"What do you think it is, Yuri?"
	"I have no idea."
	They could be excused for their confusion, the ship they were
looking at was completely different from anything currently in use.
	The ship's bow was a simple metal sphere, which was at the tip of
a long, thin latticework spar that ended with the skeleton of a
parabolic dish. Perhaps a tenth of the way back from the bow was a
rotating cuff, about twice as wide as it was long. Six shuttles of
some sort were docked to the axis between the sphere and the ring,
like bats clinging to a tree branch, utterly dwarfed. The most
remarkable thing about it, however, was its size, just one of the
shuttles could have made six _Lovely Angel_s, and they were
completely dwarfed by the rest of it.

		*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*

			BACKGROUND

	In the late twenty-first century one of the most unexpected
scientific discoveries of human history was made by an unknown math
proffessor at an obscure college. Three years later he finished
checking his calculations and published his discoveries. Two months
later he was one of NASA's most highly paid consultants.
	In laymans terms, what he had discovered was a way to cheat
Einstein. If an object were to pass though a certain point at a
specific distance from a star, while moving at a certain speed,
then it would go superluminal. Specifically, its velocity would be
multiplied by a factor of fifty-seven and a third.
	Maximum interstellar travel velocity was one hundred and
ninety-nine percent of lightspeed.
	Transit velocity was just over .11 c.
	The transit distance was well over twice the radius of Pluto's
orbit.
	This made things difficult, but still much easier that they would
otherwise be.
	Fifty intesteller colonization ventures were launched over the
next ten years.
	Two months after the last one of these went superluminal, a method
of transit that was nearly two-hundred times faster was discovered.
	Humanity's slow expansion into the stars turned into an explosion.
	When the first of the slideships, as the early expiditions had
come to be called, emerged at its (already inhabited) destination,
all of its crew were dead.
	This pattern was repeated with all of the other arriving
slideships, no matter their destination.
	Except one. 
	The one that had farthest to travel.
	It arrived almost a thousand light-years away, and five hundred
Earth years later.


		SLIDESHIP _BRILLIANT WING_
			Coming Soon?

    *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
     
Well? Would YOU like to write this? I had the idea, I like the
idea...I don't know squat about Dirty Pair. <sigh> Better to see it
written by someone else than to never see it written at all...

The Brilliant Wing is within a century or so of modern
tech...foreseeable future only. The only thing on it that's out of
our reach is the drive...it's a ramjet.

I don't know what happened to the other slideship crews...you could
have them splattered across the walls...they could have simply
dropped dead where they stood...they could just be gone... As to
why the Brilliant Wing escaped...I don't know.

Summarized: The Brilliant Wing arrives at its destination, Kei and
Yuri are sent to investigate.

Potential futures: The magnetic feilds that the Wing uses to
capture the hydrogen that it uses as fuel are capable of shorting
out even military shielding...and the drive its self may be apllied
al la the Kzinti Lesson.

oh, and, no darkfics based off this. Please?

Be well.
Nathan Baxter



===
* "There is nothing so dangerous as a good man who believes 
* he is doing the right thing." --Source unknown(to me, at  
*                                               least)
# "For the crime of injuring me, a god, I demand in 
# atonement death" --Largo, Bubblgum Crisis Six: Red Eyes
& "No boom TODAY. Boom TOMMORROW. There's ALWAYS a boom 
& tommorrow." --Commander Susan Ivonava
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