore.
Harry answered, "He put away his wand and picked up my mother's wand and tried to take my head off with a cutting curse. Being a toddler, I must've squirmed at just the right moment because he missed my neck and grazed my forehead, leaving this scar." Harry pointed to his otherwise quite normal scar. Dumbledore sat there with a dumbfounded expression on his face.
"Since I know you know how to display your memories, would you show us this please?" asked Dumbledore in the first demure tone he'd taken during the meeting.
"Certainly." said Harry and did as before, pointed his wand at his temple and with a flourish showed them what exactly happened that night. It was just as Harry said. And, as Dumbledore surmised, Lily must've placed some kind of ritualized protection on Harry which made Voldemort's spell backfire and kill himself. Possibly combined with the fact that he used Lily's own wand might've created the effect of his total destruction, because of the mother's love for her son, her own wand would not want to be forced to try to kill Harry. He would need to study the new information over and over to figure out how the rebounding spell fire caused Voldemort to disintegrate entirely, not just cut himself. Be that as it may, Harry was right. And not only that, it removed from likelihood that he had ever been made into a Horcrux as he once surmised. Meaning that even if Harry were somehow meant to be involved in his defeat a second time, it would not be because he would have to die to allow it to happen. He had much to think about, so he thanked Harry and his Headmaster, made his apologies and implied that Harry might well be right and then departed for Hogwarts.
"Well, I hope that settles that for the old man." observed Harry.
...
At the end of their final year at Salem, Harry and Hermione finished first and second in their class, respectively and were awarded with school honors. Since school was finally over and the couple were planning to stay together forever as far as they both could see, Harry finally showed her the big secret project at his Texas estate that theretofore he'd only talked about and hinted of. She'd needled him long enough about it and he was glad to be able to share it with someone beside Sirius and Ms. Harkness.
Down at the ranch, Harry and Hermione were sitting in the pilot capsule of his experimental warp-ship when the advanced sensors he designed for the ship detected two large pyramid shaped objects entering the solar system by Saturn and beginning to vector toward Earth. "Holy crap Mione. Look at that!" Harry exclaimed.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Unless I miss my guess or these new sensors have no idea what they are doing, I think we just picked up two large space craft entering the solar system on a path for Earth." explained Harry.
"How can your ship detect that from inside your hangar on Earth?" she asked.
"Oh, that's simple. Besides their normal ability to function on their own in space directly feeding the ships own navigational computer, I also have a back-door hack into all of NASA's satellites and space telescopes. Those feeds are also processed and included in the aggregate computer display as well."
"Ah, okay. So that means, that NASA should know about these ships coming in too." she said.
"Yes, you'd think so. Who knows what is going on really. For all we know this could all be part of some big secret American space program, you know like the kind the conspiracy people are always going on about. These might not even be aliens." concluded Harry.
"So, you don't want to fire up your new ship and take it on a maiden voyage to go fight aliens then?" Hermione giggled a bit at the thought.
"No, not really." said Harry. He continued, "Actually, this ship isn't designed to fight anything. There's nothing like a weapon on it except the warp-drive itself and that would be useless in this situation to try to use that way, and I'm not suicidal. The only other thing is the ship's shields designed to protect the ship itself from the effects of the warp drive. They aren't designed to defend against what you would think of as alien laser beams or something. But, they are very strong, maybe they could. They have to protect the ship from the high temperatures and exotic radiation at superluminal speeds put off by the warp-drive.
Anyway, I don't intend to put this ship in any danger other than the test of it's own capabilities. But this does make me wonder if I should have weapons on this thing when I go up there." said Harry.
"You mean when we go up there." prompt Hermione.
"Yeah, like I said, when we go up there." Harry smartly replied. As he thought about it some he added "Besides, it's all I could afford to do even with my wealth and my ability to creatively acquire all the Thorium and other expensive materials I needed."
"So, how did you solve all those other problems you told me about?" asked Hermione.
"I'm glad you asked, because I know the readers wouldn't have asked that." Shut up Harry, who do you think you are, Deadpool?-R Well, I do have a mutant X-gene, don't push it old man.-H
"For the hull thickness issue I settled on a design that was different in the previous assumptions in two ways. One, the warp bubble itself would only be a fraction of an inch outside the hull of the ship, the membrane of the bubble itself only several Planck lengths wide, and instead of having to be formed of the matter used to power the formation of the bubble, it is made of a material that can simply emit the negative energy from it while protecting the inner hull from the reaction and not destabilizing the bubble itself. This approach also changed the mass equations for the mass-energy requirement, but I'll get back to that.
The way the drive will work is something like how they actually describe it on Star Trek in regard to something I went ahead and called warp-coils like they did. But, the emitters for the warp field look nothing like Star Trek. It's not as simple as a few pylons called nacelles that you stick out one end of the ship to emit this field. Maybe someday when someone figures out how to produce, emit, and control as much power as God Himself, but for now we're doing this the mortal way."
Thus to form said bubble and move the ship from point A to point B through spacetime, the emitter needs to be surrounding the entire ship or else the entire thing would simply destabilize the entire ships mass by accelerating only a part of it at superluminal speeds while the rest of it, outside the bubble would have to try to keep up. Not going to happen. Additionally, the surfaces of the hull need to be precisely molded to the femtometer so that the ship predictably will go in the direction you aim it. We'll also get back to the fact that you can't steer this thing once it's in warp either.
This might be why my ship looks a bit like the proverbial flying saucer, a bit cigar shaped, or more like a flying paraboloid or two cones stuck together and stretched. The warp field needs to contract space in front of it and directly expand space behind it and everything that we want to take with us in that bubble needs to be encapsulated by that one self-same bubble. The only way I could make that work is this shape. A complete perfect circle would work even better, but that's not as conducive to landing or atmospheric flight stabilization and so forth. So, I went with this." Harry explained.
"Okay, that makes sense as far as I can tell but, how are you creating the field through the hull material and what kind of material is it that can do that?" Hermione asked.
"First, their are several layers of hull. All the outer layers are actually a functional part of the warp-drive and a high-powered electromagnetic shielding. Inside that is another dual-layer shell that serves as our internal hull for our systems and living space. They are all made of different materials.
The most outer shell, the warp-drive emitter itself is made of modified tungsten in a parallel plate geometry, with the outer shell coated with a zirconium dioxide ceramic. This works but the weakness in this design is that after one use with warp-drive, the outer layer of zirconium dioxide burns off. So, the ship is designed to store and re-coat the outer layer of the hull with a new coat of the ceramic material after each warp-burn as I call it. Then it's ready for warp again. I'm sure someday we'll find a better way to do this, but this is just a prototype and I don't have every possible asset available to science available to me for this project." Harry explained.
"Okay, fair enough. Sounds like something we'd want to improve on before anyone starts to mass produce these things though. What do you need the ceramic for anyway?" Hermione replied.
"I agree." said Harry. "The ceramic just protects the tungsten hull from the initiation of the reaction. It is ideal though that the vacuum of space makes the application and re-application of the material very easy and quick as it cures almost instantly after application."
"How do you do that though?" asked Hermione.
"There are ports all along the hull in geometrically strategic locations with retractable robotics that do that job." he answered.
"Okay, what else?" Hermione asked him to continue.
"The warp coils themselves is where the real magic happens, no pun intended. In between the next layer of hulls is where the warp coils are. Like I said, the warp bubble needs to be applied uniformly around the entire exterior of the ship through the emitters. So, these coils are actually micro tubes of purified silver quantum locked inside a liquid nitrogen bath."
"Can you say, 'expensive?'" Hermione reacted.
"You have no idea." said Harry.
"Anyway, there are three primary coils wound in helical spirals inside that layer of hull, which is only about one inch thick, but surrounding the entire hull in asymmetric distribution between the front and rear of the ship versus the sides, top and bottom. When I said it was uniform before, it's not exactly true. The bow emitters and the stern emitters are made to emit about twice as much negative energy as the other sides because that is where the bulk of the work is done. The sides only get half as much of the energy, just enough to push the bubble measurably outside the hull so that the entire ship is safely encapsulated. The idea of normalization is that the entire ship is encased in the same spacetime bubble with no seams."
The reason there are three coils is analogous to providing a negative, a positive, and a ground path in the semi-closed loop system. You see the bow and stern emit differential polarities of the negative energy particles, one that compresses the space in front of the ship and one that expands the space behind it. The other stabilizes the return providing a path for any fault current so that the entire closed loop can handle the helical rotation of the zero-point-energy emission without damaging itself and us. However, it does emit a lot of radiation and heat, which is where the next internal layer of hull comes in to play, which is a titanium-carbon alloy with a lead coating for pure strength and an initial stop for radiation. The main protection is an artificial high-energy electromagnetic field generated between the internal wrap-drive hull and the titanium-carbon lead coated hull. This has the effect of both protecting the interior of the ship from that radiation and heat as well as trapping it in between the voids between hulls so that it does not damage the warp-coils either. It may seem strange to think of that, but that was one of the problems with making this work in a practical reusable vessel of any kind.
Now you might ask, where does all that radiation and heat go? Certainly it could only take so much build up of that in a closed loop system before the hull tolerances itself would be exceeded. That's a good question. Both for the purposes of safety and conservation of resources, I am recycling it. As it turns out, we need a lot of ionized plasma gas as fuel for our sub-light engines. So, the emitted particles are collected and stored for re-use; and the heat is used to turn turbines that charge interior batteries for backup power. Additionally, when the ship comes out of warp at it's destination; we will vent any remaining pressure from that system into the vacuum of space. Now one of the weaknesses in this design is that, even in the effort to recycle the emitted radiation or heat from the warp-coils there is a finite limit to how much that can be done. The capacity to which we can do that until all storage is maxed out or until we draw down some of it, will limit the length of time and thereby the distance we can travel in any one given warp jump. We also recycle the spent liquid nitrogen in the warp-coils much the same way as nitrogen gas pressure builds up and needs release, as well as continuously re-supplying the liquid nitrogen to maintain their super-cooled temperature. The equations all work out, but these are all things we have to test when we first get it into space. We need to determine the precise measurements for this and design future versions according to our needs." Harry continued.
"This thing is sounding less safe to me all the time Harry. Are you sure you want to try this?" Hermione asked, sounding unsure for the first time since he began telling her of this project.
"If not me, then who? I'm trying to invent something here. At some point, someone has to take the risk of trying this stuff out in real tests, or we'll never know if any of this amounts to anything." Harry shrugged.
"But, that's a good segway to the other risk factor. The question of damage to the environment when we exit warp at our destination. When the ship decelerates from superluminal speed, the particles that the bubble has gathered in transit would be released in energetic outbursts akin to a sonic boom shockwave; in the case of forward-facing particles, those would be energetic enough to destroy anything at the destination directly in front of the ship. So, basically the initial way I worked around that is to program a failsafe into the navigation computer so that warp-drive beginning point and end-points have to be at least two hundred kilometers away from any other celestial object. Basically, there is a problem and the simple answer for now is, be careful. Someday we'll have to be more sophisticated than that, but this is just a prototype and decidedly not a ship one would fight space battles in where you might need to quickly run away or something. Most of the steps of operating the warp-drive require lengthy wait times for warm ups and cool downs and resets before going again, and so forth." Harry said.
"That makes sense too. I don't see a problem with that to start with." said Hermione.
"Yeah. So, really I saved the best and biggest problem for last. The mass-energy requirement, or put simply, how to generate the amount of negative energy from the quantum fluctuation in amounts large enough to do anything worthwhile. For example, one could get this to work but not travel any further than say from Earth to Jupiter. Nice, but a micro-jump compared to what we're looking for. So, I gave a look to Chris Van Den Broeck's modification to the Albubierre equation, which shows how 'a minor modification of the Alcubierre geometry can dramatically improve the total energy requirements for a warp-bubble that can be used to transport macroscopic objects. A spacetime is presented for which the total negative mass needed is of the order of a few solar masses, accompanied by a comparable amount of positive energy. This puts the warp drive in the mass scale of large traversable wormholes. The new geometry satisfies the quantum inequality concerning weak-energy condition violations and has the same advantages as the original Alcubierre spacetime.'
That was interesting, but his application approach still assumed the consumption of the mass used to fuel the reaction. Combining his positions with the original concept, I thought of the warp-coil design so that we can get away with the mass-energy equivalence on the order of several solar masses as opposed to the universal mass assumption other skeptics put forward. But, the problem still lay in how to generate that much negative energy in that quantity. Therein is the only place in this design in which I actually depended upon magic." Harry said.
"Ah ha, I knew we'd get to that eventually. You're talking about those new runic ward energy crystals you said you invented right?" said Hermione.
"Yes. It comes back to how we use the same kind of energy, zero-point-energy, but in tiny amounts compared to what this system needs. However, the mechanism is more or less the same. I borrowed from what we know works in the magical world. Which beside silver already being known as the best electrical and thermal conductor available to us today; it happens to be the same material depended upon in metallic alloys crafted to store and channel zero-point-energy in enchanted weapons, like swords, etc." he explained.
"Another place where physics and magic agree." observed Hermione.
"Yes, and it's certainly no accident. It's because of the fundamental properties of the element." he replied.
"So, how does it work though?" she asked.
"It's like this. Remember I told you how the warp coils are in a semi-closed loop system made of silver micro-tubes?"
"Yes."
"So, one of the places where it's not entirely closed loop is where the loop starts, where the terminations of those micro tubes are infused inside hundreds of runic ward crystals, which utilize our ability to charm ward crystals to do what regular mass' gluons do all the time, that is exchange zero-point-energy with the quantum vacuum, effecting quantum fluctuation. In order to defeat the limitation imposed by the Planck Energy constant (or better put, to postpone the consequence of the limitation), when I activate the crystals or "turn on the warp-drive" they begin drawing ZPE from the vacuum and supplying it directly into the warp-coils. Instead of an instantaneous reaction of direct flow of negative energy from the vacuum. It takes a while for the warp-coils to initially "fill up" with enough of these trapped energy particles to begin emitting a fully functional warp bubble. That only occurs in this design when the energy reaches the point where it can no longer be contained within the coils, thus causing a type of entropic cascade failure, causing the particles to emit in the direction that I want-outside the ships outer hull, as it try's to get back to the quantum vacuum, thus the particles pierce the outer layer hull emitter simultaneously in the geometric shape I constructed the entire thing in, and just outside the event horizon of the ceramic hull coating at an extremely thin distance from the hull, it pops back into the quantum vacuum. Maintaining this negative energy current through the coils if you will allows us to maintain a static warp bubble. In the original Alcubierre design, that would require consuming huge amounts of mass continuously. In this design we don't consume the mass, we just force the mass in the crystals to exchange energy with the quantum fluctuation the same way that gluons do. My thought was you see, that gluons don't consume mass when they perform that function, so why do we have to?
Anyway, then, we need to amp up the amount of ZPE directed toward the bow emitters in the proportion and amount necessary to compress space to achieve our desired amount of spacetime displacement or from the external observers point of view, our quantum momentum. With a constant several Planck lengths thin bubble or negative energy membrane being emitted around the ship being obliterated back into the quantum vacuum, the additional or excess energy beyond that builds up in the coils as quantum-pressure and is emitted through the stern emitters, expanding space behind the ship. Hence the ship becomes both pulled and pushed through spacetime in equal measure. The ship does not actually move from the point in space it was in, spacetime is warped around it so that it emerges from the warp-bubble in a new point in space. We're not actually moving, space is. But from the external observer it will appear as though we moved or rather simply disappeared. And to us inside the bubble, when the bubble collapses, we will have moved, or simply as an encapsulated whole, reappeared at a new point in spacetime."
"But how do you make the crystals?" Hermione asked.
"That is another process I invented for this purpose. I create a super-conducting synthetic diamond coating produced by a new micro fabrication process that works by extracting electrons from oxygen-doped type IIa diamonds that were created in a 10-6 mbar vacuum using the photo-initiated chemical vapor deposition method during ion implantation. The superconductive crystalline material is extracted during a phase of the ion implantation and used to coat single strands or litz wire coils of silver micro tube filaments that have been doped with the alkali metal sodium." he answered.
"You invented that?"
"Yes." he answered.
"But is it a room temperature super-conductor?" she pressed.
"No, that's why the silver micro-tubes inside the warp-coil's remain immersed in bath of liquid nitrogen at all times, except for the initiator filaments that are infused into the crystals." he replied.
"Ah." Hermione realized. That makes sense, she thought.
"Yeah, so after the extraction of the super-conductor coating for the micro tubes, the remaining crystal mass is ideal for the bulk mass of our crystals. A very neat little process, with little waste."
"How do your crystals handle that much ZPE all the time?" Hermione asked.
"It's because its not just one crystal, its hundreds of them each contributing their fraction of the whole power into the warp-coils. Harry walked her over to the crystal reactor room to show her. A room full of hundreds of fist sized synthetic diamond crystals in shock-absorbent mountings each connected by one inch diameter non-conductive conduits into a maze of overhead pipes. It might be that this first prototype might work but, not be able to travel very far. That's another thing we'll determine with testing. Then after that, its more and/or better crystals in future designs and/or more efficient elements than silver for the conductors if we ever discover any, and so on." concluded Harry.
"So, you have energy crystals that can channel ZPE into a semi-closed loop system that can power a negative energy system. Would it be possible to create such crystals just using technology, without magic?" Hermione asked, beginning to wonder how he would ever be able to share this breakthrough with the muggle world, which she knew he intended to do.
"It may be possible. I really didn't look into that too deeply since I had a simple way with magic as a catalyst to begin and control the reaction that is normally the providence of naturally occurring gluons." he answered.
"Okay, but will you promise me that if all this works, you will try to make that work so that we can have an easy on-ramp to sharing this technology with the muggle world? You know we'd never be able to get clearance from the ICW otherwise."
"I promise. Either way, I won't expose the wizarding world, at least not this way. Harry grinned, I always thought I'd just cross that bridge when I got to it."
Harry paused to reflect for a moment. "The thing is, really all of this is science, even the reaction in the crystals themselves, down to the creation of them. The runes and the magic is only necessary to cause the gluons in the crystal's mass to amp up their exchange with the quantum fluctuation. Which they normally do at all times with no intervention at their normal constant rate anyway, and then allow me to redirect the resulting energy into our matrix instead of letting the exchange back to the quantum flux to occur naturally. If we could find a way scientifically to control the actions of gluons directly, then we really wouldn't need magic at all. The only other place I've used magic is as a cheat to help me install, manufacture and reproduce construction materials with repeatable precision so that I didn't need a factory full of machinists to do all that for me. In a large scale muggle operation, they could do all that without magic." Harry concluded.
...
While they were having their conversation they returned to the ship's bridge and continued to monitor the progress of the apparent incoming space-ships. There was two very high-energy explosions that detonated near both ships but according to sensors they did not change the mass or composition of the sensor echoes, meaning that whatever happened, if it was a missile or a bomb, it had no or negligible effect on them. And his hacked feed from NASA confirmed it. That was the first real clue Harry and Hermione had that whatever was going on it probably really wasn't friendly, which they didn't think it would be, but one never knew. A short time later one of the ships apparently exploded from what the sensor readings indicated. Then a short time after that the second one exploded. They concluded that whatever had happened, if it had been a danger to Earth, someone handled it. They were very curious naturally. Very curious indeed.
Harry decided he would wait another month before testing his ship and they still needed a name for it. Hermione suggested that considering his Trekkie inspiration and the species of their favorite bird, there could be no other name for it than the Phoenix, the same as Zephram Cochran's first warp ship. "Harry, how did you afford to buy all this stuff?" asked Hermione.
"Simple Hermione, I'm making billions in my holding company since I started licensing my synthetic diamond super-conducting litz wire and sheets to the military and other big tech companies." Harry answered.
/Small Time Skip/
By the end of the summer (1998), Harry and Hermione took the Phoenix on its first real maiden voyage to space. They had run hundreds of pre-space tests, including full atmospheric flight, and miniature burns, recycling, and venting of all the other ignition systems, except for warp of course. That could only be done in space, safely away from Earth. Thanks to Potter Holdings, Llc. and its subsidiaries, Harry by way of proxy had all the FAA clearances he needed to fly and test his privately designed jet aircraft as well as licenses to certain normally restricted technologies. They of course didn't know the Phoenix was capable of space flight and all the things he planned to do with those technologies. But at least Harry was able to follow proper protocols for taking off, flying, and landing the Phoenix.
They already had a new design in development on paper, one that would be more decidedly saucer-shaped based on some breakthrough work he discovered on a counter-rotating mercury-counter-weight magnetic vortex motor which could defeat the effects of the Earth's centripetal force, otherwise perceived as so-called gravity. It appeared other people's experiments with that technology was never made to work properly. He would fix it. This would remove a lot of the moving parts from the next platform, requiring less of everything that had been dedicated to atmospheric flight and space launch. Allowing a more stream-lined and cost-effective warp-ship. For now though they would continue with the Phoenix prototype in order to test out the basic design of the warp-drive and Harry's custom-designed Stellar navigation system.
Finally, the big day had come. This time after they achieved stratospheric altitude they would initiate full launch burn on the RS-25 engines and make it to space, from there they would perform full burn on their Ion impulse engines (using the Xenon gas-they could only use the more energetic LFT plasma after a warp-burn-Xenon was the normal mode but it could not accelerate as fast as LFT plasma could). Then they would test all the rest of their space-based systems that theretofore had never been tested in space. If all that checked out, then after cruising to their two hundred kilometer test orbit under their Ion impulse power, they would begin a series of warp-drive tests.
/Comic Interlude/
727 pilot: "Do you know it costs us two thousand dollars to make a 360 in this airplane?"
Controller: "Roger, give me four thousand dollars worth."
ATC: "Cessna G-ABCD What are your intentions? "
Cessna: "To get my Commercial Pilots License and Instrument Rating.
ATC: "I meant in the next five minutes not years."
(Heard on the radio - Really)
Cessna: "Jones tower, Cessna 12345, student pilot, I am out of fuel."
Tower: "Roger Cessna 12345, reduce airspeed to best glide! Do you have the airfield in sight?!"
Cessna: "Uh...tower, I am on the south ramp; I just want to know where the fuel truck is."
Tower: "Mission 123, do you have problems?"
Pilot: "I think, I have lost my compass."
Tower: "Judging the way you are flying, you lost the whole instrument panel!"
Unknown Aircraft: "I'm f...ing bored!".
Air Traffic Control: "Last aircraft transmitting, identify yourself immediately!"
Unknown Aircraft: "I said I was bored, not stupid!"
/Enough of that I guess/
Harry (pilot) turned to Hermione (co-pilot) and said, "Have you confirmed our flight plan was approved?"
"Yup, we're all set." she answered.
"Good. I'm so glad we have our own private runway and don't come near any FAA towers on our flight." Harry added.
"Me too." she agreed.
"What did you file this time?" Harry asked with a laugh.
"Both VFR and IFR, Transponder /I, Departure: Potter Ranch, UTC-0800, Cruising Altitude 160,000, ROF: HEO, Destination: Potter Ranch, ETE: 120 hours, No DP, Fuel Onboard: 300 hours." Hermione replied.
"And they approved that?" he asked.
"I don't think they ever actually read these things." she laughed.
"Well, not that it really matters, but we're covered anyway. All departures to and from space will be over international waters. That along with our route in space has us under maritime rules the entire part that matters-even if I actually cared." Harry replied.
"Alright, let's go over pre-flight." said Harry.
"Roger, captain" Hermione answered with a mock-salute.
"Airframe is extended and Green, Everything is still Green for takeoff and launch." she answered.
"Confirmed." Harry replied. ...Beginning Taxi to the runway,... and we're off..." announced Harry.
"Start up the black-box recorder." Hermione reminded him.
"Done." replied Harry.
The Phoenix took flight like any fat cigar shaped plane would, with a lot of drag. But it's double the horsepower 747 engines had no problem lifting the pig into the air and they headed out on a vector toward the Gulf of Mexico, once they cleared that into the Atlantic and over international waters, as they climbed toward the inner edge of the stratosphere, Harry said "Hermione, extend the RS-25 launchers."
"Roger, RS-25's initiating opening procedure. she replied. A few minutes and some shaking from the additional drag later, as the Phoenix continued it's climb, Hermione reported: RS-25 locked in position, ready for go-sequence initiation."
"Roger, increasing pitch to launch angle and thrust to maximum." Harry replied.
The Phoenix began climbing more rapidly at the appropriate up angle for escape velocity. At the appropriate marker, Hermione announced: "We're passing pre-launch sequence altitude at 50,000 feet."
"Roger, initiate pre-burn countdown and ignite the RS-25 warm-up." said Harry.
"Roger, RS-25 warming up and pre-burn countdown starts in 3-2-1, mark for main burn in six zero seconds." answered Hermione.
"Roger mark, I am activating launch auto-pilot to meet the mark...and activated." said Harry.
The atmospheric airframe for the wings and tail stabilizers gradually retracted and finally the GE90's spun down and retracted, all under computer control in concert with the RS-25 main burn countdown such that the Phoenix airframe re-shaped itself from an airplane into a rocket prior to main burn. The computer controlled it for precision safety, preventing any loss of pitch and minimal roll and no yaw just prior to ignition. Smaller reaction control system (RCS) stabilizer rockets maintained primary roll and yaw after the ship breaks into space and the computer automatically steers them into a safe orbit running a standard tilt and roll program. These maneuvers were not well suited for human piloting.
At T-10 seconds to burn, Hermione reported: "We are passing the abort window. Auto-pilot and Sensors still show green."
"Roger, let 'er burn." said Harry. Which was kind of unnecessary because at that stage, unless they manually started the abort maneuver, the RS-25's would launch in, 4-3-2-1.
"Houston, we have ignition." announced Harry, as the Phoenix lurched forward rapidly accelerating to escape velocity.
"Don't you mean, Pine Springs, we have ignition?" asked Hermione a bit cheekily, trying not to sound as scared as she actually felt at that moment.
"Yeah, you know, just a little joke. Plus, remember we decided not to have Aunty Agatha and Uncle Sirius play mission control on us. This is stressful enough."
"I know, but they are still watching and listening... she replied. Oh, and by the way, that was the first thing we had not tested yet so far and we're still alive." she added, while the Phoenix shook and screamed past the Mesosphere barrier, heading for the outer edge of the Thermosphere.
Harry just turned and looked over at her, giving her a grin and thumbs up through his bulky space suit. "Never had any doubt my dear."
"I'm glad you didn't, because the only thing keeping me going is that I have no doubt in you." she answered truthfully.
Meanwhile, back on Earth at NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston, who at the moment had no flights going on so it was just a skeleton crew on monitoring shifts-were woke from their daydreaming by alarms going off about an unscheduled and presumably unauthorized space launch of some kind. Big shots were being called in and protocols were being looked over to see what they were supposed to do when this happened. They discovered they didn't actually have a plan for something like that. Well, chaos began to ensue as Mission Control started getting calls from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other NASA facilities wondering what in the hell was going on.
"We don't have any answers sir. All we've been able to do so far is confirm via satellite that it was an actual launch from over the middle of the South Atlantic ocean at the equator and the object or craft has just entered the Exosphere and is performing a standard tilt and roll maneuver for Earth orbit."
"Well, try to get them on comms. whoever they are." said the Director.
"We've tried sir, no response. Whoever they are they might not even be listening on any of our standard frequencies."
"Okay, keep trying and keep track of that thing. Alert me if anything else happens. I need to make a phone call."
A few minutes later in a secret underground bunker underneath NORAD in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Lt. General George Hammond received a phone call from the Director of NASA's Mission Control Center. After quickly briefing him on what they've seen so far the Director asked "General, is this one of yours? Do you know what's going on?"
"I have no idea Director, it's definitely not one of ours. We haven't even got our first designs onto approved blueprints yet."
"I know, I was just hoping it was one of your friends. Any chance it's one of your enemies?"
"It's not one of our friends, nothing that I've heard anyway. I will go to General Alert and begin looking into this from our end, and will try to find out if it is an enemy of some kind." offered Hammond.
"Thank you George. I appreciate it."
"Of course. Do you need me to alert the President?"
"No, my people are already doing that. Let me know as soon as you learn anything please."
"Will do, you do the same."
"Wilco. Thanks, Bye." Click. Hammond stood there for a second in his office pondering what could be going on, then he went into action.
"Sgt. initiate General Alert, call in SG-1 for an emergency briefing...we have some work to do." Hammond ordered.
"Yes, sir. I'm on it." ...
Back in space, Harry and Hermione were aware of none of the excitement on the ground. They always anticipated some excitement from NASA, but knowing nothing of the existence of the Stargate Program, or any alien threats to Earth, they could not have anticipated their actions being taken as a possible imminent threat. Beside they reasoned that if they succeeded, their accomplishment would outweigh any heartache.
"Passing orbital perigee now at six three kilometers." said Hermione.
"Space ahead is still showing clear and Green." answered Harry. They only intended to perform the orbital maneuver to keep within the standards that NASA's program used, to go with what they knew was considered standard and safe, clear altitudes for maneuvering and so on. But they wouldn't be staying there long. Anything Houston would see next would boggle their minds.
"Extend the Ion Impulse engines." said Harry.
"Roger, ready." answered Hermione. ...Ion Impulse engines extended ... Impulse drives report Green and ready." she finished.
"Excellent," said Harry. I am disabling launch and orbital autopilot and switching back to manual control. ...Manual control. Firing the Impulse engines in 5-4-3-2-1, mark. And burn. Impulse engines fired, 10% thrust. Slow and steady startup. Initiating all stop on the RS-25 launchers...and stopped. ... Orbit is stable under Impulse drive, reporting twenty eight thousand kph and holding." reported Harry. ...Nice, very nice, he added. Activating orbital auto-pilot. With a happy smile on his face he turned to Hermione, "Mione, please run the full test and diagnostics routine. Let's make sure everything up until now has performed flawlessly and make sure all systems are go for a re-entry."
"Already on it Har. ...Diagnostics running."
"That was very cool. I don't now about you Mione, but getting just this far is pretty amazing. Can't wait to try out the warp-drive." Harry said, as he removed his space-helmet. Ah, this is nice, breathing fresh bottled air in space without a helmet on.
"Funny Harry." she remarked as she joined him in removing her helmet, and they shared their first kiss in space.
"So, fancy a quick snack and a loo break while diagnostics is running and we get up our nerve for the next part, the part that could see us lost in space for all eternity or die trying?" Harry suggested.
"Since you put it that way I've lost my appetite, but I could use the loo." Then they went off and removed the bulkier parts of their suits and just basked in the glow of being in space, floating around as opposed to walking, and so on. That went on for an hour, while back on Earth SG-1 was trying to contact some of their off-world space-faring friends (which weren't too many at that point) to see if they knew anything. There had been no early luck. They had only just made first contact with the Tok'ra and Captain Carter's father, retired General Jacob Carter only just left as host to a symbiote. And Teal'c was trying to contact Bratac.
Sitting around the conference room table, SG-1 and a few other consultants and airmen were going in and out with status and so forth, Daniel offered: "You know, why does this have to be some off-world enemy?"
They all looked at Daniel to see what off the wall idea he might have this time. "I'm just saying. The Stargate program is an American secret. What is to say another country on Earth isn't doing their own secret program, and they are just testing something of there's?" he asked.
Capt. Carter shrugged and said, "Good point, could be."
Teal'c was absent at the moment, so the only person to play devil's advocate to Daniel's angel's advocate was Colonel O'Neill, who generally loved that role to begin with. "Yeah, maybe Daniel, but you'd think if any of our competitors on Earth was doing something at that level, the CIA or someone would know about it." he countered.
"What makes you think the CIA would tell us, if they did know?" Daniel countered back.
Colonel O'Neill just threw his hands up and said, "I don't know. We don't know what we don't know."
"Thanks Jack, that helped a lot." quipped Daniel.
Trying to prevent another verbal row between the two, Captain Carter simply said, "All we can do is chase down our own leads and report up the chain of command. We'll figure something out, we always do." she suggested.
