Return to Earth

Part 01
The navigator, being conservative at heart, and a mathematician in accuracy, plotted our approach into the Solar System at an angle at least 15 arc seconds above the solar plane in angle from the center of Sol. We had retained our enormous temporal velocity built up before we had embarked upon the change in the Aether drives pushing us into trans-light velocities. Going that fast was like time travel, but it was nice to only have to spend a week in cold sleep rather than years (or centuries). During the typical space-time hiccup we experienced every time we transitioned from normal space to extra space the same momentary lapse of reason amused us on the bridge.

When we broke on through the last space-time guffaw before circumlunar orbit (preparatory to dropping to Low Earth Orbit), something came undone in our minds. There was some missing time here and there and final approach did not seem so comfortable as we thought it might be. There was nothing we could immediately do since the hyperdense electromagnetic field protecting our ship from debris (take a meteoroid the size of marble going at 2.5 million miles an hour-what would it do to your ship?) still blocked any radio or laser communications. Even the gravity ripple communicator could not be activated this deep into a gravity well and with Aether drive engines running--that's crazy talk. But our blackout tinged with relativistic disturbances was different this time.

Part 02
"What was the shudder?" The Midshipman gasped as a violent lurching of the stellar frigate threatened to eject him from his seat at the helm.
"That," intoned,in a perfect English accent, came the voice of Lt. Cmdr. Chief Astrogator MacDougal, "is the subspace gravitation wavefront reaching our vessel at about 59 percent of standard light speed."
"What a trip...I mean roger Sir," gulped Midshipman Carlos. I had better refrain next time from too much space cake when I'm about to go on duty. It is so hard to keep a straight face with all this great sensory data to process.

Part 03

This picture shows our vessel, the HMS Lorelei

Our four engines combined displace 350 cubic meters (around 12,500 cubic feet) generating 70,000 metric tonnes of thrust. The ship displaces 28000 cubic meters (about 1,000,000 cu. feet) and masses about 15,000 tonnes. Typical performance in normal space in greater than 0.01 Earth gravities in gravitational field strength environment are 5G's (Earth gravities).
The engines are Eastinghouse HT6 Dynamic Aether Field Drives built at the Phobos Shipyards under contract by Kapek Enterprises, Inc.

Below 0.01G's grav. field strength environment, the aether drives may be activated in Spin-warp mode where the ship only partly interacts with normal space. This mode is very sensitive to gravity fields and thus a careful course needs to be plotted. The advantage is that your pseudo-velocity is now (for this ship) at about 0.058 light years per hour! (This is about 3.4 x 10 to the eleventh power miles per hour.)