Chapter 51:

Luna and I went on a visit to Britain. Our security team was a little nervous because some of the relatives of Death Eaters might have learned that we were responsible for their deaths or being pledged to House Black. We tended to discount that threat, since they could attack us anywhere on Earth, not just in Britain, but we decided not to bring our children with us to Britain.

Sirius Black was married for 3 years. So far they didn't have kids. He had announced that Harry Potter will be always be his heir as Lord Black, although he would divide his assets equally between any children he would have plus Harry Potter. While Harry Potter wasn't interested in actually running House Black, his son James, who was about to start magic school, was. He was going to go to Hogwarts, not Starfleet Junior Academy. Starfleet Junior Academy would have been expected with both his parents working at Starfleet and living in Kazakhstan and Harry Potter being in charge of Starfleet Academy's marines training. In the last two years when we saw James Potter, he had the traditional manners of British purebloods. With neither of his parents, Harry and Hermione, even approving of those manners, we couldn't figure out who he learned it from.

House Black still ran magical Britain in a coalition with more traditional elements. Each part of the coalition got what was most important to them. For the traditionals it was the preservation of magical culture in Britain and Ireland, and also the preservation of traditional magic, which in the late 20th century many tried to ban. For Sirius Black it was the fair treatment of all magicals who choose to participate in that culture, despite the circumstances of their birth.

We confirmed with Sirius that James Potter agreed with him on most important matters. Sirius said, "Look, he is not like Prongs, or for that matter my grandfather. He's his own person, but has the right ideas. I'm comfortable with him ruling Wizarding Britain in the next century. For that matter it is a good prank for him as a halfblood ruling over the purebloods."

Luna asked, "What will be the effect of him being in Slytherin for 7 years?"

Sirius laughed and answered, "Wow, you know that before even the hat does. Slytherin is not the same place as it was when you were in Hogwarts. It is now the house of the ambitious and cunning, but not one that tolerates blood purity ideology. My cousin Andromeda still runs it with an iron fist, and I use my control over families when she says that is needed."

Hogwarts expanded their curriculum to include more esoteric branches of magic. This was required by the British Ministry of Magic, and not the preference of Albus Dumbledore, who was still Headmaster at Hogwarts. Anything ever taught at Hogwarts, with few exceptions, was available again, for anyone who wanted to learn it, despite it being labeled as dark.

Non-magical born, still called muggleborn in Britain, mostly went to Starfleet Junior Academy. The remainder divided equally between having their entire family moving to a magical controlled district for non-magical families of magicals, or remaining in their original location.

The families Malfoy, Greengrass, and Zabini did a thriving business in trade between magicals, non-magicals, and Starfleet. They were each doing better than they were before Starfleet. In addition, since bribery was no longer allowed, the Malfoy fortune was no longer being drained to keep the British Ministry working on their behalf. It turned out that the earlier Minister Fudge was not just occasionally bribed by Lucius Malfoy, but engineered situations that required Fudge's assistance and further bribes from Malfoy. He also had a complex arrangement with charities so that Malfoy would donate to them, while Fudge would give out favors, such as having people hired by those charities, or companies that would supply goods and services paid by those charities.

We learned that the British Ministry of Magic had to deal with a steady stream of Irish-Americans wanting to meet Leprechauns. It was hard to convince these tourists that Leprechauns were not particularly nice. Finally they arranged controlled shows put on by Leprechauns who were paid real gold in exchange for their disappearing gold, and kept their mischief to within acceptable limits.

Centaurs refused any visitors, and they were safely behind wards. On a rare occasion they sent an invitation for someone to visit them when they had a cryptic message to impart.

The goblins mostly felt insulted that non-magical visitors wanted to see them. However a few decided that gold is gold and setup a museum and store in London. People would pay to enter the museum, credit cards accepted, and could also buy Wizarding money, take pictures with Goblins, try Goblin food, ride on Goblin carts, etc. The Goblin government gave authorization for them to make fools out of themselves for gold, but gave them limits so as not to hurt the reputation of Goblins or especially of Goblins as being suitable bankers.

There was a small museum on London that displayed werewolves. Every full moon, spectators would watch a person in a cage transform into a wolf, and then again at dawn turn back. It was a way for some werewolves to make some money and no laws were broken doing so.

Another small museum was started by a wizard who had elves and put on catered meals with service by elves. The elves would stay and talk to the guests. Noone thought any of it was very dignified, but again no laws were broken.

The non-magical population had a different experience of the end of secrecy than most countries, since the magicals stayed well hidden. They learned about some of the attacks done on non-magicals by Voldemort's forces during the war between 1970 and 1981. There were some more upset that memory charms were used against witnesses, than they were about the actual attacks. Starfleet helped with the public relations, explaining that secrecy was maintained the best way they could at the time, and that war was long ended.

Somehow the magical community got through the discussion about the 1970's without it being revealed that not every crime against non-magicals was prosecuted, that it wasn't a priority then, and it wasn't a priority now over 40 years later to charge former Death Eaters for crimes against non-magicals, as long as they kept in line. That it was considered more useful to have crimes that they could be charged with kept over their heads than it was to actually charge them.

Preparations for meeting the Vulcans continued. About 125 people were now fairly fluent in the Vulcan language, and familiar with their culture and approach to logic. Many more had some ability to speak their language and understand their culture. A full plan was devised for the various ways the Vulcans were expected to contact Earth.

Meanwhile, experiments to develop warp capability and subspace continued. Subspace was now a university class around the world. The class material was updated every term, and was expected to continue to be updated for the foreseeable future. The educational goal was to have new physics graduates develop fresh approaches to a new physics. One popular university program was to understand the combination of previously known physics, magic, and subspace. One didn't need any magical ability to design experiments and understand the new physics of magic. Earths advantage was going to be combining these three previously different laws of physics that exist in the same universe.

Subspace was the basis of much of Star Trek canon technology. Research was proceeding in understanding subspace separately from the experiments in generating warp fields. With each new understanding about subspace engineering teams tried out different possible inventions. An analysis of Star Trek canon resulted in a conclusion that it wasn't that difficult. That Zefram Cochrane must have been a researcher during a war that ended about 10 years before his warp experiment of 2063. Presumably he used his previous knowledge and started working on his faster than light ship using scavenged military equipment. We had the advantage of thousands of researchers, magic, a huge research and development budget, and knowledge of what the end result would look like and be capable of.

Around each high energy experiment to develop warp field generators, there was a grid of sensors sending signals to each other. Working in a way similar to GPS broadcasts, each sensor checked the precise timestamp received from each other sensor. Since the distance between the sensors were kept constant, any variation in synchronization would be due to the warping of space. Nearby sensors were also checking the synchronization, so if a distant sensor found an anomaly, but the nearby sensors of both of those sensors did not, then the equipment was working properly and a space warp was seen. Many tests were done with conventional rocket travel to make sure that false positives would not be seen.

On November 8th 2010, a small anomaly was found. The same experiment was repeated in multiple ways, with two identical loops going in opposite directions, and now a stretching of space in one direction and a shrinking in the other was found.

While the design of the Vulcan loops worked in warping space, it was determined that much more power was needed for it to work for faster than light travel, than we were capable of creating at that time. However, the Star Trek canon Earth method of multiple loops withing two nacelles worked better for the power levels being used. Each loop pushed the warp field a little further, reinforcing each other. The Vulcan design was set aside to try again in the future, but all research efforts would be concentrated on twin nacelles for warp capable ships.

There was an approximate calculation made as to the strength of the warp field needed for faster than light travel. Only experiments that resulted in faster than light travel would actually resolve the exact number, which is the field strength needed to reach the speed of light. It would be called warp-distortion, and generally warp field generators would be rated in milli-warp-distortion or mWD.

Automatic, unmanned ships were setup that would travel a short distance while generating a warp field. Sensors were dispersed throughout the planned routes to measure everything possible, and on-board sensors also measuring everything possible, including time dilation. The plan was to refuel and refit the ships at each end of their routes and keep sending them back and forth, learning more about warp fields each time. Each experiment would refine the design. Many relay ships were created, to be able to perform many experiments. A few ship losses showed the wisdom of keeping them unmanned, but also allowed more aggressive experiments.

On January 4th 2011, an unmanned ship went faster than light, reaching warp 1.2 which is about 1.7 times the speed of light. This news was reported throughout the world. About 800 scientists and engineers were publicly given a high level Starfleet award. About another 3000 were given a lower level Starfleet award. Of the awardees about one quarter of them were magical an eighth were those with magic, but not able to cast spells, called squibs, the rest being non-magical.

Many crewed ships that were previously prepared with warp cores were now outfitted with warp 1.2 warp field generators. They were flown around the solar system to test them out.

Starfleet was already flooded with people trying to volunteer to visit Proxima Centauri, which is 4.25 light years away, and would take 2.5 years to reach at warp 1.2. Starfleet said that they expect to have faster ships within the next year, and there would be no point launching ships now when it is likely that ships launched a year later would arrive earlier.

Immediate experiments were done to see the effects of warp travel ships flying near each other. Another was see the distance warp travel needed to be from planets and space stations to not have any noticeable effects on them.

Research now shifted to try to increase speed, discover non-magical inertial dampers and artificial gravity, and subspace communication. Subspace was starting to be understood, and all of these technologies used subspace. We were using magical inertial dampers for now.

The plans to greet visiting Vulcans were now put into operation, and we waited.